As soon as I heard her voice I felt like yelling at her: What have you done to me, everything was going smoothly and now, suddenly, what you said is happening, the baby is sick, I’m limping, it’s impossible, I can’t bear it anymore. But I managed to restrain myself in time, I said quietly, everything’s fine, the baby’s a little fussy and right now she’s not growing much, but she’s wonderful, I’m happy. Then, with feigned interest, I asked about Enzo, Gennaro, her relations with Stefano, her brother, the neighborhood, if she had had other problems with Bruno Soccavo and Michele. She answered in an ugly, obscene, aggressive dialect, but mostly without rage. Soccavo, she said, has to bleed. And when I run into Michele I spit in his face. As for Gennaro, she now referred to him explicitly as Stefano’s son, saying, he’s stocky like his father, and she laughed when I said he’s such a nice little boy. She said: You’re such a good little mamma, you take him. In those phrases I heard the sarcasm of someone who knew, thanks to some mysterious secret power, what was really happening to me, and I felt rancor, but I became even more insistent with my charade—listen to what a sweet voice Dede has, it’s really pleasant here in Florence, I’m reading an interesting book by Baran—and I kept going until she forced me to end it by telling me about the IBM course that Enzo had started.
Only of him did she speak with respect, at length, and right afterward she asked about Pietro.
“Everything’s going well with your husband?”
“Very well.”
“And for me with Enzo.”
When she hung up, her voice left a trail of images and sounds of the past that stayed in my mind for hours: the courtyard, the dangerous games, the doll she had thrown into the cellar, the dark stairs we climbed to Don Achille’s to retrieve it, her wedding, her generosity and her meanness, how she had taken Nino. She can’t tolerate my good fortune, I thought fearfully, she wants me with her again, under her, supporting her in her affairs, in her wretched neighborhood wars. Then I said to myself: How stupid I’ve been, what use has my education been, and I pretended everything was under control. To my sister Elisa, who called frequently, I said that being a mother was wonderful. To Carmen Peluso, who told me about her marriage to the gas-pump owner on the
I struggled for months, trying to keep at bay the more opaque parts of myself. Occasionally I surprised myself by praying to the Madonna, even though I considered myself an atheist, and was ashamed. More often, when I was alone in the house with the baby, I let out terrible cries, not words, only breath spilling out along with despair. But that difficult period wouldn’t end; it was a grueling, tormented time. At night, I carried the baby up and down the hall, limping. I no longer whispered sweet nonsense phrases, I ignored her and tried to think of myself. I was always holding a book, a journal, even though I hardly managed to read anything. During the day, when Adele slept peacefully—at first I called her Ade, without realizing how it sounded like Hades, a hell summed up in two syllables, so that when Pietro pointed it out I was embarrassed and began calling her Dede—I tried to write for the newspaper. But I no longer had time—and certainly not the desire—to travel around on behalf of
“In what sense?”
“It’s just words.”
