The Neapolitan Novels

The question embarrassed me, I announced in my best authoritarian tone that it was time to go to bed. Elsa had just finished vowing that in a few years, once she got her high school diploma, she would go and live in the United States with her father, and Imma was tugging on Pietro’s arm, she wanted attention, she was no doubt about to ask if she could join him, too. Dede sat in uncertain silence. Maybe, I thought, things are already resolved, Rino has been put aside, now she’ll say to Elsa: You have to wait four years, I’m finishing high school now and in a month at most I’m going to Papa’s.

22.

But as soon as Pietro and I were alone I had only to look at his face to understand that he was very worried. He said:

“There’s nothing to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dede functions by theorems.”

“What did she tell you?”

“It’s not important what she said but what she will certainly do.”

“She’ll go to bed with him?”

“Yes. She has a very firm plan, with the stages precisely marked out. Right after her exams she’ll make a declaration to Rino, lose her virginity, they’ll leave together and live by begging, putting the work ethic in crisis.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking, I’m reporting her plan to you word for word.”

“Easy for you to be sarcastic, since you can avoid it, leaving the role of the bad mother to me.”

“She’s counting on me. She said that as soon as that boy wants, she’ll come to Boston, with him.”

“I’ll break her legs.”

“Or maybe he and she will break yours.”

We talked into the night, at first about Dede, then also about Elsa and Imma, finally everything: politics, literature, the books I was writing, the newspaper articles, a new essay he was working on. We hadn’t talked so much for a long time. He teased me good-humoredly for always taking, in his view, a middle position. He made fun of my halfway feminism, my halfway Marxism, my halfway Freudianism, my halfway Foucault-ism, my halfway subversiveness. Only with me, he said in a slightly harsher tone, you never used half measures. He sighed: Nothing was right for you, I was inadequate in everything. That other man was perfect. But now? He acted like the rigorous person and he ended up in the socialist gang. Elena, Elena, how you have tormented me. You were angry with me even when those kids pointed a gun at me. And you brought to our house your childhood friends who were murderers. You remember? But so what, you’re Elena, I loved you so much, we have two children, and of course I still love you.

I let him talk. Then I admitted that I had often held senseless positions. I even admitted that he was right about Nino, he had been a great disappointment. And I tried to return to Dede and Rino. I was worried, I didn’t know how to manage the issue. I said that to keep the boy away from our daughter would cause, among other things, trouble with Lila and that I felt guilty, I knew she would consider it an insult. He nodded.

“You have to help her.”

“I don’t know how to.”

“She’s trying everything possible to engage her mind and emerge from her grief, but she’s unable to.”

“It’s not true, she did before, now she’s not even working, she’s not doing anything.”

“You’re wrong.”

Lila had told him that she spent entire days in the Biblioteca Nazionale: she wanted to learn all she could about Naples. I looked at him dubiously. Lila again in a library, not the neighborhood library of the fifties but the prestigious, inefficient Biblioteca Nazionale? That’s what she was doing when she disappeared from the neighborhood? That was her new mania? And why had she not told me about it? Or had she told Pietro just so that he would tell me?

“She hid it from you?”

“She’ll talk to me about it when she needs to.”

“Urge her to continue. It’s unacceptable that a person so gifted stopped school in fifth grade.”

“Lila does only what she feels like.”

“That’s how you want to see her.”

“I’ve known her since she was six.”

“Maybe she hates you for that.”

“She doesn’t hate me.”

“It’s hard to observe every day that you are free and she has remained a prisoner. If there’s an inferno it’s inside her unsatisfied mind, I wouldn’t want to enter it even for a few seconds.”

Pietro used precisely the phrase “enter it,” and his tone was of horror, of fascination, of pity. I repeated:

“Lina doesn’t hate me at all.”

He laughed.

“All right, as you like.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

He looked at me uncertainly. I hadn’t made up the cot as I usually did.

“Together?”