“There, it won’t fall off. But be careful for the child, disinfect it when you get home, you could easily get a bad scratch.”
I asked the man at the stall how much it cost, Nina wanted to pay, I objected.
“It’s nothing.”
After that she relaxed a little. She complained of the fatigue of recent days, the child had been impossible.
“Come, sweetheart, let’s put that pacifier away,” she said, “let’s not make a bad impression on Leda.”
She spoke of her daughter with agitation. She said that ever since Elena had lost the doll she had regressed, she wanted to be either carried or pushed in the stroller, and had even gone back to the pacifier. She looked around, as if searching for a more tranquil spot, and pushed the stroller toward the gardens. She said with a sigh that she was really tired, and she stressed “tired,” she wanted me to hear it as not only physical tiredness. Suddenly she burst out laughing, but I understood that she wasn’t laughing in fun, there was a bad feeling about it.
“I know you saw me with Gino, but you mustn’t think badly of me.”
“I don’t think badly of anything or anyone.”
“Yes, that’s obvious. As soon as I saw you, I said to myself: I would like to be like that lady.”
“What is it about me in particular?”
“You’re beautiful, you’re refined, it’s clear that you know a great many things.”
“I don’t really know anything.”
She shook her head energetically.
“You have such self-confidence, you’re not afraid of anything. I saw it the moment you arrived on the beach for the first time. I looked at you and hoped that you would look in my direction, but you never did.”
We wandered a little on the garden paths, and she spoke again of the pinewood, of Gino.
“What you saw has no meaning.”
“Now, don’t tell lies.”
“It’s true, I hold him off, and I keep my lips closed. I just want to be a girl again, a little, but pretending.”
“How old were you when Elena was born?”
“Nineteen, Elena is almost three.”
“Maybe you became a mother too soon.”
She shook her head no, insistently.
“I’m happy with Elena, I’m happy with everything. It’s just lately, because of these days. If I find the person who is making my child suffer . . .”
“What will you do,” I said ironically.
“I know what I’ll do.”
I caressed one arm lightly as if to tame her. It seemed to me that she was dutifully mimicking the tone and the formulations of her family, she had even accentuated the Neapolitan cadence to be more convincing, and I felt something like tenderness.
“I’m fine,” she repeated several times, and told me how she had fallen in love with her husband, she had met him in a discotheque, at sixteen. He loved her, adored her and the daughter. She laughed again, nervously.
“He says my breasts are exactly the size of his hand.”
The phrase seemed to me vulgar and I said: “And if he should see you the way I saw you?”
Nina became serious. “He would cut my throat.”
I looked at her, at the child. “What do you expect from me?”
She shook her head and murmured: “I don’t know. To talk a little. When I see you on the beach I think I would like to sit the whole time under your umbrella and talk. But then you’d be bored, I’m stupid. Gino told me that you’re a professor at the university. I was enrolled in literature after high school, but I only took two courses.”
“You don’t work?”
She laughed again.
“My husband works.”
“What does he do?”
She avoided the question with a peevish gesture, and a flash of hostility lighted her eyes. She said: “I don’t want to talk about him. Rosaria is doing the shopping, at any moment she might call me and then my time is up.”
“She doesn’t want you to talk to me?”
She frowned angrily.
“According to her I mustn’t do anything.”
She was silent for a moment, then she said hesitantly:
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Why did you leave your daughters?”
I thought, searching for an answer that might help her.
“I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.”
I realized that she was no longer laughing continuously, now she was paying attention to my every word.
“You didn’t see them for three years.”
I nodded yes.
“And how did you feel without them?”
“Good. It was as if my whole self had crumbled, and the pieces were falling freely in all directions with a sense of contentment.”
“You didn’t feel sad?”
“No, I was too taken up by my own life. But I had a weight right here, as if I had a stomachache. And my heart skipped a beat whenever I heard a child call Mama.”
“You felt bad, then, not good.”
“I was like someone who is taking possession of her own life, and feels a host of things at the same time, among them an unbearable absence.”
She looked at me with hostility.
“If you felt good why did you go back?”
I chose my words carefully.
“Because I realized that I wasn’t capable of creating anything of my own that could truly equal them.”
She had a sudden contented smile.
“So you returned for love of your daughters.”
“No, I returned for the same reason I left: for love of myself.”
She again took offense.
“What do you mean?”
“That I felt more useless and desperate without them than with them.”
She tried to dig inside me with her eyes: into my chest, behind my forehead.
“You found what you were looking for and you didn’t like it?”
I smiled at her.
“Nina, what I was looking for was a confused tangle of desires and great arrogance. If I had been unlucky it would have taken me my whole life to realize it. But I was lucky and it took only three years. Three years and thirty-six days.”
She seemed unsatisfied.
“How did it happen that you decided to go back?”
“One morning I discovered that the only thing I really wanted to do was peel fruit, making a snake, in front of my daughters, and then I began to cry.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If we have time I’ll tell you.”
She nodded, in an ostentatious way, to let me understand that she would like nothing more than to stay and listen, and meanwhile she realized that Elena had fallen asleep and she gently removed the pacifier, wrapped it in a kleenex, put it in her purse. With a pretty frown she conveyed the tenderness her daughter inspired, and began again:
“And after your return?”
“I was resigned to living very little for myself and a great deal for the two children: gradually I succeeded.”
“So it passes,” she said.
“What.”
She made a gesture to indicate a vertigo but also a feeling of nausea.
“The turmoil.”
I remembered my mother and said:
“My mother used another word, she called it a shattering.”
She recognized the feeling in the word, and her expression was that of a frightened girl.
“It’s true, your heart shatters: you can’t bear staying together with yourself and you have certain thoughts you can’t say.”
Then she asked me again, this time with the mild expression of someone seeking a caress: “Anyway, it passes.”
I thought that neither Bianca nor Marta had ever tried to ask me questions like Nina’s, and in this insistent tone. I looked for words, in order to lie to her by telling the truth.
“With my mother it became a sort of sickness. But that was another time. Today you can live perfectly well even if it doesn’t pass.”