But I wavered. For several days I didn’t call Nino, as I had sagely declared in Florence. Then suddenly I started calling three or four times a day, heedless. I didn’t even care about Dede, standing a few steps from the phone booth. I talked to him in the unbearable heat of that sun-struck cage, and occasionally, soaked with sweat, exasperated by my daughter’s spying look, I opened the glass door and shouted: What are you doing standing there like that, I told you to look after your sister. At the center of my thoughts now was the conference in Montpellier. Nino harassed me; he made it into a sort of definitive proof of the genuineness of my feelings, so that we went from violent quarrels to declarations of how indispensable we were to each other, from long, costly complaints to the urgent spilling of our desire into a river of incandescent words. One afternoon, exhausted, as Dede and Elsa, outside the phone booth, were chanting, Mamma, hurry up, we’re getting bored, I said to him:
“There’s only one way I could go with you to Montpellier.”
“What.”
“Tell Pietro everything.”
There was a long silence.
“You’re really ready to do that?”
“Yes, but on one condition: you tell Eleonora everything.”
Another long silence. Nino murmured:
“You want me to hurt Eleonora and the child?”
“Yes. Won’t I be hurting Pietro and my daughters? To decide means to do harm.”
“Albertino is very small.”
“So is Elsa. And for Dede it will be intolerable.”
“Let’s do it after Montpellier.”
“Nino, don’t play with me.”
“I’m not playing.”
“Then if you’re not playing behave accordingly: you speak to your wife and I’ll speak to my husband. Now. Tonight.”
“Give me some time, it’s not easy.”
“For me it is?”
He hesitated, tried to explain. He said that Eleonora was a very fragile woman. He said she had organized her life around him and the child. He said that as a girl she had twice tried to kill herself. But he didn’t stop there, I felt that he was forcing himself to the most absolute honesty. Step by step, with the lucidity that was customary with him, he reached the point of admitting that breaking up his marriage meant not only hurting his wife and child but also saying goodbye to many comforts—
“All right,” I said, “let’s end it here.”
“Wait.”
“I’ve already waited too long, I should have made up my mind earlier.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Understand that my marriage no longer makes sense and go my way.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll come to Montpellier?”
“I said my way, not yours. Between you and me it’s over.”
116.
I hung up in tears and left the phone booth. Elsa asked: Did you hurt yourself, Mamma? I answered: I’m fine, it’s Grandma who doesn’t feel well. I went on sobbing under the worried gaze of Dede and Elsa.
During the final part of the vacation I did nothing but weep. I said I was tired, it was too hot, I had a headache, and I sent Pietro and the children to the beach. I stayed in bed, soaking the pillow with tears. I hated that excessive fragility, I hadn’t been like that even as a child. Both Lila and I had trained ourselves never to cry, and if we did it was in exceptional moments, and for a short time: the shame was tremendous, we stifled our sobs. Now, instead, as in Ariosto’s Orlando, in my head a fountain had opened and it flowed from my eyes without ever drying up; it seemed to me that even when Pietro, Dede, Elsa were about to return and with an effort I repressed the tears and hurried to wash my face under the tap, the fountain continued to drip, waiting for the right moment to return to the egress of my eyes. Nino didn’t really want me, Nino pretended a lot and loved little. He had wanted to fuck me—yes, fuck me, as he had done with who knows how many others—but to have me, have me forever by breaking the ties with his wife, well, that was not in his plans. Probably he was still in love with Lila. Probably in the course of his life he would love only her, like so many who had known her. And as a result he would remain with Eleonora forever. Love for Lila was the guarantee that no woman—no matter how much he wanted her, in his passionate way—would ever put that fragile marriage in trouble, I least of all. That was how things stood. Sometimes I got up in the middle of lunch or dinner and went to cry in the bathroom.
