I understood that she wanted to get everything possible for herself, Stefano, the grocery stores, the money, the house, the cars. And I thought it was her right to fight that battle, which we were all fighting, one way or another. I tried to make her calm down, because she was very pale, her eyes were inflamed. And I was happy to hear how grateful she was to me, I was pleased to be consulted like a seer, handing out advice in a good Italian that confused her, as it did Pasquale and Pinuccia. Here, I thought sarcastically, is the use of history exams, classical philology, linguistics, and the thousands of file cards with which I drill myself rigorously: to soothe them for a few hours. They considered me impartial, without malicious feelings or passions, sterilized by study. And I accepted the role that they assigned me without mentioning my own suffering, my audaciousness, the times I had risked everything by letting Franco come to my room or sneaking into his, the vacation we had taken by ourselves in Versilia, living together as if we were married. I felt pleased with myself.
But as the time for lunch approached, the pleasure gave way to uneasiness, I went to Lila’s unwillingly. I was afraid that she would find a way to restore in a flash the old hierarchy, causing me to lose faith in my choices. I feared that she would point out Nino’s features in little Gennaro to remind me that the toy that was supposed to be mine had fallen to her. But it wasn’t like that. Rinuccio—so she called him more and more frequently—touched me immediately: he was a handsome dark boy, and Nino hadn’t yet emerged in his face and body, his features recalled Lila and even Stefano, as if all three had produced him. As for her, I felt that she had rarely been more fragile than she was then. At the mere sight of me her eyes shone with tears and her whole body trembled, I had to hold her tight to quiet her.
I noticed that in order not to make a bad impression she had combed her hair in a hurry, in a hurry had put on a little lipstick and a dress of pearl-gray rayon from the time of her engagement, that she wore shoes with a heel. She was still beautiful, but it was as if the bones of her face had become larger, her eyes smaller, and under the skin blood no longer circulated but an opaque liquid. She was very thin, embracing her I felt her bones, the clinging dress showed her swollen stomach.
At first she pretended that everything was fine. She was happy that I was enthusiastic about the baby, she liked the way I played with him, she wanted to show me all the things that Rinuccio could say and do. She began, in an anxious way that was unfamiliar, to pour out the terminology she had picked up from the chaotic reading she had done. She cited authors I had never heard of, made her son show off in exercises that she had invented for him. I noticed that she had developed a sort of tic, an expression of her mouth: she opened it suddenly and then pressed her lips together as if to contain the emotion produced by the things she was saying. Usually the expression was accompanied by a reddening of her eyes, a rosy light that the contraction of her lips, like a spring mechanism, promptly helped to reabsorb. She kept repeating that if she had dedicated herself assiduously to every child in the neighborhood, in a generation everything would change, there would no longer be the smart and the incompetent, the good and the bad. Then she looked at her son and again burst out crying. “He’s ruined the books,” she said between her tears, as if it were Rinuccio who had done it, and she showed them to me, torn, ripped in half. I had trouble understanding that the guilty person was not the little boy but her husband. “He’s got in the habit of rummaging among my things,” she murmured, “he doesn’t want me to have even a thought of my own and if he discovers that I’ve hidden even some insignificant thing he beats me.” She climbed up on a chair and took from on top of the wardrobe in the bedroom a metal box, and handed it to me. “Here’s everything that happened with Nino,” she said, “and so many thoughts that have gone through my head in these years, and also things of mine and yours that we haven’t said. Take it away, I’m afraid that he’ll find it and start reading. But I don’t want him to, they aren’t things for him, they aren’t for anyone, not even for you.”
104.
I took the box unwillingly, I thought: where will I put it, what can I do with it. We sat at the table. I marveled that Rinuccio ate by himself, that he used his own small set of wooden implements, that, after his initial shyness passed, he spoke to me in Italian without mangling the words, that he answered each of my questions directly, with precision, and asked me questions in turn. Lila let me talk to her son, she ate almost nothing, she stared at her plate, absorbed. At the end, when I was about to go, she said:
