“If you act like that I’ll shut up: I don’t want you to feel offended again.”
“I’m not offended, go on.”
She looked me straight in the eye and revealed, in curt phrases, in Italian, that Nino had never left his wife, that he continued to live with her and his son, that as a reward he had been named, just recently, the director of an important research institute financed by the bank that his father-in-law headed. She concluded gravely:
“Did you know?”
I shook my head.
“No.”
“If you don’t believe me let’s go see him and I’ll repeat everything to his face, word for word, just as I told you now.”
I waved a hand to let her know there was no need.
“I believe you,” I whispered, but to avoid her eyes I looked out the door, at the street.
Meanwhile from very far away came Carmen’s voice saying: If you’re going to Nino I want to come, too; the three of us will settle things properly. I felt her lightly touching my arm to get my attention. As small girls we had read photo-romances in the garden next to the church and had felt the same urge to help the heroine when she was in trouble. Now, surely, she had the same feeling of solidarity of those days, but with the gravity of today, and it was a genuine feeling, brought on by a wrong that was not fictional but real. Lila on the other hand had always scorned such reading and there was no doubt that at that moment she was sitting across from me with other motives. I imagined that she felt satisfied, as Antonio, too, must have been when he discovered Nino’s falseness. I saw that she and Carmen exchanged a look, a sort of mute consultation, as if to make a decision. It was a long moment. No, I read on Carmen’s lips, and that breath was accompanied by an imperceptible shaking of her head.
No to what?
Lila stared at me again, her mouth half open. As usual she was taking on the job of sticking a pin in my heart not to stop it but to make it beat harder. Her eyes were narrowed, her broad forehead wrinkled. She waited for my reaction. She wanted me to scream, weep, hand myself over to her. I said softly:
“I really have to go now.”
23
I cut Lila out of everything that followed.
I was hurt, not because she had revealed that for more than two years Nino had been telling me lies about the state of his marriage but because she had succeeded in proving to me what in fact she had said from the start: that my choice was mistaken, that I was stupid.
A few hours later I met Nino, but I acted as if nothing were wrong, I limited myself only to avoiding his embraces. I was swallowed up by bitterness. I spent the whole night with my eyes wide open, the desire to cling to that long male body was ruined. The next day he wanted to take me to see an apartment on Via Tasso, and I agreed when he said: If you like it, don’t worry about the rent, I’ll take care of it, I’m about to get a position that will resolve all our financial problems. But that night I couldn’t take it anymore and I exploded. We were in the apartment on Via Duomo, and his friend as usual wasn’t there. I said to him:
“Tomorrow I’d like to see Eleonora.”
He looked at me in bewilderment.
“Why?”
“I have to talk to her. I want to know what she knows about us, when you left home, when you stopped sleeping together. I want to know if you asked for a legal separation. I want her to tell me if her father and mother know that your marriage is over.”
He remained calm.
“Ask me: if something isn’t clear I’ll explain it to you.”
“No, I trust only her, you’re a liar.”
At that point I started yelling, I switched to dialect. He gave in immediately, he admitted everything, I had no doubt that Lila had told me the truth. I hit him in the chest with my fists and as I did I felt as if there were a me unglued from me who wished to hurt him even more, who wanted to beat him, spit in his face as I had seen people do as a child in the neighborhood quarrels, call him a shit, scratch him, tear out his eyes. I was surprised, frightened. Am I always this furious other I? I, here in Naples, in this filthy house, I, who if I could would kill this man, plunge a knife into his heart with all my strength? Should I restrain this shadow — my mother, all our female ancestors — or should I let her go? I shouted, I hit him. And at first he warded off the blows, pretending to be amused, then suddenly he darkened, sat down heavily, stopped defending himself.
I slowed down, my heart was about to burst. He murmured:
“Sit down.”
“No.”
“At least give me a chance to explain.”
I collapsed onto a chair, as far away as possible, and let him speak. You know — he began in a choked voice — that before Montpellier I had told Eleonora everything and that the break was irreparable. But when he returned, he said, things had become complicated. His wife had gone crazy, even Albertino’s life seemed in danger. Thus, to be able to continue he had had to tell her that we were no longer seeing each other. For a while the lie had held up. But since the explanations he gave Eleonora for all his absences were increasingly implausible, the scenes had begun again. Once his wife had grabbed a knife and tried to stab herself in the stomach. Another time she had gone out on the balcony and wanted to jump. Yet another time she had left home, taking the child; she had disappeared for an entire day and he was dying with fear. But when he finally tracked her down at the house of a beloved aunt, he realized that Eleonora had changed. She was no longer angry, there was just a hint of contempt. One morning — Nino said, breathlessly — she asked if I had left you. I said yes. And she said: All right, I believe you. She said it just like that and from then on she began to pretend to believe me, pretend. Now we live in this fiction and things are working well. In fact, as you see, I’m here with you, I sleep with you, if I want I’ll go away with you. And she knows everything, but she behaves as if she knew nothing.
Here he took a breath, cleared his throat, tried to understand if I was listening or harboring only rage. I continued to say nothing, I looked in another direction. He must have thought that I was yielding and he continued to explain with greater determination. He talked and talked, he was good at it, he put everything into it. He was winning, self-mocking, suffering, desperate. But when he tried to approach, I pushed him away, shouting. Then he couldn’t bear it and burst into tears. He gesticulated, he leaned toward me, he murmured between tears: I don’t want you to pardon me, I want only to be understood. I interrupted him, angrier than ever, I cried: You lied to her and you lied to me, and you didn’t do it for love of either of us, you did it for yourself, because you don’t have the courage of your choices, because you’re a coward. Then I moved on to repugnant words in dialect, and he let himself be insulted, he muttered just some phrases of regret. I felt as if I were suffocating, I gasped, I was silent, and that allowed him to return to the charge. He tried again to demonstrate that lying to me had been the only way to avoid a tragedy. When it seemed to him that he had succeeded, when he whispered to me that now, thanks to Eleonora’s acquiescence, we could try to live together without trouble, I said calmly that it was over between us. I left, I returned to Genoa.
24
The atmosphere in my in-laws’ house became increasingly tense. Nino telephoned constantly, I either hung up on him or quarreled too loudly. A couple of times Lila called, she wanted to know how it was going. I said to her: Well, very well, just the way you wanted it to go, and hung up. I became intractable, I yelled at Dede and Elsa for no reason. But mainly I began to fight with Adele. One morning I threw in her face what she had done to hinder the publication of my book. She didn’t deny it, in fact she said: It’s a pamphlet, it doesn’t have the dignity of a book. I replied: If I write pamphlets, you in your whole life haven’t been capable of writing even that, and it’s not clear where all this authority of yours comes from. She was offended, she hissed: You don’t know anything about me. Oh no, I knew things that she couldn’t imagine. That time I managed to keep my mouth shut, but a few days later I had a violent quarrel with Nino; I yelled on the phone in dialect, and when my mother-in-law reproached me in a contemptuous tone I reacted by saying: