The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (49 page)

I understood that she wanted to get everything possible for herself, Stefano, the grocery stores, the money, the house, the cars. And I thought it was her right to fight that battle, which we were all fighting, one way or another. I tried to make her calm down, because she was very pale, her eyes were inflamed. And I was happy to hear how grateful she was to me, I was pleased to be consulted like a seer, handing out advice in a good Italian that confused her, as it did Pasquale and Pinuccia. Here, I thought sarcastically, is the use of history exams, classical philology, linguistics, and the thousands of file cards with which I drill myself rigorously: to soothe them for a few hours. They considered me impartial, without malicious feelings or passions, sterilized by study. And I accepted the role that they assigned me without mentioning my own suffering, my audaciousness, the times I had risked everything by letting Franco come to my room or sneaking into his, the vacation we had taken by ourselves in Versilia, living together as if we were married. I felt pleased with myself.

But as the time for lunch approached, the pleasure gave way to uneasiness, I went to Lila’s unwillingly. I was afraid that she would find a way to restore in a flash the old hierarchy, causing me to lose faith in my choices. I feared that she would point out Nino’s features in little Gennaro to remind me that the toy that was supposed to be mine had fallen to her. But it wasn’t like that. Rinuccio—so she called him more and more frequently—touched me immediately: he was a handsome dark boy, and Nino hadn’t yet emerged in his face and body, his features recalled Lila and even Stefano, as if all three had produced him. As for her, I felt that she had rarely been more fragile than she was then. At the mere sight of me her eyes shone with tears and her whole body trembled, I had to hold her tight to quiet her.

I noticed that in order not to make a bad impression she had combed her hair in a hurry, in a hurry had put on a little lipstick and a dress of pearl-gray rayon from the time of her engagement, that she wore shoes with a heel. She was still beautiful, but it was as if the bones of her face had become larger, her eyes smaller, and under the skin blood no longer circulated but an opaque liquid. She was very thin, embracing her I felt her bones, the clinging dress showed her swollen stomach.

At first she pretended that everything was fine. She was happy that I was enthusiastic about the baby, she liked the way I played with him, she wanted to show me all the things that Rinuccio could say and do. She began, in an anxious way that was unfamiliar, to pour out the terminology she had picked up from the chaotic reading she had done. She cited authors I had never heard of, made her son show off in exercises that she had invented for him. I noticed that she had developed a sort of tic, an expression of her mouth: she opened it suddenly and then pressed her lips together as if to contain the emotion produced by the things she was saying. Usually the expression was accompanied by a reddening of her eyes, a rosy light that the contraction of her lips, like a spring mechanism, promptly helped to reabsorb. She kept repeating that if she had dedicated herself assiduously to every child in the neighborhood, in a generation everything would change, there would no longer be the smart and the incompetent, the good and the bad. Then she looked at her son and again burst out crying. “He’s ruined the books,” she said between her tears, as if it were Rinuccio who had done it, and she showed them to me, torn, ripped in half. I had trouble understanding that the guilty person was not the little boy but her husband. “He’s got in the habit of rummaging among my things,” she murmured, “he doesn’t want me to have even a thought of my own and if he discovers that I’ve hidden even some insignificant thing he beats me.” She climbed up on a chair and took from on top of the wardrobe in the bedroom a metal box, and handed it to me. “Here’s everything that happened with Nino,” she said, “and so many thoughts that have gone through my head in these years, and also things of mine and yours that we haven’t said. Take it away, I’m afraid that he’ll find it and start reading. But I don’t want him to, they aren’t things for him, they aren’t for anyone, not even for you.”

I took the box unwillingly, I thought: where will I put it, what can I do with it. We sat at the table. I marveled that Rinuccio ate by himself, that he used his own small set of wooden implements, that, after his initial shyness passed, he spoke to me in Italian without mangling the words, that he answered each of my questions directly, with precision, and asked me questions in turn. Lila let me talk to her son, she ate almost nothing, she stared at her plate, absorbed. At the end, when I was about to go, she said:

“I don’t remember anything about Nino, about Ischia, about the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. And yet it seemed to me that I loved him more than myself. It doesn’t even interest me to know what happened to him, where he went.”

I thought she was sincere, and said nothing of what I knew.

“Infatuations,” I said, “have this good thing about them: after a while they pass.”

“Are you happy?”

“Pretty much.”

“How beautiful your hair is.”

“Oh well.”

“You have to do me another favor.”

“What?”

“I have to leave this house before Stefano, without even realizing it, kills me and the child.”

“You’re worrying me.”

“You’re right to be worried, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“Go to Enzo. Tell him that I tried but I couldn’t make it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not important for you to understand: you have to go back to Pisa, you have your things. Tell him this, that’s all:
Lina tried but she couldn’t make it
.”

She went with me to the door with the child in her arms. She said to her son, “Rino, say goodbye to Aunt Lenù.”

The baby smiled, waved his hand goodbye.

Before I left I went to see Enzo. When I said to him, “
Lina told me to tell you that she tried but she couldn’t make it,”
not even the shadow of an emotion crossed his face, so I thought that the message left him completely indifferent. “Things are bad,” I added. “On the other hand I don’t really know what can be done.” He pressed his lips together, assumed a grave expression. We said goodbye.

On the train I opened the metal box, even though I had sworn not to. There were eight notebooks. From the first lines I began to feel bad. In Pisa, the bad feeling increased, over days, over months. Every word of Lila’s diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor. Those notebooks I memorized, and in the end they made me feel that the world of the Normale—the friends, male and female, who respected me, the affectionate looks of those professors who encouraged me to constantly do more—was part of a universe that was too protected and thus too predictable, compared with that tempestuous world that, in the conditions of life in the neighborhood, Lila had been able to explore in her hurried lines, on pages that were crumpled and stained. Every past effort of mine seemed without meaning. I was frightened, for months school went badly. I was alone, Franco Mari had lost his place at the Normale, I couldn’t pull myself out of the feeling of pettiness that had overwhelmed me. At a certain point it became clear that soon I, too, would get a bad mark and be sent home. So one evening in late autumn, without a precise plan, I went out carrying the metal box. I stopped on the Solferino bridge and threw it into the Arno.

During my last year in Pisa the perspective from which I had experienced the first three changed. I was possessed by an ungrateful dislike of the city, my classmates, the teachers, the exams, the frigid days, the political meetings on warm evenings near the Baptistery, the films at the film forum, the entire unchanging urban space: the Timpano, the Lungarno Pacinotti, Via XXIV May, Via San Frediano, Piazza dei Cavalieri, Via Consoli del Mare, Via San Lorenzo, routes that were the same and yet alien even when the baker said hello and the newspaper seller chatted about the weather, alien in the voices that I had nevertheless forced myself to imitate from the start, alien in the color of the stone and the plants and the signs and the clouds or sky.

I don’t know if it was because of Lila’s notebooks. Certainly, right after reading them and long before throwing away the box that contained them, I became disenchanted. My first impression, that of finding myself part of a fearless battle, passed. The trepidation at every exam and the joy of passing it with the highest marks had faded. Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was
almost
a face.

Suddenly I was aware of that
almost
. Had I made it? Almost. Had I torn myself away from Naples, the neighborhood? Almost. Did I have new friends, male and female, who came from cultured backgrounds, often more cultured than the one that Professor Galiani and her children belonged to? Almost. From one exam to the next, had I become a student who was well received by the solemn professors who questioned me? Almost. Behind the
almost
I seemed to see how things stood. I was afraid. I was afraid as I had been the day I arrived in Pisa. I was scared of anyone who had that culture without the
almost
, with casual confidence.

There were many people at the Normale who did. It wasn’t just students who passed the exams brilliantly, in Latin or Greek or history. They were youths—almost all male, as were the outstanding professors and the illustrious names who had passed through that institution—who excelled because they knew, without apparent effort, the present and future use of the labor of studying. They knew because of the families they came from or through an instinctive orientation. They knew how a newspaper or a journal was put together, how a publishing house was organized, what a radio or television office was, how a film originates, what the university hierarchies were, what there was beyond the borders of our towns or cities, beyond the Alps, beyond the sea. They knew the names of the people who counted, the people to be admired and those to be despised. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, to me anyone whose name was printed in a newspaper or a book was a god. If someone said to me with admiration or with resentment: that’s so-and-so, that’s the son of so-and-so, that’s that other so-and-so’s granddaughter, I was silent or I pretended to know. I perceived, of course, that they were
truly
important names, and yet I had never heard them, I didn’t know what they had done that was important, I didn’t know the map of prestige. For example, I came to my exams very well prepared, but if the professor were suddenly to ask me, “Do you know from what works I derive the authority on the basis of which I teach this subject in this university?” I wouldn’t know what to answer. But the others knew. So I moved among them fearful of saying and doing the wrong things.

When Franco Mari fell in love with me, that fear diminished. He instructed me, I learned to move in his wake. Franco was lively, attentive to others, insolent, bold. He felt so sure of having read the right books and thus of being right that he always spoke with authority. I had learned to express myself in private and, more rarely, in public, relying on his reputation. And I was successful, or at least was becoming so. Strengthened by his certainties, I was at times bolder than he, at times more effective. But, although I had made a lot of progress, I still worried that I wasn’t up to it, that I would say the wrong thing, reveal how ignorant and inexperienced I was in precisely the things that everyone knew. And as soon as Franco, in spite of himself, went out of my life, the fear regained power. I had had the proof of what, deep down, I already knew. His wealth, his upbringing, his reputation, well known among the students, as a young militant on the left, his sociability, even his courage when he delivered carefully measured speeches against powerful people within and outside the university—all this had given him an aura that automatically extended to me, as his fiancée or girlfriend or companion, as if the pure and simple fact that he loved me were the public sanctioning of my talents. But as soon as he lost his place at the Normale his merits faded, and no longer shone on me. The students from good families stopped inviting me to Sunday outings and parties. Some began making fun of my Neapolitan accent again. The things he had given me were no longer in fashion, looked dated. I had quickly understood that Franco, his presence in my life, had masked my true condition but hadn’t changed it, I hadn’t really succeeded in fitting in. I was one of those who labored day and night, got excellent results, were even treated with congeniality and respect, but would never carry off with the proper manner the high level of those studies. I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.

I have to say that it was a depressing period for other reasons as well. Everyone knew, in Piazza dei Cavalieri, that I went to Franco’s room at night, that I had gone alone with him to Paris, to Versilia, and this had given me the reputation of an easy girl. It’s complicated to explain what it cost me to adapt to the idea of sexual freedom that Franco ardently supported; I myself hid the difficulty to seem free and open-minded to him. Nor could I repeat in public the ideas that he had instilled in me as if they were gospel, that is to say that half virgins were the worst kind of woman, petit bourgeois who preferred to give you their ass than to do things properly. And I couldn’t say that I had a friend, in Naples, who at sixteen was already married, who at eighteen had taken a lover, who had become pregnant by him, who had returned to her husband, who would do God knows what else—that, in other words, going to bed with Franco seemed to me a small thing, compared with Lila’s turbulent affairs. I had had to put up with malicious remarks from the girls, crude ones from the boys, their persistent looks at my large bosom. I had had to reject bluntly the bluntness with which some offered to replace my former boyfriend. I had to resign myself to the fact that the youths responded to my rejections with vulgar remarks. I kept on with clenched teeth, I said to myself: it will end.