The Neapolitan Novels

99.

We were therefore at this point: my husband’s sister considered my marriage a mistake and said it to me frankly. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, it seemed to me the ultimate and unbiased confirmation of my conjugal unease. Besides, what could I do about it? I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes. Day by day I grew calmer. My daughter Dede went to first grade early, already knowing how to read and write; my daughter Elsa was happy to stay alone with me all morning in the still house; my husband, although he was the dullest of academics, seemed finally close to finishing a second book that promised to be even more important than the first; and I was Signora Airota, Elena Airota, a woman depressed by submissiveness who nevertheless, urged by her sister-in-law but also in order to fight discouragement, had begun to study almost in secret the invention of woman by men, mixing the ancient and modern worlds. I didn’t have an objective; only to be able to say to Mariarosa, to my mother-in-law, to this or that acquaintance: I’m working.

And so I pushed on, in my speculations, from the first and second Biblical creations to Defoe-Flanders, Flaubert-Bovary, Tolstoy-Karenina, La dernière mode, Rose Sélavy, and beyond, and still further, in a frenzy of revelation. Slowly I began to feel some satisfaction. I discovered everywhere female automatons created by men. There was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing. When Pietro was at work and Dede was at school and Elsa was playing next to my desk and I, at last, felt alive, digging into words and among words, I sometimes imagined what my life and Lila’s would have been if we had both taken the test for admission to middle school and then high school, if together we had studied to get our degree, elbow to elbow, allied, a perfect couple, the sum of intellectual energies, of the pleasures of understanding and the imagination. We would have written together, we would have been authors together, we would have drawn power from each other, we would have fought shoulder to shoulder because what was ours was inimitably ours. The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition. Then I felt as if my thoughts were cut off in the middle, absorbing and yet defective, with an urgent need for verification, for development, yet without conviction, without faith in themselves. Then the wish to telephone her returned, to tell her: Listen to what I’m thinking about, please let’s talk about it together, you remember what you said about Alfonso? But the opportunity was gone, lost decades ago. I had to learn to be satisfied with myself.

Then one day, just as I was preoccupied with that need, I heard the key turn in the lock. It was Pietro, coming home for lunch after picking up Dede at school. I closed books and notebooks as the child burst into the room, greeted enthusiastically by Elsa. She was starving, I knew she would cry: Mamma, what is there to eat? Instead, even before throwing down her book bag, she exclaimed: a friend of Papa’s is coming to lunch with us. I remember the date precisely: March 9, 1976. I pulled myself out of my bad mood, Dede grabbed me by the hand and drew me into the hallway. Meanwhile Elsa, because of the announced presence of a stranger, was keeping prudent hold of my skirt. Pietro said gaily: Look who I brought you.