I walked along the sea until evening, nibbling fresh coconut, toasted almonds, hazelnuts. The shops were lighted, the young Africans spread their wares on the sidewalks, a fire-eater began to spit out long flames, a clown knotted colored balloons into animal forms, attracting a big audience of children, the Saturday-night throng grew. I discovered that a dancing party was to be held in the square, and I waited for it to begin.
I like dancing, I like to watch people dance. The orchestra started with a tango; it was mainly older couples who ventured out, and they were good. Among the dancers I recognized Giovanni, whose steps and figures had a serious intensity. The spectators multiplied, the circle around the edges of the square expanded. The dancers, too, grew in number, and their competence diminished. Now people of all ages were dancing, polite grandsons with grandmothers, fathers with ten-year-old daughters, old women with old women, children with children, tourists and local people. Suddenly Giovanni was standing in front of me, asking me to dance.
I left my purse with an old woman he knew and we danced, a waltz, I believe. From then on we didn’t stop. He talked about the heat, the starry sky, the full moon, and how the mussels were flourishing. I felt better and better. He was sweaty, tense, but he continued to ask me to dance, with true courtesy, and I accepted, I was having a good time. He left me, apologizing, only when, at a certain point, the Neapolitan family appeared in the crowd, at the edge of the square.
I went to get my purse and I observed him as he politely greeted Nina, Rosaria, and finally, with particular deference, Tonino. I also saw him trying clumsily to pet Elena, who, in her mother’s arms, was eating a roll of cotton candy twice as big as her face. When the greetings were over, he remained beside them, stiff, uneasy, saying nothing, but as if he were proud to be seen in their company. I understood that for me the evening was over and I prepared to go. But I realized that Nina was handing her daughter to Rosaria and now was forcing her husband to dance. I stayed a little longer to watch her. Her movements had a natural, pleasing harmony, even—or perhaps especially—in the arms of that graceless man. I felt a touch on my arm. It was Gino, who had leaped like a beast from some corner where he had been squatting. He asked if I wanted to dance, I said I was tired, very hot, but at the same time I felt light and gay, and so I took him by the hand and we danced.
I quickly realized that he intended to guide me toward Nina and her husband, wanting her to see us. I helped him, and then I didn’t mind being seen in the arms of her suitor. But in the throng of couples it was difficult to reach them and we both gave up without saying anything. I had my purse on my shoulder but, well, all right. It was pleasant to dance with that slender, tall dark boy, with his shining eyes and mussed hair and dry palms. His nearness was so different from Giovanni’s. I felt the difference in bodies, in odors. I perceived it as a division in time: it seemed to me that that very evening, there in the square, had been split in half and that I had magically ended up dancing in two different stages of my life. When the music ended, I said I was tired, Gino wanted to take me home. We left the square behind us, the sea walk, the music. We spoke of his exam, of the university. At the door I saw that he was having a hard time saying goodbye.
“Would you like to come up,” I asked.
He made a gesture of no, he was embarrassed, he said:
“It’s beautiful, the gift you gave Nina.”
It irritated me that they had managed to see each other and that she had even showed him the pin. He added:
“She was really grateful for your kindness.”
I grumbled a yes, I was pleased. Then he said:
“I have something to ask you.”
“What.”
He didn’t look me in the face, but stared at the wall behind me.
“Nina wants to know if you would be willing to lend us your place for a few hours.”
I felt uneasy, a dart of bad humor that poisoned my veins. I looked at the boy to see if that formulation concealed a request not from Nina but born of his own desire. I said sharply:
“Tell Nina I’d like to talk to her.”
“When?”
“As soon as she can.”
“Her husband leaves tomorrow evening, before that it’s impossible.”
“Monday morning is fine.”
He was silent, now he was nervous and couldn’t leave.
“Are you angry?”
“No.”
“But you made a face.”
I said coldly:
“Gino, the man who takes care of my apartment knows Nina and has business with her husband.”
He had an expression of disdain, a half smile.
“Giovanni? He doesn’t count. Ten euros and he says nothing.”
Then I said to him with a rage that I couldn’t conceaclass="underline" “Why did you decide to ask this of me in particular?”
“Nina wanted it that way.”
24
I had a hard time getting to sleep. I thought about calling the girls, they were there, in a corner of my mind, but I kept losing them in the confusion of the days. This time, too, I decided against it. They’ll just give me a list of the things they need, I sighed. Marta will say that I went to the trouble of sending Bianca her notes, but forgot something—I don’t know what, there’s always something—that she’d asked for. It’s been like that since they were young, they live in the suspicion that I do more for one than for the other. Once it was toys, candy, even the quantity of kisses dispensed. Afterward they began to argue over clothes, shoes, motorcycles, cars—that is, money. Now I have to pay attention to give one exactly what I give the other, because each, resentful, keeps a secret account. They’ve felt since childhood that my affection is transient, and so they evaluate it on the basis of the concrete services I provide, the goods I distribute. Sometimes I think they see me now only as a material inheritance that they will have to quarrel over after my death. They don’t want the same thing to happen with the money, with our few goods, that, in their view, happened with the transmission of my physical features. No, I don’t feel like listening to their complaints. Why don’t they call me. If the phone doesn’t ring, evidently they don’t have urgent demands. I tossed and turned in the bed; I couldn’t get to sleep, and was enraged.
In any case, satisfying your daughters’ demands is something you accept. In late adolescence, Bianca and Marta, in shifts that were brutally assigned, had asked me a hundred times to leave them the apartment free. They had their sexual dealings and I had always been accommodating. I thought: better at home than in a car, in a dark street, in a field, among a thousand discomforts, exposed to so many risks. So I had gone, with a sigh, to the library or the movies or to sleep at a friend’s house. But Nina? Nina was an image on the beach in August, an entanglement of looks and a few words, at most the victim—she and her daughter—of my reckless gesture. Why should I leave her my house, how had it occurred to her.
I got up, wandered around the apartment, went out on the terrace. The night was still echoing with the sounds of the fair. Suddenly, clearly, I felt the thread that stretched between that girl and me: we hardly knew each other, and yet the bond strengthened. Perhaps she wanted me to refuse her the keys, so that she could refuse herself a dangerous outlet for her restlessness. Or she wanted me to give her the keys, so that she could feel in that gesture the authorization to take the risk of flight, the road to a future different from the one that was already written for her. Anyway, she wanted the experience, the wisdom, the rebel force that in her imagination she attributed to me—she wanted me to put these at her service. She needed me to take care of her, to follow her step by step, sustaining her in the choices that, whether I gave her the keys, or refused, I would nevertheless have pushed her to make. It seemed to me, when at last the sea and the town had grown silent, that the problem was not the demand for some hours of love with Gino in my house but her giving herself to me so that I might concern myself with her life. The beam from the lighthouse was, at fixed intervals, casting an unbearable light on the terrace, so I got up and went back inside.