The Neapolitan Novels полностью

But the difficulties hammered at me every day, cracks were continually opening up. The city hadn’t improved at all, its malaise wore me out immediately. Via Tasso turned out to be inconvenient. Nino got me a used car, a white Renault 4 that I immediately became attached to, but then I was always stuck in traffic, and I soon gave it up. I struggled to meet the endless demands of daily life much more than I ever had in Florence, Genoa, Milan. From the first day of school Dede hated her teacher and her classmates. Elsa, now in first grade, always came home depressed, her eyes red, and refused to tell me what had happened to her. I began to scold them both. I said they didn’t know how to deal with adversity, they didn’t know how to assert themselves, they didn’t know how to adapt, and they had to learn. As a result the two sisters joined forces against me: they began to speak of their grandmother Adele and aunt Mariarosa as if they were divinities who had organized a happy world made just for them, they mourned them in an increasingly explicit way. When, in an attempt to win them back, I drew them to me, cuddled them, they hugged me unwillingly, and sometimes pushed me away. And my work? It became more and more evident that, especially in that successful period, I would have done better to stay in Milan and find a job at a publisher’s. Or even settle in Rome, since I had met people on my promotional tours who had offered to help me. What were my daughters and I doing in Naples? Were we there just to make Nino happy? Was I lying to myself when I portrayed myself as free and autonomous? And was I lying to my audience when I played the part of someone who, with her two small books, had sought to help every woman confess what she couldn’t say to herself? Were they mere formulas that it was convenient for me to believe in while in fact I was no different from my more traditional contemporaries? In spite of all the talk was I letting myself be invented by a man to the point where his needs were imposed on mine and those of my daughters?

I learned to avoid myself. It was enough for Nino to knock on the door and the bitterness vanished. I said to myself: Life now is this and can’t be other. Meanwhile I tried to give myself some discipline, I didn’t resign myself, I tried to be assertive, sometimes I even managed to feel happy. The house shone with light. From my balcony I saw Naples stretching to the edges of the yellow-blue reflection of the sea. I had taken my daughters away from the temporariness of Genoa and Milan, and the air, the colors, the sounds of the dialect in the streets, the cultured people Nino brought to see me even late into the night gave me confidence, made me cheerful. I took the girls to see Pietro in Florence and was pleased when he came to see them in Naples. Over Nino’s protests I let him stay in my house. I made him a bed in the girls’ room; their affection for him was a performance, as if they wanted to keep him with them through a display of how much they loved him. We tried to have a casual relationship, I inquired about Doriana, I asked about his book, which was always about to be published when further details emerged that had to be examined. When the children held tight to their father, ignoring me, I took a little break. I went down through the Arco Mirelli and walked along Via Caracciolo, beside the sea. Or I went up to Via Aniello Falcone and came to the Floridiana. I chose a bench, I read.

31.

From Via Tasso the old neighborhood was a dim, distant rockpile, indistinguishable urban debris at the foot of Vesuvius. I wanted it to stay that way: I was another person now, I would make sure that it did not recapture me. But in that case, too, the purpose I tended to attribute to myself was fragile. A mere three or four days after the first harried arrangement of the apartment I gave in. I dressed the children carefully, dressed up myself, and said: Now let’s go see Grandmother Immacolata and Grandfather Vittorio and the uncles.