While I was waiting for Lila to read, we learned that there was a cholera outbreak in Naples. My mother became excessively agitated, then distracted, finally she broke a soup tureen I was fond of, and announced that she had to go home. I imagined that if the cholera figured heavily in that decision, my refusal to give her name to my new daughter wasn’t secondary. I tried to make her stay but she abandoned me anyway, when I still hadn’t recovered from the birth and my leg was hurting. She could no longer bear to sacrifice months and months of her life to me, a child of hers without respect and without gratitude, she would rather go and die of the cholera bacterium with her husband and her good children. Yet even in the doorway she maintained the impassiveness that I had imposed on her: she didn’t complain, she didn’t grumble, she didn’t reproach me for anything. She was happy for Pietro to take her to the station in the car. She felt that her son-in-law loved her and probably—I thought—she had controlled herself not to please me so that she wouldn’t make a bad impression on him. She became emotional only when she had to part from Dede. On the landing she asked the child in her effortful Italian: Are you sorry that grandma is leaving? Dede, who felt that departure as a betrayal, answered grimly: No.
I was angry with myself, more than with her. Then I was seized by a self-destructive frenzy and a few hours later I fired Clelia. Pietro was amazed, alarmed. I said to him rancorously that I was tired of fighting with Dede’s Maremman accent, with my mother’s Neapolitan one. I wanted to go back to being mistress of my house and my children. In reality I felt guilty and had a great need to punish myself. With desperate pleasure I surrendered to the idea of being overwhelmed by the two children, by my domestic duties, by my painful leg.
I had no doubt that Elsa would compel me to a year no less terrible than the one I’d had with Dede. But maybe because I was more experienced with newborns, maybe because I was resigned to being a bad mother and wasn’t anxious about perfection, the infant attached herself to my breast with no trouble and devoted herself to feeding and sleeping. As a result I, too, slept a lot, those first days at home, and Pietro surprisingly cleaned the house, did the shopping and cooking, bathed Elsa, played with Dede, who was as if dazed by the arrival of a sister and the departure of her grandmother. The pain in my leg suddenly disappeared. And I was in a generally peaceful state when, one late afternoon, as I was napping, my husband came to wake me: Your friend from Naples is on the phone, he said. I hurried to answer.
Lila had talked to Pietro for a long time, she said she couldn’t wait to meet him in person. I listened reluctantly—Pietro was always amiable with people who didn’t belong to the world of his parents—and since she dragged it out in a tone that seemed to me nervously cheerful, I was ready to shout at her: I’ve given you the chance to hurt me as much as possible, hurry up, speak, you’ve had the book for thirteen days, let me know what you think. But I confined myself to breaking in abruptly:
“Did you read it or not?”
She became serious.
“I read it.”
“And so?”
“It’s good.”
“Good how? Did it interest you, amuse you, bore you?”
“It interested me.”
“How much? A little? A lot?”
“A lot.”
“And why?”
“Because of the story: it makes you want to read.”
“And then?”
“Then what?”
I stiffened, and said:
“Lila, I absolutely have to know how this thing that I wrote is and I have no one else who can tell me, only you.”
“I’m doing that.”
“No, it’s not true, you’re cheating me: you’ve never talked about anything in such a superficial way.”
There was a long silence. I imagined her sitting, legs crossed, next to an ugly little table on which the telephone stood. Maybe she and Enzo had just returned from work, maybe Gennaro was playing nearby. She said:
“I told you I don’t know how to read anymore.”
“That’s not the point: it’s that I need you and you don’t give a damn.”
Another silence. Then she muttered something I didn’t understand, maybe an insult. She said harshly, resentful: I do one job, you do another, what do you expect from me, you’re the one who had an education, you’re the one who knows what books should be like. Then her voice broke, she almost cried: You mustn’t write those things, Lenù, you aren’t that, none of what I read resembles you, it’s an ugly, ugly book, and the one before it was, too.
