The Neapolitan Novels полностью

At first she was as ill-tempered as usual. Whatever I said, she always objected with rude refusals, there was nothing she didn’t claim to be able to do without me. The doctor? She wanted to see him alone. The hospital? She wanted to go alone. The treatments? She wanted to take care of them alone. I don’t need anything, she grumbled, get out, you only bother me. Yet she got angry if I was just a minute late (Since you had other things to do it was pointless to tell me you were coming); she insulted me if I wasn’t ready to bring her immediately what she asked for and she would set off with her limping gait to show me that I was worse than Sleeping Beauty, that she was much more energetic than I (There, there, who are you thinking about, your head’s not there, Lenù, if I wait for you I’ll get cold); she criticized me fiercely for being polite to doctors and nurses, hissing, If you don’t spit in their faces, those pieces of shit don’t give a damn about you, they only help if they’re scared of you. But meanwhile inside her something was changing. Often she was frightened by her own agitation. She moved as if she feared that the floor might open beneath her feet. Once when I surprised her in front of the mirror—she looked at herself often, with a curiosity she had never had—she asked me, in embarrassment, do you remember when I was young? Then, as if there were a connection, she insisted—returning to her old violence—that I swear I wouldn’t take her to the hospital again, that I wouldn’t let her die alone in a ward. Her eyes filled with tears.

What worried me most was that she became emotional easily: she had never been that way. She was moved if I mentioned Dede, if she suspected that my father had no clean socks, if she spoke of Elisa struggling with her baby, if she looked at my growing stomach, if she remembered the countryside that had once extended all around the houses of the neighborhood. With the illness there came, in other words, a weakness she hadn’t had before, and that weakness lessened her anxiety, transformed it into a capricious suffering that frequently brought tears to her eyes. One afternoon she burst out crying because she had thought of Maestra Oliviero, although she had always detested her. You remember, she said, how she insisted that you take the test for admission to middle school? And the tears poured down without restraint. Ma, I said, calm down, what’s there to cry about? It shocked me seeing her so desperate for nothing, I wasn’t used to it. She, too, shook her head, incredulous, she laughed and cried, she laughed to let me know that she didn’t know what there was to cry about.

42.

It was this frailty that slowly opened the way to an intimacy we had never shared. At first she was ashamed of being ill. If my father or my brothers or Elisa and Silvio were present at a moment of weakness she hid in the bathroom, and when they urged her tactfully (Ma, how do you feel, open the door) she wouldn’t open it, she answered inevitably: I’m fine, what do you want, why don’t you leave me in peace in the bathroom, at least. With me, on the other hand, out of the blue, she let go, she decided to show me her sufferings unashamedly.

It began one morning, at her house, when she told me why she was lame. She did it spontaneously, with no preamble. The angel of death, she said proudly, touched me when I was a child, with the exact same illness as now, but I screwed him, even though I was just a girl. And you’ll see, I’ll screw him again, because I know how to suffer—I learned at the age of ten, I haven’t stopped since—and if you know how to suffer the angel respects you, after a while he goes away. As she spoke she pulled up her dress and showed me the injured leg like the relic of an old battle. She smacked it, observing me with a fixed half-smile on her lips and terrified eyes.