At a certain point I went to look for Dede. I found her in the hall with Mirko and her doll. They were pretending to be a mother and father with their baby, but it wasn’t peaceful: they were pretending to have a fight. I stopped. Dede instructed Mirko:
You have to hit me, understand
? The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence. I observed Dede carefully; she seemed to resemble Pietro. Mirko, on the other hand, was just like Nino.
Not long afterward, the underground war that occasionally erupted into the newspapers and on television—plans for coups, police repression, armed bands, firefights, woundings, killings, bombs and slaughters I was struck again by in the cities large and small. Carmen telephoned, she was extremely worried, she hadn’t heard from Pasquale in weeks.
“Did he by any chance visit you?”
“Yes, but at least two months ago.”
“Ah. He asked for your phone number and address: he wanted to get your advice, did he?”
“Advice about what?”
“I don’t know.”
“He didn’t ask me for advice.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, he was fine, he was happy.”
Carmen had asked everywhere, even Lila, even Enzo, even the people in the collective on Via dei Tribunali. Finally she had called Nadia’s house, but the mother had been rude and Armando had told her only that Nadia had moved without leaving any address.
“They must have gone to live together.”
“Pasquale and that girl? Without leaving an address or phone number?”
We talked about it for a long time. I said maybe Nadia had broken with her family because of Pasquale, who knows, maybe they had gone to live in Germany, in England, in France. But Carmen wasn’t persuaded. Pasquale is a loving brother, she said, he would never disappear like that. She had instead a terrible presentiment: there were now daily clashes in the neighborhood, anyone who was a comrade had to watch his back, the fascists had even threatened her and her husband. And they had accused Pasquale of setting fire to the fascist headquarters and to the Solaras’ supermarket. I hadn’t known either of those things, I was astonished: This had happened in the neighborhood, and the fascists blamed Pasquale? Yes, he was at the top of the list, he was considered someone to get out of the way. Maybe, Carmen said, Gino had him killed.
“You went to the police?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“They nearly arrested me, they’re more fascist than the fascists.”
I called Professor Galiani. She said to me sarcastically: What happened, I don’t see you in the bookshops anymore or even in the newspapers, have you already retired? I said that I had two children, that for now I was taking care of them, and then I asked her about Nadia. She became unfriendly. Nadia is a grownup, she’s gone to live on her own. Where, I asked. Her business, she answered, and, without saying goodbye, just as I was asking if she would give me her son’s telephone number, she hung up.
I spent a long time finding a number for Armando, and had an even harder time finding him at home. When he finally answered, he seemed happy to hear from me, and even too eager for confidences. He worked a lot in the hospital, his marriage was over, his wife had left, taking the child, he was alone and eccentric. He stumbled when he talked about his sister. He said quietly: I don’t have any contact with her. Political differences, differences about everything. Ever since she’s been with Pasquale you can’t talk to her. I asked: Did they go to live together? He broke off: Let’s say that. And as if the subject seemed too frivolous, he avoided it, moved on, making harsh comments on the political situation, talking about the slaughter in Brescia, the bosses who bankrolled the parties and, as soon as things looked bad, the fascists.
I called Carmen again to reassure her. I told her that Nadia had broken with her family to be with Pasquale and that Pasquale followed her like a puppy.
“You think?” Carmen asked.
“I’m sure, love is like that.”
She was skeptical. I insisted, I told her in greater detail about the afternoon they had spent at my house and I exaggerated a little about how much they loved each other. We said goodbye. But in mid-June Carmen called again, desperate. Gino had been murdered in broad daylight in front of the pharmacy, shot in the face. I thought first that she was giving me that news because the son of the pharmacist was part of our early adolescence and, fascist or not, certainly that event would upset me. But the reason was not to share with me the horror of that violent death. The carabinieri had come and searched the apartment from top to bottom, even the gas pump. They were looking for any information that might lead them to Pasquale, and she had felt much worse than when they had come to arrest her father for the murder of Don Achille.
Carmen was overwhelmed by anxiety, she wept because of what seemed to her the revival of persecution. I, on the other hand, couldn’t get out of my mind the small barren square the pharmacy faced, and the shop’s interior, which I had always liked for its odor of candies and syrups, the dark-wood shelves with their rows of colored jars, and, above all, Gino’s parents, who were so kind, leaning out from behind the counter as if from a balcony: surely they had been there, had been startled by the sound of the shots, from there, perhaps, had watched, eyes wide, as their son fell in the doorway, had seen the blood. I wanted to talk to Lila. But she appeared completely indifferent, she dismissed the episode as one of many, she said only: Of course the carabinieri would go after Pasquale. Her voice knew how to grip me immediately, to persuade me; she emphasized that even if Pasquale had murdered Gino—which she ruled out—she would be on his side, because the carabinieri should have gone after the dead man for all the terrible things he had done, rather than our friend, a construction worker and Communist. After which, in the tone of someone who is going on to more important things, she asked if she could leave Gennaro with me until school began. Gennaro? How would I manage? I already had Dede and Elsa, who wore me out. I said:
“Why?”
“I have to work.”
“I’m about to go to the beach with the girls.”
“Take him, too.”
“I’m going to Viareggio and staying till the end of August. He barely knows me, he’ll want you. If you come, too, that’s fine, but alone I don’t know.”
“You swore you’d take care of him.”
“Yes, but if you were ill.”
“And how do you know I’m not ill?”
“Are you ill?”
“No.”
“So why can’t you leave him with your mother or Stefano?”
She was silent for a few seconds, she became rude.
“Will you do me this favor or not?”
I gave in immediately.
“All right, bring him here.”
“Enzo will bring him.”
Enzo arrived on a Saturday night in a bright white Fiat 500 that he had just bought. Merely seeing him from the window, hearing the dialect in which he said something to the boy who was still in the car—it was him, identical, the same composed gestures, the same physical compactness—gave solidity back to Naples, to the neighborhood. I opened the door with Dede hanging on my dress, and a single glance at Gennaro was enough to know that Melina, five years earlier, had seen correctly: the child, now that he was ten, showed plainly that he had in him not only nothing of Nino but nothing of Lila; he was, rather, a perfect replica of Stefano.
The observation provoked an ambiguous sentiment, a mixture of disappointment and satisfaction. I had thought that, since the boy would be with me for so long, it would be nice to have in the house, along with my daughters, a child of Nino; and yet I noted with pleasure that Nino had left Lila nothing.
Enzo wanted to start off again right away, but Pietro welcomed him courteously and obliged him to stay for the night. I tried to get Gennaro to play with Dede, even if there was almost six years’ difference between them, but while she was clearly eager he refused, shaking his head decisively. I was struck by the way Enzo cared for the son who wasn’t his, indicating that he knew his habits, his tastes, his needs. Although Gennaro protested because he was sleepy, Enzo gently insisted that he pee and brush his teeth before going to bed, and, when the child collapsed, he delicately undressed him and put his pajamas on.
While I washed the dishes and cleaned up, Pietro entertained the guest. They were sitting at the kitchen table; they had nothing in common. They tried politics, but when my husband made a positive reference to the progressive rapprochement of the Communists and the Christian Democrats, and Enzo said that if that strategy prevailed Berlinguer would be giving a hand to the worst enemies of the working class, they ended the discussion in order to avoid a quarrel. Pietro then politely asked him about his job, and Enzo must have found his interest sincere, because he was less laconic than usual and started on a dry, perhaps slightly too technical account. IBM had just decided to send Lila and him to a bigger company, a factory near Nola that had three hundred technical workers and forty clerical employees. The financial offer had left them stunned: three hundred and fifty thousand lire a month for him, who was the department head, and a hundred thousand for her, as his assistant. They had accepted, naturally, but now they had to earn all that money, and the work to be done was really tremendous. We are responsible, he explained—and from then on he used “we”—for a System 3 Model 10, and we have at our disposal two operators and five punch-card operators, who are also checkers. We have to collect and put into the System 3 a huge quantity of information, which is necessary so that the machine can do things like—I don’t know—the accounting, wages, invoicing, the warehousing, management of the salespeople, orders to suppliers, production, and shipping. For this purpose we use little cards—that is, the punch cards. The holes are everything, the effort is concentrated there. I’ll give you an example of the work it takes to program a simple operation like issuing invoices. You begin with the paper invoices, on which the warehouseman has marked both the products and the client they’ve been delivered to. The client has a code, his personal information has a code, and so do the products. The punch-card operators sit at the machines, press a key to release the cards, then by typing on the keys reduce the bill number, the client code, the personal-data code, the product-quantity code, to holes in the cards. To help you understand, a thousand bills for ten products make ten thousand punch cards with holes like the ones a needle would make: is it clear, do you follow?
So the evening passed. Pietro every so often nodded to show that he was following and even tried to ask some questions (
The holes count but do the unperforated parts also count?
). I confined myself to a half smile while I washed and polished. Enzo appeared pleased to be able to explain to a university professor, who listened to him like a disciplined student, and an old friend who had her degree and had written a book, and now was tidying up the kitchen, things that they knew nothing about. But in truth I was quickly distracted. An operator took ten thousand cards and inserted them in a machine that was called a sorter. The machine put them in order according to the product code. Then there were two readers, not in the sense of people but in the sense of machines programmed to read the holes and the non-holes in the cards. And then? There I got lost. I got lost amid codes and the enormous packets of cards and the holes that compared holes, that sorted holes, that read holes, that did the four operations, that printed names, addresses, totals. I got lost following a word I’d never heard before,
file
, which Enzo kept using, pronouncing it
fi-le,
this
file
, that
file
, continually. I got lost following Lila, who knew everything about those words, those machines, that work, and was doing that work now in a big company in Nola, even if with the salary her companion was earning she could be more of a lady than me. I got lost following Enzo, who could say proudly:
Without her I wouldn’t be able to do it
. Thus he conveyed to us his love and devotion, and it was clear that he liked to remind himself and others of the extraordinary quality of his woman, whereas my husband never praised me but, rather, reduced me to the mother of his children; even though I had had an education he did not want me to be capable of independent thought, he demeaned me by demeaning what I read, what interested me, what I said, and he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness.
Finally I, too, sat down at the table, depressed because neither of the two had made a move to say: Can we help you set the table, clear, wash the dishes, sweep the floor. An invoice, Enzo was saying, is a simple document, what does it take to do by hand? Nothing, if I have to create ten a day. But if I have to do a thousand? The readers read two hundred cards a minute, so two thousand in ten minutes, and ten thousand in fifty. The speed of the machine is an enormous advantage, especially if it’s enabled to do complex operations, which require a lot of time. And that’s what Lila’s and my work is: to prepare the System 3 to do complex operations. The development phases of the programs are really wonderful. The operational phases a little less. The cards often jam and break in the sorters. Very often a container in which the cards have just been sorted falls and the cards scatter on the floor. But it’s great, it’s great even then.
Just to feel that I was present, I interrupted, saying:
“Can he make a mistake?”
“He who?”
“The computer.”
“There’s no he, Lenù, he is me. If he makes a mistake, if he gets in trouble, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve gotten in trouble.”
“Oh,” I said, and then, “I’m tired.”
Pietro nodded in agreement and seemed ready to end the evening. He turned to Enzo:
“It’s certainly exciting, but if it’s as you say, these machines will take the place of men, and skills will disappear; at Fiat robots already do the welding. A lot of jobs will be lost.”