At a certain point Donato called me over, he said politely, Lenù. And Alfonso, too, insisted with a gesture, a look, that I join them. I went to their corner uneasily. Donato began to praise me loudly, as if he were speaking to a vast audience: This woman is a great scholar, a writer who has no equal anywhere in the world; I’m proud to have known her as a girl; at Ischia, when she came to vacation at our house she was a child, she discovered literature through her interest in my poor verses, she read my book before going to sleep:—isn’t it true, Lenù?
He looked at me uncertainly, suddenly a supplicant. His eyes pleaded with me to confirm the role of his words in my literary vocation. And I said yes, it’s true, as a girl I couldn’t believe that I knew personally someone who had written a book of poetry and whose thoughts were printed in the newspaper. I thanked him for the review that a dozen years earlier he had given my first book, I said it had been very useful. And Donato turned red with joy, he took off, he began to celebrate himself and at the same time to complain that the envy of mediocrities had kept him from becoming known as he deserved. Nino had to intervene, and roughly. He brought me over to his mother again.
On the street he reproached me, saying: You know what my father’s like, there’s no need to encourage him. I nodded, and meanwhile I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. Would Nino lose his hair? Would he get fat? Would he utter rancorous words against those who had been more fortunate? He was so good-looking now, I didn’t even want to think about it. He was saying of his father: he can’t resign himself, the older he gets the worse he is.
41.
During that same period my sister, after endless anxieties and protests, gave birth. She had a boy whom she named Silvio, after Marcello’s father. Since our mother was still not well I tried to help Elisa. She was white with exhaustion and terrified by the newborn. Seeing her son all smeared with blood and liquids had given her the impression of a small body in its death throes and she was disgusted. But Silvio was all too alive, he wailed desperately with clenched fists. And she didn’t know how to hold him, how to bathe him, how to take care of the wound from the umbilical cord, how to cut his nails. Even the fact that he was a male repulsed her. I tried to instruct her, but it didn’t last long. Marcello, always rather clumsy, treated me immediately with an apprehension beneath which I perceived annoyance, as if my presence in the house complicated his day. And Elisa, too, instead of being grateful, appeared annoyed by everything I said, by my very generosity. Every day I said to myself: that’s it, I have so many things to do, tomorrow I won’t go. But I kept going, until events decided for me.
Terrible events. One morning when I was at my sister’s house—it was very hot and the neighborhood was dozing in the burning-hot dust; several days earlier the station in Bologna had been blown up—a phone call came from Peppe: our mother had fainted in the bath. I hurried to her, she was in a cold sweat, trembling, she had an unbearable pain in her stomach. Finally I managed to make her see a doctor. Tests of various sorts followed and in a short time a serious illness was diagnosed, an evasive term that I learned to use immediately. The neighborhood resorted to it whenever the problem was cancer and the doctors did the same. They translated their diagnosis into a similar formula, maybe just a little more refined: the illness, rather than serious, was
My father at that news immediately fell apart, he couldn’t tolerate the situation, and became depressed. My brothers, their expressions vaguely dazed, their complexions pasty, hovered for a while with an air of wanting to help, and then, absorbed day and night by their mysterious jobs, disappeared, leaving money, which was needed for doctors and medicines. As for my sister, she stayed in her house, frightened, untidy, in her nightgown, ready to stick a nipple in Silvio’s mouth if he merely hinted at a wail. Thus, in the fourth month of my pregnancy, the full weight of my mother’s illness fell on me.
I wasn’t sorry, I wanted my mother to understand, even if she had always tormented me, that I loved her. I became very active: I involved both Nino and Pietro, asking them to direct me to the best doctors; I took her to the various luminaries; I stayed with her in the hospital when she had an urgent operation, when she was discharged. I took care of everything once I brought her home.
The heat was unbearable, and I was constantly worried. While my stomach began to swell happily and in it grew a heart different from the one in my breast, I daily observed, with sorrow, my mother’s decline. I was moved by her clinging to me in order not to get lost, the way I, a small child, had clung to her hand. The frailer and more frightened she became, the prouder I was of keeping her alive.
