But when I went back up to Via Tasso and she hurried to the neighborhood, the gap that we put between us made other gaps conspicuous. This new solidarity was undoubtedly real. We liked being together, it lightened our lives. But there was one unequivocal fact: I told her almost everything about myself, she said almost nothing about herself. While I couldn’t not tell her about my mother, or an article that I was writing, or problems with Dede and Elsa, or even about my situation as a lover-wife (it was enough not to specify the lover-wife of whom, not to utter the name of Nino too often; otherwise I could confide freely), when she talked about herself, her parents, her siblings, Rino, the anxieties Gennaro caused her, our friends and acquaintances, Enzo, Michele and Marcello Solara, the entire neighborhood, she was vague, she didn’t seem to trust me completely. Evidently I remained the one who had gone away, and who, even though I had returned, now had another view, lived in upper-class Naples, could not be fully welcomed back.
45.
That I had a sort of double identity was true. Up on Via Tasso Nino brought me his educated friends, who treated me with respect, loved my second book in particular, wanted me to look at what they were working on. We talked late into the night with an attitude of worldliness. We wondered if there was still a proletariat or not, we alluded to the socialist left and, with bitterness, to the Communists (
But I wasn’t confined to Via Tasso; I moved around, I didn’t want to be a prisoner of Naples. I often went to Florence with the children. Pietro, who had long since broken politically with his father, was now—unlike Nino, who was growing closer to the socialists—openly Communist. I stayed a few hours, listening to him in silence. He sang the praises of the competent honesty of his party, he cited the problems of the university, he informed me of the success his book was having among academics, especially the English and Americans. Then I set off again. I left the girls with him and Doriana and went to Milan, to the publisher, in particular to oppose the campaign of denigration in which Adele was persisting. My mother-in-law—the director himself had reported, one evening when he took me to dinner—did not miss any opportunity to say bad things about me and was labeling me with the reputation of a fickle and unreliable person. As a result I tried to be engaging with everyone I happened to meet at the publisher’s. I made sophisticated conversation, I was agreeable to every request from the publicity department, I claimed to the editor that my new book was at a good point, even though I hadn’t even started it. Then I set off again, stopped to get the children, and slipped into Naples, readjusting to the chaotic traffic, to the endless transactions to obtain each thing that was mine by right, to exhausting and quarrelsome lines, to the struggle to assert myself, to the permanent anxiety of going with my mother to doctors, hospitals, labs for tests. The result was that on Via Tasso and throughout Italy I felt like a woman with a small reputation, whereas in Naples, especially in the neighborhood, I lost my refinement, no one knew anything about my second book, if injustices enraged me I moved into dialect and the coarsest insults.
The only bond between high and low seemed to me blood. There was more and more killing, in the Veneto, in Lombardy, in Emilia, in Lazio, in Campania. I glanced at the newspaper in the morning and sometimes the neighborhood seemed more tranquil than the rest of Italy. It wasn’t true, of course, the violence was the same. Men fought with each other, women were beaten, people were murdered for obscure reasons. Sometimes, even among the people I loved, the tension rose and tones became threatening. But I was treated with respect. Toward me there was the benevolence that is shown to a guest who is welcomed but mustn’t stick her nose into matters she’s not familiar with. And in fact I felt like an external observer, with inadequate information. I constantly had the impression that Carmen or Enzo or others knew much more than I did, that Lila told them secrets that she didn’t reveal to me.
