I pulled the door hard toward myself just as Nino opened his eyes and Silvana suddenly raised her head, throwing me a frightened gaze. I rushed to get Imma from the playpen and while Nino shouted, Elena, wait, I was already out of the house, I didn’t even call the elevator, I ran down the stairs with the baby in my arms.
75
I took refuge in the car, I started the engine, and with Imma on my knees I left. The baby seemed happy, she wanted to honk the horn, as Elsa had taught her, she spoke her incomprehensible little words alternating with shrieks of joy at my presence. I drove without a goal, I wanted only to get as far away from the house as possible. Finally I found myself at Sant’Elmo. I parked, turned off the engine, and discovered that I had no tears, I wasn’t suffering, I was only frozen with horror.
I couldn’t believe it. Was it possible that that Nino whom I had discovered as he was thrusting his taut sex inside the sex of a mature woman — a woman who cleaned my house, did my shopping, cooked, took care of my children; a woman marked by the struggle to survive, large, worn-out, the absolute opposite of the cultivated, elegant women he brought to dinner — was the boy of my adolescence? For the whole time I was driving blindly, perhaps scarcely feeling the weight of the half-naked Imma, who was pounding the horn in vain and happily calling me, I couldn’t give him a stable identity. I felt as if, entering the house, I had suddenly found out in the open, in my bathroom, an alien creature who usually stayed hidden inside the skin of the father of my third daughter. The stranger had the features of Nino, but wasn’t him. Was it the other, the one born after Ischia? But which one? The one who had impregnated Silvia? The lover of Mariarosa? The husband of Eleonora, unfaithful and yet closely bound to her? The married man who had said to me, a married woman, that he loved me, wanted me at all costs?
Along the entire route that led me to the Vomero, I had tried to cling to the Nino of the neighborhood and of high school, the Nino of tenderness and love, to get myself out of the revulsion. Only when I stopped at Sant’Elmo did the bathroom return to mind, and the moment when he had opened his eyes and seen me in the mirror, standing on the threshold. Then everything seemed clearer. There was no split between that man who came after Lila and the boy with whom — before Lila — I had been in love since childhood. Nino was only one, and the expression he had on his face while he was inside Silvana was the proof. It was the expression of his father, Donato, not when he deflowered me on the Maronti but when he touched me between the legs, under the sheet, in Nella’s kitchen.
Nothing alien, then, but much that was ugly. Nino was what he wouldn’t have wanted to be and yet always had been. When he rhythmically hammered against Silvana’s buttocks and was also kindly taking care to give her pleasure, he wasn’t lying, just as he wasn’t lying when he wronged me and was sorry, apologized, begged me to forgive him, swore that he loved me. He is like that, I said to myself. But that didn’t console me. I felt, rather, that the horror, instead of fading, found a more solid refuge in that statement. Then a warm liquid spread down to my knees. I shook myself: Imma was naked, she had peed on me.
76
Going home seemed unthinkable, even though it was cold and Imma risked getting sick. I wrapped her in my coat as if we were playing, I bought a new package of diapers, I put one on after cleaning her with a baby wipe. Now I had to decide what to do. Dede and Elsa would get out of school soon, irritable and hungry; Imma was already hungry. I, my jeans wet, without a coat, nerves tense, was shivering with cold. I looked for a telephone, I called Lila, I asked:
“Can I come to lunch at your house with the children?”
“Of course.”
“Enzo won’t be annoyed?”
“You know he’ll be pleased.”
I heard Tina’s happy little voice, Lila said to her: Quiet. Then she asked me with a wariness that she normally didn’t have:
“Is something wrong?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“What you predicted.”
“Did you fight with Nino?”
“I’ll tell you later, I have to go now.”
I arrived early at school. Imma had by now lost any interest in me, the steering wheel, the horn, and was howling. I forced her yet again to stay wrapped in the jacket and we went to find some cookies. I thought I was acting calmly — inside I felt tranquiclass="underline" not fury but disgust still prevailed, a revulsion not different from what I would have felt if I had seen two lizards coupling — but I realized that the passersby were looking at me with curiosity, with alarm, as I hurried along the street in my wet pants, talking aloud to the baby, who, squeezed tight in the coat, was wriggling and wailing.
At the first cookie Imma quieted down, but her calm freed my anxiety. Nino must have put off his appointment, he was probably looking for me, I was in danger of finding him at school. Since Elsa came out before Dede, who was in her second year of middle school, I went and stood in a corner from which I could watch the entrance of the elementary school without being seen. My teeth were chattering with cold, Imma was smearing my coat with saliva-soaked cookie crumbs. I surveyed the area, nervously, but Nino didn’t appear. And he didn’t appear at the entrance of the middle school, from which Dede soon emerged in a flood of pushing and shoving, shouts, and insults in dialect.
The children paid little attention to me; they were very interested in the novelty of my coming to get them with Imma.
“Why are you holding her in the coat?” Dede asked.
“Because she’s cold.”
“Did you see she’s ruining it?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Once when I got you dirty you slapped me,” Elsa complained.
“It’s not true.”
“It’s very true.”
Dede investigated:
“Why is it that she has only a shirt and diaper on?”
“She’s fine like that.”
“Did something happen?”
“No. Now we’re going to have lunch at Aunt Lina’s.”
They greeted the news with their usual enthusiasm, then they settled in the car, and while the baby talked to her sisters in her obscure language, happy to be the center of their attention, they began to fight over who got to hold her. I insisted that they hold her together, without pulling her this way and that: She’s not made of rubber, I cried. Elsa wasn’t pleased with that solution and swore at Dede in dialect. I tried to slap her, I said, staring at her in the rearview mirror: What did you say, repeat it, what did you say? She didn’t cry, she abandoned Imma to Dede, muttering that taking care of her sister bored her. Then, when the baby reached out her hands to play, she pushed her away roughly. She shouted, assaulting my nerves: Imma, that’s enough, you’re bothering me, you’re getting me dirty. And to me: Mamma, make her stop. I couldn’t bear it anymore, I let out a scream that frightened all three of them. We crossed the city in a state of tension broken only by the whispering of Dede and Elsa, who were trying to understand if, again, something irreparable was about to happen in their lives.
I couldn’t even tolerate that consultation. I couldn’t bear anything anymore: their childhood, my role as mother, Imma’s babbling. And then the presence of my daughters in the car clashed with the images of coitus that were constantly before me, with the odor of sex that was still in my nostrils, with the rage that was beginning to advance, along with the most vulgar dialect. Nino had fucked the servant and then gone to his appointment, not giving a shit about me or even about his daughter. Ah, what a piece of shit, all I did was make mistakes. Was he like his father? No, too simple. Nino was very intelligent, Nino was extraordinarily cultured. His propensity for fucking did not come from a crude, naïve display of virility based on half-fascistic, half-southern clichés. What he had done to me, what he was doing to me, was filtered by a very refined knowledge. He dealt in complex concepts, he knew that this way he would offend me to the point of destroying me. But he had done it just the same. He had thought: I can’t give up my pleasure just because that shit can be a pain in the ass. Like that, just like that. And surely he judged as philistine — that adjective was still very widespread in our world — my possible reaction. Philistine, philistine. I even knew the line he would resort to in sophisticated justification: What’s the harm, the flesh is weak and I’ve read all the books. Exactly those words, nasty son of a bitch. Rage had opened up a pathway in the horror. I shouted at Imma—even at Imma—to be quiet. When I reached Lila’s house I hated Nino as until that moment I had never hated anyone.