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Then, as soon as the children left the room, accompanied by Adele, he said as if following a thread that started from the answers of the two children: I’ve learned that the break with Pietro is due to Nino Sarratore. I jumped, I nodded yes. He smiled, he began to praise Nino, but not with the absolute support of years earlier. He said that he was very intelligent, someone who knew what was what, but—he said, emphasizing the adversative conjunction—he is fickle, and he repeated the word as if to make sure that he had chosen the right one. Then he emphasized: I didn’t like Sarratore’s most recent writings. And in a suddenly contemptuous tone he relegated him to the heap of those who considered it more urgent to make the gears of neocapitalism function rather than to continue to demand transformations in social relations and in production. He used that language, but giving every word the substance of an insult.

I couldn’t bear it. I struggled to convince him that he was wrong. Adele returned just as I was citing the essays of Nino’s that seemed to me most radical, and Guido listened to me, emitting the dull sound he usually resorted to when he was suspended between agreement and disagreement. I suddenly stopped, rather agitated. For a few minutes my father-in-law seemed to soften his judgment (After all, it’s difficult for all of us to orient ourselves in the chaos of the Italian crisis, and I can understand that young men like him find themselves in trouble, especially when they have a desire to act), then he rose to go to his study. But before he disappeared he had a second thought. He paused in the doorway and uttered harshly: But there is doing and doing, Sarratore is intelligence without traditions, he would rather be liked by those in charge than fight for an idea, he’ll become a very useful technocrat. And he broke off, but still he hesitated, as if he had something much crueler on the tip of his tongue. He confined himself instead to muttering good night and went into his study.

I felt Adele’s gaze on me. I ought to retreat, I thought, I have to make up an excuse, say I’m tired. But I hoped that Adele would find a conciliating phrase that might soothe me, and so I asked:

“What does it mean that Nino is intelligence without traditions?”

She looked at me ironically.

“That he’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else. The result is that this Signor Sarratore is an unreliable person.”

“I, too, am an intelligence without traditions.”

She smiled.

“Yes, you are, too, and in fact you are unreliable.”

Silence. Adele had spoken serenely, as if the words had no emotional charge but were limited to recording the facts. Still, I felt offended.

“What do you mean?”

“That I trusted a son to you and you didn’t treat him honestly. If you wanted someone else, why did you marry him?”

“I didn’t know I wanted someone else.”

“You’re lying.”

I hesitated, I admitted: “I’m lying, yes, but why do you force me to give you a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies. You also spoke badly of Pietro, in fact you supported me against him. Were you lying?”

“No. I was really on your side, but within a pact that you should have respected.”

“What pact?”

“Remaining with your husband and children. You were an Airota, your daughters were Airotas. I didn’t want you to feel unsatisfied and unhappy, I tried to help you be a good mother and a good wife. But if the pact is broken everything changes. From me and from my husband you’ll have nothing anymore, in fact I’ll take away everything I’ve given you.”

I took a deep breath, I tried to keep my voice calm, just as she continued to do.

“Adele,” I said, “I am Elena Greco and my daughters are my daughters. I don’t give a damn about you Airotas.”

She nodded, pale, and her expression was now severe.

“It’s obvious that you are Elena Greco, it’s now far too obvious. But the children are my son’s daughters and we will not allow you to ruin them.”

17.

That was the first clash with my in-laws. Others followed, though they never reached such explicit contempt. Later my in-laws confined themselves to demonstrating in every possible way that, if I insisted on being concerned with myself above all, I had to entrust Dede and Elsa to them.