The Neapolitan Novels

66.

I entrusted myself to my mother-in-law with an immediate sense of relief, and here, too, she showed herself to be the woman I would have liked to resemble. In the space of a few days she found a big girl named Clelia, barely twenty, and originally from the Maremma, to whom she gave detailed instructions about taking care of the house, the shopping, the cooking. When Pietro found Clelia in the house without even having been consulted he made a gesture of annoyance.

“I don’t want slaves in my house,” he said.

Adele answered calmly: “She’s not a slave, she’s a salaried employee.”

And I, fortified by the presence of my mother-in-law, stammered: “Do you think I should be a slave?”

“You’re a mother, not a slave.”

“I wash and iron your clothes, I clean the house, I cook for you, I’ve given you a daughter, I bring her up in the midst of endless difficulties, I’m worn out.”

“And who makes you do that, have I ever asked you for anything?”

I couldn’t bear to argue, but Adele did, she crushed her son with a sometimes ferocious sarcasm, and Clelia remained. Then she took the child away from me, carried the crib into the room I had given her, managed with great precision the schedule of bottles both at night and during the day. When she noticed that I was limping, she took me to a doctor, a friend of hers, who prescribed various injections. She herself appeared every morning and every evening with the syringe and the vials, to blithely stick the needle into my buttocks. I felt better right away, the pain in my leg disappeared, my mood improved, I was happier. But Adele didn’t stop there. She politely insisted that I attend to myself, she sent me to the hairdresser, made me go back to the dentist. And above all she talked to me constantly about the theater, the cinema, a book she was translating, another she was editing, what her husband or other famous people whom she called familiarly by name had written in this or that journal. From her I heard for the first time about the new radical feminist tracts. Mariarosa knew the women who were writing them; she was infatuated with them, admired them. Not Adele. She said with her usual ironic attitude that they went on and on about the feminist question as if it could be dealt with separately from the class conflict. Read them anyway, she advised me, and left me a couple of those little volumes with a final cryptic phrase: Don’t miss anything, if you want to be a writer. I put them aside, I didn’t want to waste time with writings that Adele herself disparaged. But I also felt, just then, that in no way did my mother-in-law’s cultivated conversation arise from a true need to exchange ideas with me. Adele intended to systematically pull me out of the desperate state of an incompetent mother, she was rubbing words together to strike a spark and rekindle my frozen mind, my frozen gaze. But the truth was that she liked saving me more than listening to me.

And yet. Yet Dede, in spite of everything, continued to cry at night, I heard her and became agitated, she gave off a sense of unhappiness that undid the beneficial action of my mother-in-law. And though I had more time I still couldn’t write. And Pietro, who was usually controlled, in the presence of his mother became uninhibited to the point of rudeness; his return home was almost always followed by an aggressive exchange of sarcastic remarks, and this only increased the sense of breakdown I felt around me. My husband—I soon realized—found it natural to consider Adele ultimately responsible for all his problems. He got angry with her for everything, even what happened to him at work. I knew almost nothing about the wearing tensions that he was experiencing at the university; in general to my how are things he responded fine, he tended to spare me. But with his mother the barriers broke down; he assumed the recriminatory tone of the child who feels neglected. He poured out onto Adele everything he hid from me, and if I was present he acted as if I weren’t, as if I, his wife, were to act only as silent witness.

Thus many things became clear to me. His colleagues, all older than him, attributed his dazzling career, as well as the small reputation that he was starting to develop abroad, to the name he bore, and had isolated him. The students considered him unnecessarily rigid, a pedantic bourgeois who tended his own plot without making any concession to the chaos of the present, in other words a class enemy. And he, as usual, neither defended himself nor attacked, but kept straight on his path, offering—of this I was sure—lectures of acute intelligence, assessing students’ abilities with equal acuity, failing them. But it’s hard, he almost shouted at Adele, one evening, in a tone of complaint. Then he immediately lowered his voice, said that he needed tranquility, that the job was a struggle, that no small number of his colleagues set the students against him, that groups of youths often erupted into the classroom where he was teaching and forced him to break off the classes, that despicable slogans had appeared on the walls. At that point, even before Adele could speak, I lost control. If you were a little less reactionary, I said, those things wouldn’t happen to you. And he, for the first time since I’d known him, answered rudely, hissing: Shut up, you always speak in clichés.

I locked myself in the bathroom and I suddenly realized that I scarcely knew him. What did I know about him? He was a peaceful man but determined to the point of stubbornness. He was on the side of the working class and the students, but he taught and gave exams in the most traditional way. He was an atheist, he hadn’t wanted to get married in a church, he had insisted that Dede not be baptized, but he admired the early Christian communities of the Oltrarno and he spoke on religious matters with great expertise. He was an Airota, but he couldn’t bear the privileges and comforts that came from that. I calmed down, I tried to be closer to him, more affectionate. He’s my husband, I said to myself, we ought to talk more. But Adele’s presence became increasingly problematic. There was something unexpressed between them that drove Pietro to set aside manners and Adele to speak to him as if he were a fool with no hope of redemption.

We lived now like that, amid constant battles: he quarreled with his mother, he ended up saying something that made me angry, I attacked him. Until the point came when my mother-in-law, at dinner, in my presence, asked him why he was sleeping on the sofa. He answered: It’s better if you leave tomorrow. I didn’t intervene, and yet I knew why he slept on the sofa: he did it for me, so that he wouldn’t disturb me when, around three, he stopped working and allowed himself some rest. The next day Adele returned to Genoa. I felt lost.