Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (3 page)

As soon as Nino stopped talking, the man, with a slight gesture, asked to respond. It was clear that he was offended, but I was too agitated by violent emotions to immediately understand why. I was aware, naturally, that Nino’s words had shifted the conversation from literature to politics, and in an aggressive, almost disrespectful way. Yet at the moment I gave that little importance; I couldn’t forgive myself for my failure to stand up to the challenge, for having been ineffectual in front of a sophisticated audience. And yet I was clever. In high school I had reacted to my disadvantages by trying to become like Professor Galiani, I had adopted her tones and her language. In Pisa that model of a woman hadn’t been enough; I had had to deal with highly experienced people. Franco, Pietro, all the best students, and of course the renowned teachers at the Normale expressed themselves in a complex manner: they wrote with deliberate artifice, they had an ability to classify, a logical lucidity, that Professor Galiani didn’t possess. But I had trained myself to be like them. And often I succeeded: it seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the surge of emotions, and breathless speech. In short, I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object. But that evening things didn’t go as they should have. First, Adele and her friends, whom I imagined as very sophisticated readers, and then the man with the thick eyeglasses intimidated me. I had become again the eager little girl from the poor neighborhood of Naples, the daughter of the porter with the dialect cadence of the South, amazed at having ended up in that place, playing the part of the cultured young writer. So I had lost confidence and expressed myself in an unconvincing, disjointed manner. Not to mention Nino. His appearance had taken away any self-control, and the very quality of his speech on my behalf had confirmed to me that I had abruptly lost my abilities. We came from backgrounds that were not very different, we had both worked hard to acquire that language. And yet not only had he used it naturally, turning it easily against the speaker, but, at times, when it seemed to him necessary, he had even dared to insert disorder into that polished Italian with a bold nonchalance that rapidly managed to make the professorial tones of the other man sound out of date and perhaps a little ridiculous. As a result, when I saw that the man wished to speak again, I thought: he’s really angry, and if he said bad things about my book before, now he’ll say something even worse to humiliate Nino, who defended it.

But the man seemed to be gripped by something else: he did not return to my book; he didn’t bring me into it at all. He focused instead on certain formulas that Nino had used incidentally but had repeated several times: things like
baronial arrogance, anti-authoritarian literature
. I understood only then that what had made him angry was the political turn of the discussion. He hadn’t liked that vocabulary, and he emphasized this by inserting a sudden sarcastic falsetto into his deep voice (
And so pride in knowledge is today characterized as pretension, and so literature, too, has become anti-authoritarian
?). Then he began to play subtly with the word
authority
, thank God, he said, a barrier against the uncultured youths who make random pronouncements on everything by resorting to the nonsense of who knows what student-run course at the state university. And he spoke at length on that subject, addressing the audience, never Nino or me directly. In his conclusion, however, he focused first on the old critic who was sitting next to me and then directly on Adele, who was perhaps his true polemical objective from the beginning. I have no argument with the young people, he said, briefly, but with those educated adults who, out of self-interest, are always ready to ride the latest fashion in stupidity. Here at last he was silent, and he prepared to leave with quiet but energetic “Excuse me”s, “May I”s, “thank you”s.

The audience rose to let him pass, hostile and yet deferential. It was utterly clear to me by now that he was an important man, so important that even Adele answered his dark nod of greeting with a cordial
Thank you, goodbye
. Maybe for that reason Nino surprised everyone a little when, in an imperative and at the same time joking tone, evidence that he was aware who he was dealing with, he called him by the title of professor—
Professor, where are you going, don’t run off
—and then, thanks to the agility of his long legs, cut off his path, confronted him, spoke to him in that new language of his that I couldn’t really hear from where I was, couldn’t really understand, but that must be like steel cables in a hot sun. The man listened without moving, showing no signs of impatience, and then he made a gesture with his hand that meant move aside, and headed toward the door.

I left the table in a daze, struggling to take in the fact that Nino was really there, in Milan, in that room. And yet he was, already he was coming toward me, smiling, but at a restrained, unhurried pace. We shook hands, his was hot, mine cold, and we said how glad we were to see each other after so long. To know that finally the worst of the evening was over and that now he was before me, real, assuaged my bad mood but not my agitation. I introduced him to the critic who had generously praised my book, saying that he was a friend from Naples, that we had gone to high school together. The professor, although he, too, had received some jabs from Nino, was polite, praised the way he had treated that man, and spoke of Naples with fondness, addressing him as if he were a gifted student who was to be encouraged. Nino explained that he had lived in Milan for some years, his field was economic geography, he belonged—and he smiled—to the most wretched category in the academic pyramid, that is to say lecturer. He said it sweetly, without the almost sullen tones he had had as a boy, and it seemed to me that he wore a lighter armor than that which had fascinated me in high school, as if he had shed any excess weight in order to be able to joust more rapidly and with elegance. I noted with relief that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

Meanwhile some of Adele’s friends had come over to have their books signed, which made me nervous: it was the first time I had done this. I hesitated: I didn’t want to lose sight of Nino even for an instant, but I also wanted to mitigate the impression I must have made of a clumsy girl. So I left him with the old professor—his name was Tarratano—and greeted my readers politely. I intended to do this quickly, but the books were new, with an odor of ink, so different from the dog-eared, ill-smelling books that Lila and I took out from the library in the neighborhood, and I didn’t feel like marring them carelessly with the pen. I displayed my best handwriting, from the time of Maestra Oliviero, I invented elaborate dedications that caused some impatience in the women who were waiting. My heart was pounding as I wrote, with an eye on Nino. I trembled at the idea that he would leave.

He didn’t. Now Adele had gone up to him and Tarratano, and Nino spoke to her confidently and yet with deference. I remembered when he used to talk to Professor Galiani in the corridors of the high school, and it took me a while to consolidate in my mind the brilliant high school student of then with the young man of now. I vehemently discarded, on the other hand, as a pointless deviation that had made all of us suffer, the university student of Ischia, the lover of my married friend, the helpless youth who hid in the bathroom of the shop on Piazza dei Martiri and who was the father of Gennaro, a child he had never seen. Certainly Lila’s irruption had thrown him off, but—it now seemed obvious—it was just a digression. However intense that experience must have been, however deep the marks it had left, it was over now. Nino had found himself again, and I was pleased. I thought: I have to tell Lila that I saw him, that he’s well. Then I changed my mind: no, I won’t tell her.

When I finished the dedications, the room was empty. Adele took me gently by the hand, she praised the way I had spoken of my book and the way I had responded to the terrible intrusion—so she called it—of the man with the thick eyeglasses. Since I denied having done well (I knew perfectly well that it wasn’t true), she asked Nino and Tarratano to give their opinion, and both were profuse with compliments. Nino went so far as to say, looking at me seriously:
You don’t know what that girl was like in high school, extremely intelligent, cultivated, very courageous, very beautiful
. And while I felt my face burning, he began to tell with exaggerated courtesy the story of my clash with the religion teacher years earlier. Adele laughed frequently as she listened. In our family, she said, we understood Elena’s virtues right away, and then she said she had made a reservation for dinner at a place nearby. I was alarmed, I said in embarrassment that I was tired and not hungry, I would happily take a short walk with Nino before going to bed. I knew it was rude, the dinner was meant to celebrate me and thank Tarratano for his work on behalf of my book, but I couldn’t stop myself. Adele looked at me for a moment with a sardonic expression, she replied that naturally my friend was invited, and added mysteriously, as if to compensate for the sacrifice I was making: I have a nice surprise in store for you. I looked at Nino anxiously: would he accept the invitation? He said he didn’t want to be a bother, he looked at his watch, he accepted.

We left the bookstore. Adele, tactfully, went ahead with Tarratano, Nino and I followed. But I immediately found that I didn’t know what to say to him, I was afraid that every word would be wrong. He made sure there were no silences. He praised my book again, he went on to speak with great respect of the Airotas (he called them “the most civilized of the families who count for something in Italy”), he said he knew Mariarosa (“She’s always on the front lines: two weeks ago we had a big argument”), he congratulated me because he had learned from Adele that I was engaged to Pietro, whose book on Bacchic rites he seemed to know, amazing me; but he spoke with respect especially of the father, Professor Guido Airota, “a truly exceptional man.” I was a little annoyed that he already knew of my engagement, and it made me uneasy that the praise of my book had served as an introduction to the far more insistent praise of Pietro’s entire family, Pietro’s book. I interrupted him, I asked him about himself, but he was vague, with only a few allusions to a small volume coming out that he called boring but obligatory. I pressed him, I asked if he had had a hard time during his early days in Milan. He answered with a few generic remarks about the problems of coming from the South without a cent in your pocket. Then out of the blue he asked me:

“Are you living in Naples again?”

“For now, yes.”

“In the neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve broken conclusively with my father, and I don’t see anyone in my family.”

“Too bad.”

“It’s better that way. I’m just sorry not to have any news of Lina.”

For a moment I thought I’d been wrong, that Lila had never gone out of his life, that he had come to the bookstore not for me but only to find out about her. Then I said to myself: if he had really wanted to find out about Lila, in so many years he would have found a way, and I reacted violently, in the sharp tone of someone who wants to end the subject quickly:

“She left her husband and lives with someone else.”

“Did she have a boy or a girl?”

“A boy.”

He made a grimace of displeasure and said: “Lina is brave, even too brave. But she doesn’t know how to submit to reality, she’s incapable of accepting others and herself. Loving her was a difficult experience.”

“In what sense?”

“She doesn’t know what dedication is.”

“Maybe you’re exaggerating.”

“No, she’s really made badly: in her mind and in everything, even when it comes to sex.”

Those last words—
even when it comes to sex
—struck me more than the others. So Nino’s judgment on his relationship with Lila was negative? So he had just said to me, disturbingly, that that opinion included even the sexual arena? I stared for some seconds at the dark outlines of Adele and her friend walking ahead of us. The disturbance became anxiety, I sensed that
even when it comes to sex
was a preamble, that he wished to become still more explicit. Years earlier, Stefano, after his marriage, had confided in me, had told me about his problems with Lila, but he had done so without ever mentioning sex—no one in the neighborhood would have in speaking of the woman he loved. It was unthinkable, for example, that Pasquale would talk to me about Ada’s sexuality, or, worse, that Antonio would speak to Carmen or Gigliola about my sexuality. Boys might talk among themselves—and in a vulgar way, when they didn’t like us girls or no longer liked us—but among boys and girls no. I guessed instead that Nino, the new Nino, considered it completely normal to discuss with me his sexual relations with my friend. I was embarrassed, I pulled back. Of this, too, I thought, I must never speak to Lila, and meanwhile I said with feigned indifference: water under the bridge, let’s not be sad, let’s go back to you, what are you working on, what are your prospects at the university, where do you live, by yourself? But I certainly overdid it; he must have felt that I had made a quick escape. He smiled ironically, and was about to answer. But we had arrived at the restaurant, and we went in.

Adele assigned us places: I was next to Nino and opposite Tarratano, she next to Tarratano and opposite Nino. We ordered, and meanwhile the conversation had shifted to the man with the thick glasses, a professor of Italian literature—I learned—a Christian Democrat, and a regular contributor to the
Corriere della Sera
. Adele and her friend now lost all restraint. Outside of the bookstore ritual, they couldn’t say enough bad things about the man, and they congratulated Nino for the way he had confronted and routed him. They especially enjoyed recalling what Nino had said as the man was leaving the room, remarks they had heard and I hadn’t. They asked him what his exact words were, and Nino retreated, saying that he didn’t remember. But then the words emerged, maybe reinvented for the occasion, something like:
In order to safeguard authority in all of its manifestations, you suspend democracy
. And from there the three of them took off, talking, with increasing ardor, about the secret services, about Greece, about torture in the Greek prisons, about Vietnam, about the unexpected uprising of the student movement not only in Italy but in Europe and the world, about an article in
Il Ponte
by Professor Airota—which Nino said that he agreed with, word for word—about the conditions of research and teaching in the universities.