I went to the party, and at first I felt uncomfortable. But my outfit had the advantage of not arousing envy; rather, it produced a sense of guilt that encouraged camaraderie. In fact many sympathetic girls kept me company and the boys often asked me to dance. I forgot how I was dressed and even the state of my shoes. Besides, that night I met Franco Mari, a rather ugly but very amusing boy with a quick intelligence, insolent and profligate. He was a year older than me, and from a wealthy family in Reggio Emilia, a militant Communist but critical of the Party’s social-democratic leanings. I happily spent a lot of my little free time with him. He gave me everything: clothes, shoes, a new coat, glasses that didn’t obscure my eyes and my whole face, books about politics, because that was the subject dearest to him. I learned from him terrible things about Stalinism and he urged me to read Trotsky; as a result I developed an anti-Stalinist sensibility and the conviction that in the U.S.S.R. there was neither socialism nor even Communism: the revolution had been truncated and needed to be started up again.
He took me on my first trip abroad. We went to Paris, to a conference of young Communists from all over Europe. I hardly saw Paris: we spent all our time in smoky places. I was left with an impression of streets much more colorful than those of Naples and Pisa, irritation at the sound of the police sirens, and amazement at the widespread presence of blacks on the streets and in the meeting rooms; Franco gave a long speech, in French, that was much applauded. When I told Pasquale about my political experience, he wouldn’t believe that I—really, you, he said—had done a thing like that. Then he was silent, embarrassed, when I showed off my reading, declaring that I was now a Trotskyite.
From Franco I also got many habits that were later reinforced by the instructions and conversations of some of the professors: to use the word “study” even if I was reading a book of science fiction; to compile very detailed note cards on every text I studied; to get excited whenever I came upon passages in which the effects of social inequality were well described. He was very attached to what he called my reeducation and I willingly let myself be reeducated. But to my great regret I couldn’t fall in love. I loved him, I loved his restless body, but I never felt that he was indispensable. The little that I felt was gone in a short time, when he lost his place at the Normale: he failed an exam and had to leave. For several months we wrote to each other. He tried to reenter the Normale; he said that he was doing it only to be near me. I encouraged him to take the exam, he failed. We wrote occasionally, and then for a long time I had no news of him.
84.
This is more or less what happened to me between the end of 1963 and the end of 1965. How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done.
It’s more complicated to recount what happened to her in those years. The belt slows down, accelerates, swerves abruptly, goes off the tracks. The suitcases fall off, fly open, their contents scatter here and there. Her things end up among mine: to accommodate them, I am compelled to return to the narrative concerning me (and that had come to me unobstructed), and expand phrases that now sound too concise. For example, if Lila had gone to the Normale in my place would she ever have decided simply to make the best of things? And the time I slapped the girl from Rome, how much did her behavior influence me? How did she manage—even at a distance—to sweep away my artificial meekness, how much of the requisite determination did she give me, how much did she dictate even the insults? And the audacity, when, amid a thousand doubts and fears, I brought Franco to my room—where did that come from if not from her example? And the sense of unhappiness, when I realized that I didn’t love him, when I observed the coldness of my feelings, what was its origin if not, by comparison, the capacity to love that she had demonstrated and was demonstrating?
Yes, it’s Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less. Not to mention what she never said but let me guess, what I didn’t know and read later in her notebooks. Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.
I have to admit, for example, that everything about Lila’s sufferings escaped me. Because she had taken Nino, because with her secret arts she had become pregnant by him and not by Stefano, because for love she was on the point of carrying out an act inconceivable in the environment we had grown up in—abandoning her husband, throwing away the comfort so recently acquired, running the risk of being murdered along with her lover and the child she carried in her womb—I considered her happy, with that tempestuous happiness of novels, films, and comic strips, the only kind that at that time truly interested me, that is to say not conjugal happiness but the happiness of passion, a furious confusion of evil and good that had befallen her and not me.
I was mistaken. Now I return to the moment when Stefano took us away from Ischia, and I know for certain that the moment the boat pulled out from the shore and Lila realized that she would no longer find Nino waiting for her on the beach in the morning, would no longer debate, talk, whisper with him, that they would no longer swim together, no longer kiss and caress and love each other, she was violently scarred by suffering. Within a few days the entire life of Signora Carracci—balances and imbalances, strategies, battles, wars and alliances, troubles with suppliers and customers, the art of cheating on the weight, the devotion to piling up money in the drawer of the cash register—dematerialized, lost truth. Only Nino was concrete and true, and she who wanted him, who desired him day and night, who clung to her husband in the darkness of the bedroom to forget the other even for a few moments. A terrible fraction of time. It was in those very moments that she felt most strongly the need to have him, and so clearly, with such a precision of detail, that she pushed Stefano away like a stranger and took refuge in a corner of the bed, weeping and shouting insults, or she ran to the bathroom and locked herself in.
85.
At first she thought of sneaking out at night and returning to Forio, but she realized that her husband would find her right away. Then she thought of asking Alfonso if Marisa knew when her brother would return from Ischia, but she was afraid that her brother-in-law would tell Stefano she had asked that question and she let it go. She found in the telephone book the number of the Sarratore house and she telephoned. Donato answered. She said she was a friend of Nino, he cut her off in an angry tone, hung up. Out of desperation she returned to the idea of taking the boat, and had nearly made up her mind, when, one afternoon in early September, Nino appeared in the doorway of the crowded grocery, unshaved and totally drunk.
Lila restrained Carmen, who had jumped up to chase out the disorderly youth, in her eyes a crazy stranger. “I’ll take care of it,” she said, and dragged him away. Precise gestures, cold voice, the certainty that Carmen Peluso hadn’t recognized the son of Sarratore, now very different from the child who had gone to elementary school with them.
She acted fast. She appeared normal, like a woman who knows how to solve every problem. In truth, she no longer knew where she was. The shelves stacked with goods had faded, the street had lost every definition, the pale façades of the new apartment buildings had dissolved; but most of all she didn’t feel the risk she was running. Nino Nino Nino: she felt only joy and desire. He was before her again, finally, and his every feature loudly proclaimed that he had suffered and was suffering, had looked for her and wanted her, so much that he tried to grab her, kiss her on the stree
t.
She took him to her house, it seemed to her the safest place. Passersby? She saw none. Neighbors? She saw none. They began to make love as soon as she closed the door of the apartment behind her. She felt no scruple. She felt only the need to grab Nino, immediately, hold him, keep him. That need didn’t diminish even when they calmed down. The neighborhood, the neighbors, the grocery, the streets, the sounds of the trains, Stefano, Carmen waiting, perhaps anxious, slowly returned, but only as objects to be arranged hastily, so that they would not get in the way, but with enough care so that, piled up haphazardly, they would not suddenly fall.
Nino reproached her for having left without warning him, he held her tight, he still wanted her. He demanded that they go away immediately, together, but then he didn’t know where. She answered yes yes yes, and shared his madness in everything, although, unlike him, she felt the time, the real seconds and minutes that, slipping by, magnified the danger of being surprised. So, lying with him on the floor, she looked at the lamp hanging from the ceiling just above them, like a threat, and if before she had been preoccupied only with having Nino right away, no matter what might come crashing down, now she thought about how to keep him close to her without the lamp detaching itself from the ceiling, without the floor cleaving in two, with him forever on one side, her on the other.
“Go.”
“No.”
“You’re mad.”
“Yes.”
“Please, I’m begging you, go.”
She convinced him. She waited for Carmen to say something, for the neighbors to gossip maliciously, for Stefano to return from the other grocery and beat her. It didn’t happen, and she was relieved. She increased Carmen’s pay, she became affectionate toward her husband, she invented excuses that allowed her to meet Nino secretly.
86.
At first the larger problem was not the possibility of gossip that would ruin everything but him, the beloved. Nothing mattered to him except to clutch her, kiss her, bite her, penetrate her. It seemed that he wanted, that he needed, to live his whole life with his mouth on her mouth, inside her body. And he couldn’t tolerate the separations, he was frightened by them, he feared that she would vanish again. So he stupefied himself with alcohol, he didn’t study, he smoked constantly. It was as if for him there was nothing in the world but the two of them, and if he resorted to words he did it only to cry to her his jealousy, to tell her obsessively how intolerable he found it that she continued to live with her husband.
“I’ve left everything,” he murmured wearily, “and you don’t want to leave anything.”
“What are you thinking of doing?” she then asked him.
Nino was silent, disoriented by the question, or he became enraged, as if the situation offended him. He said desperately, “You don’t want me anymore.”
But Lila wanted him, wanted him again and again, but she also wanted something else, and right away. She wanted him to return to studying, she wanted him to continue to stimulate her mind the way he had on Ischia. The phenomenal child of elementary school, the girl who had charmed Maestra Oliviero, who had written The Blue Fairy, had reappeared and was stirring with new energy. Nino had found her under the pile of dirt where she had ended up and pulled her out. That girl was now urging him to be once more the studious youth he had been and allow her to develop the power to sweep away Signora Carracci. Which she gradually did.
I don’t know what happened: Nino must have perceived that in order not to lose her he had to be something more than a furious lover. Or maybe not, maybe he simply felt that passion was emptying him. The fact is that he began studying again. And Lila at first was content: he slowly recovered, became as she had known him on Ischia, which made him even more essential to her. She had again not only Nino but also something of his words, his ideas. He read Smith unhappily, she, too, tried to do it; he read Joyce even more unhappily, she tried, too. She bought the books that he mentioned to her the rare times they managed to meet. She wanted to talk about them, there was never a chance.
Carmen, who was increasingly bewildered, didn’t understand what could be so urgent when Lila, with one excuse or another, was absent for several hours. She observed her frowning, so immersed in reading a book or writing in her notebooks that she seemed not to see or hear anything, as she left the burden of the customers to Carmen, even during the grocery’s busiest hours. Carmen had to say, “Lina, please, can you help me?” Only then did she look up, run a fingertip over her lips, say yes.
As for Stefano, he fluctuated between anxiety and acquiescence. While he quarreled with his brother-in-law, his father-in-law, the Solaras, and was upset because, in spite of all that swimming in the sea, children didn’t come, here was his wife being sarcastic about the troubles with the shoes, and wrapped up in novels, journals, newspapers until late into the night: this mania had returned, as if real life no longer interested her. He observed her, he didn’t understand or didn’t have the time or the wish to understand. After Ischia, a part of him, the most aggressive, in the face of those alternating attitudes of rejection and peaceful estrangement, was inciting him to a new clash and a definitive explanation. But another part, more prudent, perhaps afraid, restrained the first, pretended not to notice, thought: better like this than when she’s being a pain in the ass. And Lila, who had grasped that thought, tried to make it last in his mind. At night, when they both returned home from work, she was not hostile toward her husband. But after dinner and some talk she withdrew cautiously into reading, a mental space inaccessible to him, inhabited only by her and Nino.
What did he become for her in that period? A sexual yearning that kept her in a state of permanent erotic fantasy; a blazing up of her mind that wanted to be at the same level as his; above all an abstract plan for a secret couple, hiding in a kind of refuge that was to be part bungalow for two hearts, part workshop of ideas on the complexity of the world, he present and active, she a shadow glued to his footsteps, cautious prompter, fervent collaborator. The rare times that they were able to be together not for a few minutes but for an hour, that hour was transformed into an inexhaustible flow of sexual and verbal exchanges, a complete well-being that, at the moment of separation, made the return to the grocery and to Stefano’s bed unbearable.
“I can’t take it anymore.”
“Me neither.”
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to be with you always.”
Or at least, she added, for a few hours every day.
But how to carve out time, safe and regular? Seeing Nino at home was extremely dangerous, seeing him in the street even more so. Not to mention that at times Stefano telephoned the grocery and she wasn’t there, and to come up with a plausible explanation was difficult. So, caught between Nino’s impatience and her husband’s complaints, instead of regaining a sense of reality and telling herself clearly that she was in a situation with no way out, Lila began to act as if the real world were a backdrop or a chessboard, and you had only to shift a painted screen, move a pawn or two, and you would see that the game, the only thing that really counted, her game, the game of the two of them, could continue to be played. As for the future, the future became the day after and then the next and then the one after that. Or sudden images of massacre and blood, which were very frequent in her notebooks. She never wrote I will die murdered, but she noted local crime news, sometimes she reinvented it. In these stories of murdered women she emphasized the murderer’s rage, the blood everywhere. And she added details that the newspapers didn’t report: eyes dug out of their sockets, injuries caused by a knife to the throat or internal organs, the blade that pierced a breast, nipples cut off, the stomach ripped open from the bellybutton down, the blade that scraped across the genitals. It was as if she wanted to take the power away even from the realistic possibility of violent death by reducing it to words, to a form that could be controlled.
87.
It was in that perspective of a game with poss
ibly mortal outcomes that Lila inserted herself into the conflict between her brother, her husband, and the Solara brothers. She used Michele’s conviction that she was the most suitable person to manage the commercial situation in Piazza dei Martiri. She abruptly stopped saying no and after quarrelsome negotiations as a result of which she obtained absolute autonomy and a substantial weekly salary, as if she were not Signora Carracci, she agreed to go and work in the shoe store. She didn’t care about her brother, who felt threatened by the new Solara brand and saw her move as a betrayal; or about her husband, who at first was furious, threatened her, then drove her to complicated mediations in his name with the two brothers concerning debts contracted with their mother, sums of money to receive and to give. She also ignored the sugary words of Michele, who constantly hovered around her, to supervise, without appearing to, the reorganization of the shop, and at the same time pressed to get new shoe models directly from her, passing over Rino and Stefano.
Lila had perceived for a long time that her brother and her father would be swept away, that the Solaras would appropriate everything, that Stefano would stay afloat only if he became more dependent on their dealings. But if before that prospect made her indignant, now, she wrote in her notebooks, the situation left her completely indifferent. Of course, she was sad about Rino, she was sorry that his role as a boss was already declining, especially since he was married and had a child. But in her eyes the bonds of the past now had little substance, her capacity for affection had taken a single path, every thought, every feeling had Nino at its center. If before her motivation was to make her brother rich, now it was only to please Nino.