“In what sense?”
“You sounded like her when something is very important to her.”
“I’m very different, unfortunately.”
He was silent again.
“You’re different, fortunately. But in these types of things there’s no one like her. Tell her about that girl and you’ll see, she’ll help you.”
I telephoned Adele. I did it with some embarrassment, which I overcame by reminding myself of all the times I had seen her at work, for my book, in the search for the apartment in Florence. She was a woman who liked to be busy. If she needed something, she picked up the telephone and, link by link, put together the chain that led to her goal. She knew how to ask in such a way that saying no was impossible. And she crossed ideological borders confidently, she respected no hierarchies, she tracked down cleaning women, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, ministers, and she addressed all with cordial detachment, as if the favor she was about to ask she was in fact already doing for them. Amid a thousand awkward apologies for disturbing her, I told Adele in detail about my friend, and she became curious, interested, angry. At the end she said:
“Let me think.”
“Of course.”
“Meanwhile, can I give you some advice?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.”
“How?”
“By writing. Frighten Soccavo to death, and others like him. Promise you’ll do it?”
“I’ll try.”
She gave me the name of an editor at
49.
The telephone call to Pietro and, especially, the one to my mother-in-law released a feeling that until that moment I had kept at bay, that in fact I had repressed, but that was alive and ready to advance. It had to do with my changed status. It was likely that the Airotas, especially Guido but perhaps Adele herself, considered me a girl who, although very eager, was far from the person they would have chosen for their son. It was just as likely that my origin, my dialectal cadence, my lack of sophistication in everything, had put the breadth of their views to a hard test. With just a slight exaggeration I could hypothesize that even the publication of my book was part of an emergency plan intended to make me presentable in their world. But the fact remained, incontrovertible, that they had accepted me, that I was about to marry Pietro, with their consent, that I was about to enter a protective family, a sort of well-fortified castle from which I could proceed without fear or to which I could retreat if I were in danger. So it was urgent that I get used to that new membership, and above all I had to be conscious of it. I was no longer a small match-seller almost down to the last match; I had won for myself a large supply of matches. And so—I suddenly understood—I could do for Lila much more than I had calculated on doing.
It was with this perspective that I had my friend give me the documentation she had collected against Soccavo. She handed it over passively, without even asking what I wanted to do with it. I read with increasing absorption. How many terrible things she had been able to say precisely and effectively. How many intolerable experiences could be perceived behind the description of the factory. I turned the pages in my hands for a long time, then suddenly, almost without coming to a decision, I looked in the telephone book, I called Soccavo. I subdued my voice to the right tone, I asked for Bruno. He was cordial—
