The Neapolitan Novels

30.

Nino had been sincere, he had actually rented the apartment on Via Tasso. I went to live there right away, even though it was infested with ants and the furniture came down to a double bed without a headboard, cots for the children, a table, some chairs. I didn’t talk about love, I didn’t mention the future.

I told him that my decision had to do mostly with Franco, and I limited myself to bringing him good news and bad. The good was that my publisher had agreed to bring out his collection of essays, provided he made a new draft that was a little less dry; the bad was that I didn’t want him to touch me. He greeted the first piece of news joyfully, he was desperate about the second. But then, as it turned out, we spent every evening sitting together, rewriting his essays, and with that closeness I couldn’t keep my rage alive. Eleonora was still pregnant when we began to love each other again. And when she gave birth to a girl, who was named Lidia, Nino and I had returned to being lovers, a couple with our habits, a nice house, two children, an intense life, both private and public.

“Don’t think,” I said from the start, “that I’m at your command: I’m not capable of leaving you now, but sooner or later it will happen.”

“It won’t happen, you won’t have any reason to.”

“I have plenty of reasons.”

“Everything will change soon.”

“We’ll see.”

But it was a stage set, I passed off as very reasonable what was in fact unreasonable and humiliating. I’m taking—I said, adapting Franco’s words—what is indispensable to me now, and as soon as I’ve consumed his face, his words, every desire, I’ll send him away. When I waited for him in vain for days I told myself it was better that way, I was busy, he was with me too much. And when I felt the sting of jealousy I tried to calm myself by whispering: I am the woman he loves. And if I thought of his children I said to myself: He spends more time with Dede and Elsa than with Albertino and Lidia. Naturally it was all true and all false. Yes, the force of Nino’s attraction would wear out. Yes, I had a lot of things to do. Yes, Nino loved me, he loved Dede and Elsa. But there were also others, yes, whom I pretended to ignore. Yes, I was more attracted to him than ever. Yes, I was ready to neglect everything and everyone if he needed me. Yes, his ties to Eleonora, Albertino, and the newborn Lidia were at least as strong as his ties to me and my daughters. I lowered dark curtains over those yeses, and if in fact here or there a tear in the fabric made evident the true state of things I quickly resorted to big words about the world to come: everything is changing, we are inventing new forms of living together, and other nonsense of the sort that I myself uttered in public or wrote every time it happened.

But the difficulties hammered at me every day, cracks were continually opening up. The city hadn’t improved at all, its malaise wore me out immediately. Via Tasso turned out to be inconvenient. Nino got me a used car, a white Renault 4 that I immediately became attached to, but then I was always stuck in traffic, and I soon gave it up. I struggled to meet the endless demands of daily life much more than I ever had in Florence, Genoa, Milan. From the first day of school Dede hated her teacher and her classmates. Elsa, now in first grade, always came home depressed, her eyes red, and refused to tell me what had happened to her. I began to scold them both. I said they didn’t know how to deal with adversity, they didn’t know how to assert themselves, they didn’t know how to adapt, and they had to learn. As a result the two sisters joined forces against me: they began to speak of their grandmother Adele and aunt Mariarosa as if they were divinities who had organized a happy world made just for them, they mourned them in an increasingly explicit way. When, in an attempt to win them back, I drew them to me, cuddled them, they hugged me unwillingly, and sometimes pushed me away. And my work? It became more and more evident that, especially in that successful period, I would have done better to stay in Milan and find a job at a publisher’s. Or even settle in Rome, since I had met people on my promotional tours who had offered to help me. What were my daughters and I doing in Naples? Were we there just to make Nino happy? Was I lying to myself when I portrayed myself as free and autonomous? And was I lying to my audience when I played the part of someone who, with her two small books, had sought to help every woman confess what she couldn’t say to herself? Were they mere formulas that it was convenient for me to believe in while in fact I was no different from my more traditional contemporaries? In spite of all the talk was I letting myself be invented by a man to the point where his needs were imposed on mine and those of my daughters?

I learned to avoid myself. It was enough for Nino to knock on the door and the bitterness vanished. I said to myself: Life now is this and can’t be other. Meanwhile I tried to give myself some discipline, I didn’t resign myself, I tried to be assertive, sometimes I even managed to feel happy. The house shone with light. From my balcony I saw Naples stretching to the edges of the yellow-blue reflection of the sea. I had taken my daughters away from the temporariness of Genoa and Milan, and the air, the colors, the sounds of the dialect in the streets, the cultured people Nino brought to see me even late into the night gave me confidence, made me cheerful. I took the girls to see Pietro in Florence and was pleased when he came to see them in Naples. Over Nino’s protests I let him stay in my house. I made him a bed in the girls’ room; their affection for him was a performance, as if they wanted to keep him with them through a display of how much they loved him. We tried to have a casual relationship, I inquired about Doriana, I asked about his book, which was always about to be published when further details emerged that had to be examined. When the children held tight to their father, ignoring me, I took a little break. I went down through the Arco Mirelli and walked along Via Caracciolo, beside the sea. Or I went up to Via Aniello Falcone and came to the Floridiana. I chose a bench, I read.