My last interruption came when it had begun to get light, and she had just finished telling me about the encounter with Michele. I said: That’s enough, calm down, take your temperature. It was 101. I hugged her tight, I whispered: now I’ll take care of you, and until you’re better we’ll stay together, and if I have to go to Florence you and the child will come with me. She refused energetically, she made the final confession of that night. She said she had been wrong to follow Enzo to San Giovanni a Teduccio, she wanted to go back to the neighborhood.
“To the neighborhood?”
“Yes.”
“You’re crazy.”
“As soon as I feel better I’ll do it.”
I rebuked her, I told her it was a thought induced by the fever, that the neighborhood would exhaust her, that to set foot there was stupid.
“I can’t wait to leave,” I exclaimed.
“You’re strong,” she answered, to my astonishment. “I have never been. The better and truer you feel, the farther away you go. If I merely pass through the tunnel of the
“I don’t remember. But, anyway, don’t go back to the neighborhood.”
I tried in vain to make her change her mind. We discussed it for a long time.
“Go,” she said finally, “talk to the two of them, they’ve been waiting for hours. They haven’t closed their eyes and they have to go to work.”
“What shall I tell them?”
“Whatever you want.”
I pulled the covers up, I also covered Gennaro, who had been tossing in his sleep all night. I realized that Lila was already falling asleep. I whispered:
“I’ll be back soon.”
She said: “Remember what you promised.”
“What?”
“You’ve already forgotten? If something happens to me, you’ve got to take Gennaro.”
“Nothing will happen to you.”
As I went out of the room Lila started in her half-sleep, she whispered: “Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always, even when you leave Naples. That way I’ll know that you see me and I’m at peace.”
47.
In the time that passed between that night and the day of my wedding—I was married on May 17, 1969, in Florence, and, after a honeymoon of just three days in Venice, enthusiastically began my life as a wife—I tried to do all I could for Lila. At first, in fact, I thought simply that I would help her until she got over the flu. I had things to do about the house in Florence, I had a lot of engagements because of the book—the telephone rang constantly, and my mother grumbled that she had given the number to half the neighborhood but no one called her, to have that thingamajig in the house, she said, is just a bother, since the calls were almost always for me—I wrote notes for hypothetical new novels, I tried to fill the gaps in my literary and political education. But my friend’s general state of weakness soon led me to neglect my own affairs and occupy myself with her. My mother realized right away that we had resumed our friendship: she found it shameful, she flew into a rage, she was full of insults for both of us. She continued to believe that she could tell me what to do and what not to, she limped after me, criticizing me. Sometimes she seemed determined to insert herself into my body, simply to keep me from being my own master. What do you have in common with her anymore, she insisted, think of what you are and of what she is, isn’t that disgusting book you wrote enough, you want to go on being friends with a whore? But I behaved as if I were deaf. I saw Lila every day and from the moment I left her sleeping in her room and went to face the two men who had waited all night in the kitchen I devoted myself to reorganizing her life.
