‘So you’ve really made up your mind, Jacopo? I was hoping you would have second thoughts.’
‘Bambù, you’re really stubborn, you know? If he himself realizes it and he’s not well … Did you see how he asked to go when he saw a glimmer of hope? If he realizes it, all of you should realize it as well. When I returned, I too dreamt of nothing but studying here and enjoying the sunshine, our home! What did you think? I dreamt of it for years, but clearly it’s not possible.’
‘But he could go to Milan himself, to that doctor.’
‘No! He asked me to go with him, and all in all it will be best for me too that way: I’ll study and quickly become apprenticed … I’d say this is a warning. As always after a war, times speed up. Yes, the pace has quickened and this is probably a sign that we shouldn’t waste a moment. We’re behind Europe by at least twenty years! Mama, please, you talk to Ida. I know you understand.’
‘I understand perfectly. But we have to consider the accounts: we have very little money now.’
‘Damn! With the newspaper having risen to thirty liras in a year! Shit, Mody, I’ll accept the offer of that bitch who’s loaded with money. I’ll go into business!’
‘Into business, Nina?’
‘That’s right, Jacopo. Back there, on the island, I started knitting, and crocheting hats, scarves, sweaters and shawls isn’t bad. Plus, with that shitty Esmeralda we’ll have helpers. I like to choose and match colours. I’ve always had a passion for colour, maybe because I’m begalina, half blind, as my mother used to say, and colours stand out.’
‘Oh, dear Nina, thank heavens you’re staying here!’
‘We’ll work, Mama! And it will be a good thing for both ’Ntoni and me to start looking after ourselves, financially speaking as well.’
‘Anyway, I’m going to bed. What a day this has been! I have to bolster my strength so that tomorrow I can face Esmeralda’s favours and her intentions to save me through redemptive work, concepts that motivate that aristocratic lady. She’s beautiful though; damn, she’s gorgeous! They talk a lot about proletarian beauty … to console us and keep us in line in our poverty. Before, I didn’t look at the rich, or I looked at them and didn’t see them, since my eyes were blinded by that populist platitude. Until I realized, damn if I didn’t realize, that they are not only rich but beautiful, fragrantly scented and often intelligent! Like you, Jacopo. Damn this rotten world!’
‘You’re making me blush, Nina. Come, I’ll take you up.’
‘Oh sure, go ahead, take me up, give me your arm. Not everyone has the chance to be accompanied by a young man like you. Good as gold! At least I’ll be able to tell my grandkids: “So, you won’t believe it, my dear grandchildren, but your grandmother, long ago, had the good fortune, thanks to incarceration and prison cells, of landing among the most elegant and refined people…” And they’ll say: “No, really, Nonna? How did that happen? Tell us!”’
88
Nina’s voice trails off toward the darkness of the parlour. I’d like to follow that voice and go on dreaming while she talks. But the buzz of voices, the clanging of trains, the muffled sound of pressing throngs branch out from my future and invade the room, keeping me pinned in my chair … I’d like to drive off those crowds and go back with her to a small cell, where being more than a few feet apart from one another is unthinkable. Why is that? Is it nostalgia for that lost cell that’s making me cry like this? How could I have known it if life hadn’t shown me? How could I have known that my greatest joy lay concealed in the seemingly darkest years of my life? One must surrender to life, always without fear … Even now, between train whistles and the slamming of compartment doors, life calls me, and I must go.
The ability to speak and to transport my listeners, which had suddenly revealed itself in me, exciting my senses and my mind as though I were under the influence of a drug, kept telling me that this natural gift — most likely firmly ripened in the fertile soil of years of silence, study and reflection — could serve to bring us women like Nina, like Bambolina … To awaken them from a twenty-year lethargy, let them know that they aren’t the first, acquaint them with examples from the past.
‘Look, Modesta, you can’t fall back on that Alexandra Kollontai in every speech … Balabanoff, did you say? Maria Giudice? Come on, Modesta. They’re problematic figures, nonaligned. Sensational more than anything else, at least for the time being. When we learned that Maria was ill, I’ll be frank with you, it was a relief for everyone. It’s awful to say so, but all she did was create confusion. You can’t just suddenly start talking about free love, about abortion and divorce. You have to take it gradually, as comrade Giorgio says.’
Right, Giorgio … On the desk, his photograph stands out among the books.
‘Your husband, you mean?’
‘As you wish, Modesta. I see you haven’t changed.’
‘Nor have you.’
On the other side of the desk, polished and without a trace of dust, Joyce (or her ghost?) smiles at me with mild detachment.
‘Here, there are other, more urgent things to worry about.’
‘But why did I have to call you by your husband’s name in order to see you?’
‘What of it? True, you’ve never had a political mind, Modesta. We have to reassure the public, we have to show the country that we are respectable people in all ways, not those lawless reds, those rabble-rousing reds, and so on, like you still see written on walls in the rural areas.’
Where had she learned that winning, democratic smile, just like the one you saw on celebrities and politicians overseas? Before, she’d never smiled, and the grave sadness of her eyes had made her beautiful. Now, with that strange smile seemingly pinned to the corners of her mouth, her white hair expertly cut by skilful hands — a cut just barely longer than a man’s — her beauty had become rigid, reduced to an abstract image of mortuary solitude. Modesta had sensed it years before, but the living embodiment of her intuition makes her tremble with anger, and with fear.
To overcome the repugnance that Joyce’s words spill into her being, Modesta searches her memory for the faces of other female comrades she’s met on platforms, at assemblies, at rallies during those years … Luciana? Carla? Renata, maybe? Renata, only twenty-two years old, with that eternal refrain repeated yet again just last night? ‘But women, barring some exceptions, are silly fools. A waste of time, Modesta! I really don’t understand how a person like you can waste your time going to dinner with one of them.’ Watch out, Bambolina, Crispina, Olimpia: beware! In twenty or thirty years, don’t blame men when you find yourselves crying in a cramped room with your hands rubbed raw by bleach. It’s not men who have betrayed you, but these women who were once slaves themselves, who have willingly forgotten their state of bondage. By disavowing you, they can align themselves with men in various positions of power.
‘So what have you decided, Modesta?’
‘Decided?’
‘You never change! It’s hopeless to try to get you to think. The minute you don’t like what someone is saying, you lose yourself in idle reveries and amen! You had a lot of promise, Modesta, but I see that your exquisitely female obstinacy got the upper hand.’