The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (40 page)

“I’ll sit the civil-service exam.”

“You won’t go to the university?”

My cheeks burned, as if I were unable to hide a sin.

“No.”

“You need to work?”

“Yes.”

I was dismissed, I returned to Alfonso and the others. But a little later the professor came up to me in the hallway, and talked for a long time about a kind of college in Pisa, where, if you passed an exam like the one I had already done, you studied free.

“If you come back here in a couple of days, I’ll give you all the necessary information.”

I listened, but the way you do when someone is talking to you about something that will never really concern you. And when, two days later, I went back to school, only out of fear that the professor would be offended and give me a low grade, I was struck by the very precise information that she had transcribed for me on a sheet of foolscap. I never met her again, I don’t even know her name, and yet I owe her a great deal. Continuing to address me formally, she unaffectedly gave me a dignified farewell embrace.

The exams were over, I passed with an A average. Alfonso also did well, with a B average. Before leaving forever, with no regrets, the run-down gray building whose only merit, in my eyes, was that Nino, too, had been there, I caught sight of Professor Galiani and went to say goodbye. She congratulated me on my results but without enthusiasm. She didn’t offer me books for the summer, she didn’t ask what I would do now that I had my high-school diploma. Her distant tone upset me, I thought that things between us had been settled. What was the trouble? Once Nino had left her daughter and had fallen out of touch, was I to be associated with him forever, the same clay: insubstantial, unserious, unreliable? I was used to being liked by everyone, to wrapping that liking around me like shining armor; I was disappointed, and I think that her indifference had an important role in the decision I then made. Without talking about it to anyone (who could I ask advice from, anyway, if not Professor Galiani?) I applied for admission to the Pisa Normale. I immediately started doing everything I possibly could to earn money. Since the upper-class families whose children I had given lessons to all year were happy with me and my reputation as a good teacher had spread, I was able to fill the August days with new students who had to retake, in September, their exams in Latin, Greek, history, philosophy, and even mathematics. At the end of the month I found myself rich, I had amassed seventy thousand lire. I gave fifty to my mother, who reacted with a violent gesture, she almost tore the money from my hand and stuffed it in her bra, as if we were not in the kitchen of our house but on the street and she was afraid of being robbed. I didn’t tell her that I had kept twenty thousand lire for myself.

Not until the day before my departure did I tell my family that I was going to Pisa to take exams. “If they accept me,” I announced, “I’ll go there to study and I won’t have to spend a lira for anything.” I spoke with great decisiveness, in Italian, as if it were not a subject that could be reduced to dialect, as if my father, my mother, my siblings shouldn’t and couldn’t understand what I was about to do. In fact they confined themselves to listening uneasily, it seemed to me that in their eyes I was no longer me but a stranger who had come to visit at an inconvenient time. Finally my father said, “Do what you have to do but be careful, we can’t help you.” And he went to bed. My little sister asked if she could come with me. My mother, instead, said nothing, but before she vanished she left five thousand lire on the table for me. I stared at it for a long time, without touching it. Then, overcoming my scruples about how I wasted money to satisfy my whims, I thought, it’s my money, and I took it.

For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn’t be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.

Everything went well. Except the exam, it seemed. The professor with the blue hair hadn’t told me that it would be much more difficult than the graduation exam. The Latin, especially, seemed complex, but really that was only the beginning: every test was the occasion for an extremely painstaking investigation of my skills. I held forth, I stammered, I often pretended to have the answer on the tip of my tongue. The professor of Italian treated me as if even the sound of my voice irritated him:
You, miss, do not make a logical argument when you write but flit from one thing to another; I see, miss, that you launch recklessly into subjects in which you are completely ignorant of the issues of critical method.
I was depressed, I quickly lost confidence in what I was saying. The professor realized it and, looking at me ironically, asked me to talk about something I had read recently. I suppose he meant something by an Italian writer, but I didn’t understand and clung to the first support that seemed to me secure, that is to say the conversation we had had the summer before, on Ischia, on the beach of Citara, about Beckett and about Dan Rooney, who, although he was blind, wanted to become deaf and mute as well. The professor’s ironic expression changed slowly to bewilderment. He cut me off me quickly and delivered me to the history professor. He was just as bad. He subjected me to an endless and exhausting list of questions formulated with the utmost precision. I had never felt so ignorant as I did at that moment, not even in the worst years of school, when I had done so badly. I was able to answer everything, dates, events, but only in an approximate way. As soon as he pressed me with even more exacting questions I gave up. Finally he asked me, disgusted, “Have you ever read something that is not simply the school textbook?”

I said, “I’ve studied the idea of nationhood.”

“Do you remember the name of the author of the book?”

“Federico Chabod.”

“Let’s hear what you understood.”

He listened to me attentively for several minutes, then abruptly dismissed me, leaving me with the certainty that I had said a lot of nonsense.

I cried and cried, as if I had carelessly lost somewhere the most promising part of myself. Then I said that despair was stupid, I had always known that I wasn’t really smart. Lila, yes, she was smart, Nino, yes, he was smart. I was only presumptuous and had been justly punished.

Instead I found out that I had passed the exam. I would have a place of my own, a bed that I didn’t have to make at night and unmake in the morning, a desk and all the books I needed. I, Elena Greco, the daughter of the porter, at nineteen years old was about to pull myself out of the neighborhood, I was about to leave Naples. By myself.

A series of whirlwind days began. A few things to wear, a very few books. My mother’s sullen words: “If you earn money, send it to me by mail; now who’s going to help your brothers with their homework? They’ll do badly at school because of you. But go, leave, who cares: I’ve always known that you thought you were better than me and everybody else.” And then my father’s hypochondriac words: “I have a pain here, who knows what it is, come to your papa, Lenù, I don’t know if you’ll find me alive when you get back.” And then my brothers’ and sister’s insistent words: “If we come to see you can we sleep with you, can we eat with you?” And Pasquale, who said to me, “Be careful where all this studying leads, Lenù. Remember who you are and which side you’re on.” And Carmen, who couldn’t get over the death of her mother, and was fragile, started crying as she said goodbye. And Alfonso, who was stunned and murmured, “I knew you’d keep studying.” And Antonio, who instead of listening to what I was saying about where I was going, and what I was going to do, kept repeating, “I’m really feeling good now, Lenù, it’s all gone, it was going into the Army that made me ill.” And then Enzo, who confined himself to taking my hand and squeezing it so hard that it hurt for days. And finally Ada, who said only, “Did you tell Lina, did you tell her?” and she gave a little laugh, and insisted, “Tell her, she’ll die of envy.”

I imagined that Lila had already heard from Alfonso, from Carmen, from her husband, whom Ada had certainly told, that I was going to Pisa. If she didn’t come to congratulate me, I thought, it’s likely that the news really has disturbed her. On the other hand, if she didn’t know, to go deliberately to tell her, when for more than a year we had scarcely said hello, seemed to me out of place. I didn’t want to flaunt the good fortune that she hadn’t had. So I set aside the question and devoted myself to the last preparations. I wrote to Nella to tell her what had happened and ask for the address of Maestra Oliviero, so that I could give her the news. I visited a cousin of my father, who had promised me an old suitcase. I made the rounds of some of the houses where I had taught and where I had to collect my final payment.

It seemed to me an occasion to give a kind of farewell to Naples. I crossed Via Garibaldi, went along the Tribunali, at Piazza Dante took a bus. I went up to the Vomero, first to Via Scarlatti, then to the Santarella. Afterward I descended in the funicular to Piazza Amedeo. I was greeted with regret and, in some cases, affection by the mothers of my students. Along with the money they gave me coffee and almost always a small gift. When my rounds were over, I realized that I was a short distance from Piazza dei Martiri.

I turned onto Via Filangieri, uncertain what to do. I recalled the opening of the shoe store, Lila all dressed up like a rich lady, how she was gripped by the anxiety of not having truly changed, of not having the same refinement as the girls of that neighborhood. I, on the other hand, I thought, really have changed. I’m still wearing the same shabby clothes, but I’ve got my high-school diploma and I’m about to go and study in Pisa. I’ve changed not in appearance but deep inside. The appearance will come soon and it won’t be just appearance.

I felt pleased with that thought, that observation. I stood in front of an optician’s window, I studied the frames. Yes, I’ll have to change my glasses, the ones I have overwhelm my face, I need lighter frames—I picked out a pair with large, round thin rims. Put up my hair. Learn to use makeup. I left the window and arrived at Piazza dei Martiri.

Many shops at that hour had their shutters lowered halfway; the Solaras’ was three-quarters down. I looked around. What did I know of Lila’s new habits? Nothing. When she worked in the new grocery she didn’t go home for lunch, even though the house was nearby. She stayed in the shop and ate something with Carmen or talked to me when I came by after school. Now that she worked in Piazza dei Martiri, it was even more unlikely that she would go home for lunch: it would be pointless, besides the fact that there wasn’t enough time. Maybe she was in a café, maybe walking along the sea with the assistant she surely had. Or maybe she was inside resting. I knocked on the shutter with my open hand. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing. I called, I heard steps inside, Lila’s voice asked, “Who is it?”

“Elena.”

“Lenù,” I heard her exclaim.

She pulled up the shutter, she appeared before me. It was a long time since I’d seen her, even from a distance, and she seemed changed. She wore a white blouse and a tight blue skirt, her hair and makeup were done with the usual care. But her face was as if broadened and flattened, her entire body seemed to me broader and flatter. She pulled me inside, lowered the shutter. The place, gaudily illuminated, had changed, it really did seem not like a shoe store but like a living room. She said with a tone of such genuineness that I believed her: “What a wonderful thing has happened to you, Lenù, and how happy I am that you came to say goodbye.” She knew about Pisa, of course. She embraced me warmly, she kissed me on both cheeks, her eyes filled with tears, she repeated, “I’m really happy.” Then she called, turning to the door of the bathroom:

“Come, Nino, you can come out, it’s Lenuccia.”

My breath failed. The door opened and Nino appeared, in his usual pose, head lowered, hands in pockets. But his face was furrowed by tension. “Hello,” he murmured. I didn’t know what to say and offered him my hand. He shook it without energy. Lila meanwhile went on to tell me many important things in a brief series of sentences: they had been secretly seeing each other for almost a year; she had decided for my good not to involve me further in a deception that, if discovered, would cause trouble for me as well; she was two months pregnant, she was about to confess everything to Stefano, she wanted to leave him.

Lila spoke in a tone I knew well, of determination, with which she strove to eliminate emotion, and she confined herself to rapidly and almost disdainfully summarizing events and actions, as if she were afraid that allowing herself merely a tremor in her voice or lower lip would cause everything to lose its outlines and overflow, inundating her. Nino sat on the couch looking down, making at most a nod of assent. They held hands.

She said that their meetings there in the shop, amid all the anxieties, had ended the moment she had the urine analysis and discovered the pregnancy. Now she and Nino needed their own house, their own life. She wanted to share with him friendships, books, lectures, movies, theater, music. “I can’t bear living apart anymore,” she said. She had hidden some money and was negotiating for a small apartment in Campi Flegrei, twenty thousand lire a month. They would hide there, waiting for the baby to be born.

How? Without a job? With Nino who had to study? I couldn’t control myself, I said:

“What need is there to leave Stefano? You’re good at telling lies, you’ve told him so many, you can perfectly well continue.”

She looked at me with narrow eyes. She had clearly perceived the sarcasm, the bitterness, even the contempt that those words contained behind the appearance of friendly advice. She also noticed that Nino had abruptly raised his head, that his mouth was half open as if he wanted to say something, but he contained himself in order to avoid an argument. She replied, “Lying was useful in order not to be killed. But now I would prefer to be killed rather than continue like this.”