As soon as she left I realized with some surprise that her irruption had had an unhoped-for effect. My husband, as we were returning home, went beyond the few phrases of solidarity whispered outside my door the night before. That intemperate encounter with my mother must have revealed to him about me, about how I had grown up, more than what I had told him and he had imagined. He felt sorry for me, I think. He returned abruptly to himself, our relations became polite, a few days later we went to a lawyer, who talked for a moment about this and that, then asked:
“You’re sure you don’t want to live together anymore?”
“How can one live with a person who no longer loves you?” Pietro answered.
“You, Signora, you no longer want your husband?”
“It’s my business,” I said. “All you have to do is settle the practical details of the separation.”
When we were back on the street Pietro laughed: “You’re just like your mother.”
“It’s not true.”
“You’re right, it’s not true: you’re like your mother if she had had an education and had started writing novels.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re worse.”
I was angry but not very. I was glad that within the limits of the possible he had come to his senses. I drew a sigh of relief and began to focus on what to do. In the course of long phone calls to Nino, I told him everything that had happened since the moment we parted, and we discussed my moving to Naples; out of prudence I didn’t tell him that Pietro and I had begun to sleep under the same roof, even if in separate rooms, naturally. Most important, I talked to my daughters often and I told Adele, with explicit hostility, that I would come to get them.
“Don’t worry,” my mother-in-law tried to reassure me, “you can leave them as long as you need to.”
“Dede has school.”
“We can send her here, nearby, I would take care of everything.”
“No, I need them with me.”
“Think about it. A woman separated, with two children and your ambitions, has to take account of reality and decide what she can give up and what she can’t.”
Everything, in that last sentence, bothered me.
15.
I wanted to leave immediately for Genoa, but I got a phone call from France. The older of my two publishers asked me to put into writing, for an important journal, the arguments she had heard me make in public. So right away I found myself in a situation in which I had to choose between going to get my daughters and starting work. I put off my departure, I worked day and night with the anxiety of doing well. I was still trying to give my text an acceptable form when Nino announced to me that, before returning to the university, he had some free days and was eager to see me. I couldn’t resist; we drove to Argentario. I was dazed by love. We spent marvelous days devoted to the winter sea and, as had never happened with either Franco or, even less, Pietro, to the pleasure of eating and drinking, conversation, sex. Every morning at dawn I dragged myself out of bed and began writing.
One evening, in bed, Nino gave me some pages he had written, saying that he would value my opinion. It was a complicated essay, on Italsider in Bagnoli. I read it lying close beside him, while now and then he murmured, self-critical: I write badly, correct it if you want, you’re better, you were better in high school. I praised his work highly, and suggested some corrections. But he wasn’t satisfied, he urged me to intervene further. Then, finally, as if to convince me of the need for my corrections, he said that he had a terrible thing to reveal to me. Half embarrassed, half ironic, he described this secret: “the most shameful thing I’ve done in my life.” And he said that it had to do with the article I had written in high school about my fight with the religion teacher, the one that he had commissioned for a student magazine.
“What did you do?” I asked, laughing.
“I’ll tell you, but remember I was just a boy.”
I felt that he was seriously ashamed and I became slightly worried. He said that when he read my article he couldn’t believe that someone could write in such a pleasing and intelligent way. I was content with that compliment, I kissed him, I remembered how I had labored over those pages with Lila, and meanwhile I described to him in a self-ironic way the disappointment, the pain I had felt when the magazine hadn’t had space to publish it.
“I told you that?” Nino asked, uneasily.
“Maybe, I don’t remember now.”
He had an expression of dismay.
“The truth is that there was plenty of space.”
“Then why didn’t they publish it?”
“Out of envy.”
I burst out laughing.
“The editors were envious of me?”
“No, it was
