I felt dark, not in the sense that my spirits darkened, but as if my gaze illuminated Nadia, and left me in the shadows. It went on for a long time; my wife beating herself up while feeling sorry for the old mathematician impoverished by Eros, and I exclaiming that that man must also have a wife, children, grandchildren, admirers—which was why everyone, absolutely everyone should know how loathsomely he’d behaved with one of the most promising mathematicians in Italy. And at that exact time, it was clear how I might see myself in the ancient academic who, I imagined, was afraid that Nadia might spread the word about the foul business he’d conducted. And so, precisely while I was wishing, above all, that the grandchildren knew what a deplorable grandfather they had, I recognized within me, just as sincerely, the fear of humiliation, the shame, and I said to myself: keep quiet, what are you saying, that guy hasn’t done anything bad, not compared to what you confided to Teresa, imagine if she came back from America now and talked about it with Nadia, with Tilde, with Itrò, with your readers, and said: you understand the kind of man he is, that Pietro Vella, come on, go get an axe and split his head in two. That’s where the darkness originated from, and already, as I was staring at Nadia, talking to her, illuminated by her generous pity, I quickly sought shelter in my dark depression, and softened my words, muttering: rushing to save a filthy old pig who’s ruining your career seems truly excessive to me; but maybe I’m being too hard on him, I didn’t mean the stuff about the axe and splitting his head in two.
From that moment, slowly, the terrible things my wife had gone through became a joke between us. If, in the course of opening a particularly stubborn can of beans, I summoned the axe I wanted to use for the Fucking Academic God—that was now my name for the old mathematician—we’d burst out laughing. And in the beginning I laughed a lot, she less, and then it was her turn to laugh a lot while I piped down. After a bit I convinced myself that the worst was over, and one Sunday afternoon we got into bed, when Emma was at her grandparents’, and she pressed up against me whispering, Come inside me, it’s the right time. I understood what she was implying, and I happily obeyed. A month later she was pregnant, she was excited to carry the child, and then Sergio was born.
But Nadia wasn’t satisfied. During her second pregnancy, she started to study English and Spanish, she struggled to read novels in their original languages, and she wanted nothing more to do with algebraic surfaces. Given that she now spoke to me mixing bits of foreign languages into her Italian, she started up a little ditty about how lovely it was to be incinta, pregnant, embarazada. One night she murmured into my ear, laughing nervously, forget the condom, embarrass me a third time, impregnate me. I was disoriented. I asked: are you joking or being serious? She wasn’t joking. At the very same time that women, even those in Valle Peligna, were trying to overthrow their suffocating lives, Nadia had decided to overwhelm herself with math homework, me, and lots of kids. And so I made her happy, and I did this, above all, because it seemed that being pregnant suffused her with an engaging vitality. But the third time around was so tough, the labor so complicated, and life with three small children so hard—the last one, Ernesto, was born enormous but then immediately turned thin and inconsolable—that she no longer turned to books, she stopped studying foreign languages, and now she only asked: did you check, are you sure the condom didn’t break?