“I know, but better than nothing.”
And at that point she took out of her bag the book I had given her, the volume of Beckett’s plays, and showed it to him.
“Have you read this?”
Nino took the book, examined it, admitted uneasily, “No.”
“So there is something you haven’t read.”
“Yes.”
“You should read it.”
Lila began to talk to us about the book. To my surprise she was very deliberate, she talked the way she used to, choosing the words so as to make us see people and things, and also the emotion she gave them, portraying them anew, keeping them there, present, alive. She said that we didn’t have to wait for nuclear war, in the book it was as if it had already happened. She told us at length about a woman named Winnie who at a certain point announced, another happy day, and she herself declaimed the phrase, becoming so upset that, in uttering it, her voice trembled slightly: another happy day, words that were insupportable, because nothing, nothing, she explained, in Winnie’s life, nothing in her gestures, nothing in her head, was happy, not that day or the preceding days. But, she added, the biggest impression had been made on her by a Dan Rooney. Dan Rooney, she said, is blind but he’s not bitter about it, because he believes that life is better without sight, and in fact he wonders whether, if one became deaf and mute, life would not be still more life, life without anything but life.
“Why did you like it?” Nino asked.
“I don’t know yet if I liked it.”
“But it made you curious.”
“It made me think. What does it mean that life is more life without sight, without hearing, even without words?”
“Maybe it’s just a gimmick.”
“No, what gimmick. There’s a thing here that suggests a thousand others, it’s not a gimmick.”
Nino didn’t reply. He said only, staring at the cover of the book as if that, too, needed to be deciphered, “Have you finished it?”
“Yes.”
“Will you lend it to me?”
That request disturbed me, I felt pained. Nino had said, I remembered it clearly, that he had little interest in literature, what he read was different. I had given that Beckett to Lila just because I knew that I couldn’t use it in conversation with him. And now that she was talking about it he was not only listening but asked to borrow it.
I said, “It’s Professor Galiani’s, she gave it to me.”
“Have you read it?” he asked me.
I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I added right away, “I was thinking of starting tonight.”
“When you’re finished will you give it to me?”
“If it interests you so much,” I said quickly, “you read it first.”
Nino thanked me, scratched away with his nail the trace of a mosquito from the cover, said to Lila, “I’ll read it overnight and tomorrow we can talk about it.”
“Not tomorrow, we won’t see each other.”
“Why?”
“I’ll be with my husband.”
“Oh.”
He seemed annoyed. I waited fearfully for him to ask me if the two of us would see each other. But he had a burst of impatience, he said, “I can’t tomorrow, either. Bruno’s parents arrive tonight and I have to go sleep in Barano. I’ll be back on Monday.”
Barano? Monday? I hoped that he would ask me to join him at the Maronti. But he was distracted, maybe his mind was still on Dan Rooney, who, not content with being blind, wished to become deaf and mute, too. He didn’t ask me anything.
49.
On the way home I said to Lila, “If I lend you a book, which, besides, isn’t mine, please don’t take it to the beach. I can’t give it back to Professor Galiani with sand in it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and cheerfully gave me a kiss on the cheek. She wanted to carry both my bag and Pinuccia’s, maybe to ask forgiveness.
Slowly my mood cleared. I thought that Nino hadn’t randomly alluded to the fact that he was going to Barano: he wanted me to know, and I decided independently to go and see him there. He’s like that, I said to myself, with growing relief, he needs to be pursued: tomorrow I’ll get up early and go. Pinuccia’s ill humor, on the other hand, continued. Usually she was quick to get angry but quick to get over it, too, especially now that pregnancy had softened not only her body but also the rough edges of her character. Instead she became increasingly fretful.
“Did Bruno say something unpleasant?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you not feel well?”
“I’m fine, I don’t even know what’s wrong with me.”
“Go and get ready, Rino will be here.”
“Yes.”
But she continued to sit in her damp bathing suit, leafing distractedly through a photonovel. Lila and I got dressed up, Lila especially decked herself out as if she were going to a party, and still Pinuccia did nothing. Then even Nunzia, who was laboring silently over the dinner preparations, said softly, “Pinù, what’s the matter, sweetie, aren’t you going to get dressed?” No answer. Only when we heard the roar of the Lambrettas and the voices of the two young men calling did Pina jump up and run to her room, crying, “Don’t let them come in, please.”
The evening was bewildering, for the husbands, too. Stefano, by now used to permanent conflict with Lila, found himself unexpectedly in the company of a girl who was very affectionate, yielding to caresses and kisses without her usual irritation; while Rino, accustomed to Pinuccia’s clingy coquettishness, intensified by her pregnancy, was disappointed that his wife didn’t come down the stairs to greet him, that he had to look for her in the bedroom, and when finally he embraced her, he immediately noticed the effort she made to act as if she were pleased. Not only that. While Lila laughed heartily when, after a few glasses of wine, the two men started in with the lively sexual allusions that indicated desire, Pinuccia, at a whispered remark from Rino, laughing, jerked away and hissed, in a half Italian, “Stop it, you’re a boor.” He got angry: “You call me a boor? Boor?” She resisted for a few minutes, then her lower lip trembled and she took refuge in her room.
“It’s the pregnancy,” Nunzia said, “you have to be patient.”
Silence. Rino finished eating, then, fuming, went to his wife. He didn’t come back.
Lila and Stefano decided to go out on the Lambretta to see the beach at night. They left laughing together, kissing. I cleared the table, as usual struggling with Nunzia, who didn’t want me to lift a finger. We talked about when she had met Fernando and they fell in love, and she said something that made a deep impression. She said, “For your whole life you love people and you never really know who they are.” Fernando was both good and bad, and she had loved him very much but she had also hated him. “So,” she emphasized, “there’s nothing to worry about: Pinuccia is in a bad mood but she’ll get over it; and you remember how Lina came back from her honeymoon? Well, look at them now. Life is like that: one day you’re getting hit, the next kissed.”
I went to my room, I tried to finish Chabod, but I recalled how Nino had been charmed by the way Lila talked about that Rooney, and the desire to waste time with the idea of nationhood vanished. Even Nino is evasive, I thought, even with Nino it’s hard to understand who he is. He seemed not to care about literature and yet Lila randomly picks up a book of plays, says two foolish things, and he becomes ardent about it. I rummaged among the books in search of other literary things, but I had none. I realized that a book was missing. Was that possible? Professor Galiani had given me six. Nino now had one, one I was reading, on the marble windowsill there were three. Where was the sixth?
I looked everywhere, even under the bed, and while I was looking I remembered that it was a book about Hiroshima. I was upset—surely Lila must have taken it while I was in the bathroom. What was happening to her? After years of shoes, engagement, love, grocery store, dealings with the Sol
aras, had she decided to revert to the person she had been in elementary school? Certainly there had already been a sign: she had wanted to make that bet, which, whatever its outcome, had surely been a way of demonstrating to me her wish to study. But had she followed up on that desire, had she actually done it? No. Yet had Nino’s conversation been enough—six afternoons of sun on the sand—to revive in her the desire to learn, maybe compete again to be the best? Was that why she had sung the praises of Maestra Oliviero? Why had she found it wonderful that someone should become passionate for his whole life only about important things and not those of daily life? I left my room on tiptoe, opening the door carefully, so that it wouldn’t squeak.
The house was silent, Nunzia had gone to sleep, Stefano and Lila weren’t back yet. I went into their room: a chaos of clothes, shoes, suitcases. On a chair I found the volume, it was titled Hiroshima the Day After. She had taken it without asking my permission, as if my things were hers, as if what I was I owed to her, as if even Professor Galiani’s attention to my education resulted from the fact that she, with a distracted gesture, with a tentative phrase, had put me in the position of gaining that privilege for myself. I thought of taking the book. But I was ashamed, I changed my mind, and left it there.
50.
It was a dull Sunday. I suffered from the heat all night, I didn’t dare open the window for fear of the mosquitoes. I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep again. Go to Barano? With what result? Spend the day playing with Ciro, Pino, and Clelia, while Nino took long swims or sat in the sun without saying a word, in mute conflict with his father. I woke up late, at ten, and as soon as I opened my eyes a sensation of loss, as if from a great distance, came over me and pained me.
I learned from Nunzia that Pinuccia and Rino had already gone to the beach, while Stefano and Lila were still sleeping. I soaked my bread in the caffelatte without wanting it, I conclusively gave up going to Barano. I went to the beach, anxious and sad.
I found Rino sleeping in the sun, his hair wet, his heavy body lying, stomach down, on the sand, and Pinuccia walking back and forth on the shore. I invited her to go toward the fumaroles, she refused rudely. I walked for a long time alone in the direction of Forio to calm myself.
The morning passed slowly. When I came back I went swimming, then lay in the sun. I had to listen to Rino and Pinuccia, who, as if I weren’t there, were murmuring to each other phrases such as:
“Don’t go.”
“I have to work: the shoes have to be ready for the fall. Did you see them, do you like them?”
“Yes, but the things Lina made you add are ugly, take them off.”
“No, they look good.”
“You see? What I say counts for nothing with you.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s very true, you don’t love me anymore.”
“I do love you, and you know how much I want you.”
“No way, look at the belly I have.”
“I’d give that belly ten thousand kisses. For the whole week all I do is think about you.”
“Then don’t go to work.”
“I can’t.”
“Then I’ll leave tonight, too.”
“We’ve already paid our share, you have to have your vacation.”
“I don’t want it anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because as soon as I fall asleep I have terrible dreams and I’m awake all night.”
“Even when you sleep with my sister?”
“Even more, if your sister could kill me, she would.”
“Go sleep with my mamma.”
“Your mamma snores.”
Pinuccia’s tone of voice was unbearable. All day I tried to figure out the reasons for her complaints. That she didn’t sleep much or very well was true. But that she wanted Rino to stay, or that she really wanted to leave with him, seemed to me a lie. At one point I was convinced that she was trying to tell him something that she herself didn’t know and so could express only in the form of peevishness. But then I forgot about it, I had other things to think about. Lila’s exuberance, first of all.
When she appeared at the beach with her husband, she seemed happier than the night before. She wanted to show him how she had learned to swim, and together they headed away from the shore—out where it’s deep, Stefano said, even though it was really only a few meters from the shore. With her elegant and precise strokes, and the rhythmic turn of the head to breathe that she had by now learned, moving her mouth away from the water, she immediately left him behind. Then she stopped to wait for him, laughing, until he caught up, clumsily flailing his arms, his head straight up, as he snorted at the water that sprayed in his face.
She was even livelier in the afternoon, when they went for a ride on the Lambretta. Rino wanted to drive around, too, and since Pinuccia refused—she was afraid of falling and losing the baby—he said to me, “You come, Lenù.” It was my first such experience, with Stefano in the lead, Rino following, and the wind, and the fear of falling or crashing, and the increasing excitement, the strong odor that came from the sweaty back of Pinuccia’s husband, and the swaggering self-confidence that pushed him to violate every rule and to respond to any protests according to the habits of the neighborhood, braking suddenly, threatening, always ready to fight to assert his right to do as he pleased. It was fun, a return to those feelings of a bad girl, very different from the ones Nino inspired in me when he appeared on the beach, in the afternoon, with his friend.
In the course of that Sunday I named the two boys often: I especially liked saying the name of Nino. I quickly noticed that both Pinuccia and Lila acted as if it hadn’t been the three of us who spent time with Bruno and Nino, but only me. As a result, when their husbands said goodbye, hurrying off to catch the ferry, Stefano asked me to say hello to Soccavo’s son for him, as if I were the only one who would have the opportunity to see him, and Rino teased me, with remarks like: Who do you like more, the son of the poet or the son of the mortadella maker? Who do you think is handsomer? as if his wife and sister had no basis for forming their own opinions.
Finally, the reactions of both to the departure of their husbands annoyed me. Pinuccia became cheerful, she wanted to wash her hair, which—she said aloud—was full of sand. Lila lounged about the house listlessly, then she lay down on her unmade bed, paying no attention to the mess in the room. When I went to say good night I saw that she hadn’t even undressed: she was reading the book about Hiroshima, frowning, eyes narrowed. I didn’t reproach her, I said only, perhaps a little sharply:
“How is it that you suddenly feel like reading again?”
“It’s none of your business,” she answered.
51.
On Monday Nino appeared, like a ghost evoked by my desire, not at four in the afternoon, as usual, but, surprisingly, at ten in the morning. We three girls had just arrived at the beach, resentful, each convinced that the others had spent too much time in the bathroom, Pinuccia particularly upset about how her hair had been ruined by her sleeping on it. It was she who spoke first, stern, almost aggressive. She asked Nino, even before he could explain to us, why in the world he had turned his schedule upside down:
“Why didn’t Bruno come, he had better things to do?”
“His parents are still here, they’re leaving at noon.”
“Then he’ll come?”
“I think so.”
“Because if he’s not coming I’m going back to sleep, with just the three of you I’ll be bored.”
And while Nino was telling us how terrible his Sunday in Barano had been, and so he had left early and, since he couldn’t go to Bruno’s, had come straight to the beach, she interrupted once or twice, asking in a whine: Who’s going to go swimming with me? Since both Lila and I ignored her, she went into the water angrily by herself.
Never mind. We preferred to listen attentively to the list of wrongs that Nino suffered at the hands of his father. A cheater, he called him, a malingerer. He had settled himself
in Barano, extending his leave from work on the ground of some feigned illness, which had been properly certified, however, by a health-service doctor who was a friend of his. “My father,” he said in disgust, “is in everything and for everything the negation of the general interest.” And then, without a break, he did something unpredictable. With a sudden movement that made me jump he leaned over and gave me a big, noisy kiss on the cheek, followed by the remark: “I’m really glad to see you.” Then, slightly embarrassed, as if he had realized that with that effusiveness toward me he might be acting rudely toward Lila, he said: “May I also give you a kiss?”
“Of course,” Lila answered, affably, and he gave her a light kiss, with no sound, a barely perceptible contact. After that he began to talk excitedly about the plays of Beckett: Ah, how he liked those guys buried in the ground up to their necks; and how beautiful the statement was about the fire that the present kindles inside you; and, even though among the thousand evocative things that Maddy and Dan Rooney said he had had a hard time picking out the precise point cited by Lila, well, the concept that life is felt more when you are blind, deaf, mute, and maybe without taste or touch was objectively interesting in itself. In his view it meant: Let’s get rid of all the filters that prevent us from fully savoring our being here and now, real.
Lila appeared bewildered, she said that she had thought about it and that life in the pure state frightened her. She expressed herself with some emphasis, she exclaimed, “Life without seeing and without speaking, without speaking and listening, life without a covering, without a container, is shapeless.” She didn’t use exactly those words, but certainly she said “shapeless” and she said it with a gesture of revulsion. Nino repeated reluctantly, “shapeless,” as if it were a curse word. Then he started talking again, even more overwrought, until, with no warning, he took off his shirt, revealing himself in all his dark thinness, grabbed us both by the hand, and dragged us into the water, as I cried happily, “No, no, no, I’m cold, no,” and he answered, “Here finally another happy day,” and Lila laughed.