I tried to live up to that end. Nadia, meanwhile—set to work on our moving to a new place, in cahoots with Tilde and Itrò, and egged on largely by the wife of the latter, Ida: a pianist of discreet technical skill but very frequent professional engagements, painfully thin, and always dressed in black, as if she were already a widow. My wife had, for once and for all, become another person: from bearing three children, she had emerged, timidly at first, but then with growing determination, as a woman charged with energy, extremely cordial with my friends and acquaintances, and ready to display her practical side. Thanks to her, we left the apartment way out on Via Nomentana and rented another on the banks of the Tiber, in Flaminio, not too far from the luxurious dwelling of Mr. and Mrs. Itrò. After the initial difficulties, things got better, and even Emma, Sergio, and Ernesto, for whom the move had been hard, were convinced that our situation had improved. Now we lived in a place full of light. The two boys shared a nice big room, and Emma had a small one to herself. Nadia chose a room that overlooked the Tiber as her studio; I carved out some space on a meager enclosed veranda that looked out on a terrace, and beyond its railing, I could gaze out at antennas, terra-cotta roof tiles, and chimneys, or alternatively, my eyes would drop down into the deep, dark well of a little cloister.
For a while, we kept teaching at our school on the outskirts, but then that became onerous. Now we had to wake up at five-thirty, and even that wasn’t early enough, given the complicated needs of the family. But Itrò took this to heart, and soon found a way to transfer me to a prestigious high school in the center, and my wife to a technical school right by our apartment. And so it happened that, not without some melancholy, I left behind the school where I’d been teaching since I was twenty-five years old, where I’d met sixteen-year-old Teresa, where I’d been her teacher for three years, and where I’d met Nadia, back when she still dreamed of teaching at a university.
At the new school, I was welcomed with politeness, then with hostility, and in the end, quite soon, amiably. Naturally, with a few teachers and small groups of students, the enmity persisted, or rather, it tended to flare up when I published some article ranting at those who, either in a programmed way or for personal insufficiency, on all levels of the hierarchy, did a sloppy job of working or studying. But soon something happened, one of the many events that, back then, surprised me more than anyone. Franchino, about whom I’d by then forgotten, gave me a call. We got together, we had a beer, we talked a long while, and after that, he stopped by to see me every other week. We got to know each other quite well; he even showed up a few times at the school. And it was at the school that I discovered how famous he was, and incredibly revered for his commitment to union politics, above all by those who, as soon as I gave them cause, would criticize me harshly. These people couldn’t believe that Franchino deigned to chat with me in the atrium. Someone came forward, making respectful overtures, and began to listen in, and then another, later, asked me, disoriented: you know him? You’re friends? And there was confusion for a while. Who was I? A reactionary, a fellow traveler, or a real comrade? A few rushed to lift me out of my pigeonhole into their political and cultural one, others would grant me this upgrade only when Franchino, with just a few generous words, gave heft to what I wrote, and to me, in public. And so, after not too long, I felt completely at ease at the new school and, I must say, also getting along swimmingly with my former detractor.
I told Teresa, in the letters we continued to write each other, lots about Franchino. She replied by reminding me of how my great friendships in the past had all met with a terrible end. I had told her myself how quickly they’d developed, and how, just as quickly, they’d fizzled out. As a matter of fact, a few times, she’d been witness both to the first phase as well as the second. And she was right, that bond between me and Franchino was nothing new. I’d always aroused, in both sexes, a need for an indissoluble bond. Ever since I was a boy, I’d been considered indispensable; playmates and friends would want me all to themselves, they’d hound me. But then what would happen? It was as if everyone, each in a different way, got scared of how strong our bond was, and out of the blue, from being all too present, they turned into shades in my memory. Girls would turn this into a tragedy, so that most of my love affairs had ended in extremely painful separations. The males, on the other hand, tended to say abruptly, with no clear motive: it’s best we stop seeing each other.
This tendency had wounded me, and I’d always been wary of it. I felt like a book that people raved about at the start, but then, little by little, started to satisfy less, or even went downhill. My mother—my own mother, no less—hadn’t she behaved this same way? I’d been her favorite, but in a family where love wasn’t enough to erase the suffering. My father believed she was unfaithful—he’d had that fixation—and constantly yelled at her; she would reply, yelling back in turn: it’s not true, you’re crazy, you see things that don’t exist. I was so distressed by the affliction of both of them that I set about, early on, to distance them, to make them fade, to erase my love for them and, without realizing it, for anyone. My thoughts, I recall, even at the age of eight or nine, were cold-blooded. If she’s a whore, I said to myself, he shouldn’t just yell at her, he should kill her. And if she’s not, he needs to stop tormenting her, or I’ll grab the bread knife and kill him in his sleep. I saw the blood now of one, now the other, but without emotions, from afar. Once, in the kitchen, in our wretched kitchen in Naples, in the forties or start of the fifties, in the previous century, my mother had read something in my eyes, or maybe in the way my lips were twisted, and she told me I frightened her. I was frightening? Me? They were the ones who frightened me. How I’d suffered for what she’d said, but I’d squelched that suffering in my heart, to the point of suffocating it. Sometimes I’d circle around my mother to see if she’d caress me, but I don’t recall that she ever did.
But by the 1980’s, no one wanted to retreat from me. My three children were always by my side, people started to read what I’d written and what I was writing, Itrò was deeply fond of me, Tilde cared for me deeply, my new home welcomed the young and the old, men and women, all of them admired me, and for each, it was a struggle to bid me farewell. And then Franchino—he who, in the past had actually hated me—held on to me tight. When he’d come over, he made a habit of leaving at least an hour after the other guests. Once he asked me, on the q.t.:
—What about women? Do you know how many I’d have, if I were you?
—I don’t have any lovers.
—Never?
—Never.
—Not even one of these respectable ladies or young girls always buzzing around you?
—No one. I’m faithful to my wife.
He gave me a long, questioning look, unsure of whether or not to ask his next question.
—And your wife? he finally asked.
—What about my wife?
—Is your wife faithful to you?