19
I couldn’t get to sleep. Added to my strained nerves, to the contradictory thoughts, was Mirko, who had started crying again. I recalled the powerful emotion I had felt when I held the child in my arms and, since he didn’t calm down, I couldn’t restrain myself. I got up, and, following the trail of his wailing, reached a door through which light filtered. I knocked, Silvia answered rudely. The room was more welcoming than mine, it had an old armoire, a night table, a double bed on which the girl was sitting, in baby-doll pink, legs crossed, a spiteful expression on her face. Her arms flung wide, the backs of both hands on the sheet, she was holding Mirko on her bare thighs, like a votive offering: he, too, was naked, violet, the black hole of his mouth opened wide, his little eyes narrowed, his limbs agitated. At first she greeted me with hostility, then she softened. She said she felt she was an incompetent mother, she didn’t know what to do, she was desperate. Finally she said: He always acts like this if he doesn’t eat, maybe he’s sick, he’ll die here on the bed, and as she spoke she seemed very unlike Lila — ugly, disfigured by the nervous twisting of her mouth, by her staring eyes. Until she burst into tears.
The weeping of mother and child moved me, I would have liked to embrace them both, hold them tight, rock them. I whispered: Can I take him for a moment? She nodded yes between her sobs. So I took the child off her knees, brought him to my breast, and again felt the flood of odors, sounds, warmth, as if his vital energies were rushing joyfully to return to me, after the separation. I walked back and forth in the room murmuring a sort of ungrammatical litany that I invented on the spot, a long senseless declaration of love. Mirko miraculously calmed down, fell asleep. I laid him gently beside his mother, but with no desire to be separated from him. I was afraid to go back to my room, a part of me was sure of finding Juan there and wanted to stay here.
Silvia thanked me without gratitude, a thank you to which she coldly added a list of my virtues: You’re intelligent, you know how to do everything, you know how to be respected, you’re a real mother, your children will be lucky. I denied it, I said I’m going. But she had a jolt of anxiety, she took my hand, and begged me to stay: He listens to you, do it for him, he’ll sleep peacefully. I accepted immediately. We lay down on the bed with the baby in the middle, and turned off the light. But we didn’t sleep, we began to talk about ourselves.
In the dark Silvia became less hostile. She told me of the disgust she had felt when she discovered she was pregnant. She had hidden the pregnancy from the man she loved and also from herself, she was sure it would pass like an illness that has to run its course. Meanwhile, however, her body reacted, changing shape. She had had to tell her parents, wealthy professionals in Monza. There had been a scene, she had left home. But, instead of admitting that she had let months pass, waiting for a miracle, instead of confessing that physical fear had prevented her from considering abortion, she had claimed that she wanted the child, for love of the man who had made her pregnant. He had said to her: If you want him, for love of you I want him, too. Love her, love him: at that moment they were both serious. But after several months, even before the pregnancy reached its end, they had both fallen out of love. Silvia insisted over and over on this point, sorrowfully. Nothing remained, only bitterness. So she had found herself alone and if until now she had managed to get by, it was thanks to Mariarosa, whom she praised abundantly, she spoke of her rapturously, a wonderful teacher and truly on the side of the students, an invaluable companion.
I told her that the whole Airota family was admirable, that I was engaged to Pietro, that we would be married in the fall. She said impetuously: Marriage horrifies me and so does the family, it’s all old stuff. Abruptly her tone became melancholy.
“Mirko’s father also works at the university.”
“Yes?”
“It all began because I took his course. He was so assured, so competent, very intelligent, handsome. He had all the virtues. And even before the student struggles began he said: Re-educate your professors, don’t be treated like beasts.”
“Does he take any interest in the baby?”
She laughed in the darkness, she murmured bitterly:
“A male, apart from the mad moments when you love him and he enters you, always remains outside. So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him. He liked me, I liked him, the end. It happens to me many times a day — I’m attracted to someone. That doesn’t happen to you? It lasts a short time, then it passes. Only the child remains, he’s part of you; the father, on the other hand, was a stranger and goes back to being a stranger. Even the name no longer has the sound it used to. Nino, I’d say, and I would repeat it, over and over in my head, as soon as I woke up, it was a magic word. Now, though, it’s a sound that makes me sad.”
I didn’t say anything for a while, finally I whispered:
“Mirko’s father is named Nino?”
“Yes, everyone knows him, he’s very famous at the university.”
“Nino what?”
“Nino Sarratore.”
20
I went out early, leaving Silvia sleeping with the child at her breast. Of the painter I found no trace. I managed to say goodbye only to Mariarosa, who had got up very early to take Franco to the station and had just returned. She looked sleepy, and seemed uneasy. She asked:
“Did you sleep well?”
“I talked to Silvia a lot.”
“She told you about Sarratore?”
“Yes.”
“I know you’re friends.”
“Did he tell you?”
“Yes. We gossiped a little about you.”
“Is it true that Mirko is his son?”
“Yes.” She repressed a yawn, she smiled. “Nino is fascinating, the girls fight over him, they drag him this way and that. And these, luckily, are happy times, you take what you want, all the more since he has a power that conveys joy and the desire to act.”
She said that the movement needed people like him. She said that it was necessary, however, to look after him, let him grow, direct him. The very capable people, she said, should be guided: in them the bourgeois democrat, the technical manager, the modernizer is always lying in wait. We both regretted that we had spent so little time together and vowed to do better on the next occasion. I picked up my bag at the hotel, and left.
Only on the train, during the long journey to Naples, did I take in that second paternity of Nino’s. A squalid desolation extended from Silvia to Lila, from Mirko to Gennaro. It seemed to me that the passion of Ischia, the night of love in Forio, the secret relationship of Piazza dei Martiri, and the pregnancy — all faded, were reduced to a mechanical device that Nino, upon leaving Naples, had activated with Silvia and who knows how many others. The thing offended me, as if Lila were squatting in a corner of my mind and I felt her feelings. I was bitter as she would have been if she had known, I was furious as if I had suffered the same wrong. Nino had betrayed Lila and me. We were, she and I, similarly humiliated, we loved him without ever being truly loved in return. And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies. I remembered when he had come to see me in the neighborhood, years earlier, and we had stayed talking in the courtyard, and Melina had seen him from the window and had taken him for his father. Donato’s former lover had caught resemblances that had seemed nonexistent to me. But now it was clear, she was right and I was wrong. Nino was not fleeing his father out of fear of becoming like him: Nino already was his father and didn’t want to admit it.