He went on for hours. My siblings at a certain point collapsed and went back to sleep. I stayed to soothe my parents and persuade them to accept something that for me, at that moment, was an important sign of my entrance into Pietro’s world. Besides, it made me feel bolder than Lila. And most of all, if I met Nino again, I would have liked to be able to say to him, in an allusive way: See where that argument with the religion teacher led, every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. But I would have been exaggerating, in reality it was much simpler. For at least ten years the God of childhood, already fairly weak, had been pushed aside like an old sick person, and I felt no need for the sanctity of marriage. The essential thing was to get out of Naples.
9.
My family’s horror at the idea of a civil union alone certainly was not exhausted that night, but it diminished. The next day my mother treated me as if anything she touched—the coffee pot, the cup with the milk, the sugar bowl, the fresh loaf of bread—were there only to lead her into the temptation to throw it in my face. Yet she didn’t start yelling again. As for me I ignored her; I left early in the morning, and went to start the paperwork for the installation of the telephone. Having taken care of that business I went to Port’Alba and wandered through the bookstores. I was determined, within a short time, to enable myself to speak with confidence when situations like the one in Milan arose. I chose journals and books more or less at random, and spent a lot of money. After many hesitations, influenced by that remark of Nino’s that kept coming to mind, I ended up getting Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—I knew almost nothing of Freud and the little I knew irritated me—along with a couple of small books devoted to sex. I intended to do what I had done in the past with schoolwork, with exams, with my thesis, what I had done with the newspapers that Professor Galiani passed on to me or the Marxist texts that Franco had given me. I wanted to study the contemporary world. Hard to say what I had already taken in at that time. There had been the discussions with Pasquale, and also with Nino. There had been some attention paid to Cuba and Latin America. There was the incurable poverty of the neighborhood, the lost battle of Lila. There was school, which defeated my siblings because they were less stubborn than I was, less dedicated to sacrifice. There were the long conversations with Franco and occasional ones with Mariarosa, now jumbled together in a wisp of smoke. (The world is profoundly unjust and must be changed, but both the peaceful coexistence between American imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies, on the one hand, and the reformist politics of the European, and especially the Italian, workers’ parties, on the other, are directed at keeping the proletariat in a subordinate wait-and-see situation that throws water on the fire of revolution, with the result that if the global stalemate wins, if social democracy wins, it will be capital that triumphs through the centuries and the working class will fall victim to enforced consumerism.) These stimuli had functioned, certainly they had been working in me for a long time, occasionally they excited me. But driving that decision to bring myself up to date by forced marches was, at least at first, I think, the old urgency to succeed. I had long ago convinced myself that one can train oneself to anything, even to political passion.
