Whatever the reason, the book really was doing better and better. Once Adele telephoned and, with her usual mixture of irony and affection, said: If it keeps going like this you’ll get rich and you won’t know what to do with poor Pietro anymore. Then she passed me on to her husband, no less. Guido, she said, wants to talk to you. I was agitated, I had had very few conversations with Professor Airota and they made me feel awkward. But Pietro’s father was very friendly, he congratulated me on my success, he spoke sarcastically about the sense of decency of my detractors, he talked about the extremely long duration of the dark ages in Italy, he praised the contribution I was making to the modernization of the country, and so on with other formulas of that sort. He didn’t say anything specific about the novel; surely he hadn’t read it, he was a very busy man. But it was nice that he wanted to give me a sign of approval and respect.
Mariarosa was no less affectionate, and she, too, was full of praise. At first she seemed on the point of talking in detail about the book, then she changed the subject excitedly, she said she wanted to invite me to the university: it seemed to her important that I should take part in what she called the unstoppable flow of events. Leave tomorrow, she urged, have you seen what’s happening in France? I knew all about it, I clung to an old blue grease-encrusted radio that my mother kept in the kitchen, and said yes, it’s magnificent, Nanterre, the barricades in the Latin Quarter. But she seemed much better informed, much more involved. She was planning to drive to Paris with some of her friends, and invited me to go with her. I was tempted. I said all right, I’ll think about it. To go to Milan, and on to France, to arrive in Paris in revolt, face the brutality of the police, plunge with my whole personal history into the most incandescent magma of these months, add a sequel to the journey I’d made years earlier with Franco. How wonderful it would be to go with Mariarosa, the only girl I knew who was so open-minded, so modern, completely in touch with the realities of the world, almost as much a master of political speech as the men. I admired her, there were no women who stood out in that chaos. The young heroes who faced the violence of the reactions at their own peril were called Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and, as in war films where there were only men, it was hard to feel part of it; you could only love them, adapt their thoughts to your brain, feel pity for their fate. It occurred to me that among Mariarosa’s friends there might also be Nino. They knew each other, it was possible. Ah, to see him, to be swept into that adventure, expose myself to dangers along with him. The day passed like that. The kitchen was silent now, my parents were sleeping, my brothers were still out wandering in the streets, Elisa was in the bathroom, washing. To leave, tomorrow morning.
13.
I left, but not for Paris. After the elections of that turbulent year, Gina sent me out to promote the book. I began with Florence. I had been invited to teach by a woman professor friend of a friend of the Airotas, and I ended up in one of those student-run courses, widespread in that time of unrest in the universities, speaking to around thirty students, boys and girls. I was immediately struck by the fact that many of the girls were even worse than those described by my father-in-law in Il Ponte: badly dressed, badly made up, muddled, excitable, angry at the exams, at the professors. Urged by the professor who had invited me, I spoke out about the student demonstrations with manifest enthusiasm, especially the ones in France. I showed off what I was learning; I was pleased with myself. I felt that I was expressing myself with conviction and clarity, that the girls in particular admired the way I spoke, the things I knew, the way I skillfully touched on the complicated problems of the world, arranging them into a coherent picture. But I soon realized that I tended to avoid any mention of the book. Talking about it made me uneasy, I was afraid of reactions like those of the neighborhood, I preferred to summarize in my own words ideas from Quaderni piacentini or the Monthly Review. On the other hand I had been invited because of the book, and someone was already asking to speak. The first questions were all about the struggles of the female character to escape the environment where she was born. Then, near the end, a girl I remember as being tall and thin asked me to explain, breaking off her phrases with nervous laughs, why I had considered it necessary to write, in such a polished story, a risqué part.
