The Neapolitan Novels полностью

Late in the morning on the following Sunday, I heard someone calling from the courtyard and I recognized Nino’s voice. I looked out, he was alone. I quickly tried to make myself presentable and, without even telling my mother, happy and at the same time anxious, I ran down. When I found myself before him I could hardly breathe. “I only have ten minutes,” I said, and we didn’t go out to walk along the stradone, but wandered among the houses. Why had he come without Nadia? Why had he come all the way here if she couldn’t? He answered my questions without my asking. Some relatives of Nadia’s father were visiting and she had been obliged to stay home. He had wanted to see the neighborhood again but also to bring me something to read, the latest issue of a journal called Cronache Meridionali. He handed me the issue with a petulant gesture, I thanked him, and he started, incongruously, to criticize the review, and so I asked why he had decided to give it to me. “It’s rigid,” he said, and added, laughing, “Like Professor Galiani and Armando.” Then he turned serious, he assumed a tone that was like an old man’s. He said that he owed a great deal to our professor, that without her the period of high school would have been a waste of time, but that you had to be on guard, keep her at a distance. “Her greatest defect,” he said emphatically, “is that she can’t bear for someone to have an opinion different from hers. Take from her everything she can give you, but then go your own way.” Then he returned to the review, he said that Galiani also wrote for it and suddenly, with no connection, he mentioned Lila: “Then, if possible, have her read it, too.” I didn’t tell him that Lila no longer read anything, that now she was Signora Carracci, that she had kept only her meanness from when she was a child. I was evasive, and asked about Nadia, he told me that she was taking a long car trip with her family, to Norway, and then would spend the rest of the summer in Anacapri, where her father had a family house.

“Will you go and see her?”

“Once or twice—I have to study.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Very well. She’s going back to Barano this year, she’s made up with the woman who owns the house.”

“Will you go on vacation with your family?”

“I? With my father? Never ever. I’ll be on Ischia but on my own.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a friend who has a house in Forio: his parents leave it to him for the whole summer, and we’ll stay there and study. You?”

“I’m working at Mezzocannone until September.”

“Even during the mid-August holiday?”

“No, for the holiday, no.”

He smiled. “Then come to Forio, the house is big. Maybe Nadia will come for two or three days.”

I smiled, nervously. To Forio? To Ischia? To a house without adults? Did he remember the Maronti? Did he remember that we had kissed there? I said I had to go in. “I’ll stop by again,” he promised. “I want to know what you think of the review.” He added, in a low voice, his hands stuck in his pockets, “I like talking to you.”

He had talked a lot, in fact. I was proud, thrilled, that he had felt comfortable. I murmured, “Me, too,” although I had said little or nothing, and was about to go in when something happened that disturbed us both. A cry cut the Sunday quiet of the courtyard and I saw Melina at the window, waving her arms, trying to attract our attention. When Nino also turned to look, perplexed, Melina cried even louder, a mixture of joy and anguish. She cried, Donato.

“Who is it?” Nino asked.

“Melina,” I said, “do you remember?”

He made a grimace of uneasiness. “Is she angry with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s saying Donato.”

“Yes.”

He turned again to look toward the window where the widow was leaning out, repeatedly calling that name.

“Do you think I look like my father?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

He said nervously, “I’ll go.”

“You’d better.”

He left quickly, shoulders bent, while Melina cried louder and louder, increasingly agitated: Donato, Donato, Donato.