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[...] Everything that struck me — my studies, books, Franco, Pietro, the children, Nino, the earthquake — would pass, and I, whatever I among those I was accumulating, I would remain firm, I was the needle of the compass that stays fixed while the lead traces circles around it. Lila on the other hand — it seemed clear to me now, and it made me proud, it calmed me, touched me — struggled to feel stable. She couldn’t, she didn’t believe it. However much she had always dominated all of us and had imposed and was still imposing a way of being, on pain of her resentment and her fury, she perceived herself as a liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed only at containing herself. When, in spite of her defensive manipulation of persons and things, the liquid prevailed, Lila lost Lila, chaos seemed the only truth, and she — so active, so courageous — erased herself and, terrified, became nothing.
For a few days she lingered in a state of peaceful joy. I brought Dede, whom she loved dearly, and I let her hold Imma. She was even affectionate toward Elsa, whom she had never liked much. I observed her: she was a gray, wrinkled old woman, even though she wasn’t a hundred but sixty. I then first felt the impact of time, the force that was pushing me toward forty, the velocity with which life was consumed, the concreteness of the exposure to death: If it’s happening to her, I thought, there’s no escape, it will happen to me as well.
The words she had said to me at the end (You’re you, I have confidence) also stayed with me for a long time. She died convinced that because of how I was made, because of the resources I had accumulated, I would not be overwhelmed by anything. That idea worked inside me and in the end helped me. I decided to prove to her that she had been right. I began again in a disciplined way to take care of myself. I returned to using every bit of empty time for reading and writing. I lost what little interest I’d had in petty politics — I couldn’t get excited at the intrigues of the five governing parties and their quarrels with the Communists, as Nino now was actively doing — but I continued to follow closely the corrupt and violent drift of the country. I collected feminist readings and, still fortified by the small success of my last book, proposed articles to the new journals directed at women. But, I have to admit, a great part of my energy was focused on convincing my publisher that I was moving along with the new novel.
No, Nino no longer persuaded me the way he used to. He expressed himself, I don’t know how to say it, in a provocative and yet opaque way, as if precisely he, who extolled the long view, were able to follow only the daily moves and counter-moves of a system that to me, to his own friends, seemed rotten to the core. Enough, he would insist, let’s end the childish aversion to power: one has to be on the inside in the places where things are born and die: the parties, the banks, television. And I listened, but when he turned to me I lowered my gaze. I no longer concealed from myself that his conversation partly bored me, and partly seemed to point to a brittleness that dragged him down.
Over time I had become used to his penchant for seductive behavior, I considered it a sort of tic. I was used above all to the way women immediately liked him. But at a certain point something was spoiled there, too. I began to notice that he had an impressive number of women friends, and that they all seemed to brighten in his vicinity. I knew that light well, I wasn’t surprised. Being close to him gave you the impression of being visible, especially to yourself, and you were content. It was natural, therefore, that all those girls, and older women, too, were fond of him, and if I didn’t exclude sexual desire I also didn’t consider it essential. I stood confused on the edge of the remark made long ago by Lila, In my opinion he’s not your friend, either, and tried as infrequently as possible to transmute it into the question: Are these women his lovers? So it wasn’t the hypothesis that he was betraying me that disturbed me but something else. I was convinced that Nino encouraged in those people a sort of maternal impulse to do, within the limits of the possible, what could be useful to him.
I began to study him while he was engaged in that work of seduction. He often invited young and not so young women to dinner at my house, alone or with their husbands or companions. I observed with some anxiety that he knew how to give them space: he ignored the male guests almost completely, making the women the center of his attention, and at times focusing on one in particular. Many evenings I witnessed conversations that, although they took place in the presence of other people, he was able to conduct as if he were alone, in private, with the only woman who at that moment appeared to interest him. He said nothing allusive, or compromising, he merely asked questions.
On one occasion I tried, with affectionate irony, to show him up as a liar in front of everyone:
“Don’t believe him. At first he helped me clear, he washed the dishes: today he doesn’t even pick his socks up off the floor.”
“That’s not true,” he protested.
“Yes, it is. He wants to liberate the women of others but not his.”
“Well, your liberation shouldn’t necessarily signify the loss of my freedom.”
In remarks like this, too, uttered playfully, I soon recognized, uneasily, echoes of my conflicts with Pietro. Why had I gotten so angry at my ex-husband while with Nino I let it go? I thought: maybe every relationship with men can only reproduce the same contradictions and, in certain environments, even the same smug responses. But then I said to myself: I mustn’t exaggerate, there’s a difference, with Nino it’s certainly going better.
[...] She shouted, assaulting my nerves: Imma, that’s enough, you’re bothering me, you’re getting me dirty. And to me: Mamma, make her stop. I couldn’t bear it anymore, I let out a scream that frightened all three of them. We crossed the city in a state of tension broken only by the whispering of Dede and Elsa, who were trying to understand if, again, something irreparable was about to happen in their lives.
I couldn’t even tolerate that consultation. I couldn’t bear anything anymore: their childhood, my role as mother, Imma’s babbling. And then the presence of my daughters in the car clashed with the images of coitus that were constantly before me, with the odor of sex that was still in my nostrils, with the rage that was beginning to advance, along with the most vulgar dialect. Nino had fucked the servant and then gone to his appointment, not giving a shit about me or even about his daughter. Ah, what a piece of shit, all I did was make mistakes. Was he like his father? No, too simple. Nino was very intelligent, Nino was extraordinarily cultured. His propensity for fucking did not come from a crude, naïve display of virility based on half-fascistic, half-southern clichés. What he had done to me, what he was doing to me, was filtered by a very refined knowledge. He dealt in complex concepts, he knew that this way he would offend me to the point of destroying me. But he had done it just the same. He had thought: I can’t give up my pleasure just because that shit can be a pain in the ass. Like that, just like that. And surely he judged as philistine — that adjective was still very widespread in our world — my possible reaction. Philistine, philistine. I even knew the line he would resort to in sophisticated justification: What’s the harm, the flesh is weak and I’ve read all the books. Exactly those words, nasty son of a bitch. Rage had opened up a pathway in the horror. I shouted at Imma—even at Imma—to be quiet. When I reached Lila’s house I hated Nino as until that moment I had never hated anyone.
“You want to continue with Nino?”
I could hear her opposition and I almost shouted:
“What can I do?”
“The only thing possible: leave him.”
For her it was the right solution, she had always wanted it to end like that, she had never concealed it from me. I said:
“I’ll think about it.”
“No, you won’t think about it. You’ve already decided to pretend it was nothing and go on.”
I avoided answering but she pressed me, she said that I shouldn’t throw myself away, that I had another destiny, that if I went on like that I would lose myself. I noticed that she was becoming harsh, I felt that to restrain me she was on the point of telling me what for a long time I had wanted to know and what for a long time she had been silent about. I was afraid, but had I not myself, on various occasions, tried to urge her to be clear? And now, had I not come to her also so that finally she would tell me everything?
“No, to produce ideas you don’t have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.”
“Then why are you with them?”
I answered: I’m not with them, I’m here. I wanted her to feel that I was part of an upper-class world and yet different. She herself pushed me in that direction. She was amused if I was sarcastic about my colleagues. Sometimes I had the impression that she insisted so that I would confirm that I really was one of those who told people how things stood and what they should think. The decision to live in the neighborhood made sense to her only if I continued to count myself among those who wrote books, contributed to magazines and newspapers, appeared sometimes on television. She wanted me as her friend, her neighbor, provided I had that aura. And I supported her. Her approval gave me confidence. I was beside her in the Villa Comunale, with our daughters, and yet I was definitively different, I had a wide-ranging life. It flattered me to feel that, compared to her, I was a woman of great experience and I felt that she, too, was pleased with what I was. I told her about France, Germany, and Austria, about the United States, the debates I had taken part in, here and there, the men there had been recently, after Nino. She was attentive to every word with a half smile, never saying what she thought. Not even the story of my occasional relationships set off in her a need to confide.