I returned to Via Tasso determined to cut off every relation with Nino. I found the house empty and in perfect order, I sat beside the French door that led to the balcony. Life in that apartment was over, in a couple of years the reasons for my very presence in Naples had been consumed.
I waited with growing anxiety for him to appear. Several hours passed, I fell asleep, I woke with a start, when it was dark. The telephone was ringing.
I hurried to answer, sure that it was Nino, but it was Antonio. He was calling from a café nearby, he asked if I could meet him. I said: Come up. I heard his hesitation, then he agreed. I had no doubt that Lila had sent him, and he admitted it himself right away.
“She doesn’t want you to do something foolish,” he said, making an effort to speak in Italian.
“You can stop me?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
He sat down in the living room, after refusing the coffee I wanted to make for him, and deliberately, in the tone of someone who is used to giving detailed reports, listed all Nino’s lovers: names, surnames, professions, relatives. Some I didn’t know, they were relationships from long ago. Others he had brought to dinner at my house and I remembered them, affectionate with me and the children. Mirella, who had taken care of Dede, Elsa, and also Imma, had been with him for three years. And his relationship with the gynecologist who had delivered my daughter, and Lila’s too, was even longer. Antonio enumerated a sizable number of females—he used that word—with whom, at various times, Nino had applied the same scheme: an intense period of meetings, then occasional encounters, in no case a definitive break. He’s faithful, Antonio said, sarcastically, he never really cuts off relations: now he goes to that one, now he goes to that other.
“Does Lina know?”
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Recently.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
“I wanted to tell you right away.”
“And Lina?”
“She said to wait.”
“And you obeyed her. You two let me cook and set the table for people he had betrayed me with the day before or would betray me with the day after. I ate with people whose foot or knee or something else he touched under the table. I entrusted my children to a girl he jumped on as soon as I looked away.”
Antonio shrugged, he looked at his hands, clasped them, and left them between his knees.
“If they tell me to do a thing I do it,” he said in dialect.
But then he got confused. I almost always do it, he said, and tried to explain: sometimes I obey money, sometimes respect, in some cases myself. As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love. As if by way of example, he told me again about how, years before, he had spied on Nino and Lila for the Solaras. In that case, he said proudly, I didn’t do what they ordered. He hadn’t felt like handing Lila over to Michele and had called Enzo so that he could get her out of trouble. He spoke again of the beating he had given Nino. I did it, he muttered, most of all because you loved him and not me, and then because if that piece of shit went back to Lina, she would have stayed faithful to him and would be ruined forever. You see, he concluded, in that case, too, there was little to be gained by talking, Lina wouldn’t have listened to me, love not only doesn’t have eyes, it doesn’t have ears, either.
I asked him, stunned:
“In all these years you never told Lina that Nino was going back to her that night?”
“No.”
“You should have.”
“Why? When my head says, it’s better to act in this way, I do it, and I don’t think about it anymore. If you go back to it you only make trouble.”
How wise he had become. That was when I learned that the story of Nino and Lila would have lasted a little longer if Antonio hadn’t cut it off with a beating. But I immediately discarded the hypothesis that they would have loved each other all their lives, and perhaps both he and she would have become utterly different people: to me it seemed not only unlikely but unbearable. Instead I sighed with impatience. Antonio had decided for his own reasons to save Lila and now Lila had sent him to save me. I looked at him, I said with explicit sarcasm something about his role as a protector of women. He should have showed up in Florence, I thought, when I was hanging in the balance, when I didn’t know what to do, and made the decision for me with his gnarled hands, as years before he had decided for Lila. I asked him teasingly:
“What orders do you have now?”
“Before sending me here, Lina forbade me to break the face of that shit. But I did it once and I’d like to do it again.”
“You’re unreliable.”
“Yes and no.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s a complicated situation, Lenù, stay out of it. You just tell me that the son of Sarratore should repent the day he was born and I’ll make him repent.”
I couldn’t contain myself, I burst out laughing at the mannered seriousness with which he expressed himself. It was the tone he had learned in the neighborhood as a boy, the formal tone of the upright male: he who in reality had been timid and fearful. What an effort it must have been, but now it was his tone, he wouldn’t have known how to have any other. The only difference, in relation to the past, was that in that situation he was making an effort to speak in Italian and the difficult language was coming to him with a foreign accent.
He darkened because of my laughter, he looked at the black panes of the window, he said: Don’t laugh. I saw that his forehead was shiny in spite of the cold, he was sweating from the shame of having seemed ridiculous to me. He said: I know I don’t express myself well, I know German better than Italian. I became aware of his odor, the way it had smelled at the time of the ponds. I’m laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who’ve wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I’m laughing out of despair, because I’ve never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don’t know if you can imagine, because at this moment I’m so ill that I think I’m fainting.
In fact I felt weak, and dead inside. So I was suddenly grateful to Lila for having had the sensitivity to send me Antonio, he was the only person whose affection at that moment I didn’t doubt. Besides, his lean body, his big bones, his thick eyebrows, his coarse features had remained familiar to me, they didn’t repel me, I wasn’t afraid of them. At the ponds, I said, it was cold and we didn’t feel it: I’m trembling, can I sit next to you?
He looked at me uncertainly, but I didn’t wait for his assent. I got up, I sat on his knees. He didn’t move, he extended only his arms, for fear of touching me, and let them fall to the sides of the chair. I leaned against him, resting my face between his neck and his shoulder, it seemed to me that for a few seconds I fell asleep.
“Lenù.”
“Yes?”
“Do you not feel well?”
“Hold me, I have to warm up.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure you want me.”
“I want you now, this time only: it’s something you owe me and I you.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I love you and you, instead, have always loved only him.”
“Yes, but I never desired anyone the way I desired you, not even him.”
I talked for a long time, I told him the truth, the truth of that moment and the truth of the faraway time of the ponds. He was the discovery of excitement, he was the pit of the stomach that grew warm, that opened up, that turned liquid, releasing a burning indolence. Franco, Pietro, Nino had stumbled on that expectation but had never managed to satisfy it, because it was an expectation without a definite object, it was the hope of pleasure, the hardest to fulfill. The taste of Antonio’s mouth, the perfume of his desire, his hands, the large sex taut between his thighs constituted a before that couldn’t be matched. The after had never been truly equal to our afternoons hidden by the skeleton of the canning factory, although they consisted of love without penetration and often without orgasm.
I spoke in an Italian that was complex. I did it more to explain to myself what I was doing than to clarify to him, and this must have seemed to him an act of trust, he seemed content. He held me, he kissed me on one shoulder, then on the neck, finally on the mouth. I don’t think I’ve had any other sexual relation like that, which abruptly joined the ponds of more than twenty years earlier and the room on Via Tasso, the chair, the floor, the bed, suddenly sweeping away everything that was between us, that divided us, what was me, what was him. Antonio was delicate, he was brutal, and I was the same, no less than him. He demanded things and I demanded things with a fury, an anxiety, a need for violation that I didn’t think I harbored. At the end he was annihilated by wonder and I was, too.
“What happened?” I asked, stunned, as if the memory of that absolute intimacy had already vanished.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but luckily it happened.”
I smiled.
“You’re like everybody else, you’ve betrayed your wife.”
I wanted to joke, but he took me seriously, he said in dialect:
“I haven’t betrayed anyone. My wife—before now—doesn’t exist yet.”
An obscure formulation but I understood. He was trying to tell me that he agreed with me, seeking to communicate, in turn, a sense of time outside the present chronology. He wanted to say that we had lived now a small fragment of a day that belonged to twenty years earlier. I kissed him, I whispered: Thank you, and I told him I was grateful because he had chosen to ignore the brutal reasons for all that sex—mine and his—and to see in it only the need to close our accounts.
Then the telephone rang, I went to answer, it might be Lila who needed me for the children. But it was Nino.
“Luckily you’re home,” he said breathlessly. “I’m coming right away.”
“No.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Let me explain, it’s essential, it’s urgent.”
“No.”
“Why?”
I told him and hung up.