The Story of the Lost Child (11 page)

To Carmen, obviously, I had given a toned-down report of that meeting, but she was unhappy just the same. A decorous unhappiness, which in the end had led me to see her occasionally when I went to Naples. I felt in her an anguish that I understood. Pasquale was
our
Pasquale. We both loved him, whatever he had done or was doing. Of him I now had a drifting, fragmentary memory: the time we had been together at the neighborhood library, the time of the fight in Piazza dei Martiri, the time he had come in the car to take me to Lila, the time he had showed up at my house in Florence with Nadia. Carmen on the other hand I felt as more consistent. Her suffering as a child—I had a clear memory of her father’s arrest—was welded to her suffering for her brother, to the tenacity with which she tried to watch over his fate. If she had once been only the childhood friend who had ended up behind the counter in the Carraccis’ new grocery store thanks to Lila, now she was a person I saw willingly and was fond of.

We met in a coffee shop on Via Duomo. The place was dark, and we sat near the street door. I told her in detail about my plans, I knew she would talk to Lila and I thought: That’s as it should be. Carmen, wearing dark colors, with her dark complexion, listened attentively and without interrupting. I felt frivolous in my elegant outfit, talking about Nino and my desire to live in a nice house. At a certain point she looked at the clock, announced:

“Lina’s coming.”

That made me nervous; I had a date with her, not with Lila. I looked in turn at the clock, and said, “I have to go.”

“Wait, five minutes and she’ll be here.”

She began to speak of her with affection and gratitude. Lila took care of her friends. Lila took care of everyone: her parents, her brother, even Stefano. Lila had helped Antonio find an apartment and had become very friendly with the German woman he had married. Lila intended to set up her own computer business. Lila was sincere, she was rich, she was generous, if you were in trouble she reached into her purse. Lila was ready to help Pasquale in any way. Ah, she said, Lenù, how lucky you two are to have always been so close, how I envied you. And I seemed to hear in her voice, to recognize in a movement of her hand, the tones, the gestures of our friend. I thought again of Alfonso, I remembered my impression that he, a male, resembled Lila even in his features. Was the neighborhood settling in her, finding its direction?

“I’m going,” I said.

“Wait a minute, Lila has something important to tell you.”

“You tell me.”

“No, it’s up to her.”

I waited, with growing reluctance. Finally Lila arrived. This time she had paid much more attention to her looks than when I’d seen her in Piazza Amedeo, and I had to acknowledge that, if she wanted, she could still be very beautiful. She exclaimed:

“So you’ve decided to return to Naples.”

“Yes.”

“And you tell Carmen but not me?”

“I would have told you.”

“Do your parents know?”

“No.”

“And Elisa?”

“Not her, either.”

“Your mother’s not well.”

“What’s wrong?”

“She has a cough, but she won’t go to the doctor.”

I became restless, I turned to look at the clock.

“Carmen says you have something important to tell me.”

“It’s not a nice thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“I asked Antonio to follow Nino.”

I jumped.

“Follow in what sense?”

“See what he does.”

“Why?”

“I did it for your own good.”

“I’ll worry about my own good.”

Lila glanced at Carmen as if to get her support, then she turned back to me.

“If you act like that I’ll shut up: I don’t want you to feel offended again.”

“I’m not offended, go on.”

She looked me straight in the eye and revealed, in curt phrases, in Italian, that Nino had never left his wife, that he continued to live with her and his son, that as a reward he had been named, just recently, the director of an important research institute financed by the bank that his father-in-law headed. She concluded gravely:

“Did you know?”

I shook my head.

“No.”

“If you don’t believe me let’s go see him and I’ll repeat everything to his face, word for word, just as I told you now.”

I waved a hand to let her know there was no need.

“I believe you,” I whispered, but to avoid her eyes I looked out the door, at the street.

Meanwhile from very far away came Carmen’s voice saying: If you’re going to Nino I want to come, too; the three of us will settle things properly. I felt her lightly touching my arm to get my attention. As small girls we had read photo-romances in the garden next to the church and had felt the same urge to help the heroine when she was in trouble. Now, surely, she had the same feeling of solidarity of those days, but with the gravity of today, and it was a genuine feeling, brought on by a wrong that was not fictional but real. Lila on the other hand had always scorned such reading and there was no doubt that at that moment she was sitting across from me with other motives. I imagined that she felt satisfied, as Antonio, too, must have been when he discovered Nino’s falseness. I saw that she and Carmen exchanged a look, a sort of mute consultation, as if to make a decision. It was a long moment. No, I read on Carmen’s lips, and that breath was accompanied by an imperceptible shaking of her head.

No to what?

Lila stared at me again, her mouth half open. As usual she was taking on the job of sticking a pin in my heart not to stop it but to make it beat harder. Her eyes were narrowed, her broad forehead wrinkled. She waited for my reaction. She wanted me to scream, weep, hand myself over to her. I said softly:

“I really have to go now.”

I cut Lila out of everything that followed.

I was hurt, not because she had revealed that for more than two years Nino had been telling me lies about the state of his marriage but because she had succeeded in proving to me what in fact she had said from the start: that my choice was mistaken, that I was stupid.

A few hours later I met Nino, but I acted as if nothing were wrong, I limited myself only to avoiding his embraces. I was swallowed up by bitterness. I spent the whole night with my eyes wide open, the desire to cling to that long male body was ruined. The next day he wanted to take me to see an apartment on Via Tasso, and I agreed when he said: If you like it, don’t worry about the rent, I’ll take care of it, I’m about to get a position that will resolve all our financial problems. But that night I couldn’t take it anymore and I exploded. We were in the apartment on Via Duomo, and his friend as usual wasn’t there. I said to him:

“Tomorrow I’d like to see Eleonora.”

He looked at me in bewilderment.

“Why?”

“I have to talk to her. I want to know what she knows about us, when you left home, when you stopped sleeping together. I want to know if you asked for a legal separation. I want her to tell me if her father and mother know that your marriage is over.”

He remained calm.

“Ask me: if something isn’t clear I’ll explain it to you.”

“No, I trust only her, you’re a liar.”

At that point I started yelling, I switched to dialect. He gave in immediately, he admitted everything, I had no doubt that Lila had told me the truth. I hit him in the chest with my fists and as I did I felt as if there were a me unglued from me who wished to hurt him even more, who wanted to beat him, spit in his face as I had seen people do as a child in the neighborhood quarrels, call him a shit, scratch him, tear out his eyes. I was surprised, frightened.
Am I always this furious other I? I, here in Naples, in this filthy house, I, who if I could would kill this man, plunge a knife into his heart with all my strength? Should I restrain this shadow—my mother, all our female ancestors—or should I let her go?
I shouted, I hit him. And at first he warded off the blows, pretending to be amused, then suddenly he darkened, sat down heavily, stopped defending himself.

I slowed down, my heart was about to burst. He murmured:

“Sit down.”

“No.”

“At least give me a chance to explain.”

I collapsed onto a chair, as far away as possible, and let him speak. You know—he began in a choked voice—that before Montpellier I had told Eleonora everything and that the break was irreparable. But when he returned, he said, things had become complicated. His wife had gone crazy, even Albertino’s life seemed in danger. Thus, to be able to continue he had had to tell her that we were no longer seeing each other. For a while the lie had held up. But since the explanations he gave Eleonora for all his absences were increasingly implausible, the scenes had begun again. Once his wife had grabbed a knife and tried to stab herself in the stomach. Another time she had gone out on the balcony and wanted to jump. Yet another time she had left home, taking the child; she had disappeared for an entire day and he was dying with fear. But when he finally tracked her down at the house of a beloved aunt, he realized that Eleonora had changed. She was no longer angry, there was just a hint of contempt. One morning—Nino said, breathlessly—she asked if I had left you. I said yes. And she said: All right, I believe you. She said it just like that and from then on she began to pretend to believe me,
pretend
. Now we live in this fiction and things are working well. In fact, as you see, I’m here with you, I sleep with you, if I want I’ll go away with you. And she knows everything, but she behaves as if she knew nothing.

Here he took a breath, cleared his throat, tried to understand if I was listening or harboring only rage. I continued to say nothing, I looked in another direction. He must have thought that I was yielding and he continued to explain with greater determination. He talked and talked, he was good at it, he put everything into it. He was winning, self-mocking, suffering, desperate. But when he tried to approach, I pushed him away, shouting. Then he couldn’t bear it and burst into tears. He gesticulated, he leaned toward me, he murmured between tears: I don’t want you to pardon me, I want only to be understood. I interrupted him, angrier than ever, I cried: You lied to her and you lied to me, and you didn’t do it for love of either of us, you did it for yourself, because you don’t have the courage of your choices, because you’re a coward. Then I moved on to repugnant words in dialect, and he let himself be insulted, he muttered just some phrases of regret. I felt as if I were suffocating, I gasped, I was silent, and that allowed him to return to the charge. He tried again to demonstrate that lying to me had been the only way to avoid a tragedy. When it seemed to him that he had succeeded, when he whispered to me that now, thanks to Eleonora’s acquiescence, we could try to live together without trouble, I said calmly that it was over between us. I left, I returned to Genoa.

The atmosphere in my in-laws’ house became increasingly tense. Nino telephoned constantly, I either hung up on him or quarreled too loudly. A couple of times Lila called, she wanted to know how it was going. I said to her: Well, very well, just the way you wanted it to go, and hung up. I became intractable, I yelled at Dede and Elsa for no reason. But mainly I began to fight with Adele. One morning I threw in her face what she had done to hinder the publication of my book. She didn’t deny it, in fact she said: It’s a pamphlet, it doesn’t have the dignity of a book. I replied: If I write pamphlets, you in your whole life haven’t been capable of writing even that, and it’s not clear where all this authority of yours comes from. She was offended, she hissed: You don’t know anything about me. Oh no, I knew things that she couldn’t imagine. That time I managed to keep my mouth shut, but a few days later I had a violent quarrel with Nino; I yelled on the phone in dialect, and when my mother-in-law reproached me in a contemptuous tone I reacted by saying:

“Leave me alone, worry about yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Pietro told me that you’ve had lovers.”

“I?”

“Yes, you, don’t be so taken aback. I assumed my responsibilities in front of everyone, even Dede and Elsa, and I’m paying for the consequences of my actions. You, who give yourself so many airs, you’re just a hypocritical little bourgeois who hides her dirt under the carpet.”

Adele turned pale, she was speechless. Rigid, her face tense, she got up and closed the door of the living room. Then she said to me in a low voice, almost a whisper, that I was an evil woman, that I couldn’t understand what it meant to truly love and to give up one’s beloved, that behind a pleasing and docile façade I concealed an extremely vulgar craving to grab everything, which neither studying nor books could ever tame. Then she concluded: Tomorrow get out, you and your children; I’m sorry only that if the girls had grown up here they might have tried not to be like you.

I didn’t answer, I knew I had gone too far. I was tempted to apologize but I didn’t. The next morning Adele ordered the maid to help me pack. I’ll do it myself, I exclaimed, and without even saying goodbye to Guido, who was in his study pretending nothing was happening, I found myself at the station loaded with suitcases, the two children watching me, trying to understand what my intentions were.

I remember the exhaustion, the echo of the station hall, the waiting room. Dede reproached me for shoving: Don’t push me, don’t always shout, I’m not deaf. Elsa asked: Are we going to Papa? They were cheerful because there was no school, but I felt that they didn’t trust me and they asked cautiously, ready to be silent if I got angry: What are we doing, when are we going back to Grandma and Grandpa’s, where are we going to eat, where will we sleep tonight.

At first, desperate as I was, I thought of going to Naples and showing up with the children, without warning, at Nino and Eleonora’s house. I said to myself: Yes, that’s what I should do, my daughters and I are in this situation because of him, and he has to pay. I wanted my disorder to crash into him and overwhelm him, as it was overwhelming me. He had deceived me. He had held on to his family and, like a toy, me, too. I had chosen definitively, he hadn’t. I had left Pietro, he had kept Eleonora. I was in the right, then. I had the right to invade his life and say to him: Well, my dear, we are here; if you’re worried about your wife because she does crazy things, now I’m doing crazy things, let’s see how you manage it.