The Neapolitan Novels

106.

I went out with Eleonora and the three children in a state of such well-being that even if she had stuck a knife in me I would not have felt bad. Nino’s wife, besides, in the face of my euphoria and the many kindnesses I showed her, stopped being hostile, praised Dede and Elsa’s good behavior, confessed that she admired me. Her husband had told her everything about me, my studies, my success as a writer. But I’m a little jealous, she admitted, and not because you’re clever but because you’ve known him forever and I haven’t. She, too, would like to have met him as a girl, and know what he was like at ten, at fourteen, his voice before it changed, his laughter as a boy. Luckily I have Albertino, she said, he’s just like his father.

I observed the child, but it didn’t seem to me that I saw signs of Nino, maybe they would appear later. I look like Papa, Dede exclaimed suddenly, proudly, and Elsa added: I’m more like my mamma. I thought of Silvia’s son, Mirko, who had seemed identical to Nino. What pleasure I had felt holding him in my arms, soothing his cries in Mariarosa’s house. What had I been looking for at that time, in that child, when I was still far from the experience of motherhood? What had I sought in Gennaro, before I knew that his father was Stefano. What was I looking for in Albertino, now that I was the mother of Dede and Elsa, and why did I examine him so closely? I dismissed the idea that Nino remembered Mirko from time to time. Nor did I think he had ever demonstrated any interest in Gennaro. Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object. Was Albertino the child of will, of attention? Or did he, too, exist in the arms of this woman-mother without Nino’s feeling that he had had anything to do with it? I roused myself, I said to Eleonora that her son was the image of his father and was content with that lie. Then I told her in detail, with affection, with tenderness, about Nino at the time of elementary school, at the time of the contests organized by Maestra Oliviero and the principal to see who was smartest, Nino at the time of high school, about Professor Galiani and the vacation we had had on Ischia, with other friends. I stopped there, even though she kept childishly asking: And then?

The more we talked, the more she liked me; she became attached to me. If we went into a shop and I liked something, tried it on but then decided against it, I discovered on leaving that Eleonora had bought it, as a present for me. She also wanted to buy clothes for Dede and Elsa. At the restaurant she paid. And she paid for the taxi in which she took me home with the children, and then had herself driven to the hotel, loaded with packages. We said goodbye, the children and I waved until the car turned the corner. She’s another piece of my city, I thought. Outside my field of experience. She used money as if it had no value. I ruled out that it was Nino’s money. Her father was a lawyer, also her grandfather, her mother was from a banking family. I wondered what difference there was between their bourgeois wealth and that of the Solaras. I thought of how many hidden turns money takes before becoming high salaries and lavish fees. I remembered the boys from the neighborhood who were paid by the day unloading smuggled goods, cutting trees in the parks, working at the construction sites. I thought of Antonio, Pasquale, Enzo. Ever since they were boys they had been scrambling for a few lire here, a few there to survive. Engineers, architects, lawyers, banks were another thing, but their money came, if through a thousand filters, from the same shady business, the same destruction, a few crumbs had even mutated into tips for my father and had contributed to allowing me an education. What therefore was the threshold beyond which bad money became good and vice versa? How clean was the money that Eleonora had heedlessly spent in the heat of a Florentine day; and the checks with which the gifts that I was taking home had been bought, how different were they from those with which Michele paid Lila for her work? All afternoon, the girls and I paraded in front of the mirror in the clothes we had been given as presents. They were nice things, pretty and cheerful. There was a pale red, forties-style dress that looked especially good on me, I would have liked Nino to see me in it.

But the Sarratore family returned to Naples without our having a chance to see them again. Unpredictably, time didn’t collapse; rather, it began to flow lightly. Nino would return, that was certain. And he would talk about my writing. To avoid unnecessary friction I put a copy of my work on Pietro’s desk. Then I called Mariarosa with the pleasant certainty that I had worked well and told her I had managed to put in order that tangle I had talked to her about. She wanted me to send it immediately. A few days later she called me excitedly, asked if she could translate it herself into French and send it to a friend of hers in Nanterre who had a small publishing house. I agreed enthusiastically, but it didn’t end there. A few hours later my mother-in-law called pretending to be offended.

“How is it that now you give what you write to Mariarosa and not to me?”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t interest you. It’s just seventy pages, it’s not a novel, I don’t even know what it is.”

“When you don’t know what you’ve written it means you’ve worked well. And anyway let me decide if it interests me or not.”

I sent her a copy. I did it almost casually. The same morning Nino, around midday, called me by surprise from the station, he had just arrived in Florence.

“I’ll be at your house in half an hour, I’ll leave my bag and go to the library.”

“You won’t eat something?” I asked with naturalness. It seemed to me normal that he—arriving after a long journey—should come to sleep at my house, that I should prepare something for him to eat while he took a shower in my bathroom, that we should have lunch together, he and I and the children, while Pietro was giving exams at the university.