The Neapolitan Novels

11.

I returned to Florence, I talked to Pietro about our separation. We quarreled violently while Adele tried to protect the children and perhaps herself, shutting herself up with them in her room. At a certain point we realized not that we were overdoing it but that the presence of our daughters did not allow us to overdo it as we felt the need to do. So we went out, continuing to fight in the street. When Pietro walked off, I don’t know where—I was furious, I didn’t want to see or hear him anymore—I went home. The children were sleeping. I found Adele sitting in the kitchen reading.

I said: “You see how he treats me?”

“And you?”

“I?”

“Yes, you: do you see how you treat him, how you’ve treated him?”

I turned away and shut myself in the bedroom, slamming the door. The contempt she had put into those words surprised me, wounded me. It was the first time she had turned against me so explicitly.

I left the next day for France, full of guilt because of the children’s crying and the books I had to study on the trip. But as I concentrated on the reading, the pages became more and more mixed up with Nino, Pietro, my daughters, the defense of Pasquale made by his sister, Antonio’s words, Alfonso’s mutation. I arrived in Paris after an exhausting train trip, more confused than ever. Yet at the station, when I recognized the younger of the two women publishers on the platform, I became cheerful, I found again the pleasure of extending myself that I had had with Nino in Montpellier. This time there were no hotels and monumental lecture halls; everything was more modest. The two women took me around to big cities and small towns, every day a journey, every evening a debate in a bookstore or even in a private apartment. As for meals and sleep, there was home cooking, a cot, or, occasionally, a couch.

I was very tired, and paid less and less attention to my appearance; I lost weight. And yet my editors and the audiences I encountered night after night liked me. Moving here and there, discussing with this and that person in a language that wasn’t mine but that I rapidly learned to manage, I gradually rediscovered an aptitude that I had displayed years before, with my previous book: I had a natural ability to transform small private events into public reflection. Every night I improvised successfully, starting from my own experience. I talked about the world I came from, about the poverty and squalor, male and also female rages, about Carmen and her bond with her brother, her justifications for violent actions that she would surely never commit. I talked about how, since I was a girl, I had observed in my mother and other women the most humiliating aspects of family life, of motherhood, of subjection to males. I talked about how, for love of a man, one could be driven to be guilty of every possible infamy toward other women, toward children. I talked about my difficult relationship with the feminist groups in Florence and Milan, and, as I did, an experience that I had underestimated suddenly became important: I discovered in public what I had learned by watching that painful effort of excavation. I talked about how, to assert myself, I had always sought to be male in intelligence—I started off every evening saying I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination—and I told how I had recently seen a male childhood friend of mine make every effort possible to subvert himself, extracting from himself a female.

I drew often on that half hour spent in the Solaras’ shop, but I only realized it later, maybe because Lila never came to my mind. I don’t know why I didn’t at any point allude to our friendship. Probably it seemed to me that, although she had dragged me into the swelling sea of her desires and those of our childhood friends, she didn’t have the capacity to decipher what she had put before my eyes. Did she see, for example, what in a flash I had seen in Alfonso? Did she reflect on it? I ruled that out. She was mired in the lota, the filth, of the neighborhood, she was satisfied with it. I, on the other hand, in those French days, felt that I was at the center of chaos and yet had tools with which to distinguish its laws. That conviction, reinforced by the small success of my book, helped me to be somewhat less anxious about the future, as if, truly, everything that I was capable of adding up with words written and spoken were destined to add up in reality as well. Look, I said to myself, the couple collapses, the family collapses, every cultural cage collapses, every possible social-democratic accommodation collapses, and meanwhile everything tries violently to assume another form that up to now would have been unthinkable: Nino and me, the sum of my children and his, the hegemony of the working class, socialism and Communism, and above all the unforeseen subject, the woman, I. Night after night, I went around recognizing myself in an idea that suggested general disintegration and, at the same time, new composition.

Meanwhile, always somewhat breathlessly, I telephoned Adele and talked to the children, who answered in monosyllables, or asked, over and over, like a refrain: When are you coming home? Around Christmas, I tried to take leave of my publishers, but by now they had taken my fate to heart, and didn’t want to let me go. They had read my first book, they wanted to republish it, and to this purpose they dragged me to the offices of the French publishing house that had printed it years earlier, unsuccessfully. I timidly got involved in discussions and negotiations, sustained by the two women, who, unlike me, were very combative, and knew how to cajole and threaten. Finally, in part thanks to the mediation of the Milan publisher, they came to an agreement: my text would be reissued the following year under the imprint of my new publishers.

I told Nino on the phone, and he seemed very excited. But then, sentence by sentence, his displeasure emerged.

“Maybe you don’t need me anymore,” he said.

“What are you talkin about? I can’t wait to hold you.”

“You’re so involved in your own affairs that there’s not even a tiny spot left for me.”

“You’re wrong. It’s thanks to you that I wrote this book, that I seem to have everything clear in my mind.”

“Then let’s see each other in Naples, or even in Rome, now, before Christmas.”

But by this point a meeting was impossible, the editorial matters had taken up my time, I had to get back to the children. Yet I couldn’t resist, and we decided to meet in Rome at least for a few hours. I traveled in a sleeping car, and arrived in the capital exhausted on the morning of December 23rd. I spent pointless hours in the station: Nino wasn’t there. I was worried, I was desolate. I was about to take a train for Florence when he appeared, sweating despite the cold. He had had endless difficulties, and had come by car, by train he would never have made it. We ate something quickly, we found a hotel in Via Nazionale, close to the station, and shut ourselves in the room. I wanted to go in the afternoon, but I didn’t have the strength to leave him, and I delayed my departure until the next day. We woke up happy to have slept together: ah, it was wonderful to stretch out a foot and discover, after the unconsciousness of sleep, that he was there in the bed, beside me. It was Christmas Eve, and we went out to get each other presents. My departure was postponed hour by hour and so was his. Not until the late afternoon did I drag myself with my suitcase to his car, I couldn’t leave him. Finally he started the engine, drove off, disappeared in the traffic. Laboriously I trudged from Piazza della Repubblica to the station, but I had delayed too long, and I missed the train by a few minutes. I was desperate: I would arrive in Florence in the middle of the night. And yet it had happened that way. I resigned myself to telephoning home. Pietro answered.

“Where are you?”

“In Rome, the train is stuck here in the station and I don’t know when it’s leaving.”

“Ah, these trains. Shall I tell the girls that you won’t be here for Christmas Eve dinner?”

“Yes, I probably won’t arrive in time.”

He burst into laughter, he hung up.

I traveled in a totally empty, frigid train. Not even the conductor came by. I felt as if I had lost everything and was heading toward nothingness, prisoner of a bleakness that accentuated my guilt. I arrived in Florence in the middle of the night, and couldn’t find a taxi. I carried my suitcase through the cold, on the deserted streets; even the Christmas bells had long since vanished into the night. I used my keys to enter. The apartment was dark and there was an anguished silence. I went through the rooms, no trace of the children, or of Adele. Tired, terrified, but also exasperated, I looked for at least a note that would tell me where they had gone. Nothing.

The house was in perfect order.