We waited a long time, the child at one point said, in the grip of anxiety: What if the people hold him up? I reassured her: They won’t hold him up. Nino finally arrived, preceded by the secretary, a very attractive young woman. Well dressed, radiant, he hugged and kissed his daughter rapturously, picked her up and held her the whole time, as if she were still little. But what surprised me was the immediate assurance with which Imma clung to his neck and said to him happily, unfolding the leaflet: You’re handsomer than in this photo, you know my teacher voted for you?
Nino was very attentive to her; he had her tell him about school, about her friends, about the subjects she liked best. He paid only the slightest attention to me, by now I belonged to another life — an inferior life — and it seemed pointless to waste his energies. I talked about Pasquale, he listened, but without neglecting his daughter, and nodded at the secretary to take notes. At the end of my account he asked seriously:
“What do you expect from me?”
“To find out if he’s in good health and is getting the full protection of the law.”
“Is he cooperating with the law?”
“No, and I doubt that he ever will.”
“He’d be better off.”
“Like Nadia?”
He gave a small, embarrassed laugh.
“Nadia is behaving in the only way possible, if she doesn’t intend to spend the rest of her life in jail.”
“Nadia is a spoiled girl, Pasquale isn’t.”
He didn’t answer right away, he pressed Imma’s nose as if it were a button and imitated the sound of a bell. They laughed together and then he said:
“I’ll see what your friend’s situation is, I’m here to be sure that the rights of everyone are protected. But I’ll tell him that the relatives of the people he killed also have rights. You don’t play at being a rebel, shed real blood, and then cry: we have rights. Do you understand, Imma?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“And if the teacher mistreats you, call me.”
I said:
“If the teacher mistreats her, she’ll manage by herself.”
“The way Pasquale Peluso managed?”
“Pasquale never asked anyone to protect him.”
“And that vindicates him?”
“No, but it’s significant that if Imma has to assert her right you tell her: call me.”
“For your friend Pasquale aren’t you calling me?”
I left very nervous and unhappy, but for Imma it was the most important day of her first seven years of life.
The days passed. I thought it had been a waste of time, but in fact Nino kept his word, he looked into Pasquale’s situation. It was from him I learned, later, things that the lawyers either didn’t know or didn’t tell us about. The involvement of our friend in some notorious political crimes that had afflicted Campania was at the center of Nadia’s detailed confession, but this had also been common knowledge for some time. The new information, instead, was that she now tended to ascribe everything to him, even acts of minor interest. Thus the long list of Pasquale’s crimes included mentions of the murder of Gino, of Bruno Soccavo, the death of Manuela Solara, and, finally, that of her sons, Marcello and Michele.
“What agreement did your old girlfriend make with the carabinieri?” I asked Nino the last time I saw him.
“I don’t know.”
“Nadia is telling a pile of lies.”
“I don’t rule it out. But one thing I know for sure: she is ruining a lot of people who thought they were safe. So tell Lina to be careful, Nadia has always hated her.”
25
So many years had passed, and yet Nino didn’t miss a chance to mention Lila, to show that he was solicitous of her even at a distance. I was there with him, I had loved him, I had beside me his daughter who was licking a chocolate ice-cream cone. But he considered me only a friend of his youth to whom he could show off the extraordinary path he had traveled, from his high school desk to a seat in parliament. In that last encounter of ours his greatest compliment was to put me on the same rung of the ladder. I don’t remember in relation to what subject he said: The two of us climbed very high. But even as he uttered that sentence I read in his gaze that the declaration of equality was a sham. He considered himself much better than me and the proof was that, in spite of my successful books, I stood before him as a petitioner. His eyes smiled at me cordially, suggesting: Look what you lost by losing me.
I left in a hurry with the child. I was sure that he would have had quite a different attitude if Lila had been present. He would have mumbled, he would have felt mysteriously crushed, maybe even a little ridiculous with that preening. When we reached the garage where I had left the car — that time I had come to Rome by car — something occurred to me for the first time: only with Lila had Nino put at risk his own ambitions. On Ischia, and for the following year, he had given in to a romance that could have caused him nothing but trouble. An anomaly, in the journey of his life. At the time he was already a well-known and very promising university student. He had taken up with Nadia — that was clear to me now — because she was the daughter of Professor Galiani, because he had considered her the key to gaining access to what then appeared to us a superior class. His choices had always been consistent with his ambitions. Hadn’t he married Eleonora out of self-interest? And I myself, when I had left Pietro for him, wasn’t I in fact a well-connected woman, a writer of some success, with ties to an important publishing house — useful, in short, to his career? And all the other women who had helped him: didn’t they come under the same logic? Nino loved women, certainly, but he was above all a cultivator of useful relations. What his intelligence produced would never, alone, have had sufficient energy to assert itself, without the web of power that he had been weaving since he was a boy. What about Lila? She had gone to school up to fifth grade, she was the very young wife of a shopkeeper, if Stefano had known of their relationship he could have killed them both. Why had Nino in that case gambled his entire future?
I put Imma in the car, I scolded her for letting the ice cream drip on the dress bought for the occasion. I started the car, I left Rome. Maybe what had attracted Nino was the impression of having found in Lila what he, too, presumed he had and that now, just by comparison, he discovered that he didn’t have. She possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila’s intelligence. She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, or to any purpose. All of us had submitted and that submission had — through trials, failures, successes — reduced us. Only Lila, nothing and no one seemed to reduce her. Rather, even if over the years she became as stupid and intractable as anyone, the qualities that we had attributed to her would remain intact, maybe they would be magnified. Even when we hated her we ended by respecting her and fearing her. It didn’t surprise me, when I thought about it, that Nadia, although she had met Lila only a few times, detested her and wanted to hurt her. Lila had taken Nino from her. Lila had humiliated her in her revolutionary beliefs. Lila was mean and could hit before being hit. Lila was from the proletariat but rejected any deliverance. In other words Lila was an honorable enemy and hurting her could be pure satisfaction, without the store of guilt that a designated victim like Pasquale would certainly arouse. Nadia could truly think of her in that way. How tawdry everything had become over the years: Professor Galiani, her house with a view of the bay, her thousands of books, her paintings, her cultured conversations, Armando, Nadia herself. She was so pretty, so well brought up, when I saw her beside Nino, outside the school, when she welcomed me to the party at her parents’ beautiful house. And there was still something incomparable about her when she stripped herself of every privilege with the idea that, in a radically new world, she would have a more dazzling garment. But now? The noble reasons for that denuding had all dissolved. There remained the horror of so much blood stupidly shed and the villainy of unloading the blame on the former bricklayer, who had once seemed to her the avant-garde of a new humanity, and who now, along with so many others, served to reduce her own responsibilities almost to nothing.