The Neapolitan Novels

In that climate their business, already in trouble because of Lila’s indifference and the money she had spent on lawyers and other things, couldn’t get going again. By mutual consent they sold it, and although Enzo had often imagined that it was worth a billion lire, they barely got a couple of hundred million. In the spring of 1992, when they had stopped fighting, they separated both as business partners and as a couple. Enzo left a good part of the money to Lila and went to look for work in Milan. To me he said one afternoon: Stay near her, she’s a woman who isn’t comfortable with herself, she’ll have a hard old age. For a while he wrote regularly, I did the same. A couple of times he called me. Then that was all.

36.

More or less around the same time another couple broke up, Elsa and Rino. Their love and complicity lasted for five or six months, at which point my daughter took me aside and confided that she felt attracted to a young mathematics teacher, a teacher in another section who didn’t even know of her existence. I asked:

“And Rino?”

She answered:

“He is my great love.”

I understood, as she added jokes to sighs, that she was making a distinction between love and attraction, and that her love for Rino wasn’t affected in the least by her attraction to the teacher.

Since I was as usual stressed—I was writing a lot, publishing a lot, traveling a lot—it was Imma who became the confidante of both Elsa and Rino. My youngest daughter, who respected the feelings of both, gained the trust of both and became a reliable source of information for me. I learned from her that Elsa had succeeded in her intention of seducing the professor. I learned from her that Rino had eventually begun to suspect that things with Elsa weren’t going well. I learned from her that Elsa had abandoned the professor so that Rino wouldn’t suffer. I learned from her that, after a break of a month, she had started up again. I learned from her that Rino, suffering for almost a year, finally confronted her, weeping, and begged her to tell him if she still loved him. I learned from her that Elsa had shouted at him: I don’t love you anymore, I love someone else. I learned from her that Rino had slapped her, but only with his fingertips, just to show he was a man. I learned from her that Elsa had run to the kitchen, grabbed the broom, and beaten him furiously, with no reaction from him.

From Lila, however, I learned that Rino—when I was absent and Elsa didn’t come home from school and stayed out all night—had gone to her in despair. Pay some attention to your daughter, she said one evening, try to understand what she wants. But she said it indifferently, without concern for Elsa’s future or for Rino’s. In fact she added: Besides, look, if you have your commitments and you don’t want to do anything it’s all right just the same. Then she muttered: We weren’t made for children. I wanted to respond that I felt I was a good mother and wore myself out trying to do my work without taking anything away from Dede, Elsa, and Imma. But I didn’t, I perceived that at that moment she wasn’t angry with me or my daughter, she was only trying to make her own indifference toward Rino seem normal.

Things were different when Elsa left the professor, and began going out with a classmate with whom she was studying for her final exams. She told Rino right away, so that he would understand that it was over. Lila then came up to my house, and, taking advantage of the fact that I was in Turin, made an ugly scene. What did your mother put in your head, she said in dialect, you have no sensitivity, you hurt people and don’t realize it. Then she yelled at her: My dear, you think you’re so important, but you’re a whore. Or at least Elsa reported that, entirely confirmed by Imma, who said to me: It’s true, Mamma, she called her a whore.