The Story of a New Name

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I didn’t imagine that I would earn money. But I received the draft of the contract and discovered that, surely thanks to Adele’s support, the publisher was giving me an advance of two hundred thousand lire, a hundred on signing and a hundred on delivery. My mother was speechless, she couldn’t believe it. My father said, “It takes months for me to earn that much money.” They both began to brag in the neighborhood and outside: our daughter has become rich, she’s a writer, she’s marrying a university professor. I flourished again, I stopped studying for the teachers’ college exam. As soon as the money arrived I bought a dress, some makeup, went for the first time in my life to the hairdresser, and left for Milan, a city unknown to me.

At the station I had trouble orienting myself. Finally I found the right metro, and arrived nervously at the door of the publishing house. I gave a thousand explanations to the porter, who hadn’t asked me anything, and who in fact, while I spoke, continued to read the newspaper. I went up in the elevator, I knocked, I went in. I was struck by how neat and tidy it was. My head was crowded with all that I had studied and I wanted to display it, to demonstrate that even if I was a woman, even if you could see my origins, I was a person who at twenty-three, had won the right to publish that book, and now, nothing nothing nothing about me could be called into question.

I was greeted politely, led from office to office. I talked with the editor who was working on my manuscript, an old man, bald, with a very pleasant face. We talked for a couple of hours, he praised me, he cited Adele Airota often, with great respect, he showed me some revisions that he suggested, he left me a copy of the text and his notes. As he was saying goodbye he added, in a serious voice, “The story is good, a contemporary story very well expressed, the writing is always surprising; but that’s not the point. It’s the third time I’ve read the book and on every page there is something powerful whose origin I can’t figure out.” I turned red, thanked him. Ah, how much I had been able to do, and how rapid it all was, how well liked I was and how likable I had become, I could speak about my studies, where I had done them, about my thesis on the fourth book of the Aeneid: I replied with courteous precision to courteous observations, mimicking perfectly the tones of Professor Galiani, of her children, of Mariarosa. A pretty, amiable woman named Gina asked if I needed a hotel and, at my nod of assent, found me one on Via Garibaldi. To my great amazement I discovered that everything was charged to the publisher, everything that I spent on food, the train tickets. Gina told me to present a record of expenses, I would be reimbursed, and she asked me to say hello to Adele for her. “She called me,” she said. “She’s very fond of you.”

The next day I left for Pisa, I wanted to embrace Pietro. On the train I considered one by one the editor’s notes and, satisfied, I saw my book with the eyes of one who praised it and was working to make it even better. I arrived very pleased with myself. My fiancé found me a place to sleep at the house of an old assistant professor of Greek literature whom I also knew. In the evening he took me to dinner and to my surprise showed me my manuscript. He, too, had a copy and had made some notes, we looked at them together one by one. They bore the imprint of his usual rigor and had to do mostly with the vocabulary.

“I’ll take care of them,” I said thanking him.

After dinner we walked to an isolated meadow. After we had held and touched each other for a long time in the cold, obstructed by coats and woolen sweaters, he asked me to revise and polish with care the pages where the protagonist loses her virginity on the beach. I said, bewildered, “It’s an important moment.”

“You yourself said that that part is a bit risqué.”

“At the publisher no one objected.”

“They’ll talk to you about it later.”

I became irritated, I told him that I would think about it and the next day I left for Naples in a bad mood. If that episode upset Pietro, who was a young man of wide reading, and had written a book on Bacchic rites, what would my mother and father say, my siblings, the neighborhood, if they read it? On the train I worked on the manuscript, keeping in mind the observations of the editor, and Pietro’s, and what I could eliminate I did. I wanted the book to be good, I didn’t want anyone to dislike it. I doubted that I would ever write another.