“She’s fine,” I said.
“What is she doing?”
“She works in a sausage factory on the outskirts of Naples.”
“Didn’t she marry a shopkeeper?”
“The marriage didn’t work.”
“When I come to Naples you must introduce me.”
“Of course.”
“Leave me a number, an address.”
“All right.”
He looked at me to assess what words would be least hurtful, and asked: “Has she read your book?”
“I don’t know, did you read it?”
“Of course.”
“How did it seem to you?”
“Good.”
“In what way?”
“There are wonderful passages.”
“Which ones?
“Those where you give the protagonist the capacity to put together the fragments of things in her own way.”
“And that’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“No: it’s clear that you didn’t like it.”
“I told you it’s good.”
I knew him, he was trying not to humiliate me. That exasperated me, I said:
“It’s a book that’s inspired discussion, it’s selling well.”
“So good, no?”
“Yes, but not for you. What is it that doesn’t work?”
He compressed his lips again, and made up his mind: “There’s not much depth, Elena. Behind the petty love affairs and the desire for social ascent you hide precisely what it would be valuable to tell.”
“What?”
“Forget it, it’s late, we should go to sleep.” And he tried to assume an expression of benevolent irony, but in reality he had that new tone of someone who has an important task to complete and gives only sparingly to all the rest: “You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the moment for writing novels.”
18
Mariarosa returned just then along with Juan and Silvia, carrying clean towels and nightclothes. She certainly heard that last phrase, and surely she understood that we were talking about my book, but she didn’t say a word. She could have said that she had liked the book, that novels can be written at any moment, but she didn’t. From that I deduced that, beyond the declarations of liking and affection, in those circles that were so caught up and sucked in by political passions my book was considered an insignificant little thing, and the pages that were helping its circulation either were judged cheap versions of much more sensational texts that I had never read, or deserved that dismissive label of Franco’s: a story of petty love affairs.
My sister-in-law showed me the bathroom and my room with a fleeting courtesy. I said goodbye to Franco, who was leaving early. I merely shook his hand, and he made no move to embrace me. I saw him disappear into a room with Mariarosa, and from Juan’s dark expression and Silvia’s unhappy look I understood that the guest and the mistress of the house would sleep together.
I withdrew into the room assigned to me. There was a strong smell of stale smoke, an unmade single bed, no night table, no lamp except the weak ceiling light, newspapers piled up on the floor, some issues of journals like Menabò, Nuovo impegno, Marcatré, expensive art books, some well-thumbed, others evidently never opened. Under the bed I found an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts; I opened the window, and put it on the sill. I got undressed. The nightgown that Mariarosa had given me was too long, too tight. I went to the bathroom barefoot, along the shadowy corridor. The absence of a toothbrush didn’t bother me: I hadn’t grown up brushing my teeth, it was a recent habit, acquired in Pisa.
In bed I tried to erase the Franco I had met that night by superimposing the Franco of years earlier, the rich, generous youth who had loved me, who had helped me, who had bought everything for me, who had educated me, who had taken me to Paris for his political meetings and on vacation to Versilia, to his parents’ house. But I was unsuccessful. The present, with its unrest, the shouting in the packed classroom, the political jargon that was buzzing in my head and spilling out onto my book, vilifying it, prevailed. Was I deluded about my literary future? Was Franco right, there were other things to do besides write novels? What impression had I made on him? What memory did he have of our love, if he even had one? Was he complaining about me to Mariarosa as Nino had complained to me about Lila? I felt wounded, disheartened. Certainly what I had imagined as a pleasant and perhaps slightly melancholy evening seemed to me sad. I couldn’t wait for the night to pass so that I could return to Naples. I had to get up to turn out the light. I went back to bed in the dark.
I had trouble falling asleep. I tossed and turned, the bed and the room had the odors of other bodies, an intimacy similar to that of my house but in this case made up of the traces of possibly repulsive strangers. Then I fell asleep, but I woke suddenly: someone had come into the room. I whispered: Who’s there? Juan answered. He said, straight out, in a pleading voice, as if he were asking an important favor, like some form of first aid:
“Can I sleep with you?”
The request seemed to me so absurd that, to wake myself completely, to understand, I asked: “Sleep?”
“Yes, lie next to you, I won’t bother you, I just don’t want to be alone.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why?”
I didn’t know what to say. I murmured: “I’m engaged.”
“So what? We’ll sleep, that’s all.”
“Go away, please, I don’t even know you.”
“I’m Juan, I showed you my work, what else do you want?”
I felt him sit down on the bed, I saw his dark profile, I felt his breath that smelled of cigars.
“Please,” I said, “I’m sleepy.”
“You’re a writer, you write about love. Everything that happens to us feeds the imagination and helps us to create. Let me be near you, it’s something you’ll be able to write about.”
He touched my foot with the tips of his fingers. I couldn’t bear it, I leaped up and turned on the light. He was still sitting on the bed, in underpants and undershirt.
“Out,” I hissed and in such a peremptory tone, so clearly close to shouting, so determined to attack and to fight with all my energy, that he got up, slowly, and said with disgust:
“You’re a hypocrite.”
He went out. I closed the door behind him, there was no key.
I was appalled, I was furious, I was frightened, a bloodthirsty dialogue was whirling in my head. I waited a while before going back to bed, and I didn’t turn out the light. What had I intimated about myself, what sort of person did it seem that I was, what legitimatized Juan’s request? Was it the reputation of a free woman that my book was giving me? Was it the political words I had uttered, which evidently were not only a dialectical jousting, a game to prove that I was as skillful as a man, but defined the entire person, sexual availability included? Was it a sort of membership in the same ranks that had led that man to show up in my room without scruples, and Mariarosa, also without scruples, to lead Franco into hers? Or had I been contaminated myself by the diffuse erotic excitement that I had felt in the university classroom, and that, unaware, I gave off? In Milan I always felt ready to make love with Nino, betraying Pietro. But that was an old passion, it justified sexual desire and betrayal, while sex in itself, that unmediated demand for orgasm, no, I couldn’t be drawn into that. I was unprepared; it disgusted me. Why let myself be touched by Adele’s friend in Turin, why in this house by Juan, what did I display, what did they want to display? Suddenly I thought of what had happened with Donato Sarratore. Not so much the evening on the beach in Ischia, which I had transformed into the episode in the novel, but the time he appeared in Nella’s kitchen, when I had just gone to bed, and he had kissed me, touched me, causing a flow of pleasure against my very will. Between the girl of then, astonished, frightened, and the woman attacked in the elevator, the woman who had been subjected to that incursion now, was there a connection? The extremely cultured friend of Adele’s Tarratano, the Venezuelan artist Juan, were they of the same clay as Nino’s father, train conductor, bad poet, hack journalist?