The Neapolitan Novels полностью

I don’t remember anything about my wedding. A few photographs, acting as props, rather than inspiring memory, have frozen it around a few images: Pietro with an absent-minded expression, me looking angry, my mother, who is out of focus but manages nevertheless to appear unhappy. Or not. It’s the ceremony itself that I can’t remember, but I have in mind the long discussion I had with Pietro a few days before we got married. I told him that I intended to take the Pill in order not to have children, that it seemed to me urgent to try first of all to write another book. I was sure that he would immediately agree. Instead, surprisingly, he was opposed. First he made it a problem of legality, the Pill was not yet officially for sale; then he said there were rumors that it ruined one’s health; then he made a complicated speech about sex, love, and reproduction; finally he stammered that someone who really has to write will write anyway, even if she is expecting a baby. I was unhappy, I was angry, that reaction seemed to me not consistent with the educated youth who wanted only a civil marriage, and I told him so. We quarreled. Our wedding day arrived and we were not reconciled: he was mute, I cold.

There was another surprise, too, that hasn’t faded: the reception. We had decided to get married, greet our relatives, and go home without any sort of celebration. That decision had developed through the combination of Pietro’s ascetic tendency and my intention to demonstrate that I no longer belonged to the world of my mother. But our line of conduct was secretly undone by Adele. She dragged us to the house of a friend of hers, for a toast, she said; and there, instead, Pietro and I found ourselves at the center of a big reception, in a very aristocratic Florentine dwelling, among a large number of relatives of the Airotas and famous and very famous people who lingered until evening. My husband became taciturn, I wondered, bewildered, why, since in fact it was a celebration for my wedding, I had had to be limited to inviting only my immediate family. I said to Pietro:

“Did you know this was happening?”

“No.”

For a while we confronted the situation together. But soon he evaded the attempts of his mother and sister to introduce him to this man, to that woman; he entrenched himself in a corner with my relatives and talked to them the whole time. At first I resigned myself, somewhat uneasily, to inhabiting the trap we had fallen into, then I began to find it exciting that well-known politicians, prestigious intellectuals, young revolutionaries, even a well-known poet and a famous novelist showed interest in me, in my book, and spoke admiringly of my articles in l’Unità. The time flew by, I felt more and more accepted in the world of the Airotas. Even my father-in-law wanted to detain me, questioning me kindly on my knowledge of labor matters. A small group formed, of people engaged in the debate, in newspapers and journals, over the tide of demands that was rising in Italy. And me, here I was, with them, and it was my celebration, and I was at the center of the conversation.

At some point, my father-in-law warmly praised an essay, published in Mondo Operaio, that in his view laid out the problem of democracy in Italy with crystalline intelligence. Drawing on a large number of facts, the piece demonstrated that, as long as the state television, the big papers, the schools, the universities, the judiciary worked day after day to solidify the dominant ideology, the electoral system would in fact be rigged, and the workers’ parties would never have enough votes to govern. Nods of assent, supporting citations, references to this article and that one. Finally, Professor Airota, with all his authority, mentioned the name of the author of the article, and I knew even before he uttered it—Giovanni Sarratore—that it was Nino. I was so happy that I couldn’t contain myself, I said I knew him, I called Adele over to confirm to her husband and the others how brilliant my Neapolitan friend was.

Nino was present at my wedding even if he wasn’t present, and speaking of him I felt authorized to talk also about myself, about the reasons I had become involved in the workers’ struggle, about the need to provide the parties and parliamentary representatives on the left with hard data so that they could address the delays in their understanding of the current political and economic period, and so on with other stock phrases I had learned only recently but used with assurance. I felt clever. My mood brightened; I enjoyed being with my in-laws and feeling admired by their friends. At the end, when my relatives timidly said goodbye and hurried off somewhere to wait for the first train to take them back to Naples, I no longer felt irritated with Pietro. He must have realized it, because he, in turn, softened, and the tension vanished.