The Story of a New Name

125

I hadn’t told her what the story of my book was or when it would be in bookstores. I hadn’t even told her about Pietro, of the plan to get married in a couple of years. Her life had overwhelmed me and it took days for me to restore clear outlines and depth to mine. What finally restored me to myself — but what myself? — was the proofs of the book: a hundred and thirty-nine pages, thick paper, the words of the notebook, fixed by my handwriting, which had become pleasantly alien thanks to the printed characters.

I spent happy hours reading, rereading, correcting. Outside it was cold, a frigid wind slipped in through the loose window frames. I sat at the kitchen table with Gianni and Elisa, who were studying. My mother was busily working around us, but with surprising care, in order not to disturb me.

Soon I went to Milan again. This time I allowed myself, for the first time in my life, to take a taxi. The bald editor, at the end of a day spent evaluating the final corrections, said to me, “I’ll call you a taxi,” and I didn’t know how to say no. So it happened that when I went from Milan to Pisa, at the station I looked around and thought: why not, let’s play the great lady again. And the temptation resurfaced when I returned to Naples, in the chaos of Piazza Garibaldi. I would have liked to arrive in the neighborhood in a taxi, sitting comfortably in the back seat, a driver at my service, who, when we reached the gate, would open the door for me. I took the bus instead, I didn’t feel up to it. But something about me must have been different, because when I greeted Ada, who was taking her baby out for a walk, she looked at me distractedly, and walked by. Then she stopped, turned back, said, “How well you look, I didn’t recognize you, you’re different.”

At the moment I was pleased, but soon I became unhappy. What advantage could I have gained from becoming different? I wanted to remain myself, chained to Lila, to the courtyard, to the lost dolls, to Don Achille, to everything. It was the only way to feel intensely what was happening to me. Yet change is hard to oppose: in that period, in spite of myself, I changed more than in the years in Pisa. In the spring the book came out, which, much more than my degree, gave me a new identity. When I showed a copy to my mother, to my father, to my sister and brothers, they passed it around in silence, but without looking through it. They stared at the cover with uncertain smiles, they were like police agents confronted with a fake document. My father said, “It’s my surname,” but he spoke without satisfaction, as if suddenly, instead of being proud of me, he had discovered that I had stolen money from his pocket.

Days passed, the first reviews came out. I scanned them anxiously, wounded by even the slightest hint of criticism. I read the best ones aloud to the whole family, my father brightened. Elisa said teasingly, “You should have signed Lenuccia, Elena’s disgusting.”

In those frenzied days, my mother bought a photograph album and began to paste in it everything good that was written about me. One morning she asked, “What’s the name of your fiancé?”

She knew, but she had something in mind and to communicate it she wished to start there.

“Pietro Airota.”

“Then you’ll be called Airota.”

“Yes.”

“And if you write another book, on the cover will it say Airota?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I like Elena Greco.”

“So do I,” she said.

But she never read it. My father didn’t read it, Peppe, Gianni, Elisa didn’t read it, and at first the neighborhood didn’t read it. One morning a photographer came and kept me for two hours, first in the gardens, then along the stradone, then at the entrance to the tunnel, taking photographs. Later, one of the pictures appeared in Il Mattino; I expected passersby would stop me on the street, would read the book out of curiosity. Instead no one, not Alfonso, Ada, Carmen, Gigliola, Michele Solara, who, unlike his brother Marcello, wasn’t a complete stranger to the alphabet, ever said to me, as soon as they could: your book is wonderful, or, who knows, your book is terrible. They only greeted me warmly and went on.

I encountered readers for the first time in a bookstore in Milan. The event, I soon discovered, had been urgently planned by Adele Airota, who was following the book’s journey at a distance and traveled purposely from Genoa for the occasion. She came to the hotel, kept me company all afternoon, tried tactfully to calm me. I had a tremor in my hands that wouldn’t go away, I struggled with words, I had a bitter taste in my mouth. I was angry with Pietro, who had stayed in Pisa, he was busy. Mariarosa, who lived in Milan, made a quick congratulatory visit before the reading, then she had to go.

I went to the bookstore terrified. The room was full, I went in with my eyes down. I thought I would faint with emotion. Adele greeted many of those present, they were friends and acquaintances of hers. She sat in the first row, gave me encouraging looks, turned occasionally to talk to a woman of her age who was sitting behind her. Until that moment I had spoken in public only twice, forced to by Franco, and the audience then was made up of six or seven of his friends who smiled with understanding. The situation was different now. I had before me some forty refined, cultivated strangers who stared at me in silence, with an unfriendly gaze; it was in large part the prestige of the Airotas that compelled them to be there. I wanted to get up and run away.

But the rite began. An old critic, a university professor much esteemed in his time, said as many good things about the book as possible. I couldn’t understand his speech, I thought only of what I was to say. I fidgeted in my chair, I had a stomachache. The world had vanished into chaos, and I couldn’t find within myself the authority to call it back and put it in order again. Yet I pretended self-assurance. When it was my turn, I spoke without really knowing what I was saying, I talked in order not to be silent, I gesticulated too much, I displayed too much literary knowledge, I made a show of my classical education. Then silence fell.

What were those people in front of me thinking? How was the critic and professor beside me evaluating my remarks? And was Adele, behind her air of cordiality, repenting her support of me? When I looked at her I realized immediately that my eyes were begging her for the comfort of a nod of approval and I was ashamed. Meanwhile the professor touched an arm as if to calm me, asked the audience for questions. Many stared in embarrassment at their knees, the floor. The first to speak was an older man with thick eyeglasses, well known to those present but not to me. At simply hearing his voice, Adele had an expression of annoyance. The man talked for a long time about the decline of publishing, which now looked more for money than for literary quality; then he moved on to the marketing collusion between critics and the cultural pages of the dailies; finally he focused on my book, first ironically, then, when he cited the slightly risqué pages, in an openly hostile tone. I turned red and rather than answer I mumbled some banal comments, off the subject. Until I broke off, exhausted, and stared at the table. The professor-critic encouraged me with a smile, with his gaze, thinking that I wanted to continue. When he realized that I didn’t intend to, he asked curtly: “Anyone else?”

At the back a hand was raised.

“Please.”

A tall young man, with long, unruly hair and a thick black beard, spoke in a contemptuously polemical way of the preceding speaker, and, a few times, even of the introduction of the nice man who was sitting next to me. He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function. Then he went on to praise the modernizing force of my novel. I recognized him most of all by his voice, it was Nino Sarratore.