The Neapolitan Novels

73.

Finally the moment seemed auspicious, it was a long time since we’d had our old harmony. Only this time the harmony really was confined to a tangle of vibrating breaths along the telephone wires. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time. She didn’t know what I looked like after two pregnancies, I didn’t know if she was still pale and very thin, or had changed. For several years I had been speaking to a mental image that the voice was slowly reviving. Maybe for that reason, the murder of Don Achille suddenly seemed like an invention, the core of a possible story. And once I got off the telephone I tried to put order into our conversation, reconstructing the passages on the basis of which Lila, fusing past and present, had led me from the murder of poor Dario to that of the loan shark, up to Manuela Solara. I had trouble sleeping, I pondered for a long time. I felt with increasing lucidity that that material might be a shore from which to lean out and grasp a story. In the following days I mixed Florence with Naples, the tumults of the present with distant voices, the comfort of now and the struggle I had had to pull myself out of my origins, the anxiety of losing everything and the fascination of regression. As I thought about it I became convinced that I could make a book out of it. With great effort, with constant, painful second thoughts, I filled a graph-paper notebook, constructing a web of violence that welded together the past twenty years. Sometimes Lila telephoned, she asked:

“Why don’t you call anymore, aren’t you well?”

“I’m very well, I’m writing.”

“And when you write I no longer exist?”

“You exist but I’m distracted.”

“If I’m ill, if I need you?”

“Call.”

“And if I don’t telephone you stay inside your novel?”

“Yes.”

“I envy you, lucky you.”

I worked with growing anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to get to the end of the story before the baby was born, I was afraid I might die while I was giving birth, leaving the book unfinished. It was hard, nothing like the happy unconsciousness in which I had written the first novel. Once I had sketched out the story, I decided to give the text a more thoughtful pace. I wanted the writing to be lively, new, deliberately chaotic, and I didn’t hold back. So I worked on a second, detailed draft. I went back and rewrote every line even when, thanks to a Lettera 32 that I had bought when I was expecting Dede, thanks to carbon paper, I had transformed the notebooks into a solid typescript in triplicate, almost two hundred pages, with not a single typing mistake.

It was summer, it was very hot, my belly was enormous. The pain in my buttock had reappeared, it came and went, and my mother’s step in the hall got on my nerves. I stared at the pages, I discovered that I was afraid of them. For days I couldn’t make up my mind, I worried about giving it to Pietro to read. Maybe, I thought, I should send it directly to Adele, this isn’t the type of story for him. And besides, with the persistence that distinguished him, he continued to make life difficult for himself at the university, coming home in a state of agitation, making abstract speeches about the value of law—in other words, he wasn’t in the right state of mind to read a novel about workers, bosses, struggles, blood, camorrists, loan sharks. What’s more, my novel. He keeps me separate from the confusion inside him, he’s never been interested in what I was and what I’ve become, what’s the point of giving him the book? He’ll just discuss this or that choice of word, and the punctuation, and if I insist on an opinion he’ll say something vague. I sent Adele a copy of the manuscript, then I called her.

“I’ve finished.”

“I’m so pleased. Will you let me read it?”

“I sent it to you this morning.”

“Good, I can’t wait to read it.”