Lila didn’t notice at all. She, from the depths of the neighborhood, from that area that now seemed to me infinitesimal, continued to consider me an appendage of hers. From Pietro she got the telephone number in Genoa, and she began to use it without worrying about annoying my in-laws. When she managed to reach me she pretended not to notice my terseness and talked for both of us, without pause. She talked about Enzo, about work, about her son, who was doing well in school, about Carmen, about Antonio. When I wasn’t there, she persisted in telephoning, with neurotic perseverance, enabling Adele—who wrote in a notebook the calls that came for me, putting down, I don’t know, such and such month, such and such day, Sarratore (three calls), Cerullo (nine calls)—to complain about the nuisance I caused. I tried to convince Lila that if they said I wasn’t there it was pointless to insist, that the house in Genoa wasn’t my house, and that she was embarrassing me. Useless. She went so far as to call Nino. It’s hard to say how things really went: he was embarrassed, he made light of it, he was afraid of saying something that would irritate me. Early on he told me that Lila had telephoned Eleonora’s house repeatedly, angering her, then I gathered that she had tried to get him on the phone at Via Duomo directly, finally that he himself had hastened to track her down to prevent her from constantly telephoning his wife. Whatever had happened, the fact was that Lila had forced him to meet her. Not alone, however: Nino was immediately eager to explain that she had come with Carmen, since it was Carmen—mainly Carmen—who urgently needed to get in touch with me.
I listened to the account of the meeting without emotion. First, Lila had wanted to know in detail how I behaved in public when I talked about my books: what dress I wore, how I did my hair and my makeup, if I was shy, if I was entertaining, if I read, if I improvised. Otherwise she was silent, she had left the field to Carmen. So it turned out that all that eagerness to talk to me had to do with Pasquale. Through her own channels, Carmen had found out that Nadia Galiani had fled to safety abroad, and so she wanted to ask a favor again, that I get in touch with my high-school teacher to ask her if Pasquale, too, was safe. Carmen had exclaimed a couple of times: I don’t want the children of the rich people to get out and not the ones like my brother. Then she had urged him to let me know—as if she herself considered her worry about Pasquale to be an indictable crime that could involve me, too—that if I wanted to help her I shouldn’t use the telephone either to get in touch with the professor or to get in touch with her. Nino concluded: Both Carmen and Lina are imprudent, better to let it go, they can get you in trouble.
I thought that, a few months earlier, an encounter between Nino and Lila, even in the presence of Carmen, would have alarmed me. Now I was discovering instead that it left me indifferent. Evidently I was now so sure of Nino’s love that, although I couldn’t rule out that she wanted to take him away from me, it seemed impossible that she could succeed. I caressed his cheek, I said, amused, Don’t
19.
I noted for the first time, during that period, the rigidity of the perimeter that Lila had established for herself. She was less and less interested in what happened outside the neighborhood. If she became excited by something whose dimensions were not merely local, it was because it concerned people she had known since childhood. Even her work, as far as I knew, interested her only within a very narrow radius. Enzo occasionally had to spend time in Milan, or Turin. Not Lila, she had never moved, and I only began to notice that closing off of herself seriously when my own taste for travel intensified.
I took every possible opportunity to travel outside of Italy, at the time, especially if it was possible to do so with Nino. For example, when the small German publisher who had brought out my little book organized a promotional tour in West Germany and Austria, Nino canceled all his engagements and acted as my cheerful and obedient driver. We travelled all over for some two weeks, gliding from one landscape to the next as if beside paintings with dazzling colors. Every mountain or lake or city or monument entered our life as a couple only to become part of the pleasure of being there, at that moment, and it always seemed like a refined contribution to our happiness. Even when rude reality intervened and frightened us because it corresponded to the darkest words that I uttered night after night in front of radical audiences, we recounted the fear to each other afterward as if it had been a pleasant adventure.
