But according to the gynecologist, whom Nino invited to dinner one night with her husband, the delivery had been normal, any other woman would have given birth without all that talk. What complicated it was only Lila’s teeming head. The doctor had been very irritated. You’re doing the opposite of what you should, she had reprimanded her, you hold on when instead you should push: go on, go, push. According to her—she now felt an open aversion toward her patient, and there in my house, at dinner, she didn’t hide it but, rather, displayed it in a conspiratorial way, especially to Nino—Lila had done her best not to bring her infant into the world. She held onto it with all her strength and meanwhile gasped: Cut my stomach open, you get it out, I can’t do it. When the gynecologist continued to encourage her, Lila shouted vulgar insults at her. She was soaked in sweat, the gynecologist told us, her eyes were bloodshot below her broad forehead, and she was screaming: You talk, you give orders, you come here and do it, you piece of shit, you push the baby out if you can, it’s killing me.
I was annoyed and I said to the doctor: You shouldn’t tell us these things. She became even more irritated, she exclaimed: I’m telling you because we’re among friends. But then, stung, she assumed the tone of the doctor and said with an affected seriousness that if we loved Lila we should (she meant Nino and me, obviously) help her concentrate on something that truly gave her satisfaction, otherwise, with her dancing brain (she used precisely that expression), she would get herself and those around her in trouble. Finally, she repeated that in the delivery room she had seen a struggle against nature, a terrible clash between a mother and her child. It was, she said, a truly unpleasant experience.
The infant was a girl, a girl and not a boy as everyone had predicted. When I was able to go to the clinic, Lila, although she was exhausted, showed me her daughter proudly. She asked:
“How much did Imma weigh?”
“Seven pounds.”
“Nunzia weighs almost nine pounds: my belly was small but she is large.”
She really had named her for her mother. And in order not to upset Fernando, her father, who was even more irascible in old age than he’d been as a young man, and Enzo’s relatives, she had her baptized in the neighborhood church and held a big party in the Basic Sight offices.
68.
The babies immediately became an excuse to spend more time together. Lila and I talked on the phone, met to take them for a walk, spoke endlessly, no longer about ourselves but about them. Or at least so it seemed to us. In reality a new richness and complexity in our relationship began to manifest itself through a mutual attention to our daughters. We compared them in every detail as if to assure ourselves that the health or illness of the one was the precise mirror of the health or illness of the other and as a result we could readily intervene to reinforce the first and cut off the second. We told each other everything that seemed good and useful for healthy development, engaging in a sort of virtuous competition of who could find the best food, the softest diaper, the most effective cream for a rash. There was no pretty garment acquired for Nunzia—but now she was called Tina, the diminutive of Nunziatina—that Lila did not also get for Imma, and I, within the limits of my finances, did the same. This onesie was cute on Tina, so I got one for Imma, too—she’d say—or these shoes were cute on Tina and I got some for Imma, too.
“You know,” I said one day, smiling, “that you’ve given her the name of my doll?”
“What doll?”
“Tina, you don’t remember?”
She touched her forehead as if she had a headache, and said:
“It’s true, but I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“She was a beautiful doll—I was attached to her.”
“My daughter is more beautiful.”
