Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (48 page)

“Promise that you’ll keep calling me every day.”

“No, I won’t call you anymore.”

“If you don’t I’ll go mad.”

“I’ll go mad if I go on thinking of you.”

We explored with a sort of masochistic pleasure the dead end we felt ourselves in, and, exasperated by the obstacles we ourselves were piling up, we ended by quarreling. He left, anxiously, at six in the morning. I cleaned up the house, had a cry, drove all the way to Viareggio hoping never to arrive. Halfway there I realized that I hadn’t taken a single book capable of justifying that trip. I thought: better this way.

When I returned I was warmly welcomed by Elsa, who said sulkily: Papa isn’t good at playing. Dede defended Pietro, she exclaimed that her sister was small and stupid, and ruined every game. Pietro examined me, in a bad mood.

“You didn’t sleep.”

“I slept badly.”

“Did you find the books?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“Where do you think they are? At home. I checked what I had to check and that was it.”

“Why are you angry?”

“Because you make me angry.”

“We called you again last night. Elsa wanted to say good night but you weren’t there.”

“It was hot, I took a walk.”

“Alone?”

“With whom?”

“Dede says you have a boyfriend.”

“Dede has a strong bond with you and she’s dying to replace me.”

“Or she sees and hears things that I don’t see or hear.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said.”

“Pietro, let’s try to be clear: to your many maladies do you want to add jealousy, too?”

“I’m not jealous.”

“Let’s hope not. Because if it weren’t so I’m telling you right away: jealousy is too much, I can’t bear it.”

In the following days clashes like that became more frequent. I kept him at bay, I reproached him, and at the same time I despised myself. But I was also enraged: what did he want from me, what should I do? I loved Nino, I had always loved him: how could I tear him out of my breast, my head, my belly, now that he wanted me, too? Ever since I was a child I had constructed for myself a perfect self-repressive mechanism. Not one of my true desires had ever prevailed, I had always found a way of channeling every yearning. Now enough, I said to myself, let it all explode, me first of all.

But I wavered. For several days I didn’t call Nino, as I had sagely declared in Florence. Then suddenly I started calling three or four times a day, heedless. I didn’t even care about Dede, standing a few steps from the phone booth. I talked to him in the unbearable heat of that sun-struck cage, and occasionally, soaked with sweat, exasperated by my daughter’s spying look, I opened the glass door and shouted: What are you doing standing there like that, I told you to look after your sister. At the center of my thoughts now was the conference in Montpellier. Nino harassed me; he made it into a sort of definitive proof of the genuineness of my feelings, so that we went from violent quarrels to declarations of how indispensable we were to each other, from long, costly complaints to the urgent spilling of our desire into a river of incandescent words. One afternoon, exhausted, as Dede and Elsa, outside the phone booth, were chanting, Mamma, hurry up, we’re getting bored, I said to him:

“There’s only one way I could go with you to Montpellier.”

“What.”

“Tell Pietro everything.”

There was a long silence.

“You’re really ready to do that?”

“Yes, but on one condition: you tell Eleonora everything.”

Another long silence. Nino murmured:

“You want me to hurt Eleonora and the child?”

“Yes. Won’t I be hurting Pietro and my daughters? To decide means to do harm.”

“Albertino is very small.”

“So is Elsa. And for Dede it will be intolerable.”

“Let’s do it after Montpellier.”

“Nino, don’t play with me.”

“I’m not playing.”

“Then if you’re not playing behave accordingly: you speak to your wife and I’ll speak to my husband. Now. Tonight.”

“Give me some time, it’s not easy.”

“For me it is?”

He hesitated, tried to explain. He said that Eleonora was a very fragile woman. He said she had organized her life around him and the child. He said that as a girl she had twice tried to kill herself. But he didn’t stop there, I felt that he was forcing himself to the most absolute honesty. Step by step, with the lucidity that was customary with him, he reached the point of admitting that breaking up his marriage meant not only hurting his wife and child but also saying goodbye to many comforts—
only living comfortably makes life in Naples acceptable—
and to a network of relationships that guaranteed he could do what he wanted at the university. Then, overwhelmed by his own decision to be silent about nothing, he concluded: Remember that your father-in-law has great respect for me and that to make our relationship public would cause both for me and for you an irremediable breach with the Airotas. It was this last point of his, I don’t know why, that hurt me.

“All right,” I said, “let’s end it here.”

“Wait.”

“I’ve already waited too long, I should have made up my mind earlier.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Understand that my marriage no longer makes sense and go my way.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll come to Montpellier?”

“I said my way, not yours. Between you and me it’s over.”

I hung up in tears and left the phone booth. Elsa asked: Did you hurt yourself, Mamma? I answered: I’m fine, it’s Grandma who doesn’t feel well. I went on sobbing under the worried gaze of Dede and Elsa.

During the final part of the vacation I did nothing but weep. I said I was tired, it was too hot, I had a headache, and I sent Pietro and the children to the beach. I stayed in bed, soaking the pillow with tears. I hated that excessive fragility, I hadn’t been like that even as a child. Both Lila and I had trained ourselves never to cry, and if we did it was in exceptional moments, and for a short time: the shame was tremendous, we stifled our sobs. Now, instead, as in Ariosto’s Orlando, in my head a fountain had opened and it flowed from my eyes without ever drying up; it seemed to me that even when Pietro, Dede, Elsa were about to return and with an effort I repressed the tears and hurried to wash my face under the tap, the fountain continued to drip, waiting for the right moment to return to the egress of my eyes. Nino didn’t really want me, Nino pretended a lot and loved little. He had wanted to fuck me—yes, fuck me, as he had done with who knows how many others—but to have me, have me forever by breaking the ties with his wife, well, that was not in his plans. Probably he was still in love with Lila. Probably in the course of his life he would love only her, like so many who had known her. And as a result he would remain with Eleonora forever. Love for Lila was the guarantee that no woman—no matter how much he wanted her, in his passionate way—would ever put that fragile marriage in trouble, I least of all. That was how things stood. Sometimes I got up in the middle of lunch or dinner and went to cry in the bathroom.

Pietro treated me cautiously, sensing that I might explode at any moment. At first, a few hours after the break with Nino, I had thought of telling him everything, as if he were not only a husband to whom I had to explain myself but also a confessor. I felt the need of it; and especially when he approached me in bed and I put him off, whispering: No, the children will wake up, I was on the point of pouring out to him every detail. But I always managed to stop myself in time, it wasn’t necessary to tell him about Nino. Now that I no longer called the person I loved, now that I felt truly lost, it seemed to me useless to be cruel to Pietro. It was better to close the subject with a few clear words: I can’t live with you anymore. And yet I was unable to do even that. Just when, in the shadowy light of the bedroom, I felt ready to take that step, I pitied him, I feared for the future of the children, I caressed his shoulder, his cheek, I whispered: Sleep.

On the last day of the vacation, things changed. It was almost midnight, Dede and Elsa were sleeping. For at least ten days I hadn’t called Nino. I had packed the bags, I was worn out by sadness, by effort, by the heat, and I was sitting with Pietro on the balcony, each in our own lounge chair, in silence. There humidity was debilitating, soaking our hair and clothes, and our smell of the sea and of resin. Pietro suddenly said:

“How’s your mother?”

“My mother?”

“Fine.”

“Dede told me she’s ill.”

“She recovered.”

“I called her this afternoon. Your mother has always been in good health.”

I said nothing.

How inopportune that man was. Here, already, the tears were returning. Oh good God, I was fed up, fed up. I heard him say calmly:

“You think I’m blind and deaf. You think I didn’t realize it when you flirted with those imbeciles who came to the house before Elsa was born.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know perfectly well.”

“No, I don’t know. Who are you talking about? People who came to dinner a few times years ago? And I flirted with them? Are you crazy?”

Pietro shook his head, smiling to himself. He waited a few seconds, then he asked me, staring at the railing: “You didn’t even flirt with the one who played the drums?”

I was alarmed. He wasn’t retreating, he wasn’t giving in. I snorted.

“Mario?”

“See, you remember?”

“Of course I remember, why shouldn’t I? He’s one of the few interesting people you brought home in seven years of marriage.”

“Did you find him interesting?”

“Yes, and so what? What’s got into you tonight?”

“I want to know. Can’t I know?”

“What do you want to know? All that I know, you do, too. It must be at least four years since we saw that man, and you come out now with this foolishness?”

He stopped staring at the railing, he turned to look at me, serious.

“Then let’s talk about more recent events. What is there between you and Nino?”

It was a blow as violent as it was unexpected.
He wanted to know what there was between Nino and me.
That question, that name were enough to make the fountain flow again in my head. I was blinded by tears, I shouted at him, beside myself, forgetting we were outside, that people tired out by a day of sun and sea were sleeping: Why did you ask that question, you should have kept it to yourself, now you’ve spoiled everything and there’s nothing to do, it would have been enough for you to keep silent, instead you couldn’t, and now I have to go, now I have
no choice
but to go.

I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he was convinced he had made a mistake that now, for obscure reasons, risked ruining our relationship forever. Or he saw me suddenly as a crude organism that cracked the fragile surface of discourse and appeared in a pre-logical way, a woman in her most alarming manifestation. Certainly I must have seemed to him an intolerable spectacle: he jumped up, and went inside. But I ran after him and continued shouting all manner of things: my love for Nino since I was a child, the new possibilities of life that he revealed to me, the unused energy I felt inside me, and the dreariness in which he, Pietro, had plunged me for years, his responsibility for having kept me from living fully.

When I had exhausted my strength and collapsed in a corner, I found him in front of me with hollow cheeks, his eyes sunk into violet stains, his tan a crust of mud. I understood only then that I had shocked him. The questions he had asked didn’t admit even hypothetical affirmative answers like: Yes, I flirted with the drummer and even more; Yes, Nino and I have been lovers. Pietro had formulated them only to be denied, to silence the doubts that had come to him, to go to bed more serene. Instead I had imprisoned him in a nightmare from which, now, he no longer knew how to escape. He asked, almost whispering, in search of safety:

“Have you made love?”

Again I felt pity for him. If I had answered affirmatively I would have started shouting again, I would have said: Yes, once while you were sleeping, a second time in his car, a third in our bed in Florence. And I would have uttered those sentences with the pleasure that that list provoked in me. Instead I shook my head no.

We returned to Florence. We reduced the communication between us to what was indispensable and to friendly tones in the presence of the children. Pietro went to sleep in his study as he had in the time when Dede never closed her eyes, I in the bedroom. I thought and thought about what to do. The way Lila and Stefano’s marriage had ended didn’t constitute a model, it was something from other times, managed without the law. I counted on a civil procedure, according to the law, suited to the times and to our situation. But in fact I continued not to know what to do and so I did nothing. Especially since I had just returned and already Mariarosa was telephoning me to tell me that the French volume was progressing, she would send me the proofs, while the serious, punctilious editor at the Italian publishing house was raising various questions about the text. For a while I was pleased I tried to become interested again in my work. But I couldn’t, it seemed to me that I had problems much more serious than a passage interpreted incorrectly, or some awkward sentences.

Then, one morning, the telephone rang, Pietro answered. He said hello, he repeated hello, he hung up. My heart began to beat madly, I got ready to rush to the phone ahead of my husband. It didn’t ring again. Hours passed, I tried to distract myself by rereading my book. It was a terrible idea: it seemed to me utter nonsense, and made me so weary that I fell asleep with my head on the desk. But then the phone rang again, my husband answered again. He shouted, frightening Dede: Hello, and slammed down the receiver as if he wanted to break it.

It was Nino, I knew it, Pietro knew it. The date of the conference was approaching, surely he wanted to insist again that I come with him. He would aim at pulling me inside the materiality of desires. He would show me that our only chance was a secret relationship lived to exhaustion, amid evil actions and pleasures. The way was to betray, invent lies, leave together. I would fly in a plane for the first time, I would be next to him as it took off, as in films. And why not, after Montpellier we would go to Nanterre, we would see Mariarosa’s friend, I would talk to her about my book, I would agree on initiatives, I would introduce them to Nino. Ah yes, to be accompanied by a man I loved, who had a power, a force that no one failed to notice. The hostile feeling softened. I was tempted.