It was an odd exchange, not in its content but in its heated tones, the rules of etiquette abandoned. In Mariarosa’s eyes I glimpsed a flash of amusement: she understood that if Franco and I talked to each other like that there had been something more than a friendship between university colleagues. Come, give me a hand, she said to Silvia and Juan. She had to get a ladder, to find sheets for me, for Franco. The two followed her, Juan whispered something in her ear.
Franco stared at the floor for a moment, he pressed his lips together as if to restrain a smile, and said affectionately: “You’ve remained the petit bourgeois you always were.”
That was the way, years earlier, he had often made fun of me when I was afraid of being caught in his room. In the absence of the others, I said impetuously: “You’re the petit bourgeois, by origin, by education, by behavior.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m not offended.”
“You’ve changed, you’ve become aggressive.”
“I’m the same as ever.”
“Everything all right at home?”
“Yes.”
“And that friend of yours who was so important to you?”
The question came with a logical leap that disoriented me. Had I talked to him about Lila in the past? In what terms? And why did she come to mind now? Where was the connection that he had seen somewhere and I hadn’t?
“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.”
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?
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.”