“Contract?”
“Of course. Have you dealt with other publishers?”
“No. But I haven’t even reread what I wrote.”
“You wrote only a single draft, all at once?” she asked, vaguely ironic.
“Yes.”
“I assure you that it’s ready for publication.”
“I still need to work on it.”
“Trust yourself: don’t touch a comma, there is sincerity, naturalness, and a mystery in the writing that only true books have.”
She congratulated me again, although she accentuated the irony. She said that, as I knew, even the Aeneid wasn’t polished. She ascribed to me a long apprenticeship as a writer, asked if I had other things, appeared amazed when I confessed that it was the first thing I had written. “Talent and luck,” she exclaimed. She told me that there was an unexpected opening in the editorial list and my novel had been considered not only very good but lucky. They thought of bringing it out in the spring.
“So soon?”
“Are you opposed?”
I quickly said no.
Gigliola, who was behind the bar and had listened to the phone call, finally asked me, inquisitively, “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said and left.
I wandered around the neighborhood overwhelmed by an incredulous joy, my temples pounding. My answer to Gigliola hadn’t been a hostile way of cutting her off, I really didn’t know. What was that unexpected announcement: a few lines from Pietro, long-distance words, nothing certainly true? And what was a contract, it meant money, it meant rights and duties, was I in danger of getting in some trouble? In a few days I’ll find out that they’ve changed their mind, I thought, the book won’t be published. They’ll reread the story, those who found it good will find it pointless, those who haven’t read it will be angry with those who were eager to publish it, they’ll all be angry with Adele Airota, and Adele Airota herself will change her mind, she’ll feel humiliated, she’ll blame me for disgracing her, she’ll persuade her son to leave me. I passed the building where the old neighborhood library was: how long it had been since I’d set foot in it. I went in, it was empty, it smelled of dust and boredom. I moved absentmindedly along the shelves, I touched tattered books without looking at title or author, just to feel them with my fingers. Old paper, curled cotton threads, letters of the alphabet, ink. Volumes, a dizzying word. I looked for Little Women, I found it. Was it possible that it was really about to happen? Possible that what Lila and I had planned to do together was happening to me? In a few months there would be printed paper sewn, pasted, all covered with my words, and on the cover the name, Elena Greco, me, breaking the long chain of illiterates, semi-literates, an obscure surname that would be charged with light for eternity. In a few years — three, five, ten, twenty — the book would end up on those shelves, in the library of the neighborhood where I was born, it would be catalogued, people would ask to borrow it to find out what the daughter of the porter had written. I heard the flush of the toilet, I waited for Maestro Ferraro to appear, just as when I was a diligent girclass="underline" the same fleshless face, perhaps more wrinkled, the crew-cut hair white but still thick over the low forehead. Here’s someone who could appreciate what was happening to me, who would more than justify my burning head, the fierce pounding in my temples. But from the bathroom a stranger emerged, a small rotund man of around forty.
“Do you want to take out books?” he asked. “Do it quickly because I’m about to close.”
“I was looking for Maestro Ferraro.”
“Ferraro is retired.”
Do it quickly, he was about to close.
I left. Just now that I was becoming a writer, there was no one in the entire neighborhood capable of saying: What an extraordinary thing you’ve done.
121
I didn’t imagine that I would earn money. But I received the draft of the contract and discovered that, surely thanks to Adele’s support, the publisher was giving me an advance of two hundred thousand lire, a hundred on signing and a hundred on delivery. My mother was speechless, she couldn’t believe it. My father said, “It takes months for me to earn that much money.” They both began to brag in the neighborhood and outside: our daughter has become rich, she’s a writer, she’s marrying a university professor. I flourished again, I stopped studying for the teachers’ college exam. As soon as the money arrived I bought a dress, some makeup, went for the first time in my life to the hairdresser, and left for Milan, a city unknown to me.
At the station I had trouble orienting myself. Finally I found the right metro, and arrived nervously at the door of the publishing house. I gave a thousand explanations to the porter, who hadn’t asked me anything, and who in fact, while I spoke, continued to read the newspaper. I went up in the elevator, I knocked, I went in. I was struck by how neat and tidy it was. My head was crowded with all that I had studied and I wanted to display it, to demonstrate that even if I was a woman, even if you could see my origins, I was a person who at twenty-three, had won the right to publish that book, and now, nothing nothing nothing about me could be called into question.
I was greeted politely, led from office to office. I talked with the editor who was working on my manuscript, an old man, bald, with a very pleasant face. We talked for a couple of hours, he praised me, he cited Adele Airota often, with great respect, he showed me some revisions that he suggested, he left me a copy of the text and his notes. As he was saying goodbye he added, in a serious voice, “The story is good, a contemporary story very well expressed, the writing is always surprising; but that’s not the point. It’s the third time I’ve read the book and on every page there is something powerful whose origin I can’t figure out.” I turned red, thanked him. Ah, how much I had been able to do, and how rapid it all was, how well liked I was and how likable I had become, I could speak about my studies, where I had done them, about my thesis on the fourth book of the Aeneid: I replied with courteous precision to courteous observations, mimicking perfectly the tones of Professor Galiani, of her children, of Mariarosa. A pretty, amiable woman named Gina asked if I needed a hotel and, at my nod of assent, found me one on Via Garibaldi. To my great amazement I discovered that everything was charged to the publisher, everything that I spent on food, the train tickets. Gina told me to present a record of expenses, I would be reimbursed, and she asked me to say hello to Adele for her. “She called me,” she said. “She’s very fond of you.”
The next day I left for Pisa, I wanted to embrace Pietro. On the train I considered one by one the editor’s notes and, satisfied, I saw my book with the eyes of one who praised it and was working to make it even better. I arrived very pleased with myself. My fiancé found me a place to sleep at the house of an old assistant professor of Greek literature whom I also knew. In the evening he took me to dinner and to my surprise showed me my manuscript. He, too, had a copy and had made some notes, we looked at them together one by one. They bore the imprint of his usual rigor and had to do mostly with the vocabulary.
“I’ll take care of them,” I said thanking him.
After dinner we walked to an isolated meadow. After we had held and touched each other for a long time in the cold, obstructed by coats and woolen sweaters, he asked me to revise and polish with care the pages where the protagonist loses her virginity on the beach. I said, bewildered, “It’s an important moment.”
“You yourself said that that part is a bit risqué.”
“At the publisher no one objected.”