Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (32 page)

“Did you finish your book?”

“Yes.”

“And why did you give it to my mother to read and not me?”

“You’re busy, I didn’t want to bother you. But if you want to read it, there’s a copy on my desk.”

He didn’t answer. I waited, I asked:

“Adele told you I sent it to her?”

“Who else would it have been?”

“Did she finish it?”

“Yes.”

“What does she think?”

“She’ll tell you, it’s between you two.”

He was offended. After dinner I moved the manuscript from my desk to his, I put Dede to bed, I watched television without seeing or hearing anything, and finally I went to bed. I couldn’t close my eyes: Why had Adele talked to Pietro about the book but hadn’t yet called me? The next day, July 30, 1973, I went to see if my husband had started reading: the typescript was under the books he had been working on for most of the night, it was clear that he hadn’t even looked through it. I became nervous, I shouted at Clelia to take care of Dede, not to sit around and let my mother to do everything. I was very harsh with her, and my mother evidently took it as a sign of affection. She touched my belly as if to calm me, she asked:

“If it’s another girl what will you call her?”

I had other things on my mind, my leg hurt, I answered without thinking:

“Elsa.”

She darkened, I realized too late that she was expecting me to say: We gave Dede the name of Pietro’s mother, and if it’s another girl this time we’ll give her your name. I tried to justify it, but reluctantly. I said: Ma, try to understand, your name is Immacolata, I can’t give my daughter a name like that, I don’t like it. She grumbled: Why, is Elsa nicer? I replied: Elsa is like Elisa, if I give her the name of my sister you should be pleased. She didn’t say another word. Oh, how tired I was of everything. The heat was getting worse, I was dripping with sweat, I couldn’t stand my heavy belly, I couldn’t stand my limping, I couldn’t stand anything, not a thing.

Finally, a little before lunchtime, Adele telephoned. Her voice lacked its usual ironic inflection. She spoke slowly and seriously, I felt that every word was a struggle: she said, with a lot of euphemistic phrases and many fine distinctions, that the book wasn’t good. But when I tried to defend it, she stopped looking for formulations that wouldn’t hurt me and became explicit. The protagonist was unlikable. The characters were caricatures. Situations and dialogues were mannered. The writing tried to be modern and was only confused. All that hatred was unpleasant. The ending was crude, like a spaghetti Western, it was an insult to my intelligence, my education, my talent. I resigned myself to silence, I listened to her criticisms to the end. She concluded by saying: The earlier novel was vivid, innovative, this, however, is old in its contents and so pretentiously written that the words seem empty. I said quietly: Maybe at the publisher they’ll be kinder. She stiffened and replied: If you want to send it, go ahead, but I would assume they’ll judge it unpublishable. I didn’t know what to say, I said: All right, I’ll think about it, goodbye. She kept me on the line, however, and, rapidly changing her tone, began to speak affectionately of Dede, of my mother, my pregnancy, of Mariarosa, who enraged her. Then she asked:

“Why didn’t you give the novel to Pietro?”

“I don’t know.”

“He could have advised you.”

“I doubt it.”

“You don’t respect him?”

“No.”

Afterward, shut in my study, I despaired. It had been humiliating, intolerable. I could hardly eat, I fell asleep with the window closed despite the heat. At four in the afternoon I had my first labor pains. I said nothing to my mother, I took the bag I had prepared, I got in the car, and drove to the clinic, hoping to die on the way, I and my second child. Instead everything went smoothly. The pain was excruciating, but in a few hours I had another girl. Pietro insisted the next morning that our second daughter should be given the name of my mother, it seemed to him a necessary tribute. I replied bitterly that I was tired of following tradition, I repeated that she was to be called Elsa. When I came home from the clinic, the first thing I did was call Lila. I didn’t tell her I had just given birth, I asked if I could send her the novel.

I heard her breathing lightly for a few seconds, then she said: “I’ll read it when it comes out.”

“I need your opinion right away.”

“I haven’t opened a book for a long time, Lenù, I don’t know how to read anymore, I’m not capable.”

“I’m asking you as a favor.”

“The other you just published, period; why not this one?”

“Because the other one didn’t even seem like a book to me.”

“I can only tell you if I like it.”

“All right, that’s enough.”

While I was waiting for Lila to read, we learned that there was a cholera outbreak in Naples. My mother became excessively agitated, then distracted, finally she broke a soup tureen I was fond of, and announced that she had to go home. I imagined that if the cholera figured heavily in that decision, my refusal to give her name to my new daughter wasn’t secondary. I tried to make her stay but she abandoned me anyway, when I still hadn’t recovered from the birth and my leg was hurting. She could no longer bear to sacrifice months and months of her life to me, a child of hers without respect and without gratitude, she would rather go and die of the cholera bacterium with her husband and her good children. Yet even in the doorway she maintained the impassiveness that I had imposed on her: she didn’t complain, she didn’t grumble, she didn’t reproach me for anything. She was happy for Pietro to take her to the station in the car. She felt that her son-in-law loved her and probably—I thought—she had controlled herself not to please me so that she wouldn’t make a bad impression on him. She became emotional only when she had to part from Dede. On the landing she asked the child in her effortful Italian: Are you sorry that grandma is leaving? Dede, who felt that departure as a betrayal, answered grimly: No.

I was angry with myself, more than with her. Then I was seized by a self-destructive frenzy and a few hours later I fired Clelia. Pietro was amazed, alarmed. I said to him rancorously that I was tired of fighting with Dede’s Maremman accent, with my mother’s Neapolitan one. I wanted to go back to being mistress of my house and my children. In reality I felt guilty and had a great need to punish myself. With desperate pleasure I surrendered to the idea of being overwhelmed by the two children, by my domestic duties, by my painful leg.

I had no doubt that Elsa would compel me to a year no less terrible than the one I’d had with Dede. But maybe because I was more experienced with newborns, maybe because I was resigned to being a bad mother and wasn’t anxious about perfection, the infant attached herself to my breast with no trouble and devoted herself to feeding and sleeping. As a result I, too, slept a lot, those first days at home, and Pietro surprisingly cleaned the house, did the shopping and cooking, bathed Elsa, played with Dede, who was as if dazed by the arrival of a sister and the departure of her grandmother. The pain in my leg suddenly disappeared. And I was in a generally peaceful state when, one late afternoon, as I was napping, my husband came to wake me: Your friend from Naples is on the phone, he said. I hurried to answer.

Lila had talked to Pietro for a long time, she said she couldn’t wait to meet him in person. I listened reluctantly—Pietro was always amiable with people who didn’t belong to the world of his parents—and since she dragged it out in a tone that seemed to me nervously cheerful, I was ready to shout at her: I’ve given you the chance to hurt me as much as possible, hurry up, speak, you’ve had the book for thirteen days, let me know what you think. But I confined myself to breaking in abruptly:

“Did you read it or not?”

She became serious.

“I read it.”

“And so?”

“It’s good.”

“Good how? Did it interest you, amuse you, bore you?”

“It interested me.”

“How much? A little? A lot?”

“A lot.”

“And why?”

“Because of the story: it makes you want to read.”

“And then?”

“Then what?”

I stiffened, and said:

“Lila, I absolutely have to know how this thing that I wrote is and I have no one else who can tell me, only you.”

“I’m doing that.”

“No, it’s not true, you’re cheating me: you’ve never talked about anything in such a superficial way.”

There was a long silence. I imagined her sitting, legs crossed, next to an ugly little table on which the telephone stood. Maybe she and Enzo had just returned from work, maybe Gennaro was playing nearby. She said:

“I told you I don’t know how to read anymore.”

“That’s not the point: it’s that I need you and you don’t give a damn.”

Another silence. Then she muttered something I didn’t understand, maybe an insult. She said harshly, resentful: I do one job, you do another, what do you expect from me, you’re the one who had an education, you’re the one who knows what books should be like. Then her voice broke, she almost cried: You mustn’t write those things, Lenù, you aren’t that, none of what I read resembles you, it’s an ugly, ugly book, and the one before it was, too.

Like that. Rapid and yet strangled phrases, as if her breath, light, a whisper, had suddenly become solid and couldn’t move in and out of her throat. I felt sick to my stomach, a sharp pain above my belly, which grew sharper, but not because of what she said but rather because of
how
she said it. Was she sobbing? I exclaimed anxiously: Lila, what’s wrong, calm down, come on, breathe. She didn’t calm down. They were really sobs, I heard them in my ear, burdened with such suffering that I couldn’t feel the wound of that
ugly, Lenù, ugly, ugly
, nor was I offended that she reduced my first book, too—the book that had sold so well, the book of my success, but of which she had never told me what she thought—to a failure. What hurt me was her weeping. I wasn’t prepared, I hadn’t expected it. I would have preferred the mean Lila, I would have preferred her treacherous tone. But no, she was sobbing, and she couldn’t control herself.

I felt bewildered. All right, I thought, I’ve written two bad books, but what does it matter, this unhappiness is much more serious. And I said softly: Lila, why are you crying, I should be crying, stop it. But she shrieked: Why did you make me read it, why did you force me to tell you what I think, I should have kept it to myself. And I: No, I’m glad you told me, I swear. I wanted her to quiet down but she couldn’t, she poured out on me a confusion of words: Don’t make me read anything else, I’m not fit for it, I expect the best from you, I’m too certain that you can do better,
I want
you to do better, it’s what I want most, because who am I if you aren’t great, who am I? I whispered: Don’t worry, always tell me what you think, that’s the only way you can help me, you’ve helped me since we were children, without you I’m not capable of anything. And finally she smothered her sobs, she said, sniffling: Why did I start crying, I’m an idiot. She laughed: I didn’t want to upset you, I had prepared a positive speech, imagine, I wrote it, I wanted to make a good impression. I urged her to send it, I said, it could be that you know better than I do what I should write. And at that point we forgot the book, I told her that Elsa was born, we talked about Florence, Naples, the cholera. What cholera, she said sarcastically, there’s no cholera, there’s only the usual mess and the fear of dying in shit, more fear than facts, we eat a bag of lemons and no one shits anymore.

Now she talked continuously, without a break, almost cheerful, a weight had been lifted. As a result I began again to feel the bind I was in—two small daughters, a husband generally absent, the disaster of the writing—and yet I didn’t feel anxious; rather, I felt light, and I brought the conversation back to my failure. I had in mind phrases like: the thread is broken, that fluency of yours that had a positive effect on me is gone, now I’m truly alone. But I didn’t say it. I confessed instead in a self-satirizing tone that behind the labor of that book was the desire to settle accounts with the neighborhood, that it seemed to me to represent the great changes that surrounded me, that what had in some way suggested it, encouraging me, was the story of Don Achille and the mother of the Solaras. She burst out laughing. She said that the disgusting face of things alone was not enough for writing a novel: without imagination it would seem not a true face but a mask.

I don’t really know what happened to me afterward. Even now, as I sort out that phone call, it’s hard to relate the effects of Lila’s sobs. If I look closely, I have the impression of seeing mainly a sort of incongruous gratification, as if that crying spell, in confirming her affection and the faith she had in my abilities, had ultimately cancelled out the negative judgment of both books. Only much later did it occur to me that the sobs had allowed her to destroy my work without appeal, to escape my resentment, to impose on me a purpose so high—
don’t disappoint her
—that it paralyzed every other attempt to write. But I repeat: however much I try to decipher that phone call, I can’t say that it was at the origin of this or that, that it was an exalted moment of our friendship or one of the most wretched. Certainly Lila reinforced her role as a mirror of my inabilities. Certainly I was more willing to accept failure, as if Lila’s opinion were much more authoritative—but also more persuasive and more affectionate—than that of my mother-in-law.

In fact a few days later I called Adele and said to her: Thank you for being so frank, I realized that you’re right, and it strikes me now that my first book, too, had a lot of flaws. Maybe I ought to think about it, maybe I’m not a good writer, or I simply need more time. My mother-in-law hastily drowned me in compliments, praised my capacity for self-criticism, reminded me that I had an audience and that that audience was waiting. I said yes, of course. And right afterward I put the last copy of the novel in a drawer, I also put away the notebooks full of notes, I let myself be absorbed by daily life. The irritation at that useless labor extended to my first book, too, perhaps even to the literary purposes of writing. If an image or an evocative phrase came to mind, I felt a sense of uneasiness, and moved on to something else.