The Neapolitan Novels

113.

Nino traveled at night, he reached Florence around nine in the morning. He called, Pietro answered, he hung up. He called again, I went to answer. He had parked downstairs. Come down. I can’t. Come down immediately, or I’ll come up. We were leaving in a few days for Viareggio, Pietro by now was on vacation. I left the children with him, I said I had some urgent shopping to do for the beach. I rushed to Nino.

Seeing each other was a terrible idea. We discovered that, instead of waning, desire had flared up and made a thousand demands with brazen urgency. If at a distance, on the telephone, words allowed us to fantasize, constructing glorious prospects but also imposing on us an order, containing us, frightening us, finding ourselves together, in the tiny space of the car, careless of the terrible heat, gave concreteness to our delirium, gave it the cloak of inevitability, made it a tile in the great subversive season under way, made it consistent with the forms of realism of that era, those which asked for the impossible.

“Don’t go home.”

“And the children, Pietro?”

“And us?”

Before he left again for Naples he said he didn’t know if he could tolerate not seeing me for all of August. We were desperate as we said goodbye. I didn’t have a telephone in the house we had rented in Viareggio, he gave me the number of the house in Capri. He made me promise to call every day.

“If your wife answers?”

“Hang up.”

“If you’re at the beach?”

“I have to work, I’ll almost never go to the beach.”

In our fantasy, telephoning was to serve also to set a date, sometime in August, and find a way of seeing each other at least once. He urged me to invent an excuse and return to Florence. He would do the same with Eleonora and would join me. We would see each other at my house, we would have dinner together, we would sleep together. More madness. I kissed him, I caressed him, I bit him, and I tore myself away from him in a state of unhappy happiness. I went to buy, at random, towels, a couple of bathing suits for Pietro, a shovel and pail for Elsa, a blue bathing suit for Dede. At the time blue was her favorite color.