“Lenù.”
“Yes?”
“Do you not feel well?”
“Hold me, I have to warm up.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure you want me.”
“I want you now, this time only: it’s something you owe me and I you.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I love you and you, instead, have always loved only him.”
“Yes, but I never desired anyone the way I desired you, not even him.”
I talked for a long time, I told him the truth, the truth of that moment and the truth of the faraway time of the ponds. He was the discovery of excitement, he was the pit of the stomach that grew warm, that opened up, that turned liquid, releasing a burning indolence. Franco, Pietro, Nino had stumbled on that expectation but had never managed to satisfy it, because it was an expectation without a definite object, it was the hope of pleasure, the hardest to fulfill. The taste of Antonio’s mouth, the perfume of his desire, his hands, the large sex taut between his thighs constituted a before that couldn’t be matched. The after had never been truly equal to our afternoons hidden by the skeleton of the canning factory, although they consisted of love without penetration and often without orgasm.
I spoke in an Italian that was complex. I did it more to explain to myself what I was doing than to clarify to him, and this must have seemed to him an act of trust, he seemed content. He held me, he kissed me on one shoulder, then on the neck, finally on the mouth. I don’t think I’ve had any other sexual relation like that, which abruptly joined the ponds of more than twenty years earlier and the room on Via Tasso, the chair, the floor, the bed, suddenly sweeping away everything that was between us, that divided us, what was me, what was him. Antonio was delicate, he was brutal, and I was the same, no less than him. He demanded things and I demanded things with a fury, an anxiety, a need for violation that I didn’t think I harbored. At the end he was annihilated by wonder and I was, too.
“What happened?” I asked, stunned, as if the memory of that absolute intimacy had already vanished.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but luckily it happened.”
I smiled.
“You’re like everybody else, you’ve betrayed your wife.”
I wanted to joke, but he took me seriously, he said in dialect:
“I haven’t betrayed anyone. My wife—before now—doesn’t exist yet.”
An obscure formulation but I understood. He was trying to tell me that he agreed with me, seeking to communicate, in turn, a sense of time outside the present chronology. He wanted to say that we had lived now a small fragment of a day that belonged to twenty years earlier. I kissed him, I whispered: Thank you, and I told him I was grateful because he had chosen to ignore the brutal reasons for all that sex — mine and his — and to see in it only the need to close our accounts.
Then the telephone rang, I went to answer, it might be Lila who needed me for the children. But it was Nino.
“Luckily you’re home,” he said breathlessly. “I’m coming right away.”
“No.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Let me explain, it’s essential, it’s urgent.”
“No.”
“Why?”
I told him and hung up.
79
It was hard to separate from Nino; it took months. I don’t think I’ve ever suffered so much for a man; it tortured me both to keep him away and to take him back. He wouldn’t admit that he had made romantic and sexual offers to Lila. He insulted her, he mocked her, he accused her of wanting to destroy our relationship. But he was lying. At first he always lied, he even tried to convince me that what I had seen in the bathroom was a mistake due to weariness and jealousy. Then he began to give in. He confessed to some relationships but backdated them, as for others, indisputably recent, he said they had been meaningless, he swore that with those women it was friendship, not love. We quarreled all through Christmas, all winter. Sometimes I silenced him, worn out by his skill at accusing himself, defending himself, and expecting forgiveness, sometimes I yielded in the face of his despair, which seemed real — he often arrived drunk — sometimes I threw him out because, out of honesty, pride, maybe even dignity, he never promised that he would stop seeing those he called his friends, nor would he assure me that he would not lengthen the list.
On that theme he often undertook long, very cultured monologues in which he tried to convince me that it wasn’t his fault but that of nature, of astral matter, of spongy bodies and their excessive liquids, of the immoderate heat of his loins — in short, of his exorbitant virility. No matter how much I add up all the books I’ve read, he murmured, in a tone that was sincere, pained, and yet vain to the point of ridiculousness, no matter how much I add up the languages I’ve learned, the mathematics, the sciences, the literature, and most of all my love for you — yes, the love and the need I have for you, the terror of not being able to have you anymore — believe me, I beg you, believe me, there’s nothing to be done, I can’t I can’t I can’t, the occasional desire, the most foolish, the most obtuse, prevails.
Sometimes he moved me, more often he irritated me, in general I responded with sarcasm. And he was silent, he nervously ruffled his hair, then he started again. But when I said to him coldly one morning that perhaps all that need for women was the symptom of a labile heterosexuality that in order to endure needed constant confirmation, he was offended, he harassed me for days, he wanted to know if I had been better with Antonio than with him. Since I was now tired of all that distraught talk, I shouted yes. And since in that phase of excruciating quarrels some of his friends had tried to get into my bed, and I, out of boredom, out of spite, had sometimes consented, I mentioned names of people he was fond of, and to wound him I said they had been better than him.
He disappeared. He had said that he couldn’t do without Dede and Elsa, he had said that he loved Imma more than his other children, he had said that he would take care of the three children even if I hadn’t wanted to go back to him. In reality not only did he forget about us immediately but he stopped paying the rent in Via Tasso, along with the bills for the electricity, the gas, the telephone.
I looked in vain for a cheaper apartment in the area: often, apartments that were uglier and smaller commanded even higher rents. Then Lila said to me that there were three rooms and a kitchen available just above her. The rent was almost nothing, from the windows you could see both the stradone and the courtyard. She said it in her way, in the tone of someone who signals: I’m only giving you the information, do as you like. I was depressed, I was frightened. Elisa had recently yelled at me during a quarreclass="underline" Papa is alone, go live with him, I’m tired of having to take care of him myself. And naturally I had refused, in my situation I couldn’t take care of my father, too. I was already the slave of my daughters. Imma was constantly sick, as soon as Dede got over the flu Elsa had it, she wouldn’t do her homework unless I sat with her, Dede got mad and said: Then you have to help me, too. I was exhausted, a nervous wreck. And then, in the great chaos I had fallen into, I didn’t have even that bit of active life that until then I had guaranteed myself. I turned down invitations and articles and trips, I didn’t dare answer the telephone for fear it was the publisher asking for the book. I had ended up in a vortex that was pulling me down, and a hypothetical return to the neighborhood would be the proof that I had touched bottom. To immerse myself again, and my daughters, in that mentality, let myself be absorbed by Lila, by Carmen, by Alfonso, by everyone, just as in fact they wanted. No, no, I swore to myself that I would go and live in Tribunali, in Duchesca, in Lavinaio, in Forcella, amid the scaffolding that marked the earthquake damage, rather than return to the neighborhood. In that atmosphere the editor called.