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of Nena’s that perhaps was my misunderstanding, that surely was my misunderstanding, and Mama would tell me was a misunderstanding if only I would ask her. But the fact is that I had no desire to ask her.
    On Monday a letter arrived from Aunt Yvonne, and we were very close to tears. She was not coming to visit us in September as she had promised when she left. She and Rodolfo went to Chamonix, not because they liked Chamonix: “I can’t stand the mountains, you know, they make me sad, but everyone comes here in the summer, all of Rodolfo’s colleagues, I mean. And if you don’t have at least a minimum of social life here, I mean if you don’t put yourself forward a little, they look at you as if you’re a baboon. They already have a superiority complex about Italians. If you even hint that you don’t like the chic places, you’re laughed at, no one looks at you anymore. Rome was really almost better, except for the bother and the salary. At least there was sun there. The climate here is infamous…”
    Perhaps it was because of that letter that Mama’s silencesbegan, or maybe because of that nonsense that Nena had said—who knows?—but more probably because of the letter. Not that Mama was moody, and not even melancholy. Rather she was absent. You saw that something occupied her thoughts. You said to her, “Excuse me, Mama. May I have the caramel pudding that was left over from dinner?” or whatever, and she didn’t answer you. After a few minutes she said, “Oh, did you ask me something?” And her eyes were fixed far away beyond the kitchen window on the avenue that ended in the country, as if someone were about to arrive. And you repeated the same question to her as before: “I asked you for the leftover pudding, Mama.” But the answer didn’t come this time either, only a vague gesture in the air that could mean, “All right, do whatever you want. Don’t you see that I’m thinking of something else?” And so even the desire for the dessert left you, so what sense was there in sitting down to eat the caramel pudding? Wasn’t it better to go and study Latin in order to occupy your mind a little?
    I learned the fourth declension perfectly. It’s true that it didn’t present the same difficulties as the third—you can’t even compare them. Even the directions in the first paragraph said so: “The fourth declension does not present particularities of any kind, save for rare exceptions to be learned from memory, for which see paragraph four,” and I very nearly felt like mourning the third declension. If that week I’d at least had a really difficult thing to learn, I’d be distracted a little, but with that stupid
domus-dornus
I did nothing but think of that statement of Nena’s, of Aunt Yvonne who wasn’t coming, and Mama’s silences. In my notebook I wrote little sentences like
silentium domus triste est
, which I then cancelled out with many little crosses connected to each other like barbed wire. It was a method my desk-mate had taught me. He called it “erasure by barbed wire,” and I liked it very much.
    After that exceptional day in which she had taken an afternoon nap, Nena had resumed her habits and again spent theafternoons in the
pied-à-terre
. But she didn’t sing “Banana Boat’’ anymore, she realized that it wasn’t right. And by then she didn’t come under the window anymore to bother me or to invite me to be the architect who was courting her. She resigned herself to being alone in the garden. Who knows how bored she was, poor Nena. Now and then, glancing from the window, I saw her intent on combing Belafonte with a large pink comb that had arrived for her from Lausanne together with some hair curlers and a drier with batteries that blew real hot air. They came in a little box on which was pictured a doll covered with curls and the inscription
La petite coiffeuse
. But she played wearily, as if against her will, and who knows how much she wanted to come to invite me