The Neapolitan Novels

27.

This may be the last time I’ll talk about Lila with a wealth of detail. Later on she became more evasive, and the material at my disposal was diminished. It’s the fault of our lives diverging, the fault of distance. And yet even when I lived in other cities and we almost never met, and she as usual didn’t give me any news and I made an effort not to ask for it, her shadow goaded me, depressed me, filled me with pride, deflated me, giving me no rest.

Today, as I’m writing, that goad is even more essential. I wish she were here, that’s why I’m writing. I want her to erase, add, collaborate in our story by spilling into it, according to her whim, the things she knows, what she said or thought: the time she confronted Gino, the fascist; the time she met Nadia, Professor Galiani’s daughter; the time she returned to the apartment on Corso Vittorio Emanuele where long ago she had felt out of place; the time she looked frankly at her experience of sex. As for my own embarrassments as I listened, my sufferings, the few things I said during her long story, I’ll think about them later.