The other episode was even uglier, but decisive. I no longer knew what I truly wanted: now I hoped that this period would be over quickly, I wished to return to familiar habits, watch over my little book. Yet I liked going into Nino’s room in the morning, tidying up the mess he left, making the bed, thinking as I cooked that he would have dinner with us that evening. And it distressed me that it was all about to end. At certain hours of the afternoon I felt mad. I had the impression that the house was empty in spite of the girls, I myself was emptied, I felt no interest in what I had written, I perceived its superficiality, I lost faith in the enthusiasm of Mariarosa, of Adele, of the French publisher, the Italian. I thought: As soon as he goes, nothing will make sense.
I was in that state—life was slipping away with an unbearable sensation of loss—when Pietro returned from the university with a grim look. We were waiting for him for dinner, Nino had been back for half an hour but had immediately been kidnapped by the children. I asked him kindly:
“Did something happen?”
He muttered:
“Don’t ever again bring to this house people from your home.”
I froze, I thought he was referring to Nino. And Nino, too, who had come in trailed by Dede and Elsa, must have thought the same thing, because he looked at him with a provocative smile, as if he expected a scene. But Pietro had something else in mind. He said in his contemptuous tone, the tone he used well when he was convinced that basic principles were at stake and he was called to defend them:
“Today the police returned and they named some names, they showed me some photographs.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I knew that, after he refused to withdraw the charges against the student who had pointed a gun at him, the visits of the police—even more than the scorn of many militant youths and not a few professors—weighed on him, as they treated him as an informer. I was sure that was why he was angry and I interrupted him, bitterly:
“Your fault. You shouldn’t have acted like that, I told you. Now you’ll never get rid of them.”
Nino intervened, he asked Pietro, mockingly:
“Who did you report?”
Pietro didn’t even turn to look at him. He was angry with me, it was with me he wanted to quarrel. He said:
“I did what was necessary then and I should have done what was necessary today. But I was silent because you were in the middle of it.”
At that point I realized that the problem was not the police but what he had learned from them. I said:
“What do I have to do with it?”
His voice changed:
“Aren’t Pasquale and Nadia your friends?”
I repeated obtusely:
“Pasquale and Nadia?”
“The police showed me photographs of terrorists and they were among them.”
I didn’t react, words failed. What I had imagined was true, then; Pietro in fact was confirming it. For a few seconds the images returned, of Pasquale firing the gun at Gino, kneecapping Filippo, while Nadia—Nadia, not Lila—went up the stairs, knocked on Bruno’s door, went in and shot him in the face. Terrible. And yet at that moment Pietro’s tone seemed out of place, as if he were using the information to make trouble for me in Nino’s eyes, to start a discussion that I had no wish to have. In fact Nino immediately interrupted again, continuing to make fun of him:
“So are you an informer for the police? What are you doing? Informing on comrades? Does your father know? Your mother? Your sister?”
I said weakly: Let’s go and eat. But right afterward I said to Nino, politely making light of it, and to get him to stop goading Pietro by bringing up his family: Stop it, what do you mean, informer. Then I alluded vaguely to the fact that some time ago Pasquale Peluso, maybe he remembered him, from the neighborhood, a good kid who had ended up getting together with Nadia, he remembered her, naturally, Professor Galiani’s daughter. And there I stopped because Nino was already laughing. He exclaimed: Nadia, oh good Lord, Nadia, and he turned again to Pietro, even more mockingly: only you and a couple of idiot police could think that Nadia Galiani is part of the armed struggle, it’s madness. Nadia, the best and nicest person I’ve ever known, what have we come to in Italy, let’s go and eat, come on, the defense of the established order can do without you for now. And he went to the table, calling Dede and Elsa, as I began to serve, sure that Pietro was about to join us.
But he didn’t. I thought he had gone to wash his hands, that he was delaying in order to calm down, and I sat in my place. I was agitated, I would have liked a nice calm evening, a quiet ending to that shared life. But he didn’t come, the children were already eating. Now even Nino seemed bewildered.
“Start,” I said, “it’s getting cold.”
“Only if you eat, too.”
