said we would see Aunt Vittoria.”
“I said you had to talk about it with your father.”
“I thought you talked to him.”
“He’s very busy right now.”
“Let’s go the two of us.”
“Better if he takes care of it. And then it’s almost the end of the school year, you have to study.”
“You two don’t want to take me. You’ve already decided not to.”
My mother assumed a tone similar to the one she’d used until a few years earlier when she wanted to be left alone and would propose some game that I could play by myself.
“Here’s what we’ll do: you know Via Miraglia?”
“No.”
“And Via della Stadera?”
“No.”
“And the Pianto cemetery?”
“No.
“And Poggioreale?”
“No.”
“And Via Nazionale?”
“No.”
“And Arenaccia?”
“No.”
“And the whole area that’s called the Industrial Zone?”
“No, Mamma, no.”
“Well, you have to learn, this is your city. Now I’ll give you the map, and after you’ve done your homework you study the route. If it’s so urgent for you, one of these days you can go by yourself, to see Aunt Vittoria.”
That last phrase confused me, maybe it hurt me. My parents wouldn’t even send me by myself to buy bread down the street. And when I was supposed to meet Angela and Ida, my father or, more often, my mother drove me to Mariano and Costanza’s house and then came to pick me up. Now, suddenly, they were prepared to let me go to unknown places where they themselves went unwillingly? No no, they were simply tired of my complaining, they considered unimportant what to me was urgent, in other words they didn’t take me seriously. Maybe at that moment something somewhere in my body broke, maybe that’s where I should locate the end of my childhood. I felt as if I were a container of granules that were imperceptibly leaking out of me through a tiny crack. And I had no doubt that my mother had already talked to my father and, in agreement with him, was preparing to separate me from them and them from me, to explain to me that I had to deal with my unreasonable, perverse behavior by myself. If I looked closely behind her kind yet weary tone, she had just said: you’re starting to annoy me, you’re making my life difficult, you don’t study, your teachers complain, and you won’t stop this business about Aunt Vittoria, ah, what a fuss, Giovanna, how can I convince you that your father’s remark was affectionate, that’s enough now, go and play with the atlas and don’t bother me anymore.
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