Nunzia didn’t say another word. A little later Lila came out of the room in a yellow dress with long sleeves and big dark glasses, like a movie star. She didn’t say a word to us. She didn’t at the Port, or on the boat, or even when we reached the neighborhood. She went home with her husband without saying goodbye.
As for me, I decided that from that moment on I would live for myself only, and as soon as we returned to Naples that was what I did, I imposed on myself an attitude of absolute detachment. I didn’t look for Lila, I didn’t look for Nino. I accepted without argument the scene that my mother made, as she accused me of having gone to play the lady on Ischia without thinking about how we needed money at home. Even my father, although he praised my healthy appearance, the golden blond of my hair, did the same: as soon as my mother attacked me in his presence, he backed her up. “You’re a grownup,” he said, “you see what you have to do.”
Earning money was, in fact, an urgent necessity. I could have demanded from Lila what she had promised me in compensation for my coming to Ischia, but after that decision to cut myself off from her, and especially after the brutal words that Stefano had addressed to Nunzia (and in some way also to me), I didn’t do it. For the same reason I absolutely ruled out the idea of her buying my school books, as she had the year before. When I saw Alfonso I asked him to tell her that I had already taken care of the books, and closed the discussion.
But after the August holiday I presented myself again at the bookstore on Mezzocannone, and partly because I had been an efficient and disciplined salesclerk, partly because of my looks, which had been improved by the sun and the sea, the owner, after some resistance, gave me back my job. He insisted, however, that I should not quit when school started but continue to work, if only in the afternoons, for the entire period of schoolbook sales. I agreed and spent long hours in the bookstore greeting teachers who came with bags full of books they had received free from publishing houses, to sell for a few lire, and students who sold their tattered used books for even less.
I lived through a week of pure anguish when my period didn’t come. Afraid that Sarratore had made me pregnant, I was in despair; I was polite on the outside, grim inside. I spent sleepless nights, but didn’t ask advice or comfort from anyone, I kept it all to myself. Finally, one afternoon in the bookstore I went to the dirty toilet and found the blood. It was one of the rare moments of well-being during that time. My period seemed a sort of symbolic cancellation of Sarratore’s incursion into my body.
In early September it occurred to me that Nino must have returned from Ischia and I began to fear and hope that he would come by at least to say hello. But he didn’t show up on Via Mezzocannone or in the neighborhood. As for Lila, I saw her only a couple of times, on Sunday, when, beside her husband in the car, she drove by on the stradone. Those few seconds were enough to enrage me. What had happened. How she had arranged things for herself. She continued to have everything, to keep everything: the car, Stefano, the house with the bathroom and the telephone and the television, the nice clothes, the prosperity. And who could say what plans she was devising in the secrecy of her mind. I knew how she was made and I said to myself that she wouldn’t give up Nino even if Nino gave up her. But I chased away those thoughts and forced myself to respect the pact I had made with myself: to plan my life without them and learn not to suffer for it. To that end I concentrated on training myself to react little or not at all. I learned to reduce my emotions to the minimum: if the owner reached out his hands I repulsed him without indignation; if the customers were rude I made the best of it; even with my mother I managed to stay submissive. I said to myself every day: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.
77.
Then school began again. Only when I entered the classroom on the first of October did I realize that I was in my last year of high school, that I was eighteen years old, that the years of school, in my case already miraculously long, were about to end. So much the better. Alfonso and I talked a lot about what we would do after we graduated. He knew as much as I did. We’ll take a civil-service exam, he said, but in fact we didn’t have clear ideas on what the exams entailed; we said sit the exam, pass the exam, but the concept was vague: did you have to do a written exercise, take an oral test? And what did you get once you’d taken it, a salary?
Alfonso confided that he was thinking of getting married, once he had taken the exam and gained a post.
“To Marisa?”
“Yes, of course.”
Sometimes I asked him warily about Nino, but he didn’t like Nino, they didn’t even say hello to each other. He had never understood what I found in him. He’s ugly, he said, all out of proportion, skin and bone. Marisa, on the other hand, seemed pretty to him. But he immediately added, careful not to wound me, “You’re pretty, too.” He liked beauty, and especially appreciated care for one’s body. He himself was attentive to his appearance, he smelled of the barber, he bought clothes, he lifted weights every day. He told me that he had a good time at the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. It wasn’t like the grocery. There you could be elegant, in fact you had to be. There you could speak Italian, the people were respectable, had gone to school. There, even when you were on your knees in front of the customers, men and women, trying on the shoes, you could do it with pleasant manners, like the knight in a courtly love story. But unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to stay in the shop.
“Why?”
“Well . . . ”
At first he was vague and I didn’t insist. Then he told me that Pinuccia was staying home now because she didn’t want to get tired, she had a belly like a torpedo; and anyway it was clear that once she had the baby she wouldn’t have time to work. This in theory should have cleared a path for him, the Solaras were pleased with him, maybe he would be able to establish himself there after he graduated. But it wasn’t possible, and here suddenly the name of Lila came up. Just hearing it my stomach flared up.
“What does she have to do with it?”
I knew she had returned from the vacation like a madwoman. She still wasn’t pregnant, the swimming had been of no use, she was behaving oddly. Once she had broken all the flowerpots on her balcony. She said she was going to the grocery, instead she left Carmen alone and went walking around. Stefano woke up at night and she wasn’t in bed: she was wandering through the house, she read and wrote. Then suddenly she calmed down. Or rather she focused her entire capacity to spoil Stefano’s life on a single objective: for Gigliola to work in the new grocery, and she in Piazza dei Martiri.
I was amazed.
“It’s Michele who wants her in the shop,” I said, “but she doesn’t want to go.”
“Once. Now she’s changed her mind, she’s moving heaven and earth to get herself there. The only obstacle is Stefano, he’s against it. But of course in the end my brother does what she wants.”
I asked no other questions, I wanted in no way to be reabsorbed into Lila’s affairs. But for a while I surprised myself by wondering: what could she have in mind, why all of a sudden does she want to go and work in the city? Then I forgot about it, taken up by other problems: the bookstore, school, the class interrogations, the textbooks. Some I bought, most I stole from the bookstore without too many scruples. I began studying rigorously again, mainly at night. In the afternoon, in fact, until Christmas vacation, when I quit, I was busy at the bookstore. And right after that Professor Galiani herself arranged a couple of private pupils for me, and I worked hard for them. Between school, lessons, and study, there was no room for anything else.
When at the end of the month I gave my mother the money I earned, she put it in her pocket without saying anything, but in the morning she got up early to make breakfast for me, sometimes even a beaten egg, which she devoted such care to—while I was still in bed half asleep, I heard the clack clack of the spoon against
the cup as she beat in the sugar—that it melted in my mouth like a cream, the sugar completely dissolved. As for the teachers at school, it seemed that they couldn’t help considering me a brilliant student, as if the sluggish operation of the entire dusty scholastic machine had decided it. I had no trouble defending my position as first in the class and, with Nino gone, I ranked among the best in the whole school. But I soon realized that although Professor Galiani continued to be very generous, she blamed me for some offense that kept her from being as friendly as she had been in the past. For example, when I gave her back her books she was annoyed, because they were sandy, and took them away without promising to give me others. For example, she no longer offered me her newspapers, and for a while I forced myself to buy Il Mattino, then I stopped, it bored me, it was a waste of money. For example, she never invited me to her house, although I would have liked to see her son Armando again. Yet she continued to praise me publicly, to give me high grades, to advise me about important lectures and even films that were shown in a parish hall in Port’Alba. Until once, near Christmas vacation, she called as school was letting out and we walked some way together. Bluntly she asked what I knew about Nino.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Tell me the truth.”
“It’s the truth.”
It slowly emerged that Nino, after the summer, had not been in touch either with her or with her daughter.
“He broke up with Nadia in a very unpleasant way,” she said, with the resentment of a mother. “He sent her a few lines in a letter from Ischia and caused her a lot of suffering.” Then she contained herself and added, resuming her role as a professor again: “Never mind, you’re all young, suffering helps one grow.”
I nodded yes, she asked me: “Did he leave you, too?”
I turned red. “Me?”
“Didn’t you see each other on Ischia?”
“Yes, but there was nothing between us.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Nadia is convinced that he left her for you.”
I denied it forcefully, I said I would be happy to see Nadia and tell her that between me and Nino there had never been anything and never would be. She was pleased, she assured me that she would report that. I didn’t mention Lila, naturally, and not only because I had decided to mind my own business but also because to talk about it would have depressed me. I tried to change the subject, but she returned to Nino. She said that various rumors were circulating about him. There were some who said that not only had he not taken his exams in the autumn but he had stopped studying; and there were some who swore they had seen him one afternoon on Via Arenaccia, alone, completely drunk, lurching along, and every so often taking a swig from a bottle. But not everyone, she concluded, found him likable and maybe there were people who enjoyed spreading nasty rumors about him. If, however, they were true, what a pity.
“Surely they’re lies,” I said.
“Let’s hope so. But it’s hard to keep up with that boy.”
“Yes.”
“He’s very smart.”
“Yes.”
“If you have a way of finding out what’s happening, let me know.”
We parted. I hurried off to give a Greek lesson to a girl in middle school who lived in Parco Margherita. But it was difficult. The large, permanently semi-dark room where I was greeted respectfully held heavy furniture, rugs with hunting scenes, old photographs of high-ranking soldiers, and various other signs of a long history of authority and ease that produced in my pale fourteen-year-old pupil a dullness of body and intelligence, and in me a feeling of impatience. That day I had to struggle to supervise declensions and conjugations. The picture of Nino as Professor Galiani had evoked him kept returning to my mind: worn jacket, tie flying, long legs staggering, the empty bottle that after the last swallow shattered on the stones of Via Arenaccia. What had happened between him and Lila, after Ischia? Contrary to my predictions, she had evidently seen her mistake, it was all over, she had returned to herself. Nino hadn’t: from a studious youth with a well-formulated response to everything he had become a vagrant, undone by the pain of love for the grocer’s wife. I thought of asking Alfonso again if he had news. I thought of going to Marisa myself and asking her about her brother. But soon I forced the idea out of my mind. It will pass, I said to myself. Has he come to see me? No. Has Lila come to see me? No. Why should I worry about him, or her, when they don’t care about me? I continued the lesson and went on my way.
78.
After Christmas I found out from Alfonso that Pinuccia had given birth, she had had a boy, named Fernando. I went to see her, thinking that I would find her in bed, happy, with the baby at her breast. Instead, she was up, but in nightgown and slippers, sulking. She rudely sent away her mother, who said to her, “Get in bed, don’t tire yourself,” and when she led me to the cradle she said grimly, “Nothing ever works out for me, look how ugly he is, it upsets me just to look at him, let alone touch him.” And although Maria, standing in the doorway, murmured, like a soothing formula, “What are you talking about, Pina, he’s beautiful,” she continued to repeat angrily, “He’s ugly, he’s uglier than Rino, that whole family is ugly.” Then she drew in her breath and exclaimed desperately, with tears in her eyes, “It’s my fault, I made a bad choice of a husband, but when you’re a girl you don’t think about it, and now look at what a child I’ve had, he has a pug nose just like Lina.” Then, with no interruption, she began to insult her sister-in-law grossly.
I learned from her that Lila, the whore, had already in two weeks done and redone as she liked the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. Gigliola had had to give in, she had returned to the Solaras’ pastry shop; she herself, Pinuccia, had had to give in, chained to the child until goodness knows when; they had all had to give in, Stefano above all, as usual. And now, every day, Lila was up to something new: she went to work dressed up as if she were Mike Bongiorno’s assistant, and if her husband wouldn’t take her in the car she had no scruples about getting Michele to drive her; she had spent who knows how much for two paintings that you couldn’t understand what they were of, and had hung them in the shop for who knows what purpose; she had bought a lot of books and, instead of shoes, she put those on the shelf; she had fitted out a sort of living room, with couches, chairs, ottomans, and a crystal bowl where she kept chocolates from Gay Odin, available to whoever wanted them, free, as if she were there not to notice the stink of the customers’ feet but to play the great lady in her castle.
“And it’s not only that,” she said, “there’s something even worse.”
“What?”
“You know what Marcello Solara did?”
“No.”
“You remember the shoes that Stefano and Rino gave him?”
“The ones made exactly the way Lina designed them?”
“Yes, a wretched shoe, Rino always said that the water got in.”
“Well, what happened?”
Pina overwhelmed me with a laborious, sometimes confused story, involving money, treacherous plots, deception, debts. Marcello, dissatisfied with the new models made by Rino and Fernando—and certainly in agreement with Michele—had had shoes like those manufactured, but not in the Cerullo factory, in another factory, in Afragola. Then, at Christmas, he had distributed them under the Solara name in the stores, including the one on Piazza dei Martiri.
“And he could do that?”
“Of course, they’re his: my brother and my husband, those two shits, gave them to him, he can do what he likes.”
“So?”
“So,” she said, “now there are Cerullo shoes and Solara shoes circulating in Naples. And the Solara shoes are selling really well, better than the Cerullos. And all the profit is the Solaras’. So Rino is extremely upset, because he expected some competition, of course, but not from the Solaras themselves, his partners, and with a shoe he made with his own hands and then stupidly threw away.”
I remembered Marcello when Lila
threatened him with the shoemaker’s knife. He was slower than Michele, more timid. What need had he to be so offensive? The Solaras had numerous businesses, some legitimate, others not, and they were getting bigger every day. They had had powerful friendships since the days of their grandfather, they did favors and received them. Their mother was a loan shark and had a book that struck fear into half the neighborhood, maybe now the Cerullos and the Carraccis, too. For Marcello, then, and for his brother, the shoes and the shop on Piazza dei Martiri were only one of the many wells into which their family dipped, and surely not among the most important. So why?
Pinuccia’s story began to disturb me. Behind the appearance of money I felt something depressing. Marcello’s love for Lila was over, but the wound had remained and become infected. No longer dependent, he felt free to hurt those who had humiliated him in the past. “Rino,” Pinuccia in fact said, “went with Stefano to protest, but it was pointless.” The Solaras had treated them contemptuously, they were people used to doing what they wanted, her brother and husband might as well have been talking to themselves. Finally Marcello had said vaguely that he and his brother were thinking of an entire Solara line that would repeat, with variations, the features of the shoe that had been made as a trial. And then he had added, without a clear connection, “Let’s see how your new products go and if it’s worth the trouble to keep them on the market.” Understood? Understood. Marcello wanted to eliminate the Cerullo brand, replace it with Solara, and thus cause not insignificant economic damage to Stefano. I have to get out of the neighborhood, out of Naples, I said to myself, what do I care about their quarrels? But in the meantime I asked:
“And Lina?”
Pinuccia’s eyes blazed.
“She’s the real problem.”
Lina had laughed at that story. When Rino and her husband got angry she made fun of them: “You gave him those shoes, not me; you did business with the Solaras, not me. If you two are idiots, what can I do?” She wouldn’t cooperate, you couldn’t tell where she stood, with the family or with the Solaras. So when Michele again insisted that he wanted her in Piazza dei Martiri, she had suddenly said yes, and had tormented Stefano to let her go.