The first years of our marriage were in many ways happy. We both worked in the same high school on the outskirts of Rome, and we’d rented, for a song, a lovely apartment in a small building in Montesacro. It belonged to some relatives of Nadia, who hailed from Protola Peligna, in Abruzzo, along with the rest of her extensive family. We furnished it with care but saying “we” would be to boast; it was my wife who saw to most of it, all I did was arrange the books and a few photos and binders bulging with papers in the chilly room I chose as my study.
It was a cheerful house, the rooms swelled with morning sun and right away we felt at home there. We were in the middle of a garden that radiated intoxicating smells. The earth smelled now of strawberries, now of mushrooms, now of resin, and almost always of damp soil. From the balconies we could see other gardens, and a building from the 1950’s that, both in inclement weather and under a clear sky, looked like the outline of an enormous, tranquil beast. On certain mornings the blue sky rested atop a motionless mist that hid the larch trees, and everything seemed miraculously still, as if the traffic roaring toward the ring road were not just a few steps away.
Nadia had gone to university in Naples, where she’d lived until graduating. She spoke of that city fondly, but she didn’t love it. Instead, she loved every stone, every leaf of the Peligna Valley, and when she praised the quality of the air—the air of her childhood—it was as if she were praising her very mother, the cheerful teacher at an elementary school who spoke to adults they way she’d always spoken to children. Even when it came to the house in Montesacro, we’d ended up in it not so much because the rent was cheap but because those stones and spaces were linked to her family, so that Nadia felt safe there. Surrounded by nature, she was relieved, given that the oppressive qualities of the city were kept at bay.
I—I must admit it—grew slowly accustomed to the idyll of married life, though I’d never been keen on idylls. When I was a bachelor, at Easter or Christmas, or even on a weekend or a day I didn’t have to teach, I couldn’t wait to go down to Naples, the city where I’d been born, to the Vasto where I had relatives, friends, and memories from adolescence and childhood. But I also liked staying in Rome, in San Lorenzo, where the studio apartment I’d shared with Teresa was located, and the activities linked to my studies, and political passions, and debates about the state of the planet, and bouts of drinking and poker games, love affairs both flighty and tempestuous. It’s not that I didn’t like Montesacro, I did, but the way I liked to spend my free time didn’t jibe with Nadia’s. She loved staying home to study or going for walks along the quiet avenues of our neighborhood, through the city’s big villas and their grounds, Villa Torlonia, Villa Borghese, Villa Ada; or better still, taking the car to parts of Abruzzo that she’d known intimately for ages, spending Sundays with her relatives from Pratola, most of all her father, a quiet man who taught science and had been a school principal for many years. So, what can I say? In the beginning, I longed for my bachelor days, but since I liked whatever my wife liked, I soon ended up liking her way of spending time.
Of course, Nadia had immediately picked up on the fact that I was a bit uneasy deep down, and when she heard me on the phone with people I’d perhaps spent time with up until a few years before she’d say: go, they’re people you care about, I’m happy if you spend an evening with them, better yet, invite them over, I’d liked to meet them, we have the space, let’s throw a party. But I’d always reply, No, I’d rather be with you. And it was true, I loved combining my time with hers, talking about this or that, listening to her while she tried to explain to me the work she’d done for her thesis and what she was still working on thanks to the encouragement of an elderly professor who admired her deeply. But I must admit, I couldn’t manage to understand a damn thing about algebraic surfaces, and I’d tell her: I’m a literary nerd who’s still stuck on rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam—and I confessed that I was ashamed of that. How I wish, Nadia, that I had the kind of mind that could wrap itself around great literature and, at the same time, great theories like that of Galileo. But I don’t. Nevertheless, I promised her that I would try my best to understand her subject of study, because—I whispered, embracing her—I want to know everything there is to know about you, every last thing, and I’d proceed to kissing her, I was consumed with the desire to smack my lips over every inch of her skin, tormenting her and making her laugh. She would begin writhing immediately, and kicked back though she was still, and I threatened her, let me see what this is, over here, and don’t laugh, if you thrash around like this, I’ll end up hurting you to make you feel good, and meanwhile, with my voice that was as rough as an ogre’s, I’d called her Nigritella, Nigritella Rubra, like the famous orchid of the Peligna Valley, it was the nickname for a passion that could never end and for sex that, as soon as it was over, wanted to start up again.
Meanwhile a very brief article I’d written quite some time back was published in a triquarterly journal that dealt with education. I’d never had specific ambitions. My work as a teacher was enough, and a life full of reading, attention to others, affection. But in Teresa’s wake, I’d written out those pages and, after having set them aside for a while, given them to a friend to read, someone who knew all about the school system. I didn’t see or hear from this friend for months, until one morning when a female colleague, quite feisty, whom I’d met when I’d taken a few run-of-the-mill courses to qualify me to teach, called me at school to say:
—What have you gone and done?
—No idea, you tell me.
—You’ve written that public schools are only suited to those who don’t need them.
—Me? That’s not true.
—Liar, I have it here, in black and white. And I’m not the only one who’s angry. We all are. We’re writing a letter now, to say that a serious journal should never had published such a superficial article.
—You’ve misread it, I was speaking in general terms. I wasn’t alluding to teachers like you.
The public life of the essay I’d written began with that painful phone call, to the extent that I never bought the journal and I avoided talking about it with Nadia, and I even quickly forgot about the essay and about the phone call. Instead, I bought the subsequent issue because my friend got in touch and announced, cheerfully refusing to be more explicit, that in the issue that had just been released, I’d find a pleasant surprise. The editors—I discovered—had published the letter of complaint, which wasn’t so ferocious after all, rather, it was written in calm language and was sensibly argued. But—and this was the surprise—the letter was boxed inside a much longer piece, signed by a well-known pedagogue at the time, Stefano Itrò, who praised my little article in no uncertain terms, maybe even to excess.
When I read the two pieces to Nadia, in the kitchen, while outside—I recall—the cold felt Siberian, and the wind struck our little house, extracting terrifying sounds from within its walls, she asked:
—Why didn’t you ever mention it to me?
—What?
—Your essay.
—I wrote it before we got together.
—But you never mentioned it now that we’re married, either.
—It didn’t seem important. You work on things that are actually serious. I wrote a trifling thing.
—Did she read it back then?
—Who’s she?
—The woman you were with before me.
—Teresa? No, we’d already split up.
—I tell you all about my aspirations. You say nothing.
—I’ll go grab it and read you the whole thing out loud. You’ll see it’s not worth it.
The reply, unlike our typically polite exchanges, was harsh:
—If it’s not worth it, then don’t waste my time.
After a few days I understood why she was so tense. That very same morning she’d gone to the lab to drop off some urine to see if she was pregnant. She’d done it without telling me, those were days when women like Nadia (not Teresa who, every time her period vaguely tarried, said, are you sure you haven’t pulled a fast one on me?) skipped, slightly embarrassed, over certain manifestations of their bodies. One afternoon I came home after a boring meeting at school and saw that she was happy. She was officially pregnant, and she no longer cared about the fact that I hadn’t told her about my essay.