The Story of the Lost Child

I felt strong, no longer a victim of my origins but capable of dominating them, of giving them a shape, of taking revenge on them for myself, for Lila, for whomever.

adjusted the blanket to protect her from the drafts

He was a man who emanated authority, even though authority is a patina and at times it doesn’t take much to crack it, if only for a few minutes, and glimpse a less edifying person.

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?

I’m taking—I said, adapting Franco’s words—what is indispensable to me now, and as soon as I’ve consumed his face, his words, every desire, I’ll send him away. When I waited for him in vain for days I told myself it was better that way, I was busy, he was with me too much. And when I felt the sting of jealousy I tried to calm myself by whispering: I am the woman he loves. And if I thought of his children I said to myself: He spends more time with Dede and Elsa than with Albertino and Lidia. Naturally it was all true and all false. Yes, the force of Nino’s attraction would wear out. Yes, I had a lot of things to do. Yes, Nino loved me, he loved Dede and Elsa. But there were also others, yes, whom I pretended to ignore. Yes, I was more attracted to him than ever. Yes, I was ready to neglect everything and everyone if he needed me. Yes, his ties to Eleonora, Albertino, and the newborn Lidia were at least as strong as his ties to me and my daughters. I lowered dark curtains over those yeses, and if in fact here or there a tear in the fabric made evident the true state of things I quickly resorted to big words about the world to come: everything is changing, we are inventing new forms of living together, and other nonsense of the sort that I myself uttered in public or wrote every time it happened.

in his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust

Although I now wrote about women’s autonomy and discussed it everywhere, I didn’t know how to live without his body, his voice, his intelligence. It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters. At the idea of hurting him and of no longer seeing him I withered painfully, the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother, and the woman-mother was disconnected from the woman-lover, and the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions. As I traveled toward Milan, I discovered that, with Lila set aside, I didn’t know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris.

“You’re just like your mother.”
“It’s not true.”
“You’re right, it’s not true: you’re like your mother if she had had an education and had started writing novels.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re worse.”

Seeing how cheap and ugly they were I felt confused. Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. I thought: now that Lila has let herself be seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.

f I’d known that to get a diploma and a degree all you needed to have was free time, to be shut up in a place without worrying about earning a living, and, with discipline, learning by heart pages and pages of some books, I would have done it before,” he said once, in a teasing tone.