The Neapolitan Novels

30.

I blossomed. The teacher’s cousin was called Nella Incardo and she lived in Barano. I arrived in the town by bus, and found the house easily. Nella was a big, kind woman, very lively, talkative, unmarried. She rented rooms to vacationers, keeping for herself one small room and the kitchen. I would sleep in the kitchen. I had to make up my bed in the evening and take it all apart (boards, legs, mattress) in the morning. I discovered that I had some mandatory obligations: to get up at six-thirty, make breakfast for her and her guests—when I arrived there was an English couple with two children—tidy up and wash cups and bowls, set the table for dinner, and wash the dishes before going to sleep. Otherwise I was free. I could sit on the terrace and read with the sea in front of me, or walk along a steep white road toward a long, wide, dark beach that was called Spiaggia dei Maronti.

In the beginning, after all the fears that my mother had inoculated me with and all the troubles I had with my body, I spent the time on the terrace, dressed, writing a letter to Lila every day, each one filled with questions, clever remarks, lively descriptions of the island. But one morning Nella made fun of me, saying, “What are you doing like this? Put on your bathing suit.” When I put it on she burst out laughing, she thought it was old-fashioned. She sewed me one that she said was more modern, very low over the bosom, more fitted around the bottom, of a beautiful blue. I tried it on and she was enthusiastic, she said it was time I went to the sea, enough of the terrace.

The next day, amid a thousand fears and a thousand curiosities, I set out with a towel and a book toward the Maronti. The trip seemed very long, I met no one coming up or going down. The beach was endless and deserted, with a granular sand that rustled at every step. The sea gave off an intense odor and a sharp, monotonous sound.

I stood looking for a long time at that great mass of water. Then I sat on the towel, uncertain what to do. Finally I got up and stuck my feet in. How had it happened that I lived in a city like Naples and never thought, not once, of swimming in the sea? And yet it was so. I advanced cautiously, letting the water rise from my feet to my ankles, to my thighs. Then I missed a step and sank. Terrified, I gasped for air, swallowed water, returned to the surface, to the air. I realized that it came naturally to move my feet and arms in a certain way to keep myself afloat. So I knew how to swim. My mother really had taken me to the sea as a child and there, while she took the sand treatments, I had learned to swim. I saw her in a flash, younger, less ravaged, sitting on the black sand in the midday sun, in a flowered white dress, her good leg covered to the knee by her dress, the injured one completely buried in the burning sand.

The seawater and the sun rapidly erased the inflammation of the acne from my face. I burned, I darkened. I waited for letters from Lila, we had promised when we said goodbye, but none came. I practiced speaking English a little with the family at Nella’s. They understood that I wanted to learn and spoke to me with increasing kindness, and I improved quite a lot. Nella, who was always cheerful, encouraged me, and I began to interpret for her. Meanwhile she didn’t miss any opportunity to compliment me. She made me enormous meals, and she was a really good cook. She said that I had been a stick when I arrived and now, thanks to her treatment, I was beautiful.

In other words, the last ten days of July gave me a sense of well-being that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. I liked everything: getting up early, making breakfast, tidying up, walking in Barano, taking the road to the Maronti, uphill and down, lying in the sun and reading, going for a swim, returning to my book. I did not feel homesick for my father, my brothers and sister, my mother, the streets of the neighborhood, the public gardens. I missed only Lila, Lila who didn’t answer my letters. I was afraid of what was happening to her, good or bad, in my absence. It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.

At the end of July Nella told me that on the first of August, in place of the English, a Neapolitan family was to arrive. It was the second year they had come. Very respectable people, very polite, refined: especially the husband, a true gentleman who always said wonderful things to her. And then the older son, really a fine boy: tall, thin but strong, this year he was seventeen. “You won’t be alone anymore,” she said to me, and I was embarrassed, immediately filled with anxiety about this young man who was arriving, fearful that we wouldn’t be able to speak two words to each other, that he wouldn’t like me.

As soon as the English departed—they left me a couple of novels to practice my reading, and their address, so that if I ever decided to go to England I should go and see them—Nella had me help her clean the rooms, do the laundry, remake the beds. I was glad to do it, and as I was washing the floor she called to me from the kitchen: “How clever you are, you can even read in English. Are the books you brought not enough?”

And she went on praising me from a distance, in a loud voice, for how disciplined I was, how sensible, for how I read all day and also at night. When I joined her in the kitchen I found her with a book in her hand. She said that the man who was arriving the next day had written it himself. Nella kept it on her night table, every evening she read a poem, first to herself and then aloud. Now she knew them all by heart.

“Look what he wrote to me,” she said, and handed me the book.

It was Attempts at Serenity, by Donato Sarratore. The dedication read: “To darling Nella, and to her jams.”