The Neapolitan Novels

46.

I was a tranquil listener, and I let her talk. Some moments of the story, especially when the expression of Lila’s face and the pace of her sentences underwent a sudden, painful nervous contraction, disturbed me deeply. I felt a powerful sense of guilt, I thought: this is the life that could have been mine, and if it isn’t it’s partly thanks to her. Sometimes I almost hugged her, more often I wanted to ask questions, comment. But in general I held back, I interrupted two or three times at most.

For example, I certainly interrupted when she talked about Professor Galiani and her children. I would have liked her to explain better what the professor had said, what precise words she had used, if my name had ever come up with Nadia and Armando. But I realized in time the pettiness of the questions and restrained myself, even though a part of me considered the curiosity legitimate—they were acquaintances of mine, after all, who were important to me.

“Before I go to Florence for good, I should pay a visit to Professor Galiani. Maybe you’d come with me, do you want to?” and I added: “My relationship with her cooled a little, after Ischia, she blamed me for Nino’s leaving Nadia.” Since Lila looked at me as if she didn’t see me, I said again: “The Galianis are good people, a little stuck up, but this business of the murmur should be checked.”

This time she reacted.

“The murmur is there.”

“All right,” I said, “but even Armando said you’d need a cardiologist.”

She replied:

“He heard it, anyway.”

But I felt involved above all when it came to sexual matters. When she told me about the drying room, I almost said: an old intellectual jumped on me, in Turin, and in Milan a Venezuelan painter I’d known for only a few hours came to my room to get in bed as if it were a favor I owed him. Yet I held back, even with that. What sense was there in speaking of my affairs at that moment? And then really what could I have told her that had any resemblance to what she was telling me?

That last question presented itself clearly when, from a simple recitation of the facts—years before, when she told me about her wedding night, we had talked only of the most brutal facts—Lila proceeded to talk generally about her sexuality. It was a subject completely new for us. The coarse language of the environment we came from was useful for attack or self-defense, but, precisely because it was the language of violence, it hindered, rather than encouraged, intimate confidences. So I was embarrassed, I stared at the floor, when she said, in the crude vocabulary of the neighborhood, that fucking had never given her the pleasure she had expected as a girl, that in fact she had almost never felt anything, that after Stefano, after Nino, to do it really annoyed her, so that she had been unable to accept inside herself even a man as gentle as Enzo. Not only that: using an even more brutal vocabulary, she added that sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of passion, she had done everything that a man could want from a woman, and that even when she had wanted to conceive a child with Nino, and had become pregnant, the pleasure you were supposed to feel, particularly at that moment of great love, had been missing.

Before such frankness I understood that I could not be silent, that I had to let her feel how close I was, that I had to react to her confidences with equal confidences. But at the idea of having to speak about myself—the dialect disgusted me, and although I passed for an author of racy pages, the Italian I had acquired seemed to me too precious for the sticky material of sexual experiences—my uneasiness grew, I forgot how difficult her confession had been, that every word, however vulgar, was set in the weariness in her face, in the trembling of her hands, and I was brief.

“For me it’s not like that,” I said.

I wasn’t lying, and yet it wasn’t the truth. The truth was more complicated and to give it a form I would have needed practiced words. I would have had to explain that, in the time of Antonio, rubbing against him, letting him touch me had always been very pleasurable, and that I still desired that pleasure. I would have had to admit that being penetrated had disappointed me, too, that the experience was spoiled by the sense of guilt, by the discomfort of the conditions, by the fear of being caught, by the haste arising from that, by the terror of getting pregnant. But I would have had to add that Franco—the little I knew of sex was largely from him—before entering me and afterward let me rub against one of his legs, against his stomach, and that this was nice and sometimes made the penetration nice, too. As a result, I would have had to tell her, I was now waiting for marriage, Pietro was a very gentle man, I hoped that in the tranquility and the legitimacy of marriage I would have the time and the comfort to discover the pleasure of coitus. There, if I had expressed myself like that, I would have been honest. But the two of us, at nearly twenty-five, did not have a tradition of such articulate confidences. There had been only small general allusions when she was engaged to Stefano and I was with Antonio, bashful phrases, hints. As for Donato Sarratore, as for Franco, I had never talked about either one. So I kept to those few words—For me it’s not like that—which must have sounded to her as if I were saying: Maybe you’re not normal. And in fact she looked at me in bewilderment, and said as if to protect herself:

“In the book you wrote something else.”

So she had read it. I murmured defensively:

“I don’t even know anymore what ended up in there.”

“Dirty stuff ended up in there,” she said, “stuff that men don’t want to hear and women know but are afraid to say. But now what—are you hiding?”

She used more or less those words, certainly she said dirty. She, too, then, cited the risqué pages and did it like Gigliola, who had used the word dirt. I expected that she would offer an evaluation of the book as a whole, but she didn’t, she used it only as a bridge to go back and repeat what she called several times, insistently, the bother of fucking. That is in your novel, she exclaimed, and if you told it you know it, it’s pointless for you to say: For me it’s not like that. And I mumbled Yes, maybe it’s true, but I don’t know. And while she with a tortured lack of shame went on with her confidences—the great excitement, the lack of satisfaction, the sense of disgust—I thought of Nino, and the questions I had so often turned over and over reappeared. Was that long night full of tales a good moment to tell her I had seen him? Should I warn her that for Gennaro she couldn’t count on Nino, that he already had another child, that he left children behind him heedlessly? Should I take advantage of that moment, of those admissions of his, to let her know that in Milan he had said an unpleasant thing about her: Lila is made badly even when it comes to sex? Should I go so far as to tell her that in those agitated confidences of hers, even in that way of reading the dirty pages of my book, now, while she was speaking I seemed to find confirmation that Nino was, in essence, right? What in fact had Sarratore’s son intended if not what she herself was admitting? Had he realized that for Lila being penetrated was only a duty, that she couldn’t enjoy the union? He, I said to myself, is experienced. He has known many women, he knows what good female sexual behavior is and so he recognizes when it’s bad. To be made badly when it comes to sex means, evidently, not to be able to feel pleasure in the male’s thrusting; it means twisting with desire and rubbing yourself to quiet that desire, it means grabbing his hands and placing them against your sex as I sometimes did with Franco, ignoring his annoyance, the boredom of the one who has already had his orgasm and now would like to go to sleep. My uneasiness increased, I thought: I wrote that in my novel, is that what Gigliola and Lila recognized, was that what Nino recognized, perhaps, and the reason he wanted to talk about it? I let everything go and whispered somewhat randomly:

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“That your pregnancy was without joy.”

She responded with a flash of sarcasm:

“Imagine how I felt.”

My last interruption came when it had begun to get light, and she had just finished telling me about the encounter with Michele. I said: That’s enough, calm down, take your temperature. It was 101. I hugged her tight, I whispered: now I’ll take care of you, and until you’re better we’ll stay together, and if I have to go to Florence you and the child will come with me. She refused energetically, she made the final confession of that night. She said she had been wrong to follow Enzo to San Giovanni a Teduccio, she wanted to go back to the neighborhood.

“To the neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy.”

“As soon as I feel better I’ll do it.”

I rebuked her, I told her it was a thought induced by the fever, that the neighborhood would exhaust her, that to set foot there was stupid.

“I can’t wait to leave,” I exclaimed.

“You’re strong,” she answered, to my astonishment. “I have never been. The better and truer you feel, the farther away you go. If I merely pass through the tunnel of the stradone, I’m scared. Remember when we tried to get to the sea but it started raining? Which of us wanted to keep going and which of us made an about-face, you or me?”

“I don’t remember. But, anyway, don’t go back to the neighborhood.”

I tried in vain to make her change her mind. We discussed it for a long time.

“Go,” she said finally, “talk to the two of them, they’ve been waiting for hours. They haven’t closed their eyes and they have to go to work.”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Whatever you want.”

I pulled the covers up, I also covered Gennaro, who had been tossing in his sleep all night. I realized that Lila was already falling asleep. I whispered:

“I’ll be back soon.”

She said: “Remember what you promised.”

“What?”

“You’ve already forgotten? If something happens to me, you’ve got to take Gennaro.”

“Nothing will happen to you.”

As I went out of the room Lila started in her half-sleep, she whispered: “Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always, even when you leave Naples. That way I’ll know that you see me and I’m at peace.”