The question came with a logical leap that disoriented me. Had I talked to him about Lila in the past? In what terms? And why did she come to mind now? Where was the connection that he had seen somewhere and I hadn’t?
“She’s fine,” I said.
“What is she doing?”
“She works in a sausage factory on the outskirts of Naples.”
“Didn’t she marry a shopkeeper?”
“The marriage didn’t work.”
“When I come to Naples you must introduce me.”
“Of course.”
“Leave me a number, an address.”
“All right.”
He looked at me to assess what words would be least hurtful, and asked: “Has she read your book?”
“I don’t know, did you read it?”
“Of course.”
“How did it seem to you?”
“Good.”
“In what way?”
“There are wonderful passages.”
“Which ones?
“Those where you give the protagonist the capacity to put together the fragments of things in her own way.”
“And that’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“No: it’s clear that you didn’t like it.”
“I told you it’s good.”
I knew him, he was trying not to humiliate me. That exasperated me, I said:
“It’s a book that’s inspired discussion, it’s selling well.”
“So good, no?”
“Yes, but not for you. What is it that doesn’t work?”
He compressed his lips again, and made up his mind: “There’s not much depth, Elena. Behind the petty love affairs and the desire for social ascent you hide precisely what it would be valuable to tell.”
“What?”
“Forget it, it’s late, we should go to sleep.” And he tried to assume an expression of benevolent irony, but in reality he had that new tone of someone who has an important task to complete and gives only sparingly to all the rest: “You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the moment for writing novels.”
18.
Mariarosa returned just then along with Juan and Silvia, carrying clean towels and nightclothes. She certainly heard that last phrase, and surely she understood that we were talking about my book, but she didn’t say a word. She could have said that she had liked the book, that novels can be written at any moment, but she didn’t. From that I deduced that, beyond the declarations of liking and affection, in those circles that were so caught up and sucked in by political passions my book was considered an insignificant little thing, and the pages that were helping its circulation either were judged cheap versions of much more sensational texts that I had never read, or deserved that dismissive label of Franco’s:
My sister-in-law showed me the bathroom and my room with a fleeting courtesy. I said goodbye to Franco, who was leaving early. I merely shook his hand, and he made no move to embrace me. I saw him disappear into a room with Mariarosa, and from Juan’s dark expression and Silvia’s unhappy look I understood that the guest and the mistress of the house would sleep together.
I withdrew into the room assigned to me. There was a strong smell of stale smoke, an unmade single bed, no night table, no lamp except the weak ceiling light, newspapers piled up on the floor, some issues of journals like
In bed I tried to erase the Franco I had met that night by superimposing the Franco of years earlier, the rich, generous youth who had loved me, who had helped me, who had bought everything for me, who had educated me, who had taken me to Paris for his political meetings and on vacation to Versilia, to his parents’ house. But I was unsuccessful. The present, with its unrest, the shouting in the packed classroom, the political jargon that was buzzing in my head and spilling out onto my book, vilifying it, prevailed. Was I deluded about my literary future? Was Franco right, there were other things to do besides write novels? What impression had I made on him? What memory did he have of our love, if he even had one? Was he complaining about me to Mariarosa as Nino had complained to me about Lila? I felt wounded, disheartened. Certainly what I had imagined as a pleasant and perhaps slightly melancholy evening seemed to me sad. I couldn’t wait for the night to pass so that I could return to Naples. I had to get up to turn out the light. I went back to bed in the dark.
