The Neapolitan Novels

71.

I examined the situation. The two previous books, which for years had produced a little money, partly thanks to translations, had stopped selling. The advance I had received for my new book and hadn’t yet earned was nearly gone. The articles I wrote, working late into the night, either brought in little or were not paid at all. I lived, in other words, on the money that Pietro contributed punctually every month and that Nino supplemented by taking on the rent for the house, the bills, and, I have to admit, often giving me money for clothes for myself and the children. But as long as I had had to confront all the upheavals and inconveniences and sufferings that followed my return to Naples, it had seemed fair. Now instead—after that evening—I decided that it was urgent to become as autonomous as possible. I had to write and publish regularly, I had to reinforce my profile as an author, I had to earn money. And the reason was not any literary vocation, the reason had to do with the future: Did I really think that Nino would take care of me and my daughters forever?

It was then that a part of me—only a part—began to emerge that consciously, without particular suffering, admitted that it couldn’t really count on him. It wasn’t just the old fear that he would leave me; rather it seemed to me an abrupt contraction of perspective. I stopped looking into the distance, I began to think that in the immediate future I couldn’t expect from Nino more than what he was giving me, and that I had to decide if it was enough.

I continued to love him, of course. I liked his long slender body, his methodical intelligence. And I had a great admiration for his work. His old ability to assemble facts and interpret them was a skill that was much in demand. Recently he had published a highly regarded work—maybe that was the one Guido had liked so much—on the economic crisis and on the karstic movement of capital that was being shifted from sources to be investigated toward construction, finance, private television. Yet something about him had begun to bother me. For example, I was wounded by his delight in finding favor with my former father-in-law. Nor did I like the way he had begun again to differentiate Pietro—a petty professor with no imagination, highly praised only because of his surname and his obtuse activity in the Communist Party—from his father, the real Professor Airota, whom he praised unrestrainedly as the author of fundamental volumes on Hellenism and as an outstanding and combative figure of the socialist left. His renewed liking for Adele further wounded me; he was constantly calling her a great lady, extraordinary at public relations. He seemed to me, in other words, sensitive to the approval of those who had authority and ready to catch out, or even, at times, humiliate, out of envy, those who did not yet have enough of it and those who did not have it at all but could have it. Something that marred the image that I had always had of him and that he generally had of himself.

It wasn’t only that. The political and cultural climate was changing, other readings were emerging. We had all stopped making extreme speeches, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with positions that years earlier I had opposed in Pietro, out of a wish to contradict him, out of the need to quarrel. But Nino went too far, he now found ridiculous not only every subversive statement but also every ethical declaration, every display of purity. He said, making fun of me:

“There are too many sensitive souls around.”

“Meaning?”

“People who are outraged, as if they didn’t know that either the parties do their job or you get armed gangs and Masonic lodges.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that a party can’t be anything other than a distributor of favors in exchange for support, ideals are part of the furniture.”

“Well, then I’m a sensitive soul.”

“I know that.”

I began to find his craving to be politically surprising unpleasant. When he organized dinners at my house he embarrassed his own guests by defending from the left positions of the right. The fascists—he maintained—aren’t always wrong and we should learn to talk to each other. Or: You can’t simply condemn, you have to get your hands dirty if you want to change things. Or even: Justice should as soon as possible be subordinated to the rights of those who have the task of governing, otherwise the judges become loose cannons, dangerous for the preservation of the democratic system. Or again: Wages have to be frozen, the mechanism of the wage index scale is ruinous for Italy. If someone disagreed with him he became contemptuous, he sneered, he let it be understood that it wasn’t worth the trouble to argue with people wearing blinders, whose heads were full of old slogans.

I retreated into an uneasy silence, in order not to take sides against him. He loved the shifting sands of the present, the future for him was decided there. He knew about everything that happened in the parties and in parliament, about the internal movements of capital and of the organization of labor. I, on the other hand, persisted in reading only what had to do with the dark conspiracies, the kidnappings and bloody last-ditch efforts of the armed red gangs, the debate on the decline of the centrality of workers, the identification of new opposition subjects. As a result I felt more comfortable with the language of the other diners than with his. One evening he quarreled with a friend who taught in the school of architecture. He became inflamed by passion, disheveled, handsome.

“You can’t distinguish between a step forward, a step back, and standing still.”

“What’s a step forward?” the friend asked.

“A prime minister who isn’t the same old Christian Demo-crat.”

“And standing still?”

“A demonstration by steelworkers.”

“And a step back?”

“Asking who’s cleaner, the socialists or the Communists.”

“You’re turning cynical.”

“You, on the other hand, have always been a shit.”

No, Nino no longer persuaded me the way he used to. He expressed himself, I don’t know how to say it, in a provocative and yet opaque way, as if precisely he, who extolled the long view, were able to follow only the daily moves and counter-moves of a system that to me, to his own friends, seemed rotten to the core. Enough, he would insist, let’s end the childish aversion to power: one has to be on the inside in the places where things are born and die: the parties, the banks, television. And I listened, but when he turned to me I lowered my gaze. I no longer concealed from myself that his conversation partly bored me, and partly seemed to point to a brittleness that dragged him down.

One time he was lecturing Dede, who had to do some sort of crazy research for her teacher, and to soften his pragmatism I said:

“The people, Dede, always have the possibility of turning everything upside down.”

Good-humoredly he replied, “Mamma likes to make up stories, which is a great job. But she doesn’t know much about how the world we live in functions, and so whenever there’s something she doesn’t like she resorts to a magic word: let’s turn everything upside down. You tell your teacher that we have to make the world that exists function.”

“How?” I asked.

“With laws.”

“But if you say that the judges should be controlled.”

Displeased with me, he shook his head, just as Pietro used to do.

“Go and write your book,” he said, “otherwise you’ll complain it’s our fault that you can’t work.”

He started a lesson with Dede on the division of powers, which I listened to in silence and agreed with from A to Z.