The Neapolitan Novels

44.

It was true, nothing was wrong with Lila: nothing new. She remained the same restless creature with an irresistible force of attraction, and that force made her special. Every one of her affairs, for better or for worse (how she was reacting to the pregnancy, what she had done to Michele and how she had subdued him, how she was asserting herself in the neighborhood), continued to seem to us more intense than ours, and it was for that reason that time for her seemed to move slowly. I saw her frequently, above all because my mother’s illness brought me to the neighborhood. But with a new sense of balance. Maybe because of my public persona, maybe because of all my private troubles, I felt more mature than Lila by now, and I was increasingly convinced that I could welcome her back into my life, acknowledging her fascination without suffering from it.

In those months I rushed frantically here and there, but the days flew by; paradoxically I felt light even when I crossed the city to take my mother to a doctor’s appointment in the hospital. If I didn’t know what to do with the children I turned to Carmen, or sometimes even Alfonso, who had telephoned me often to tell me I could count on him. But naturally the person in whom I had the most confidence, the one whom Dede and Elsa went to most willingly, was Lila, although she was always burdened by work and exhausted by pregnancy. The differences between my belly and hers were increasing. I had a large, wide stomach, which seemed to expand sideways rather than forward; she had a small stomach, squeezed between narrow hips, sticking out like a ball that was about to tumble out of her lap.

As soon as I told Nino about my condition, he took me to a gynecologist who was the wife of a colleague, and since I liked the doctor—very skilled, very available, very different in manner and perhaps also in competence from the gruff doctors in Florence—I had told Lila about her enthusiastically and urged her to come with me at least once, to try. Now we went together for our examinations, and had arranged to see her at the same time: when it was my turn, she stood quietly in a corner, and when it was her turn, I held her hand, because doctors still made her nervous. But the best part was in the waiting room. In those moments I forgot about my mother’s suffering and we became girls again. We liked sitting next to each other, I fair, she dark, I calm, she anxious, I likable, she malicious, the two of us opposite and united, and separate from the other pregnant women, whom we observed ironically.

It was a rare hour of joy. Once, thinking of the tiny creatures who were defining themselves in our bodies, I remembered when—sitting next to each other in the courtyard, as we were now in the waiting room—we played at being mothers with our dolls. Mine was called Tina, hers Nu. She had thrown Tina into the shadows of the cellar and I, out of spite, had done the same with Nu. Do you remember, I asked. She seemed bewildered, she had the faint smile of someone struggling to recapture a memory. Then, when I whispered to her, with a laugh, how fearful we were, how bold, climbing up to the door of the terrible Don Achille Carracci, the father of her future husband, and accusing him of the theft of our dolls, she began to find it funny, we laughed like idiots, disturbing the inhabited stomachs of the other patients, who were more sedate.

We stopped only when the nurse called us, Cerullo and Greco: we had both given the surnames we had had as girls. She was a large good-humored woman, who never failed to say to Lila, touching her stomach, There’s a boy in here; and to me, Here’s a girl. Then she showed us in and I whispered to Lila: I already have two girls, if you really have a boy will you give it to me: and she replied, Yes, let’s do an exchange, no problem.

The doctor always found us in good health, the tests were excellent, everything was going smoothly. Or rather—since she focused her attention on our weight, and Lila remained as usual very thin while I tended to get fat—at every examination she judged that Lila was healthier than me. And although we both had many worries, on those occasions we were almost always happy to have found again, at the age of thirty-six, a pathway to affection: though distant in every way we were still close.

But when I went back up to Via Tasso and she hurried to the neighborhood, the gap that we put between us made other gaps conspicuous. This new solidarity was undoubtedly real. We liked being together, it lightened our lives. But there was one unequivocal fact: I told her almost everything about myself, she said almost nothing about herself. While I couldn’t not tell her about my mother, or an article that I was writing, or problems with Dede and Elsa, or even about my situation as a lover-wife (it was enough not to specify the lover-wife of whom, not to utter the name of Nino too often; otherwise I could confide freely), when she talked about herself, her parents, her siblings, Rino, the anxieties Gennaro caused her, our friends and acquaintances, Enzo, Michele and Marcello Solara, the entire neighborhood, she was vague, she didn’t seem to trust me completely. Evidently I remained the one who had gone away, and who, even though I had returned, now had another view, lived in upper-class Naples, could not be fully welcomed back.