Dede and Elsa were enchanted by the new arrangement. They scarcely knew their aunt, but they adored the sense of absolute freedom that she radiated. The house in Sant’Ambrogio continued to be a port in a storm; Mariarosa welcomed everyone with the tone of a sister or perhaps a nun without prejudices, and she didn’t care about dirt, mental problems, crime, drugs. The girls had no duties; they wandered through the rooms until late at night, curious. They listened to speeches and jargons of every type, they were entertained when people made music, when they sang and danced. Their aunt went out in the morning to the university and returned in the late afternoon. She was never anxious, she made them laugh, she chased them around the apartment, played hide-and-seek or blind-man’s buff. If she stayed home, she undertook great cleaning efforts, involving me, them, stray guests. But more than our bodies she looked after our minds. She had organized evening courses, and invited her colleagues from the university. Sometimes she herself gave lectures that were witty and packed with information, and she kept her nieces beside her, addressing them, involving them. The apartment at those times was crowded with her friends, men and women, who came just to listen to her.
One evening, during one of those lessons, there was a knock on the door and Dede ran to open it; she liked to greet people. Returning to the living room, she said excitedly: It’s the police. In the small assembly there was an angry, almost threatening murmur. Mariarosa rose calmly and went to speak to the police. There were two, they said that the neighbors had complained, or something like that. She was cordial, insisted that they come in, almost forced them to sit with us in the living room, and returned to her lecture. Dede had never seen a policeman up close, and started talking to the younger one, resting her elbow on his knee. I remember her opening remark, by which she intended to explain that Mariarosa was a good person:
“In fact,” she said, “my aunt is a professor.”
“In fact,” the cop said faintly, with an uncertain smile.
“Yes.”
“How well you speak.”
“Thank you. In fact, her name is Mariarosa Airota and she teaches art history.”
The boy whispered something to his older companion. They remained prisoners for ten minutes or so and then they left. Dede led them to the door.
Later I, too, was assigned one of these educational projects, and for my evening more people showed up than usual. My daughters sat on cushions in the first row, in the big living room, and they listened obediently. Starting then, I think, Dede began to observe me with curiosity. She had great respect for her father, her grandfather, and now Mariarosa. She knew nothing about me and didn’t want to know anything. I was her mother, I forbade everything, she couldn’t stand me. She must have been amazed that I was listened to with an attention that she on principle would never have given me. And maybe she also liked the composure with which I responded to criticisms; that evening they came surprisingly from Mariarosa. My sister-in-law was the only one among the women present who did not agree with even a word of what I was saying — she who, long ago, had encouraged me to study, to write, to publish. Without asking my permission, she told the story of the fight I had had with my mother in Florence, demonstrating that she knew about it in detail. “Resorting to many learned citations,” she theorized that a woman without love for her origins is lost.
27
When I had to travel I left the children to my sister-in-law, but I soon realized that it was really Franco who took care of them. Generally he stayed in his room, he didn’t join in the lectures, he paid no attention to the constant coming and going. But he was fond of my daughters. When necessary he cooked for them, he invented games, in his way he instructed them. Dede learned from him to challenge the silly fable — so she described it, telling me about it — of Menenius Agrippa, which she had been taught in the new school I had decided to enroll her in. She laughed and said: The patrician Menenius Agrippa, Mamma, bewildered the common people with his talk, but he couldn’t prove that one man’s limbs are nourished when another man’s stomach is filled. Ha ha ha. From him she also learned, on a big map of the world, the geography of inordinate prosperity and intolerable poverty. She couldn’t stop repeating: It’s the greatest injustice.
One evening when Mariarosa wasn’t there, my boyfriend from the days of Pisa said, in a serious tone of regret, alluding to the children, who followed him around the house with drawn-out cries: Imagine, they could have been ours. I corrected him: They’d be a few years older by now. He nodded yes. I observed him for a few seconds while he stared at his shoes. I compared him in my mind to the rich, educated student of fifteen years earlier: it was him and yet it was not him. He no longer read, he didn’t write, within the past year he had reduced to the minimum his participation in assemblies, debates, demonstrations. He talked about politics — his only true interest — without his former conviction and passion; rather, he accentuated the tendency to mock his own grim prophecies of disaster. In hyperbolic tones he listed the catastrophes that in his view were approaching: one, the decline of the revolutionary subject par excellence, the working class; two, the definitive dispersion of the political patrimony of socialists and Communists, who were already perverted by their daily quarrel over which was playing the role of capital’s crutch; three, the end of every hypothesis of change, what was there was there and we would have to adapt to it. I asked skeptically: You really think it’s going to end like that? Of course — he laughed — but you know that I’m a skilled debater, and if you want I’ll prove to you, by means of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the exact opposite: Communism is inevitable, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the highest form of democracy, the Soviet Union and China and North Korea and Thailand are much better than the United States, shedding blood in rivulets or rivers in certain cases is a crime and in certain others is just. Would you prefer that I do that?
Only twice did I see him as he had been as a youth. One morning Pietro appeared, without Doriana, assuming the attitude of someone who was making an inspection to check on what conditions his daughters were living in, what school I had put them in, if they were happy. It was a moment of great tension. The children perhaps told him too much, and with a childish taste for fantastic exaggeration, about the way they were living. So he began to quarrel ponderously first with his sister and then with me, he said to us both that we were irresponsible. I lost my temper, and shouted at him: You’re right, take them away, you take care of them, you and Doriana. And at that point Franco came out of his room, intervened, rolled out his old skill with words, which in the past had enabled him to control raucous meetings. He and Pietro ended up having a learned discussion on the couple, the family, the care of children, and even Plato, forgetting about Mariarosa and me. My husband left, his face flushed, his eyes clear, nervous and yet pleased to have found someone with whom he could have an intelligent and civilized conversation.
Stormier — and terrible for me — was the day when Nino appeared without warning. He was tired from the long drive, unkempt in appearance, very tense. At first I thought he had come to decide, on his own authority, the fate of me and the children. Enough, I hoped he would say, I’ve cleared up my situation and we’re going to live in Naples. I felt disposed to give in without any more nonsense, I was exhausted by the provisional nature of things. But it didn’t turn out like that. We closed ourselves in a room, and he, amid endless hesitations, twisting his hands, his hair, his face, repeated, against all my expectations, that it was impossible for him to separate from his wife. He was agitated, he tried to embrace me, he struggled to explain that only by staying with Eleonora would it be possible for him not to give up me and our life together. At another moment I would have pitied him; it was evident that his suffering was sincere. But, at the time, I didn’t care in the least how much he was suffering, I looked at him in astonishment.