Sometimes she felt a weight on her chest. She became alarmed and turned on the light in the middle of the night, looked at her sleeping child. She saw almost nothing of Nino; Gennaro reminded her, rather, of her brother. When he was younger, the child had followed her around, now instead he was bored, he yelled, he wanted to run off and play, he said bad words to her. I love him—Lila reflected—but do I love him just as he is? An ugly question. The more she observed her son, the more she felt that, even if the neighbor found him very intelligent, he wasn’t growing up as she would have liked. She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain, now it seemed to her wrong that the quality of a person depends on the quality of his early childhood. You had to be constant, and Gennaro had no constancy, nor did she. My mind is always scattering, she said to herself, I’m made badly and he’s made badly. Then she was ashamed of thinking like that, she whispered to the sleeping child: you’re clever, you already know how to read, you already know how to write, you can do addition and subtraction, your mother is stupid, she’s never satisfied. She kissed the little boy on the forehead and turned out the light.
But still she couldn’t sleep, especially when Enzo came home late and went to bed without asking her to study. On these occasions, Lila imagined that he had met some prostitute or had a lover, a colleague in the factory where he worked, an activist from the Communist cell he had immediately joined. Males are like that, she thought, at least the ones I’ve known: they have to have sex constantly, otherwise they’re unhappy. I don’t think Enzo is any different, why should he be. And besides I’ve rejected him, I’ve left him in the bed by himself, I can’t make any demands. She was afraid only that he would fall in love and send her away. She wasn’t worried about finding no roof over her head, she had a job at the sausage factory and felt strong, surprisingly, much stronger than when she had married Stefano and found herself with a lot of money but was subjugated by him. Rather, she was afraid of losing Enzo’s kindness, the attention he gave to all her anxieties, the tranquil strength he emanated and thanks to which he had saved her first from Nino’s absence, then from Stefano’s presence. All the more because, in her present situation, he was the only one who gave her any gratification, who continued to ascribe to her extraordinary capabilities.
“You know what that means?”
“No.”
“Look closely.”
“It’s German, Enzo, I don’t know German.”
“But if you concentrate, after a while you’ll know it,” he said to her, partly joking, partly serious.
Enzo had worked hard to get a diploma and had succeeded, but, even though she had stopped going to school in fifth grade, he believed that she had a much brighter intelligence than he did and attributed to her the miraculous quality of rapidly mastering any material. In fact, when, with very little to go on, he nevertheless became convinced that the languages of computer programming held the future of the human race, and that the élite who first mastered them would have a resounding part in the history of the world, he immediately turned to her.
“Help me.”
“I’m tired.”
“The life we lead is disgusting, Lina, we have to change.”
“For me it’s fine like this.”
“The child is with strangers all day.”
“He’s big, he can’t live in a bell jar.”
“Look what bad shape your hands are in.”
“They’re my hands and I’ll do as I like with them.”
“I want to earn more, for you and for Gennaro.”
“You take care of your things and I’ll take care of mine.”
Harsh reactions, as usual. Enzo enrolled in a correspondence course—it was expensive, requiring periodic tests to be sent to an international data processing center with headquarters in Zurich, which returned them corrected—and gradually he had involved Lila and she had tried to keep up. But she behaved in a completely different way than she had with Nino, whom she had assailed with her obsession to prove that she could help him in everything. When she studied with Enzo she was calm, she didn’t try to overpower him. The evening hours that they spent on the course were a struggle for him, for her a sedative. Maybe that was why, the rare times he returned late and seemed able to do without her, Lila remained wakeful, anxious, as she listened to the water running in the bathroom, with which she imagined Enzo washing off his body every trace of contact with his lovers.
29.
