Выбрать главу

113

Nino traveled at night, he reached Florence around nine in the morning. He called, Pietro answered, he hung up. He called again, I went to answer. He had parked downstairs. Come down. I can’t. Come down immediately, or I’ll come up. We were leaving in a few days for Viareggio, Pietro by now was on vacation. I left the children with him, I said I had some urgent shopping to do for the beach. I rushed to Nino.

Seeing each other was a terrible idea. We discovered that, instead of waning, desire had flared up and made a thousand demands with brazen urgency. If at a distance, on the telephone, words allowed us to fantasize, constructing glorious prospects but also imposing on us an order, containing us, frightening us, finding ourselves together, in the tiny space of the car, careless of the terrible heat, gave concreteness to our delirium, gave it the cloak of inevitability, made it a tile in the great subversive season under way, made it consistent with the forms of realism of that era, those which asked for the impossible.

“Don’t go home.”

“And the children, Pietro?”

“And us?”

Before he left again for Naples he said he didn’t know if he could tolerate not seeing me for all of August. We were desperate as we said goodbye. I didn’t have a telephone in the house we had rented in Viareggio, he gave me the number of the house in Capri. He made me promise to call every day.

“If your wife answers?”

“Hang up.”

“If you’re at the beach?”

“I have to work, I’ll almost never go to the beach.”

In our fantasy, telephoning was to serve also to set a date, sometime in August, and find a way of seeing each other at least once. He urged me to invent an excuse and return to Florence. He would do the same with Eleonora and would join me. We would see each other at my house, we would have dinner together, we would sleep together. More madness. I kissed him, I caressed him, I bit him, and I tore myself away from him in a state of unhappy happiness. I went to buy, at random, towels, a couple of bathing suits for Pietro, a shovel and pail for Elsa, a blue bathing suit for Dede. At the time blue was her favorite color.

114

We went on vacation. I paid little attention to the children, I left them with their father most of the time. I was constantly running around to find a telephone, if only to tell Nino that I loved him. Eleonora answered a couple of times, and I hung up. But her voice was enough to irritate me, I found it unjust that she should be beside him day and night, what did she have to do with him, with us. That annoyance helped me overcome my fear, the plan of seeing each other in Florence seemed increasingly feasible. I said to Pietro, and it was true, that while the Italian publisher, with all the will in the world, couldn’t bring out my book before January, it would come out in France at the end of October. I therefore had to clarify some urgent questions, a couple of books would be helpful, I needed to go home.

“I’ll go get them for you,” he offered.

“Stay with the girls, you’re never with them.”

“I like to drive, you don’t.”

“Leave me alone. Can’t I have a day off? Maids get one, why not me?”

I left early in the morning in the car; the sky was streaked with white, and through the window came a cool breeze that carried the odors of summer. I went into the empty house with my heart pounding. I undressed, I washed, I looked at myself in the mirror, dismayed by the white stain of stomach and breast, I got dressed, I undressed, I dressed again until I felt pretty.

Nino arrived around three in the afternoon; I don’t know what nonsense he had told his wife. We made love until evening. For the first time he had the luxury of dedicating himself to my body with a devotion, an idolatry that I wasn’t prepared for. I tried to be his equal, I wanted at all costs to seem good to him. But when I saw him exhausted and happy, something suddenly went bad in my mind. For me that was a unique experience, for him a repetition. He loved women, he adored their bodies as if they were fetishes. I didn’t think so much of the other women of his I knew about, Nadia, Silvia, Mariarosa, or his wife, Eleonora. I thought instead of what I knew well, the crazy things he had done for Lila, the frenzy that had brought him close to destroying himself. I recalled how she had believed in that passion and had clung to him, to the complicated books he read, his thoughts, his ambitions, to affirm herself and give herself the chance for change. I remembered how she had collapsed when Nino abandoned her. Did he know how to love and induce one to love only in that excessive way, did he not know others? Was this mad love of ours the repeat of other mad loves? Was he exploiting a prototype: wanting me in this way, without caring about anything, was it the same way he had wanted Lila? Didn’t even his coming to my and Pietro’s house resemble Lila’s taking him to the house where she and Stefano lived? Were we not doing but redoing?

I pulled back, he asked: what’s wrong? Nothing, I didn’t know what to say, they weren’t thoughts that could be spoken. I pressed against him, I kissed him and I tried to get out of my heart the feeling of his love for Lila. But Nino insisted and finally I couldn’t escape, I seized a relatively recent echo—Here, maybe this I can say to you—and asked him in a tone of feigned amusement:

“Do I have something wrong when it comes to sex, like Lina?”

His expression changed. In his eyes, in his face, a different person appeared, a stranger who frightened me. Even before he answered I quickly whispered:

“I was joking, if you don’t want to answer forget it.”

“I don’t understand what you said.”

“I was only quoting your words.”

“I’ve never said anything like that.”

“Liar, you did in Milan, when we were going to the restaurant.”

“It’s not true, and anyway I don’t want to talk about Lina.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer. I felt bitter, I turned away. When he touched my back with his fingers I whispered coldly: Leave me alone. We were motionless for a while, without speaking. Then he began to caress me again, he kissed me lightly on the shoulder, I gave in. Yes, I admitted to myself, he’s right, I should never ask him about Lila.

In the evening the telephone rang; it must be Pietro, with the girls. I nodded to Nino not to breathe, I left the bed and went to answer. I prepared in my throat an affectionate, reassuring tone, but without realizing it I kept my voice too low, an unnatural murmur, I didn’t want Nino to hear and later make fun of me or even get angry.

“Why are you whispering like that?” Pietro asked. “Everything all right?”

I raised my voice immediately, and now it was excessively loud. I sought loving words, I made much of Elsa, I urged Dede not to make her father’s life difficult and to brush her teeth before going to bed. Nino said, when I came back to bed:

“What a good wife, what a good mamma.”

I answered: “You are no less.”

I waited for the tension to diminish, for the echo of the voices of my husband and children to fade. We took a shower together. It was a new, enjoyable experience, a pleasure to wash him and be washed. Afterward I got ready to go out. Again I was trying to look nice for him, but this time I was doing it in front of him and suddenly without anxiety. He watched, fascinated, as I tried on dresses in search of the right one, as I put on my makeup, and from time to time — even though I said, joking, don’t you dare, you’re tickling me, you’ll ruin the makeup and I’ll have to start over, careful of the dress, it will tear, leave me alone — he came up behind me, kissed me on the neck, put his hands down the front and under the dress.