He sat down again at the head of the table, between his mother and Nino. He ate a steak, drank some wine, but he looked at me in alarm, aware of my unhappiness. Certainly he felt at fault because he hadn’t arrived in time and had missed an important event in my life, because his neglect could be interpreted as a sign that he didn’t love me, because he had left me among strangers without the comfort of his affection. It would have been difficult to tell him that my dark face, my muteness, could be explained precisely by the fact that he hadn’t remained completely absent, that he had intruded between me and Nino.
Nino, meanwhile, was making me even more unhappy. He was sitting next to me but didn’t address a word to me. He seemed happy about Pietro’s arrival. He poured wine for him, offered him cigarettes, lighted one, and now they were both smoking, lips compressed, and talking about the difficult journey by car from Pisa to Milan, and the pleasure of driving. It struck me how different they were: Nino thin, lanky, his voice high and cordial; Pietro thick-set, with the comical tangle of hair over his large forehead, his broad cheeks scraped by the razor, his voice always low. They seemed pleased to have met, which was unusual for Pietro, who was generally reserved. Nino pressed him, showing a real interest in his studies (I read an article somewhere in which you compare milk and honey to wine and every form of drunkenness), and urging him to talk about them, so that my fiancé, who tended not to talk about his subject, gave in, he corrected good-humoredly, he opened up. But just when Pietro was starting to gain confidence, Adele interrupted.
“Enough talk,” she said to her son. “What about the surprise for Elena?”
I looked at her uncertainly. There were other surprises? Wasn’t it enough that Pietro had driven for hours without stopping, to arrive only in time for the dinner in my honor? I thought of my fiancé with curiosity, he had a sulky expression that I knew and that he assumed when circumstances forced him to speak about himself in public. He announced to me, but almost in a whisper, that he had become a tenured professor, a very young tenured professor, with a position at Florence. Like that, by magic, in his typical fashion. He never boasted of his brilliance, he was scarcely aware of his value as a scholar, he kept silent about the struggles he had endured. And now, look, he mentioned that news casually, as if he had been forced to by his mother, as if for him it meant nothing. In fact, it meant remarkable prestige at a young age, it meant economic security, it meant leaving Pisa, it meant escaping a political and cultural climate that for months, I don’t know why, had exasperated him. It meant finally that in the fall, or at the beginning of the next year, we would get married and I would leave Naples. No one mentioned this last thing, instead they all congratulated Pietro and me. Even Nino, who right afterward looked at his watch, made some acerbic remarks on university careers, and exclaimed that he was sorry but he had to go.
We all got up. I didn’t know what to do, I uselessly sought his gaze, as a great sorrow filled my heart. End of the evening, missed opportunity, aborted desires. Out on the street I hoped that he would give me a phone number, an address. He merely shook my hand and wished me all the best. From that moment it seemed to me that each of his gestures was deliberately cutting me off. As a kind of farewell I gave him a half smile, waving my hand as if I were holding a pen. It was a plea, it meant: you know where I live, write to me, please. But he had already turned his back.
7
I thanked Adele and her friend for all the trouble they had taken for me and for my book. They both praised Nino at length, sincerely, speaking to me as if it were I who had contributed to making him so likable, so intelligent. Pietro said nothing, he merely nodded a bit nervously when his mother told him to return soon, they were both guests of Mariarosa. I said immediately: you don’t have to come with me, go with your mother. It didn’t occur to anyone that I was serious, that I was unhappy and would rather be alone.
All the way back I was impossible. I exclaimed that I didn’t like Florence, and it wasn’t true. I exclaimed that I didn’t want to write anymore, I wanted to teach, and it wasn’t true. I exclaimed that I was tired, I was very sleepy, and it wasn’t true. Not only that. When, suddenly, Pietro declared that he wanted to meet my parents, I yelled at him: you’re crazy, forget my parents, you’re not suitable for them and they aren’t suitable for you. Then he was frightened, and asked:
“Do you not want to marry me anymore?”
I was about to say: No, I don’t want to, but I restrained myself in time, I knew that that wasn’t true, either. I said weakly, I’m sorry, I’m depressed, of course I want to marry you, and I took his hand, I interlaced my fingers in his. He was an intelligent man, extraordinarily cultured, and good. I loved him, I didn’t mean to make him suffer. And yet, even as I was holding his hand, even as I was affirming that I wanted to marry him, I knew clearly that if he hadn’t appeared that night at the restaurant I would have tried to sleep with Nino.
I had a hard time admitting it to myself. Certainly it would have been an offense that Pietro didn’t deserve, and yet I would have committed it willingly and perhaps without remorse. I would have found a way to draw Nino to me, with all the years that had passed, from elementary school to high school, up to the time of Ischia and Piazza dei Martiri. I would have made love with him, even though I hadn’t liked that remark about Lila, and was distressed by it. I would have slept with him and to Pietro I would have said nothing. Maybe I could have told Lila, but who knows when, maybe as an old woman, when I imagined that nothing would matter anymore to her or to me. Time, as in all things, was decisive. Nino would last a single night, he would leave me in the morning. Even though I had known him forever, he was made of dreams, and holding on to him forever would have been impossible: he came from childhood, he was constructed out of childish desires, he had no concreteness, he didn’t face the future. Pietro, on the other hand, was of the present, massive, a boundary stone. He marked a land new to me, a land of good reasons, governed by rules that originated in his family and endowed everything with meaning. Grand ideals flourished, the cult of the reputation, matters of principle. Nothing in the sphere of the Airotas was perfunctory. Marriage, for example, was a contribution to a secular battle. Pietro’s parents had had only a civil wedding, and Pietro, although as far as I knew he had a vast religious knowledge, would never get married in a church; rather, he would give me up. The same went for baptism. Pietro hadn’t been baptized, nor had Mariarosa, so any children that might come wouldn’t be baptized, either. Everything about him had that tendency, seemed always to be guided by a superior order that, although its origin was not divine but came from his family, gave him, just the same, the certainty of being on the side of truth and justice. As for sex, I don’t know, he was wary. He knew enough of my affair with Franco Mari to deduce that I wasn’t a virgin, and yet he had never mentioned the subject, not even an accusatory phrase, a vulgar comment, a laugh. I didn’t think he’d had other girlfriends; it was hard to imagine him with a prostitute, I was sure he hadn’t spent even a minute of his life talking about women with other men. He hated salacious remarks. He hated gossip, raised voices, parties, every form of waste. Although his circumstances were comfortable, he tended — in this unlike his parents and his sister — to a sort of asceticism amid the abundance. And he had a conspicuous sense of duty, he would never fail in his commitments to me, he would never betray me.