Now, whether that was the truth or not, it was my first experience of privation. I felt the painful void that usually opens up when something we thought we could never be separated from is suddenly taken away from us. I said nothing. And when she added: close the door, please, I left the room.
I stood for a while in front of the closed door, dazed, waiting for her to give me the street atlas. She didn’t, and so I retreated almost on tiptoe to my room to study. But, naturally, I didn’t open a book; my head began to pound out, as if on a keyboard, plans that until a moment before had been inconceivable. There’s no need for my mother to give me the map, I’ll get it, I’ll study it, and I’ll walk to Aunt Vittoria’s. I’ll walk for days, for months. How that idea seduced me. Sun, heat, rain, wind, cold, and I who was walking and walking, through countless dangers, until I met my own future as an ugly, faithless woman. I’ll do it. Most of those unknown street names that my mother had listed had stayed in my mind, I could immediately find at least one of them. Pianto especially went around and around in my head. A cemetery whose name meant weeping must be a very sad place, and so my aunt lived in an area where one felt pain or perhaps inflicted it. A street of torments, a stairway, thorn bushes that scratched your legs, wild, mud-spattered stray dogs with enormous drooling jaws. I thought of looking for that place in the street atlas, and I went to the hall, where the telephone was. I tried to pull out the atlas, which was squeezed between massive telephone books. But as I did so I noticed on top of the pile the address book in which my parents had written down the numbers they habitually used. How could I not have thought of that. Probably Aunt Vittoria’s number was in the address book, and if it was there, why wait for my parents to call her? I could do it myself. I took the book, went to the letter “V,” found no Vittoria. So I thought: she has my last name, my father’s last name, Trada, and I immediately looked at the “T”s; there it was, Trada Vittoria. The slightly faded handwriting was my father’s, the name appeared amid many others, like a stranger.
For seconds my pulse raced, I was exultant, I seemed to be facing the entrance to a secret passage that would carry me to her without other obstacles. I thought: I’ll phone her. Right away. I’ll say: I’m your niece Giovanna, I need to meet you. Maybe she’ll come get me herself. We’ll set a day, a time, and meet here at the house, or down at Piazza Vanvitelli. I made sure that my mother’s door was closed, I went back to the telephone, I picked up the receiver. But just as I finished dialing the number and the phone was ringing, I got scared. It was, if I thought about it, after the photographs, the first concrete initiative I’d taken. That I was taking. I have to ask, if not my mother, my father, one of them has to give me permission. Prudence, prudence, prudence. But I had hesitated too long, a thick voice like that of one of the smokers who came to our house for long meetings said: hello. She said it with such determination, in a tone so rude, with a Neapolitan accent so aggressive, that that “hello” was enough to terrorize me and I hung up. I was barely in time. I heard the key turning in the lock, my father was home.
10.
I moved a few steps away from the telephone just as he came in, after setting the dripping umbrella on the landing, after carefully wiping the soles of his shoes on the mat. He greeted me but uneasily, without the usual cheerfulness, in fact cursing the bad weather. Only after taking off his raincoat did he concern himself with me.
“What are you up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Mamma?”
“She’s working.”
“Did you do your homework?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything you didn’t understand and want me to explain?”
When he stopped next to the telephone to listen to the answering machine, as he usually did, I realized that I had left the address book open to the letter “T.” He saw it, he ran a finger over it, closed it, stopped listening to the messages. I hoped he would resort to some joking remark, which would have reassured me. Instead, he caressed my head with the tips of his fingers and went to my mother. Contrary to his usual practice, he closed the door behind him carefully.
I waited, listening to them discuss in low voices, a hum with sudden peaks of single syllables: you, no, but. I went back to my room, but I left the door open, I hoped they weren’t fighting. At least ten minutes passed, finally I heard my father’s footsteps again in the hall, but not in the direction of my room. He went to his, where there was another telephone, and I heard him telephoning in a low voice, a few indistinguishable words and long pauses. I thought—I hoped—that he had serious problems with Mariano, that he must be discussing the usual things that were important to him, words I’d heard forever, like politics, value, Marxism, crisis, state. When the phone call ended, I heard him in the hall again, but this time he came to my room. In general he would go through innumerable ironic formalities before entering: may I come in, where can I sit, am I bothering you, sorry, but on that occasion he sat down on the bed and without preliminaries said in his coldest voice:
“Your mother has explained to you that I wasn’t serious, I didn’t mean to hurt you, you don’t resemble my sister in the least.”
I immediately started crying again, I stammered: it’s not that, Papa, I know, I believe you, but. He didn’t seem moved by my tears, he interrupted me, saying:
“You don’t have to explain. It’s my fault, not yours, it’s up to me to fix it. I just telephoned your aunt—Sunday I’ll take you to see her. All right?”
I sobbed:
“If you don’t want to, let’s not go.”
“Of course I don’t want to, but you do and we’ll go. I’ll drop you off at her house, you’ll stay as long as you want, I’ll wait outside in the car.”
I tried to calm down, I stifled my tears.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
We were quiet for a moment, then he made an effort to smile at me, he dried my tears with his fingers. But he couldn’t do it unaffectedly, he slid into one of his long, agitated speeches, mixing high and low tones. Remember this, Giovanna, he said. Your aunt likes to hurt me. I’ve tried in every way to reason with her, I helped her, I encouraged her, I gave her as much money as I could. It was useless, she’s taken every word of mine as bullying, every kind of help she has considered a wrong. She’s proud, she’s ungrateful, she’s cruel. So I have to tell you this: she will try to take your affection away from me, she’ll use you to wound me. She’s already used our parents that way, our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles and cousins. Because of her, nobody in our family loves me. And you’ll see that she’ll try to get you, too. That possibility—he said, tense as I had almost never seen him—is intolerable to me. And he begged me—he really begged me, he joined his hands and waved them back and forth—to calm my anxieties, anxieties with no basis, but not to listen to her, to put wax in my ears like Odysseus.