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“It’s certainly exciting, but if it’s as you say, these machines will take the place of men, and skills will disappear; at Fiat robots already do the welding. A lot of jobs will be lost.”
Enzo at first agreed, then he seemed to have second thoughts, and finally he resorted to the only person whose authority he credited:
“Lina says it’s all a good thing: humiliating and stultifying jobs should disappear.”
Lina, Lina, Lina. I asked teasingly: if Lina is so good, why do they give you three hundred and fifty thousand lire and her a hundred thousand, why are you the boss and she’s the assistant? Enzo hesitated again, he seemed on the point of saying something pressing, which he then decided to abandon. He mumbled: What do you want from me, private ownership of the means of production should be abolished. In the kitchen the hum of the refrigerator could be heard for a few seconds. Pietro stood up and said: Let’s go to bed.
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At night every imagining seemed a thing that had happened or was still happening, and I was afraid for her, I saw her captured, wounded, like so many women and men in the chaos of the world, and I felt pity for her, but I also envied her. The childish conviction that she had always been destined for extraordinary things was magnified. And I regretted that I had left Naples, detached myself from her, the need to be near her returned. But I was also angry that she had set out on that road without consulting me, as if she hadn’t considered me up to it. And yet I knew a lot about capital, exploitation, class struggle, the inevitability of the proletarian revolution. I could have been useful, participated. And I was unhappy. I lay in bed, discontent with my situation as a mother, a married woman, the whole future debased by the repetition of domestic rituals in the kitchen, in the marriage bed.
“You should leave your wife more time.”
“She has all day available.”
“I’m not kidding. If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one.”
“What’s the crime?”
“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”
I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm.
“Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes, the essential thing is that she not take time from me.”
“If she doesn’t take it from you, then who can she take it from?”
Pietro frowned.
So Nino had come with his wife; I was terrified by the comparison. I knew what I was like, I knew the crude physicality of my body, but for a good part of my life I had given it little importance. I had grown up with one pair of shoes at a time, ugly dresses sewed by my mother, makeup only on rare occasions. In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele’s guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes—especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general but for a man—preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn’t, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn’t. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then the anguish of not succeeding, of not seeming pretty, of not managing to conceal with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections. But I had done it. I had done it also for Nino, recently. I had wanted to show him that I was different, that I had achieved a refinement of my own, that I was no longer the girl at Lila’s wedding, the student at the party of Professor Galiani’s children, and not even the inexperienced author of a single book, as I must have appeared in Milan. But now, enough. He had brought his wife and I was angry, it seemed to me a mean thing. I hated competing in looks with another woman, especially under the gaze of a man, and I suffered at the thought of finding myself in the same place with the beautiful girl I had seen in the photograph, it made me sick to my stomach. She would size me up, study every detail with the pride of a woman of Via Tasso taught since birth to attend to her body; then, at the end of the evening, alone with her husband, she would criticize me with cruel lucidity.
Nino stayed for ten days. Nothing of what happened in that time had anything to do with the yearning for seduction I had experienced years earlier. I didn’t joke with him; I didn’t act flirtatious; I didn’t assail him with all sorts of favors; I didn’t play the part of the liberated woman, modeling myself on my sister-in-law; I didn’t tenderly seek his gaze; I didn’t contrive to sit next to him at the table or on the couch, in front of the television; I didn’t go around the house half-dressed; I didn’t try to be alone with him; I didn’t graze his elbow with mine, his arm with my arm or breast, his leg with my leg. I was timid, restrained, spoke concisely, making sure only that he ate well, that the girls didn’t bother him, that he felt comfortable. And it wasn’t a choice, I couldn’t have behaved differently. He joked a lot with Pietro, with Dede, with Elsa, but as soon as he spoke to me he became serious, he seemed to measure his words as if there were not an old friendship between us. And it seemed right to me to do the same. I was very happy to have him in the house, and yet I felt no need for confidential tones and gestures; in fact, I liked staying on the edge and avoiding contact between us. I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down.
He left an hour later, even though Pietro sullenly insisted that he stay, even though Dede burst into tears. My husband went to wash, and reappeared soon afterward ready to go out. Looking down he said: I didn’t tell the police that Pasquale and Nadia were in our house; and I did it not to protect you but because I think dissent now is being confused with crime. I didn’t understand right away what he was talking about. Pasquale and Nadia had completely vanished from my mind, and they had a hard time re-entering. Pietro waited for a few seconds in silence. Maybe he wanted me to show that I agreed with his observation, and wished to face this day of heat and exams knowing that we were close again, that for once, at least, we thought in the same way. But I merely gave him a distracted nod. What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle. It was a relief when he, the witness to order and disorder, closed the door behind him. I couldn’t bear to be under his gaze, I feared that lips raw from kissing, the night’s weariness, the body hypersensitive, as if burned, all would suddenly become visible.
Seeing each other was a terrible idea. We discovered that, instead of waning, desire had flared up and made a thousand demands with brazen urgency. If at a distance, on the telephone, words allowed us to fantasize, constructing glorious prospects but also imposing on us an order, containing us, frightening us, finding ourselves together, in the tiny space of the car, careless of the terrible heat, gave concreteness to our delirium, gave it the cloak of inevitability, made it a tile in the great subversive season under way, made it consistent with the forms of realism of that era, those which asked for the impossible.
Nino arrived around three in the afternoon; I don’t know what nonsense he had told his wife. We made love until evening. For the first time he had the luxury of dedicating himself to my body with a devotion, an idolatry that I wasn’t prepared for. I tried to be his equal, I wanted at all costs to seem good to him. But when I saw him exhausted and happy, something suddenly went bad in my mind. For me that was a unique experience, for him a repetition. He loved women, he adored their bodies as if they were fetishes. I didn’t think so much of the other women of his I knew about, Nadia, Silvia, Mariarosa, or his wife, Eleonora. I thought instead of what I knew well, the crazy things he had done for Lila, the frenzy that had brought him close to destroying himself. I recalled how she had believed in that passion and had clung to him, to the complicated books he read, his thoughts, his ambitions, to affirm herself and give herself the chance for change. I remembered how she had collapsed when Nino abandoned her. Did he know how to love and induce one to love only in that excessive way, did he not know others? Was this mad love of ours the repeat of other mad loves? Was he exploiting a prototype: wanting me in this way, without caring about anything, was it the same way he had wanted Lila? Didn’t even his coming to my and Pietro’s house resemble Lila’s taking him to the house where she and Stefano lived? Were we not doing but redoing?
But I didn’t get discouraged. I was in a state of such exaltation that I couldn’t feel that I was wrong. In fact, it seemed to me that even the pain I caused, the humiliation and attacks I endured, were working in my favor. That unbearable experience not only would help me to become something I would be satisfied with but in the end, by inscrutable means, would also be useful to those who now were suffering. Eleonora would understand that with love there is nothing to be done, that it’s senseless to say to a person who wants to go away: No, you must stay. And Pietro, who surely in theory already knew that precept, would only need time to assimilate it and change it to wisdom, to the practice of tolerance.
Now the date of the departure was approaching, but things with Pietro didn’t improve, any agreement, even just for that trip to Montpellier, seemed impossible. If you go, he said, I’ll never let you see the children again. Or: If you take the children I’ll kill myself. Or: I’ll report you for abandonment of the conjugal home. Or: let’s the four of us go on a trip, let’s go to Vienna. Or: Children, your mother prefers Signor Nino Sarratore to you.
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