“I’ll have chocolate cake,” she said, breaking off with a graceful frown.
I looked at her in admiration. She drove a car, lived in Milan, taught at the university, stood up to her father without resentment. I, instead: I was frightened by the idea of opening my mouth, and, at the same time, humiliated by staying silent. I couldn’t contain myself, I said hyperbolically, “The Americans, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should be brought to trial for crimes against humanity.”
Silence. The whole family looked at me. Mariarosa exclaimed Bravo! she took my hand, shook it. I felt encouraged and immediately bubbled over with words, scraps of old phrases memorized at various times. I talked about planning and rationalization, the socialist-Christian Democratic precipice, about neocapitalism, about organizational structures, about Africa, Asia, primary school, Piaget, collusion of the police and the courts, fascist rot in every manifestation of the state. I was muddled, breathless. My heart was pounding, I forgot who I was with and where I was. Yet I felt around me an atmosphere of increasing approval, and I was happy to have expressed myself, I seemed to have made a good impression. I was also glad that no one in that nice little family had asked me, as happened frequently, where I came from, what my father did, and my mother. I was I, I, I.
I stayed with them, talking, in the afternoon, too. And in the evening we all went for a walk, before going to dinner. At every step Professor Airota met people he knew. Even two of the university professors, with their wives, stopped to greet him warmly.
108
But already the next day I felt bad. The time spent with Pietro’s family had given me further proof that the hard work of the Normale was a mistake. Merit was not enough, something else was required, and I didn’t have it nor did I know how to learn it. How embarrassing that jumble of agitated words was, without logical rigor, without composure, without irony, things that Mariarosa, Adele, Pietro were capable of. I had learned the methodical persistence of the researcher who checks even the commas, that, yes, and I proved it during exams, or with the thesis that I was writing. But in fact I remained naïve, even if almost too cultured, I didn’t have the armor to advance serenely as they did. Professor Airota was an immortal god who had given his children magical weapons before the battle. Mariarosa was invincible. And Pietro perfect in his overcultivated courtesy. I? I could only remain near them, shine in their radiance.
Anxiety not to lose Pietro seized me. I sought him out, I clung to him, I was affectionate. But I waited in vain for him to declare himself. One night I kissed him, on the cheek, and finally he kissed me on the mouth. We began to meet in secluded places, at night, waiting for darkness. I touched him, he touched me, he didn’t want to penetrate me. It was as if I had returned to the time of Antonio, and yet the difference was enormous. There was the excitement of going out in the evening with Airota’s son, getting strength from him. Every so often I thought of calling Lila from a public telephone: I wanted to tell her that I had this new boyfriend and that almost certainly our graduation theses would be published, they would become books, just like real books, with the cover, the title, the name. I wanted to tell her it was possible that both he and I would teach in the university, his sister Mariarosa at twenty-four was already doing so. I also wanted to tell her: you’re right, Lila, if they teach you properly from childhood, as an adult you have less trouble with everything, you are someone who seems to have been born already knowing. But in the end I gave it up. Why telephone her? To listen silently to her story? Or, if she let me speak, what would I tell her? I knew very well that what would surely happen to Pietro would never happen to me. Most important, I knew that, like Franco, he would soon disappear, and that after all it was better that way, because I didn’t love him, I was with him in the dark alleys, in the meadows, only so that I would feel the fear less.
109
Around Christmas vacation in 1966 I got a very bad flu. I telephoned a neighbor of my parents — finally even in the old neighborhood many people had a telephone — and told them I wasn’t coming home for the vacation. Then I sank into desolate days of fever and coughing, while the college emptied, became silent. I ate nothing, I even had trouble drinking. One morning when I had fallen into an exhausted half-sleep, I heard loud voices, in my dialect, as when in the neighborhood the women leaned out the windows, arguing. From the darkest depths of my mind came the known footsteps of my mother. She didn’t knock, she opened the door, she entered, loaded down with bags.
It was unimaginable. She had hardly ever left the neighborhood, at most to go to the center of the city. Outside of Naples, as far as I knew, she had never been. And yet she had got on the train, had traveled all night, and had come to my room to heap on me Christmas food that she had prepared ahead of time, quarrelsome gossip in a loud voice, orders that were supposed, as if by magic, to bring me back to health and allow me to leave with her in the evening: because she had to go, at home she had other children and my father.
She depleted me more than the fever. She shouted so much, moving objects, carelessly rearranging things, that I was afraid the dean would come. At one point I felt I was fainting, I closed my eyes, hoping she wouldn’t follow me into the nauseating darkness I was being dragged into. But she didn’t stop at anything. Always in motion through the room, helpful and aggressive, she told me about my father, my siblings, the neighbors, friends, and, naturally, about Carmen, Ada, Gigliola, Lila.
I tried not to listen but she pursued me: Do you understand what she did, do you understand what happened? And she shook me, touching an arm or a foot buried under the covers. I discovered that, in the state of fragility caused by the illness, I was more sensitive to everything I couldn’t stand about her. I got angry — and I told her this — at how, with every word, she wanted to demonstrate that all my contemporaries, compared to me, had failed. “Stop it,” I muttered. She paid no attention, she kept repeating, You, on the other hand.
But what wounded me most was to sense behind her pride as a mother the fear that things would suddenly change and I would again lose points, no longer give her occasion to boast. She did not much trust the stability of the world. So she force-fed me, dried the sweat, made me take my temperature I don’t know how many times. Was she afraid I would die, depriving her of my trophy existence? Was she afraid that, being ill, I would give in, be in some way demoted, have to return home without glory? She spoke obsessively about Lila. She was so insistent that I suddenly perceived how highly she had regarded her since she was a child. Even she, I thought, even my mother, realized that Lila is better than me and now she is surprised that I’ve left her behind, she believes and doesn’t believe it, she’s afraid of losing her position as luckiest mother in the neighborhood. Look how combative she is, look at the arrogance in her eyes. I felt the energy she gave off, and I thought that her lameness had required her to have greater strength than normal, in order to survive, imposing on her the ferocity with which she moved inside and outside the family. What, on the other hand, was my father? A weak little man, trained to be obliging, to hold out his hand discreetly to pocket small tips: certainly he would never have managed to overcome all the obstacles and arrive at this austere building. She had done it.