100.
A complicated period began. Rino stopped going to his sister’s house, but Lila didn’t want to give up keeping Rinuccio and Dino together, so she got in the habit of going to her brother’s house, but in secret from Stefano. Pinuccia endured it, sullenly, and at first Lila tried to explain to her what she was doing: exercises in reactivity, games of skill, she went so far as to confide in her that she would have liked to involve all the neighborhood children. But Pinuccia said simply, “You’re a lunatic and I don’t give a damn what nonsense you get up to. You want to take the child? You want to kill him, you want to eat him like the witches? Go ahead, I don’t want him and I never did, your brother has been the ruin of my life and you are the ruin of my brother’s life.” Then she cried, “That poor devil is perfectly right to cheat on you.”
Lila didn’t react.
She didn’t ask what that remark meant, in fact she made a careless gesture, one of those gestures that you make to brush away a fly. She took Rinuccio and, although she was sorry to be deprived of her nephew, she did not return.
But in the solitude of her apartment she discovered that she was afraid. She absolutely didn’t care if Stefano was paying some whore, in fact she was glad—she didn’t have to submit at night when he approached her. But after that remark of Pinuccia’s she began to worry about the baby: if her husband had taken another woman, if he wanted her every day and every hour, he might go mad, he might throw her out. Until that moment the possibility of a definitive break in her marriage had seemed to her a liberation; now instead she was afraid of losing the house, the money, the time, everything that allowed her to bring up the child in the best way.
She hardly slept. Maybe Stefano’s rages were not only the sign of a constitutional lack of equilibrium, the bad blood that blew the lid off good-natured habits: maybe he really was in love with someone else, as had happened to her with Nino, and he couldn’t stand to stay in the cage of marriage, of paternity, even of groceries and other dealings. She felt she had to make up her mind to confront the situation, if only to control it, and yet she delayed, she gave it up, she counted on the fact that Stefano enjoyed his lover and left her in peace. Ultimately, she thought, I just have to hold out for a couple of years, long enough for the child to grow up and be educated.
She organized her day so that he would always find the house in order, dinner ready, the table set. But, after the scene with Rino, he did not return to his former mildness, he was always disgruntled, always preoccupied.
“What’s wrong?”
“Money.”
“Money and that’s all?”
Stefano got angry: “What does and that’s all mean?”
For him there was no other problem, in life, but money. After dinner he did the accounts and cursed the whole time: the new grocery wasn’t taking in cash as it used to; the Solaras, especially Michele, were acting as if the shoe business were all theirs and the profits weren’t to be shared anymore; without saying anything to him, Rino, and Fernando, they were having the old Cerullo models made by cheap shoemakers on the outskirts, and meanwhile they were having new Solara styles designed by artisans who in fact were simply making tiny variations in Lila’s; in this way the small enterprise of his father-in-law and brother-in-law really was being ruined, dragging him down with it, the one who had invested in it.
“Understand?”
“Yes.”
“So try not to be a pain in the ass.”
But Lila wasn’t convinced. She had the impression that her husband was deliberately amplifying problems that were real but old, in order to hide from her the true, new reasons for his outbursts and his increasingly explicit hostility toward her. He blamed her for all sorts of things, and especially for having complicated his relations with the Solaras. Once he yelled at her, “What did you do to that bastard Michele, I’d like to know?”
And she answered, “Nothing.”
And he: “It can’t be, in every discussion he brings you up but he screws me: try to talk to him and find out what he wants, otherwise I ought to smash your faces, both of you.”
And Lila, impulsively: “If he wants to fuck me what should I do, let him fuck me?”
A moment later she was sorry she had said that—sometimes contempt prevailed over prudence—but now she had done it and Stefano hit her. The slap counted little, it wasn’t even with his hand open, as usual, he hit her with the tips of his fingers. Rather, what he said right afterward, disgusted, carried more weight:
“You read, you study, but you’re vulgar: I can’t bear people like you, you make me sick.”
From then on he came home later and later. On Sunday, instead of sleeping until midday as usual, he went out early and disappeared for the whole day. At the least hint from her of concrete family problems, he got angry. For example, on the first hot days she was preoccupied about a vacation at the beach for Rinuccio, and she asked her husband how they should organize it. He answered: “You take the bus and go to Torregaveta.”
She ventured: “Isn’t it better to rent a house?”
He: “Why, so you can be a whore from morning to night?”
He left, and didn’t return that night.
Everything became clear soon afterward. Lila went to the city with the child, she was looking for a book that she had found quoted in another book, but she couldn’t find it. After much searching she went on to Piazza dei Martiri, to ask Alfonso, who was still happily managing the shop, if he could find it. She ran into a handsome young man, very well dressed, one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, his name was Fabrizio. He wasn’t a customer, he was a friend of Alfonso’s. Lila stayed to talk to him, she discovered that he knew a lot. They discussed literature, the history of Naples, how to teach children, something about which Fabrizio, who worked at the university, was very knowledgeable. Alfonso listened in silence the whole time and when Rinuccio began to whine he calmed him. Then some customers arrived, Alfonso went to take care of them. Lila talked to Fabrizio a little more; it was a long time since she had felt the pleasure of a conversation that excited her. When the young man had to leave, he kissed her with childish enthusiasm, then did the same with Alfonso, two big smacking kisses. He called to her from the doorway: “It was lovely talking to you.”
“For me, too.”
Lila was sad. While Alfonso continued to wait on customers, she remembered the people she had met in that place, and Nino, the lowered shutter, the shadowy light, the pleasant conversations, the way he arrived secretly, exactly at one, and disappeared at four, after they made love. It seemed to her an imaginary time, a bizarre fantasy, and she looked around uneasily. She didn’t feel nostalgia for it, she didn’t feel nostalgia for Nino. She felt only that time had passed, that what had been important was important no longer, that the tangle in her head endured and wouldn’t come untangled. She took the child and was about to leave when Michele Solara came in.
He greeted her enthusiastically, he played with Gennaro, he said that the baby was just like her. He invited her to a bar, bought her a coffee, decided to take her home in his car. Once they were in the car he said to her, “Leave your husband, right away, today. I’ll take you and your son. I’ve bought a house on the Vomero, in Piazza degli Artisti. If you want I’ll drive you there now, I’ll show it to you, I took it with you in mind. There you can do what you like: read, write, invent things, sleep, laugh, talk, and be with Rinuccio. I’m interested only in being able to look at you and listen to you.”
For the first time in his life Michele expressed himself without his teasing tone of voice. As he drove and talked he glanced at her obliquely, slightly anxious, to see her reactions. Lila stared at the street in front of her the whole way, trying, meanwhile, to take the pacifier out of Gennaro’s mouth, she thought he used it too much. But the child pushed her hand away energetically. When Michele stopped—she didn’t interrupt him—she asked:
“Are you finished?”
“Yes.”
“And Gigliol
a?”
“What does Gigliola have to do with it? You say yes or no, and then we’ll see.”
“No, Michè, the answer is no. I didn’t want your brother and I don’t want you, either. First, because I don’t like either of you; and second because you think you can do anything and take anything without regard.”
Michele didn’t react right away, he muttered something about the pacifier, like: Give it to him, don’t let him cry. Then he said, threateningly, “Think hard about it, Lina. Tomorrow you may be sorry and you’ll come begging to me.”
“I rule it out.”
“Yes? Then listen to me.”
He revealed to her what everyone knew (“Even your mother, your father, and that shit your brother, but they tell you nothing in order to keep the peace”): Stefano had taken Ada as a lover, and not recently. The thing had begun before the vacation on Ischia. “When you were on vacation,” he said, “she went to your house every night.” With Lila’s return the two had stopped for a while. But they hadn’t been able to resist: they had started again, had left each other again, had gone back together when Lila disappeared from the neighborhood. Recently Stefano had rented an apartment on the Rettifilo, they saw each other there.
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“And so?”
So what. Lila was disturbed not so much by the fact that her husband had a lover and that the lover was Ada but by the absurdity of every word and gesture of his when he came to get her on Ischia. The shouts, the blows, the departure returned to her mind.
She said to Michele: “You make me sick, you, Stefano, all of you.”
101.
Lila suddenly felt that she was in the right and this calmed her. That evening she put Gennaro to bed and waited for Stefano to come home. He returned a little after midnight, and found her sitting at the kitchen table. Lila looked up from the book she was reading, said she knew about Ada, she knew how long it had been going on, and that it didn’t matter to her at all. “What you have done to me I did to you,” she said clearly, smiling, and repeated to him—how many times had she said it in the past, two, three?—that Gennaro wasn’t his son. She concluded that he could do what he liked, sleep where and with whom he wanted. “The essential thing,” she cried suddenly, “is that you don’t touch me again.”
I don’t know what she had in mind, maybe she just wanted to get things out in the open. Or maybe she was prepared for anything and everything. She expected that he would confess, that then he would beat her, chase her out of the house, make her, his wife, be a servant to his lover. She was prepared for every possible aggression and the arrogance of a man who feels that he is the master and has money to buy whatever he wants. Instead, getting to words that would clarify and sanction the failure of their marriage was impossible. Stefano denied it. He said, menacing, but calm, that Ada was merely the clerk in his grocery, that whatever gossip circulated about them had no basis. Then he got mad and told her that if she said that ugly thing about his son again, as God was his witness he would kill her: Gennaro was the image of him, identical, and everyone confirmed it, to keep provoking him on this point was useless. Finally—and this was the most surprising thing—he declared to her, as he had done at other times in the past, without varying the formulas, his love. He said that he would love her forever, because she was his wife, because they had been married before the priest and nothing could separate them. When he came over to kiss her and she pushed him away, he grabbed her, lifted her up, carried her to the bedroom, where the baby’s cradle was, tore off everything she had on and entered her forcibly, while she begged him in a low voice, repressing sobs: “Rinuccio will wake up, see us, hear us, please let’s go in there.”
102.
After that night Lila lost many of the small freedoms that remained to her. Stefano’s behavior was completely contradictory. Since his wife now knew of his relationship with Ada, he abandoned all caution. Often he didn’t come home to sleep; every other Sunday he went out in the car with his lover. In August, he went on a vacation with her: they went to Stockholm in the sports car, even though officially Ada had gone to Turin, to visit a cousin who worked at Fiat. At the same time, a sick form of jealousy exploded in him: he didn’t want his wife to leave the house, he obliged her to do the shopping by phone and if she went out for an hour so that the baby could get some air he interrogated her on whom she had met, whom she had talked to. He felt more a husband than ever and he watched her. It was as if he feared that his betrayal of her authorized her to betray him. What he did in his encounters with Ada on the Rettifilo stirred his imagination and led him to detailed fantasies in which Lila did even more with her lovers. He was afraid of being made ridiculous by a possible unfaithfulness on her part, while he did nothing to hide his own.
He wasn’t jealous of all men, he had a hierarchy. Lila quickly understood that in particular he was preoccupied by Michele, by whom he felt cheated in everything and as if kept in a position of permanent subjugation. Although she had never said anything about the time Solara had tried to kiss her, or of his proposal that she become his lover, Stefano had perceived that to insult him by taking his wife was an important move in the process of ruining him in business. But on the other hand the logic of business meant that Lila should behave at least a little cordially. As a result whatever she did he didn’t like. At times he pressed her obsessively: “Did you see Michele, did you talk to him, did he ask you to design new shoes?” Sometimes he shouted at her: “You are not even to say hello to that shit, is that clear?” And he opened all her drawers, rummaged through them in search of evidence of her nature as a whore.
To further complicate the situation first Pasquale interfered, then Rino.
Pasquale naturally was the last to know, even after Lila, that his fiancée was Stefano’s lover. No one told him, he saw them with his own eyes, late on a Sunday afternoon in September, coming out of a doorway on the Rettifilo embracing. Ada had told him that she had things to do with Melina and couldn’t see him. Besides, he was always out at work or at his political meetings, and took little notice of his fiancée’s distortions and evasions. Seeing them caused him terrible pain, complicated by the fact that, while his immediate impulse would have been to kill them both, his education as a militant Communist prohibited him. Pasquale had recently become secretary of the neighborhood section of the Party and although in the past, like all the boys we had grown up with, he had classified us when necessary as whores, he now felt—since he kept himself up to date, read l’Unità, studied booklets, presided over debates in the section—that he could no longer do that, in fact he made an effort to consider us women not inferior, generally speaking, to men, with our feelings, our ideas, our freedoms. Caught, therefore, between rage and broad-mindedness, the next night, still dirty from work, he went to Ada and told her that he knew everything. She appeared relieved and admitted it, cried, begged forgiveness. When he asked if she had done it for money, she answered that she loved Stefano and that she alone knew what a good and generous and kind person he was. The result was that Pasquale punched the kitchen wall in the Cappuccio house, and returned home weeping, his knuckles sore. Afterward he talked to Carmen all night, the sister and brother suffered together, one because of Ada, the other because of Enzo, whom she couldn’t forget. Things really took a bad turn when Pasquale, although he had been betrayed, decided that he had to defend the dignity of both Ada and Lila. First he wanted to clarify things, and went to talk to Stefano; he made a complicated speech whose essence was that he should leave his wife and set up a household with his lover. Then he went to Lila and reproached her because she let Stefano trample on her rights as a wife and her feelings as a woman. One morning—it was six-thirty—Stefano confronted him just as he was leaving to go to work and good-naturedly offered him money so that he would stop bothering him, his wife, and Ada. Pasquale took the money, counted it, and threw it away, saying, “I’ve worked since I was a child, I don’t need you,” then, as if to
apologize, he added that he had to go, otherwise he would be late and would be fired. But when he had gone some distance he had a second thought, he turned and shouted at the grocer, who was picking up the money scattered on the street: “You are worse than that fascist pig your father.” They fought, savagely, they had to be separated or they would have murdered each other.
Then came the trouble from Rino. He couldn’t bear the fact that his sister had stopped trying to make Dino a very intelligent child. He couldn’t bear the fact that his brother-in-law not only wouldn’t give him a cent but had even laid hands on him. He couldn’t bear the fact that the relation between Stefano and Ada had become public knowledge, with all the humiliating consequences for Lila. And he reacted in an unexpected way. Since Stefano beat Lila, he began to beat Pinuccia. Since Stefano had a lover, he found a lover. He started, that is, on a persecution of Stefano’s sister that mirrored what his sister was subjected to by Stefano.
This threw Pinuccia into despair: with tears, with entreaties, she begged him to end it. But no. If she merely opened her mouth Rino, blinded by rage, and frightening even Nunzia, shouted at her: “I should end it? I should calm down? Then go to your brother and tell him that he should leave Ada, that he should respect Lina, that we have to be a united family and that he should give me the money that he and the Solaras have cheated me of and are cheating me of.” The result was that Pinuccia very often ran out of the house, looking battered, and went to the grocery, to her brother, and sobbed in front of Ada and the customers. Stefano dragged her into the rear of the shop and she listed all her husband’s demands, but concluded, “Don’t give that bastard anything, come home now and kill him.”