The Neapolitan Novels

63.

As soon as I discovered that I was expecting a child I was overwhelmed by anxiety and I called my mother. Although our relationship had always been contentious, in that situation the need to talk to her prevailed. It was a mistake: she immediately started nagging. She wanted to leave Naples, settle in with me, help me, guide me, or, vice versa, bring me to the neighborhood, have me back in her house, entrust me to the old midwife who had delivered all her children. I had a hard time putting her off, I said that a gynecologist friend of my mother-in-law was looking after me, a great professor, and I would give birth in his clinic. She was offended. She hissed: you prefer your mother-in-law to me. She didn’t call again.

After a few days, on the other hand, I heard from Lila. We had had some telephone conversations after I left, but brief, a few minutes, we didn’t want to spend too much, she cheerful, I aloof, she asking ironically about my life as a newlywed, I inquiring seriously about her health. This time I realized that something wasn’t right.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked.

“No, why should I be?”

“You don’t tell me anything. I got the news only because your mother is bragging to everyone that you’re pregnant.”

“I just got the confirmation.”

“I thought you were taking the Pill.”

I was embarrassed.

“Yes, but then I decided not to.”

“Why?”

“The years are passing.”

“And the book you’re supposed to write?”

“I’ll see later.”

“You’d better.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“You have to do the maximum.”

“I’ll try.”

“I’m taking the Pill.”

“So with Enzo it’s going well?”

“Pretty well, but I don’t ever want to be pregnant again.”

She was silent, and I didn’t say anything, either. When she began talking once more, she told me about the first time she had realized she was expecting a baby, and the second. She described both as terrible experiences: the second time, she said, I was sure the baby was Nino’s and even though I felt sick I was happy. But, happy or not, you’ll see, the body suffers, it doesn’t like losing its shape, there’s too much pain. From there she went on in a crescendo that got darker and darker, telling me things she had told me before but never with the same desire to pull me into her suffering, so that I, too, would feel it. She seemed to want to prepare me for what awaited me, she was very worried about me and my future. This life of another, she said, clings to you in the womb first and then, when it finally comes out, it takes you prisoner, keeps you on a leash, you’re no longer your own master. With great animation she sketched every phase of my maternity, tracing it over hers, expressing herself with her habitual effectiveness. It’s as if you fabricated your very own torture, she exclaimed, and I realized then that she wasn’t capable of thinking that she was her self and I was my self; it seemed to her inconceivable that I could have a pregnancy different from hers, and a different feeling about children. She so took it for granted that I would have the same troubles that she seemed ready to consider any possible joy I found in motherhood a betrayal.

I didn’t want to listen to her anymore, I held the receiver away from my ear, she was scaring me. We said goodbye coolly.

“If you need me,” she said, “let me know.”

“All right.”

“You helped me, now I want to help you.”

“All right.”

That phone call didn’t help me at all; rather, it left me unsettled. I lived in a city I knew nothing about, even if thanks to Pietro I now was acquainted with every corner of it, which I could not say of Naples. I loved the path along the river, I took beautiful walks, but I didn’t like the color of the houses, it put me in a bad mood. The teasing tone of the inhabitants—the porter in our building, the butcher, the baker, the mailman—incited me to become teasing, too, and a hostility with no motivation emerged from it. And then the many friends of my in-laws, so available on the day of the wedding, had never showed up again, nor did Pietro have any intention of seeing them. I felt alone and fragile. I bought some books on how to become a perfect mother and prepared with my usual diligence.

Days passed, weeks, but, surprisingly, the pregnancy didn’t weigh on me at all; in fact it made me feel light. The nausea was negligible, I felt no breakdown in my body, in my mood, in the wish to be active. I was in the fourth month when my book received an important prize that brought me greater fame and a little more money. I went to the prize ceremony in spite of the political climate, which was hostile to that type of recognition, feeling that I was in a state of grace; I was proud of myself, with a sense of physical and intellectual fullness that made me bold, expansive. In the thank-you speech I went overboard, I said I felt as happy as the astronauts on the white expanse of the moon. A couple of days later, since I felt strong, I telephoned Lila to tell her about the prize. I wanted to let her know that things were not going as she had predicted, that in fact they were going smoothly, that I was satisfied. I felt so pleased with myself that I wanted to skip over the unhappiness she had caused me. But Lila had read in Il Mattino—only the Naples papers had devoted a few lines to the prize—that phrase of mine about the astronauts, and, without giving me time to speak, she criticized me harshly. The white expanse of the moon, she said ironically, sometimes it’s better to say nothing than to talk nonsense. And she added that the moon was a rock among billions of other rocks, and that, as far as rocks go, the best thing was to stand with your feet planted firmly in the troubles of the earth.

I felt a viselike grip in my stomach. Why did she continue to wound me? Didn’t she want me to be happy? Or maybe she hadn’t recovered and her illness had heightened her mean side? Bitter words came to me, but I couldn’t utter them. As if she didn’t even realize she had hurt me, or as if she felt she had the right, she went on to tell me what was happening to her, in a very friendly tone. She had made peace with her brother, with her mother, even with her father; she had quarreled with Michele Solara on the old matter of the label on the shoes and the money he owed Rino; she had been in touch with Stefano to claim that, at least from the economic point of view, he should act as Gennaro’s father, too, and not just Maria’s. Her remarks were irascible, sometimes vulgar: against Rino, the Solaras, Stefano. And at the end she asked, as if she had an urgent need for my opinion: Did I do the right thing? I didn’t answer. I had won an important prize and she had mentioned only that phrase about the astronauts. I asked her, maybe to offend her, if she still had those symptoms that unglued her head from her body. She said no, she repeated a couple of times that she was very well, she said with a mocking laugh: Only, sometimes out of the corner of my eye I see people coming out of the furniture. Then she asked me: Is everything all right with the pregnancy? Good, very good, I said, never felt better.

I traveled a lot in those months. I was invited here and there not only because of my book but also because of the articles I was writing, which in turn forced me to travel to see close up the new kinds of strike, the reactions of the owners. I never thought of trying to become a freelance journalist. I did it because doing it I was happy. I felt disobedient, in revolt and inflated with such power that my meekness seemed a disguise. In fact it enabled me to join the pickets in front of the factories, to talk to workers, both men and women, and to union officials, to slip out among the policemen. Nothing frightened me. When the Banca di Agricoltura in Milan was bombed I was in the city, at the publisher’s, but I wasn’t alarmed, I didn’t have dark presentiments. I thought of myself as part of an unstoppable force, I thought I was invulnerable. No one could hurt me and my child. We two were the only enduring reality, I visible and he (or she: but Pietro wanted a boy) for now invisible. The rest was a flow of air, an immaterial wave of images and sounds that, whether disastrous or beneficial, constituted material for my work. It passed by or it loomed so that I could put it into magic words in a story, an article, a speech, taking care that nothing ended up outside the frame, and that every concept pleased the Airotas, the publishing house, Nino, who surely somewhere was reading me, even Pasquale, why not, and Nadia, and Lila, all of whom would finally have to think: Look, we were wrong about Lena, she’s on our side, see what she’s writing.

It was a particularly intense time, that period of the pregnancy. It surprised me that being pregnant made me more eager to make love. It was I who initiated it, embraced Pietro, kissing him, even though he had no interest in kissing and began almost immediately to make love in that prolonged, painful way of his. Afterward he got up and worked until late. I slept for an hour or two, then I woke up, found him gone, turned on the light, and read until I was tired. Then I went to his room, insisted that he come to bed. He obeyed, but he got up early: sleep seemed to frighten him. Whereas I slept until midday.

There was only one event that distressed me. I was in my seventh month and my belly was heavy. I was outside the Nuovo Pignone factory when scuffles broke out, and I hurried away. Maybe I made a wrong movement, I don’t know, I felt a painful spasm in the center of my right buttock that extended along my leg like a hot wire. I limped home, went to bed, and it passed. But every so often the pain reappeared, radiating through my thigh toward my groin. I learned to respond by finding positions that alleviated it, but when I realized that I was starting to limp all the time I was terrified, and I went to the gynecologist. He reassured me, saying that everything was in order, the weight I was carrying in my womb tired me out, causing this slight sciatica. Why are you so worried, he asked in an affectionate tone, you’re such a serene person. I lied, I said I didn’t know. In reality I knew perfectly well: I was afraid that my mother’s gait had caught up with me, that she had settled in my body, that I would limp forever, like her.

I was soothed by the reassurances of the gynecologist; the pain lasted for a while longer, then disappeared. Pietro forbade me to do other foolish things, no more running around. I admitted that he was right, and spent the last weeks of my pregnancy reading; I wrote almost nothing. Our daughter was born on February 12, 1970, at five-twenty in the morning. We called her Adele, even though my mother-in-law kept repeating, poor child, Adele is a terrible name, give her any other name, but not that. I had atrocious labor pains, but they didn’t last long. When the baby emerged and I saw her, black-haired, a violet organism that, full of energy, writhed and wailed, I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it. We didn’t baptize her; my mother screamed terrible things on the telephone, she swore she would never come to see her. She’ll calm down, I thought, sadly, and anyway if she doesn’t it’s her loss.

As soon as I was back on my feet I telephoned Lila, I didn’t want her to be angry that I hadn’t told her anything.

“It was a wonderful experience,” I told her.

“What?”

“The pregnancy, the birth. Adele is beautiful, and very good.”

She answered: “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”