The Neapolitan Novels

35.

Of course not, I responded, and laughed in embarrassment. But on the street I had to explain, to Elsa especially—Dede was grimly silent—that I would not have other children, they were my children and that was that. And for two days I had a headache, I couldn’t sleep. A few deliberately placed words and Lila had disrupted an encounter that had seemed to me pleasant. I said to myself: There’s nothing to be done, she’s incurable, she always knows how to complicate my existence. And I wasn’t alluding only to the anxieties she had unleashed in Dede and Elsa. Lila had struck with precision a point in myself that I kept carefully hidden and which had to do with the urge for motherhood I’d noticed for the first time a dozen years ago, when I had held little Mirko, in Mariarosa’s house. It had been a completely irrational impulse, a sort of command of love, which at the time had overwhelmed me. I had intuited even then that it was not a simple wish to have a child, I wanted a particular child, a child like Mirko, a child of Nino’s. And in fact that yearning had not been alleviated by Pietro and the conception of Dede and Elsa. Rather, it had reemerged recently, when I saw Silvia’s child and, especially, when Nino had told me that Eleonora was pregnant. Now, with increasing frequency, it rummaged around in me, and Lila, with her usual acute gaze, had seen it. It’s her favorite game—I said to myself—she does it with Enzo, with Carmen, with Antonio, with Alfonso. She must have behaved the same way with Michele Solara, with Gigliola. She pretends to be a kind and affectionate person, but then she gives you a slight nudge, she moves you a tiny bit, and she ruins you. She wants to go back to acting like that with me, and with Nino, too. She had managed to bring out into the open a secret tremor that in general I tried to ignore, as one ignores the twitching of an eyelid.

For days, in the house on Via Tasso, alone and in company, I was constantly agitated by the question: Will you have a child with Nino? But now it wasn’t Lila’s question, I asked it of myself.