I locked myself in the bathroom and I suddenly realized that I scarcely knew him. What did I know about him? He was a peaceful man but determined to the point of stubbornness. He was on the side of the working class and the students, but he taught and gave exams in the most traditional way. He was an atheist, he hadn’t wanted to get married in a church, he had insisted that Dede not be baptized, but he admired the early Christian communities of the Oltrarno and he spoke on religious matters with great expertise. He was an Airota, but he couldn’t bear the privileges and comforts that came from that. I calmed down, I tried to be closer to him, more affectionate. He’s my husband, I said to myself, we ought to talk more. But Adele’s presence became increasingly problematic. There was something unexpressed between them that drove Pietro to set aside manners and Adele to speak to him as if he were a fool with no hope of redemption.
We lived now like that, amid constant battles: he quarreled with his mother, he ended up saying something that made me angry, I attacked him. Until the point came when my mother-in-law, at dinner, in my presence, asked him why he was sleeping on the sofa. He answered: It’s better if you leave tomorrow. I didn’t intervene, and yet I knew why he slept on the sofa: he did it for me, so that he wouldn’t disturb me when, around three, he stopped working and allowed himself some rest. The next day Adele returned to Genoa. I felt lost.
67.
Nevertheless, the months passed and both the baby and I made it. Dede started walking by herself the day of her first birthday: her father squatted in front of her, encouraged her warmly, she smiled, left me, and moved unsteadily toward him, arms outstretched, mouth half open, as if it were the happy goal of her year of crying. From then on, her nights became tranquil, and so did mine. She spent more time with Clelia, her anxieties diminished, I carved out some space for myself. But I discovered that I had no desire for demanding activities. As after a long illness, I couldn’t wait to go outside, enjoy the sun and the colors, walk on the crowded streets, look in the shop windows. And since I had some money of my own, in that period I bought clothes for myself, for the baby, and for Pietro, I crowded the house with furniture and knickknacks, I squandered money as I never had before. I felt the need to be pretty, to meet interesting people, have conversations, but I hadn’t made any friends, and Pietro, for his part, rarely brought guests home.
I tried gradually to resume the satisfying life I had had until a year before, and only then noticed that the telephone hardly ever rang, that the calls for me were rare. The memory of my novel was fading and, with it, interest in my name was diminishing. That period of euphoria was followed by a phase of anxiety and, occasionally, depression, as I wondered what to do; I began reading contemporary literature again, and was often ashamed of my novel, which in comparison seemed frivolous and very traditional; I put aside the notes for the new book, which tended to repeat the old one, and made an effort to think of a story with more political engagement, one that would contain the tumult of the present.
I made a few timid phone calls to l’Unità and tried again to write articles, but I soon realized that my pieces no longer appealed to the editors. I had lost ground, I wasn’t well informed, I didn’t have time to go and examine particular situations and report on them, I wrote elegant sentences of an abstract rigor to announce—in that particular newspaper, to whom I’m not sure—my support of the harshest criticisms of the Communist Party and the unions. Today it’s hard to explain why I insisted on writing that stuff or, rather, why, although I scarcely took part in the city’s political life, and in spite of my meekness, I felt increasingly drawn to extreme positions. Maybe I did it out of insecurity. Or maybe out of distrust in every form of mediation, a skill that, from early childhood, I associated with the intrigues of my father, who operated shrewdly in the inefficiency of the city hall. Or out of the vivid knowledge of poverty, which I felt an obligation not to forget; I wanted to be on the side of those who remained downtrodden and were fighting to turn everything upside down. Or because everyday politics, the demands that I myself had scrupulously written about, didn’t matter to me, I wished that something great—I had used and often did use that formulation—would break out, which I could experience, and report on. Or because—and this was hard to admit—my model remained Lila, with her stubborn unreasonableness that refused to accept half measures, so that although I was now distant from her in every way, I wanted to say and do what I imagined she would say and do if she had had my tools, if she had not confined herself within the space of the neighborhood.
