I was struck immediately by a very beautiful girl, with delicate features and long black hair that hung over her shoulders, who was certainly younger than me. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was standing in the midst of some combative young men, and behind her a dark man about thirty, smoking a cigar, stood glued to her like a bodyguard. What distinguished her in that environment, besides her beauty, was that she was holding in her arms a baby a few months old, she was nursing him and, at the same time, closely following the conflict, and occasionally even shouting something. When the baby, a patch of blue, with his little reddish-colored legs and feet uncovered, detached his mouth from the nipple, she didn’t put her breast back in the bra but stayed like that, exposed, her white shirt unbuttoned, her breast swollen, her mouth half open, frowning, until she realized the child was no longer suckling and mechanically tried to reattach him.
That girl disturbed me. In the noisy smoke-filled classroom, she was an incongruous icon of maternity. She was younger than me, she had a refined appearance, responsibility for an infant. Yet she seemed determined to reject the persona of the young woman placidly absorbed in caring for her child. She yelled, she gesticulated, she asked to speak, she laughed angrily, she pointed to someone with contempt. And yet the child was part of her, he sought her breast, he lost it. Together they made up a fragile image, at risk, close to breaking, as if it had been painted on glass: the child would fall out of her arms or something would bump his head, an elbow, an uncontrolled movement. I was happy when, suddenly, Mariarosa appeared beside her. Finally: there she was. How lively, how bright, how cordial she was: she seemed to be friendly with the young mother. I waved my hand, she didn’t see me. She whispered briefly in the girl’s ear, disappeared, reappeared in the crowd that was gathered around the lectern. Meanwhile, through a side door, a small group burst in whose mere arrival calmed people down. Mariarosa signaled, waited for a signal in response, grabbed the megaphone, and spoke a few words that silenced the packed classroom. For a few seconds I had the impression that Milan, the tensions of that period, my own excitement had the power to let the shadows I had in my head emerge. How many times had I thought in those days of my early political education? Mariarosa yielded the megaphone to a young man beside her, whom I recognized immediately. It was Franco Mari, my boyfriend from the early years in Pisa.
15
He had stayed the same: the same warm and persuasive tone of voice, the same ability to organize a speech, moving from general statements that led, step by step, in a logical sequence to ordinary, everyday experiences, revealing their meaning. As I write, I realize that I recall very little of his physical aspect, only his pale clean-shaven face, his short hair. And yet his was the only body that, so far, I had been close to as if we were married.
I went over to Franco after his speech, and his eyes lighted up with amazement, he embraced me. But it was hard to talk, someone pulled him by the arm, someone else had started to criticize, pointing at him insistently, as if he had to answer for terrible crimes. I stayed near the lectern, uneasy; in the crush I had lost Mariarosa. But this time it was she who saw me, and she tugged on my arm.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, pleased.
I avoided explaining that I had missed an appointment, that I had arrived by chance. I said, indicating Franco: “I know him.”
“Mari?”
“Yes.”
She spoke about Franco enthusiastically, then she whispered: They’ll make me pay for it, I invited him, look what a hornets’ nest. And since he was going to stay at her house and leave for Turin the following day, she immediately insisted that I should come and stay with her, too. I accepted, too bad about the hotel.
The meeting dragged on, there were moments of extreme tension, and a permanent sensation of alarm. It was getting dark when we left the university. Besides Franco, Mariarosa was joined by the young mother, whose name was Silvia, and the man around thirty whom I had noticed in the classroom, the one who was smoking the cigar, a Venezuelan painter named Juan. We all went to dinner in a trattoria that my sister-in-law knew. I talked to Franco enough to find out that I was wrong, he hadn’t stayed the same. Covering his face — and maybe he had placed it there himself — a mask, which, although it perfectly matched the features of before, had eliminated the generosity. Now he was pinched, restrained, he weighed his words. In the course of a short, apparently confidential exchange, he never alluded to our old relationship, and when I brought it up, complaining that he had never written to me, he cut me off, saying: It had to be like that. About the university, too, he was vague, and I understood that he hadn’t graduated.
“There are other things to do,” he said.
“What?”
He turned to Marirosa, as if irritated by the too private note of our exchange:
“Elena is asking what there is to do.”
Mariarosa answered cheerfully: “The revolution.”
So I assumed a mocking tone, I said: “And in your free time?”
Juan, who was sitting next to Silvia, broke in seriously, gently shaking the baby’s closed fist. “In our free time we’re getting ready for it.”
After dinner we piled into Mariarosa’s car; she lived in a large old apartment in Sant’Ambrogio. I discovered that the Venezuelan had a kind of studio there, a very untidy room where he brought Franco and me to show us his work: big canvases depicting crowded urban scenes, painted with an almost photographic skill, but he had spoiled them by nailing to the surface tubes of paint or brushes or palettes or bowls for turpentine and rags. Mariarosa praised him warmly, but addressing Franco in particular, whose opinion she seemed to value.
I observed, without comprehending. Certainly Juan lived there, certainly Silvia also lived there, since she moved through the house confidently with Mirko, the baby. But at first I thought that the painter and the young mother were a couple and lived as tenants in one of those rooms, but soon I changed my idea. The Venezuelan, in fact, all evening showed Silvia an abstracted courtesy, while he often put an arm around Mariarosa’s shoulders and once he kissed her on the neck.
At first there was a lot of talk about Juan’s work. Franco had always had an enviable expertise in the visual arts and a strong critical sensibility. We all listened eagerly, except Silvia, whose baby, until then very good, suddenly began to cry inconsolably. For a while I hoped that Franco would also talk about my book, I was sure he would say something intelligent, such as, with some severity, he was saying about Juan’s paintings. Instead no one alluded to my novel, and, after a burst of impatience from the Venezuelan, who hadn’t appreciated a remark of Franco’s on art and society, we went on to discuss Italy’s cultural backwardness, the political picture that emerged from the elections, the chain-reaction concessions of social democracy, the students and police repression, what was termed the lesson of France. The exchange between the two men immediately became contentious. Silvia couldn’t understand what Mirko needed. She left the room and returned, scolding him harshly as if he were a grown child, and then, from the long hall where she was carrying him up and down or from the room where she had gone to change him, shouted out clichéd phrases of dissent. Mariarosa, after describing the nurseries organized at the Sorbonne for the children of the striking students, evoked a Paris of early June, rainy and cold, still paralyzed by the general strike — not at first hand (she regretted it, she hadn’t managed to get there) but as a friend had described it to her in a letter. Franco and Juan both listened distractedly, and yet never lost the thread of their argument; rather, they confronted each other with increasing animosity.