Ah yes, militant anti-fascism, new resistance, proletarian justice, and other formulas to which she, who instinctively knew how to avoid rehashing clichés, was surely able to give depth. I imagined that those actions were necessary in order to join, I don’t know, the Red Brigades, Prima Linea, Nuclei Armati Proletari. Lila would disappear from the neighborhood as Pasquale had. Maybe that’s why she had tried to leave Gennaro with me, apparently for a month, in reality intending to give him to me forever. We would never see each other again. Or she would be arrested, like the leaders of the Red Brigades, Curcio and Franceschini. Or she would evade every policeman and prison, imaginative and bold as she was. And when the
At night every imagining seemed a thing that had happened or was still happening, and I was afraid for her, I saw her captured, wounded, like so many women and men in the chaos of the world, and I felt pity for her, but I also envied her. The childish conviction that she had always been destined for extraordinary things was magnified. And I regretted that I had left Naples, detached myself from her, the need to be near her returned. But I was also angry that she had set out on that road without consulting me, as if she hadn’t considered me up to it. And yet I knew a lot about capital, exploitation, class struggle, the inevitability of the proletarian revolution. I could have been useful, participated. And I was unhappy. I lay in bed, discontent with my situation as a mother, a married woman, the whole future debased by the repetition of domestic rituals in the kitchen, in the marriage bed.
By day I felt more lucid, and the horror prevailed. I imagined a capricious Lila who provoked hatred deliberately and in the end found herself more deeply involved in violent acts. Certainly she had had the courage to push ahead, to take the lead with the crystalline determination, the generous cruelty of one who is spurred by just reasons. But with what purpose? To start a civil war? Transform the neighborhood, Naples, Italy into a battlefield, a Vietnam in the Mediterranean? Hurl us all into a pitiless, interminable conflict, squeezed between the Eastern bloc and the Western? Encourage its fiery spread throughout Europe, throughout the entire planet? Until victory, always? What victory? Cities destroyed, fire, the dead in the streets, the shame of violent clashes not only with the class enemy but also within the front itself, among the revolutionary groups of various regions and with various motivations, all in the name of the proletariat and its dictatorship. Maybe even nuclear war.
I closed my eyes in terror. The children, the future. And I hung on to formulas: the unpredictable subject, the destructive logic of patriarchy, the feminine value of survival, compassion. I have to talk to Lila, I said to myself. She has to tell me everything she’s doing, what she plans, so that I can decide whether to be her accomplice or not.
But I never called nor did she call me. I was convinced that the long voice thread that had been our only contact for years hadn’t helped us. We had maintained the bond between our two stories, but by subtraction. We had become for each other abstract entities, so that now I could invent her for myself both as an expert in computers and as a determined and implacable urban guerrilla, while she, in all likelihood, could see me both as the stereotype of the successful intellectual and as a cultured and well-off woman, all children, books, and highbrow conversation with an academic husband. We both needed new depth, body, and yet we were distant and couldn’t give it to each other.
88.
