“Thank you, now I have to go. Be patient with Eleonora, she seems aggressive but it’s only timidity. Tomorrow morning we return to Naples, but I’ll be back after the elections and if you want we can talk.”
“It would be a pleasure. Will you come and stay with us?”
“You’re sure I won’t bother you?”
“Not at all.”
“All right.”
He didn’t hang up, I heard him breathing.
“Elena.”
“Yes.”
“Lina, when we were children, dazzled us both.”
I felt an intense uneasiness.
“In what sense?”
“You ended up attributing to her capacities that are only yours.”
“And you?”
“I did worse. What I had seen in you, I then stupidly seemed to find in her.”
I was silent for several seconds. Why had he felt the need to bring up Lila, like that, on the telephone? And what was he saying to me? Was it merely compliments? Or was he trying to communicate to me that as a boy he would have loved me but that on Ischia he had attributed to one what belonged to the other?
“Come back soon,” I said.
106.
I went out with Eleonora and the three children in a state of such well-being that even if she had stuck a knife in me I would not have felt bad. Nino’s wife, besides, in the face of my euphoria and the many kindnesses I showed her, stopped being hostile, praised Dede and Elsa’s good behavior, confessed that she admired me. Her husband had told her everything about me, my studies, my success as a writer. But I’m a little jealous, she admitted, and not because you’re clever but because you’ve known him forever and I haven’t. She, too, would like to have met him as a girl, and know what he was like at ten, at fourteen, his voice before it changed, his laughter as a boy. Luckily I have Albertino, she said, he’s just like his father.
I observed the child, but it didn’t seem to me that I saw signs of Nino, maybe they would appear later. I look like Papa, Dede exclaimed suddenly, proudly, and Elsa added: I’m more like my mamma. I thought of Silvia’s son, Mirko, who had seemed identical to Nino. What pleasure I had felt holding him in my arms, soothing his cries in Mariarosa’s house. What had I been looking for at that time, in that child, when I was still far from the experience of motherhood? What had I sought in Gennaro, before I knew that his father was Stefano. What was I looking for in Albertino, now that I was the mother of Dede and Elsa, and why did I examine him so closely? I dismissed the idea that Nino remembered Mirko from time to time. Nor did I think he had ever demonstrated any interest in Gennaro. Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object. Was Albertino the child of will, of attention? Or did he, too, exist in the arms of this woman-mother without Nino’s feeling that he had had anything to do with it? I roused myself, I said to Eleonora that her son was the image of his father and was content with that lie. Then I told her in detail, with affection, with tenderness, about Nino at the time of elementary school, at the time of the contests organized by Maestra Oliviero and the principal to see who was smartest, Nino at the time of high school, about Professor Galiani and the vacation we had had on Ischia, with other friends. I stopped there, even though she kept childishly asking: And then?
