The Neapolitan Novels

7.

The evening was spoiled. Nino said it was my mother-in-law who had told Lila that I was in Naples. He spoke with great embarrassment, choosing his words carefully, emphasizing points like: she didn’t have my address; she asked my sister for the phone number of my colleague; she telephoned a little before I was about to leave for the station; I didn’t tell you right away because I was afraid you would get angry and our day would be ruined. He concluded, desolate:

“You know what she’s like, I’ve never been able to say no to her. We have an appointment with her tomorrow at eleven, she’ll be at the entrance to the metro at Piazza Amedeo.”

I couldn’t control myself:

“How long have you been back in touch? Have you seen each other?”

“What are you talking about? Absolutely not.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Elena, I swear I haven’t talked to or seen Lila since 1963.”

“You know the child wasn’t yours?”

“She told me this morning.”

“So you talked for a long time, and about intimate things.”

“She was the one who brought up the child.”

“And you—in all this time you were never curious to know more about it?”

“It’s my problem, I don’t see the need to discuss it.”

“Your problems are also mine now. We have a lot to talk about, time is short, and I didn’t leave my children to waste it with Lina. How could it possibly have occurred to you to make this date?”

“I thought it would please you. But there’s the telephone: call your friend and tell her that we have a lot to do, you can’t see her.”

There, suddenly he lost patience, I was silent. Yes, I knew what Lila was like. Ever since I returned to Florence she had been calling often, but I had other things to think about and not only did I always hang up, I had also asked Adele—if she happened to answer—to say that I wasn’t home. Lila, however, hadn’t given up. It was therefore likely that she had found out from Adele about my presence in Naples, likely that she had taken for granted that I would not go to the neighborhood, likely that, to see me, she had found a way of getting in touch with Nino. What was the harm? And above all what did I expect? I had always known that he had loved Lila and that Lila had loved him. So? It had happened long ago, and to be jealous was inappropriate. I slowly caressed his hand, I murmured: All right, tomorrow we’ll go to Piazza Amedeo.

We ate, and he talked for a long time about our future. Nino made me promise that I would ask for a separation as soon as I returned from France. Meanwhile he assured me that he had already been in touch with a lawyer friend of his and that even if it was all complicated, and certainly Eleonora and her relatives would make things hard for him, he had decided to go ahead. You know, he said, here in Naples these things are more difficult: when it comes to a backward mentality and bad manners my wife’s relatives are no different from mine and yours, even if they have money and are high-ranking professionals. And, as if to explain himself better, he began to speak well of my in-laws. Unfortunately, he exclaimed, I’m not dealing, as you are, with respectable people, like the Airotas, people he described as having grand cultural traditions, admirable civility.

I listened, but now Lila was there between us, at our table, and I couldn’t push her away. While Nino talked, I remembered the trouble she had got herself in just to be with him, heedless of what Stefano could do to her, or her brother, or Michele Solara. And the mention of our parents for a fraction of a second brought me back to Ischia, to the evening on the beach of the Maronti—Lila with Nino in Forio, I on the damp sand with Donato—and I felt horror. This, I thought, is a secret that I will never be able to tell him. How many words remain unsayable even between a couple in love, and how the risk is increased that others might say them, destroying it. His father and I, he and Lila. I tore away revulsion, I mentioned Pietro, what he was suffering. Nino flared up, it was his turn to be jealous, I tried to reassure him. He demanded clean breaks and full stops, I demanded them, too: they seemed to us indispensable to the start of a new life. We discussed when, where. Work chained Nino inescapably to Naples, the children chained me to Florence.

“Come and live here,” he said suddenly. “Move as soon as you can.”

“Impossible, Pietro has to be able to see the children.”

“Take turns: you’ll take them to him, the next time he’ll come here.”

“He won’t agree.”

“He’ll agree.”

The evening went on like that. The more we examined the question, the more complicated it seemed; the more we imagined a life together—every day, every night—the more we desired it and the difficulties vanished. Meanwhile in the empty restaurant the waiters whispered to each other, yawned. Nino paid, and we went back along the sea walk, which was still lively. For a moment, as I looked at the dark water and smelled its odor, it seemed that the neighborhood was much farther away than when I had gone to Pisa, to Florence. Even Naples, suddenly, seemed very far from Naples. And Lila from Lila, I felt that beside me I had not her but my own anxieties. Only Nino and I were close, very close. I whispered in his ear: Let’s go to bed.