Relatives and friends crowded around her in search of a job, making an effort to appear suitable. Ada herself was hired out of the blue at Basic Sight, she was to begin by answering the telephone, then maybe she would learn other things. Rino, too—who one bad day had quarreled with Marcello and left the supermarket—inserted himself into his sister’s activity without even asking permission, boasting that he could learn in no time all there was to learn. But the most unexpected news for me—Nino told me one night, he had heard it from Marisa—was that even Alfonso had ended up at Basic Sight. Michele Solara, who continued to act in a crazy way, had closed the shop in Piazza dei Martiri for no reason and Alfonso was left without a job. As a result now he, too—and successfully—was being retrained, thanks to Lila.
I could have found out more, and maybe I would have liked to, all I had to do was call her, stop by. But I never did. Once only I met her on the street and stopped reluctantly. She must have been offended that I had told her the wrong phone number, that I had offered to give lessons to her son and instead had disappeared, that she had done everything to reconcile with me and I had withdrawn. She said she was in a hurry, she asked in dialect:
“Are you still living on Via Tasso?”
“Yes.”
“It’s out of the way.”
“It has a view of the sea.”
“What’s the sea, from up there? A bit of color. Better if you’re closer, that way you notice that there’s filth, mud, piss, polluted water. But you who read and write books like to tell lies, not the truth.”
I cut her short, I said:
“For now I’m there.”
She cut me even shorter:
“One can always change. How many times do we say one thing and then do another? Take a place here.”
I shook my head, I said goodbye. Was that what she wanted? To bring me back to the neighborhood?
37.
Then in my already complicated life two completely unexpected things happened at the same time. Nino’s research institute was invited to New York for some important job and a tiny publishing house in Boston published my book. Those two events turned into a possible trip to the United States.
After endless hesitations, endless discussions, some quarrels, we decided to take that vacation. But I would have to leave Dede and Elsa for two weeks. Even under normal conditions I had a hard time making arrangements: I wrote for some journals, I did translations, I took part in debates in places large and small, I compiled notes for a new book, and to arrange for the children with all that hectic activity was always extremely difficult. In general I turned to Mirella, a student of Nino’s, who was very reliable and didn’t ask much, but if she wasn’t available I left them with Antonella, a neighbor of around fifty, the competent mother of grown children. This time I tried to get Pietro to take them, but he said it was impossible just then to have them for so long. I examined the situation (I had no relationship with Adele, Mariarosa had left and no one knew where she was, my mother was weakened by her elusive illness, Elisa was increasingly hostile), and there didn’t seem to be an acceptable solution. It was Pietro who finally said to me: Ask Lina, she left her son with you for months, she’s in your debt. I had a hard time making up my mind. The more superficial part of me imagined that, although she had showed that in spite of her work obligations she was available, she would treat my daughters like fussy, demanding little dolls, she would torment them, or leave them to Gennaro; while a more hidden part, which perhaps upset me more than the first, considered her the only person I knew who would devote herself entirely to making them comfortable. It was the urgency of finding a solution that drove me to call her. To my tentative and evasive request she responded without hesitation, as usual surprising me:
“Your daughters are more than my daughters, bring them to me whenever you like and go do your things as long as you want.”
Even though I had told her that I was going with Nino, she never mentioned him, not even when, with all kinds of cautions, I brought her the children. And so in May of 1980, consumed by misgivings and yet excited, I left for the United States. It was an extraordinary experience. I felt again that I had no limits, I was capable of flying over oceans, expanding over the entire world: an exhilarating delirium. Naturally the two weeks were very exhausting and very expensive. The women who had published my book had no money and even though they were generous I still spent a lot. As for Nino, he had trouble getting reimbursed even for his airplane ticket. Yet we were happy. I, at least, have never been so happy as in those days.
