“Leave me alone, worry about yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Pietro told me that you’ve had lovers.”
“I?”
“Yes, you, don’t be so taken aback. I assumed my responsibilities in front of everyone, even Dede and Elsa, and I’m paying for the consequences of my actions. You, who give yourself so many airs, you’re just a hypocritical little bourgeois who hides her dirt under the carpet.”
Adele turned pale, she was speechless. Rigid, her face tense, she got up and closed the door of the living room. Then she said to me in a low voice, almost a whisper, that I was an evil woman, that I couldn’t understand what it meant to truly love and to give up one’s beloved, that behind a pleasing and docile façade I concealed an extremely vulgar craving to grab everything, which neither studying nor books could ever tame. Then she concluded: Tomorrow get out, you and your children; I’m sorry only that if the girls had grown up here they might have tried not to be like you.
I didn’t answer, I knew I had gone too far. I was tempted to apologize but I didn’t. The next morning Adele ordered the maid to help me pack. I’ll do it myself, I exclaimed, and without even saying goodbye to Guido, who was in his study pretending nothing was happening, I found myself at the station loaded with suitcases, the two children watching me, trying to understand what my intentions were.
I remember the exhaustion, the echo of the station hall, the waiting room. Dede reproached me for shoving: Don’t push me, don’t always shout, I’m not deaf. Elsa asked: Are we going to Papa? They were cheerful because there was no school, but I felt that they didn’t trust me and they asked cautiously, ready to be silent if I got angry: What are we doing, when are we going back to Grandma and Grandpa’s, where are we going to eat, where will we sleep tonight.
At first, desperate as I was, I thought of going to Naples and showing up with the children, without warning, at Nino and Eleonora’s house. I said to myself: Yes, that’s what I should do, my daughters and I are in this situation because of him, and he has to pay. I wanted my disorder to crash into him and overwhelm him, as it was overwhelming me. He had deceived me. He had held on to his family and, like a toy, me, too. I had chosen definitively, he hadn’t. I had left Pietro, he had kept Eleonora. I was in the right, then. I had the right to invade his life and say to him: Well, my dear, we are here; if you’re worried about your wife because she does crazy things, now I’m doing crazy things, let’s see how you manage it.
But while I was preparing for a long, excruciating journey to Naples I changed my mind in a flash — an announcement on the loudspeaker was enough — and left for Milan. In this new situation I needed money more than ever. I said to myself that first of all I should go to a publisher and beg for work. Only on the train did I realize the reason for that abrupt change of plan. In spite of everything, love writhed fiercely inside me and the mere idea of doing harm to Nino was repugnant to me. Although I now wrote about women’s autonomy and discussed it everywhere, I didn’t know how to live without his body, his voice, his intelligence. It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters. At the idea of hurting him and of no longer seeing him I withered painfully, the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother, and the woman-mother was disconnected from the woman-lover, and the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions. As I traveled toward Milan, I discovered that, with Lila set aside, I didn’t know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris.
I arrived worn out and frightened at Mariarosa’s house.
25
How long did I stay there? Several months, and at times it was a difficult cohabitation. My sister-in-law already knew about the fight with Adele and she said with her usual frankness: You know I love you, but you were wrong to treat my mother like that.
“She behaved very badly.”
“Now. But she helped you before.”
“She did it only so that her son wouldn’t look bad.”
“You’re unfair.”
“No, I’m direct.”
She looked at me with an irritation that was unusual in her. Then, as if she were stating a rule whose violation she could not tolerate, she said:
“I want to be direct, too. My mother is my mother. Say what you like about my father and my brother, but leave her alone.”
Otherwise she was polite. She welcomed us to her house in her casual way, assigned us a big room with three cots, gave us towels, and then left us to ourselves, as she did with all the guests who appeared and disappeared in the apartment. I was struck, as usual, by her vivacious gaze; her entire organism seemed to hang from her eyes like a worn dressing gown. I scarcely noticed that she had an unusual pallor and had lost weight. I was absorbed in myself, in my suffering, and soon I paid her no attention at all.
I tried to put some order into the room, which was dusty, dirty, crowded with things. I made my bed and the girls’ beds. I made a list of everything they and I needed. But that organizational effort didn’t last long. My head was in the clouds, I didn’t know what decisions to make, and for the first days I was constantly on the telephone. I missed Nino so much that I immediately called him. He got Mariarosa’s number and from then on he called me continuously, even if every conversation ended in a fight. At first I was overjoyed to hear his voice, and at times I was close to giving in. I said to myself: I hid from him the fact that Pietro returned home and we were sleeping under the same roof. Then I grew angry with myself, I realized that it wasn’t the same thing: I had never slept with Pietro, he slept with Eleonora; I had started the process of separation, he had consolidated his marriage bond. So we started quarreling again, I told him, shouting, never to call again. But the telephone rang regularly morning and evening. He said that he couldn’t do without me, he begged me to come to Naples. One day he announced that he had rented the apartment on Via Tasso and that everything was ready to welcome me and my daughters. He said, he declared, he promised, he appeared ready for everything, but he could never make up his mind to say the most important words: It’s really over now with Eleonora. So there was always a moment when, paying no attention to the children or to the people coming and going around the house, I screamed at him to stop tormenting me and hung up angrier than ever.
26
I lived those days despising myself, I couldn’t tear Nino out of my mind. I finished my work lethargically, I departed out of duty, I returned out of duty, I despaired, I was collapsing. And I felt that the facts were proving Lila right: I was forgetting my daughters, I was leaving them with no care, with no school.