She said in the most antagonistic tone she was capable of: “You know why Michele Solara comes to dinner with us?”
“Because he’s my boss.”
“Oh yes, sure.”
“Then why?”
“Because I’m with Stefano, who’s important. If I waited for you, the daughter of Melina I would be and the daughter of Melina I would remain.”
Antonio lost control, he said: “You’re not with Stefano, you’re Stefano’s whore.”
Ada burst into tears. “It’s not true, Stefano loves only me.”
One night things got even worse. They were at home, dinner was over. Ada was doing the dishes, Antonio was staring into space, their mother was humming an old song while she swept the floor too energetically. At some point Melina accidentally swept the broom over her daughter’s feet. It was terrible. There was at the time a superstition—I don’t know if it still exists—that if you sweep the broom over the feet of an unmarried girl she’ll never get married. Ada saw her future in a flash. She leaped back as if she had been touched by a cockroach and the plate she was holding fell to the floor.
“You swept over my feet,” she shrieked, leaving her mother astonished.
“She didn’t do it on purpose,” Antonio said.
“She did do it on purpose. You don’t want me to get married, it’s too useful for you to have me work for you, you want to keep me here my whole life.”
Melina tried to embrace her daughter, saying no no, but Ada repulsed her rudely, so that she retreated, bumped into a chair, and fell on the floor amid the fragments of the broken plate.
Antonio rushed to help his mother, but Melina now was screaming in fear, fear of her son, of her daughter, of the things around her. And Ada screamed louder in return, saying, “I’ll show you who I’m going to marry, and soon, because if Lina doesn’t get out of the way by herself, I’ll get her out, and off the face of the earth.”
Antonio left the house, slamming the door. More desperate than usual, in the following days he tried to escape from that new tragedy in his life, he made an effort to be deaf and dumb, he avoided going past the old grocery, and if by chance he ran into Stefano Carracci he looked in another direction before the wish to beat him up overpowered him. His mind was troubled, he couldn’t understand what was right and what wasn’t. Had it been right not to hand Lila over to Michele? Had it been right to tell Enzo to take her home? If Lila hadn’t returned to her husband, would his sister’s situation be different? Everything happens by chance, he reasoned, without good and without ill. But at that point his brain got stuck and on the first occasion, as if to free himself from bad dreams, he went back to quarreling with Ada. He shouted at her, “He is a married man, bitch: he has a small child, you are worse than our mother, you don’t have any sense of things.” Ada then went to Gigliola, confided to her: “My brother is crazy, my brother wants to kill me.”
So it was that one afternoon Michele called Antonio and sent him to do a long-term job in Germany. He didn’t object, in fact he obeyed willingly, he left without saying goodbye to his sister or even to Melina. He took it for granted that in a foreign country, among people who spoke like the Nazis at the church cinema, he would be stabbed, or shot, and he was content. He considered it more tolerable to be murdered than to continue to observe the suffering of his mother and Ada without being able to do anything.
The only person he wanted to see before setting off on the train was Enzo. He found him busy: at the time he was trying to sell everything, the mule, the cart, his mother’s little shop, a garden near the railroad. He wanted to give part of the proceeds to a maiden aunt who had offered to take care of his siblings.
“And you?” Antonio asked.
“I’m looking for a job.”
“You want to change your life?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a good thing.”
“It’s a necessity.”
“I, on the other hand, am what I am.”
“Nonsense.”
“It’s true, but it’s all right. Now I have to leave and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Every so often, please, could you cast an eye on my mother, my sister, and the children?”
“If I stay in the neighborhood, yes.”
“We were wrong, Enzù, we shouldn’t have taken Lina home.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s all a mess, you never know what to do.”
“Yes.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
They didn’t even shake hands. Antonio went to Piazza Garibaldi and got the train. He had a long, difficult journey, night and day, with many angry voices running through his veins. He felt extremely tired after just a few hours, his feet were tingling; he hadn’t traveled since he returned from military service. Every so often he got out to get a drink of water from a fountain, but he was afraid the train would leave. Later he told me that at the station in Florence he felt so depressed that he thought: I’ll stop here and go to Lenuccia.
111.
With the departure of Antonio the bond between Gigliola and Ada became very tight. Gigliola suggested to her what the daughter of Melina had had in mind for some time, that is, that she shouldn’t wait any longer, the matrimonial situation of Stefano should be resolved. “Lina has to get out of that house,” she said, “and you have to go in: if you wait too long, the enchantment will be broken and you’ll lose everything, even the job in the grocery, because she’ll regain ground and force Stefano to get rid of you.” Gigliola went so far as to confide to her that she was speaking from experience, she had the same problem with Michele. “If I wait for him to make up his mind to marry me,” she whispered, “I’ll get old; so I’m tormenting him: either we marry by the spring of 1968 or I’m leaving and fuck him.”
Thus Ada went on to envelop Stefano in a net of true, sticky desire that made him feel special, and meanwhile she murmured between kisses, “You have to decide, Ste’, either me or her; I’m not saying you have to throw her out in the street with the child, that’s your son, you have responsibilities; but do what lots of actors and important people do today: give her some money and that’s it. Everybody in the neighborhood knows that I’m your real wife, so I want to stay with you, always.”
Stefano said yes and hugged her tight in the uncomfortable narrow bed on the Rettifilo, but then he didn’t do much, except return home to Lila and yell, because there were no clean socks, or because he had seen her talking to Pasquale or someone else.
At that point Ada began to despair. One Sunday morning she ran into Carmen, who spoke to her in accusatory tones of the working conditions in the two groceries. One thing led to another, they began to talk venomously about Lila, whom both of them, for different reasons, considered the origin of their troubles. Finally Ada couldn’t resist and recounted her romantic situation, forgetting that Carmen was the sister of her former fiancé. And Carmen, who couldn’t wait to be part of the network of gossip, listened willingly, often interrupted to fan the flames, tried with her advice to do as much damage to Ada, who had betrayed Pasquale, and to Lila, who had betrayed her. But, I should say, apart from the resentments, there was the pleasure of having something to do with a person, her childhood friend, who found herself in the role of lover of a married man. And although since childhood we girls of the neighborhood had wanted to become wives, growing up we had almost always sympathized with the lovers, who seemed to us more spirited, more combative, and, especially, more modern. On the other hand we hoped that the legitimate wife would get gravely ill and die (in general she was a very wicked or at least unfaithful woman), and that the lover would stop being a lover and crown her dream of love by becoming a wife. We were, in short, on the side of the violation, but only because it reaffirmed the value of the rule. As a result Carmen, although amid much devious advice, ended up by passionately taking Ada’s side, her feelings were genuine, and one day she said to her, in all honesty: “You can’t go on like this, you have to get rid of that bitch, marr
y Stefano, give him your own children. Ask the Solaras if they know anyone in the Sacra Rota.”
Ada immediately added Carmen’s suggestions to Gigliola’s and one night, in the pizzeria, she turned directly to Michele: “Can you get to this Sacra Rota?”
He answered ironically, “I don’t know, I can ask, one always finds a friend. But just take what’s yours, that’s the most urgent thing. And don’t worry about anything: if someone gives you trouble, send him to me.”
Michele’s words were very important, Ada felt supported, never in her life had she felt so surrounded by approval. Yet Gigliola’s hammering, Carmen’s advice, that unexpected promise of protection on the part of an important male authority, and even her anger at the fact that in August Stefano wouldn’t take a trip abroad as he had the year before but had only gone to the Sea Garden a few times, were not enough to push her to attack. It took a true, concrete new fact: the discovery that she was pregnant.
The pregnancy made Ada furiously happy, but she kept the news to herself, she didn’t speak of it even to Stefano. One afternoon she took off her smock, left the grocery as if to go out for some fresh air, and instead went to Lila’s house.
“Did something happen?” Signora Carracci asked in bewilderment as she opened the door.
Ada answered, “Nothing has happened that you don’t already know.”
She came in and told her everything, in the presence of the child. She began calmly, she talked about actors and also cyclists, she called herself a kind of “white lady”—like the lover of the famous cyclist Fausto Coppi—but more modern, and she mentioned the Sacra Rota to demonstrate that even the Church and God in certain cases where love is very strong would dissolve a marriage. Since Lila listened without interrupting, something that Ada would never have expected—rather, she hoped that she would say just half a word, so that she could beat her bloody—she got nervous and began to walk around the apartment, first to demonstrate that she had been in the house often and knew it well, and, second, to reproach her: “Look at this mess, dirty dishes, the dust, socks and underwear on the floor, it’s not possible that that poor man has to live like this.” Finally, in an uncontrollable frenzy, she began to pick the dirty clothes up off the bedroom floor, shrieking, “Starting tomorrow I’m coming here to tidy up. You don’t even know how to make the bed, look here, Stefano can’t bear the sheet to be folded like this, he told me he’s explained it to you a thousand times and you pay no attention.”
Here she stopped suddenly, confused, and said in a low voice, “You have to go, Lina, because if you don’t I’ll kill the child.”
Lila managed to respond only, “You’re behaving like your mother, Ada.”
Those were the words. I imagine her voice now: she wasn’t capable of emotional tones, she must have spoken as usual with cold malice, or with detachment. And yet years later she told me that, seeing Ada in the house in that state, she had remembered the cries of Melina, the abandoned lover, when the Sarratore family left the neighborhood, and she had seen again the iron that flew out the window and almost killed Nino. The long flame of suffering, which then had much impressed her, was flickering again in Ada; only now it wasn’t the wife of Sarratore feeding it but her, Lila. A cruel game of mirrors that at the time escaped us all. But not her, and so it’s likely that instead of resentment, instead of her usual determination to do harm, bitterness was triggered in her, and pity. Certainly she tried to take her hand, she said, “Sit down, I’ll make you a cup of chamomile tea.”
But Ada, in all Lila’s words, from first to last, and above all in that gesture, saw an insult. She withdrew abruptly, she rolled her eyes in a striking way, showing the white, and when the pupils reappeared she shouted, “Are you saying that I’m mad? That I’m mad like my mother? Then you had better pay attention, Lina. Don’t touch me, get out of the way, make yourself a chamomile. I’m going to clean up this disgusting house.”
She swept, she washed the floors, she remade the bed, and she didn’t say another word.
Lila followed her with her gaze, afraid that she would break, like an artificial body subjected to excessive acceleration. Then she took the child and went out, she walked around the new neighborhood for a long time, talking to Rinuccio, pointing out things, naming them, inventing stories. But she did it more to keep her anguish under control than to entertain the child. She went back to the house only when, from a distance, she saw Ada go out the front door and hurry off as if she were late.
112.
When Ada returned to work, out of breath and extremely agitated, Stefano, menacing but calm, asked her, “Where have you been?” She answered, in the presence of the customers waiting to be served, “To clean up your house, it was disgusting.” And addressing the audience on the other side of the counter: “There was so much dust on the night table you could write in it.”
Stefano said nothing, disappointing the customers. When the shop emptied and it was time to close, Ada cleaned, swept, always watching her lover out of the corner of her eye. Nothing happened, he did the accounts sitting at the cash register, smoking heavily aromatic American cigarettes. Once the last butt was out, he grabbed the handle to lower the shutter, but he lowered it from the inside.
“What are you doing?” Ada asked, alarmed.
“We’ll go out on the courtyard side.”
After that, he struck her in the face so many times, first with the palm of his hand, then the back, that she leaned against the counter in order not to faint. “How dare you go to my house?” he said in a voice strangled by the will not to scream. “How dare you disturb my wife and my son?” Finally he realized that his heart was nearly bursting and he tried to calm down. It was the first time he had hit her. He stammered, trembling, “Don’t ever do it again.” And he went out, leaving her bleeding in the shop.
The next day Ada didn’t go to work. Battered as she was, she appeared at Lila’s house, and Lila, when she saw the bruises on her face, told her to come in.
“Make me the chamomile,” said Melina’s daughter.
Lila made it for her.
“The baby is cute.”
“Yes.”
“Just like Stefano.”
“No.”
“He has the same eyes and the same mouth.”
“No.”
“If you have to read your books, go ahead, I’ll take care of the house and Rinuccio.”
Lila stared at her, this time almost amused, then she said, “Do what you like, but don’t go near the baby.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t do anything to him.”
Ada set to work: she straightened, washed the clothes, hung them in the sun, cooked lunch, prepared dinner. At one point she stopped, charmed by the way Lila was playing with Rinuccio.
“How old is he?”
“Two years and four months.”
“He’s little, you push him too much.”
“No, he does what he can do.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“It’s true.”
“With Stefano?”
“Of course.”
“Does he know?”
“No.”
Lila then understood that her marriage really was almost over, but, as usual when she became aware that change was imminent, she felt neither resentment nor anguish nor worry. When Stefano arrived, he found his wife reading in the living room, Ada playing with the baby in the kitchen, the apartment full of good smells and shining like a large, single precious object. He realized that the beating had been of no use, he turned white, he couldn’t breathe.
“Go,” he said to Ada in a low voice.
“No.”
“What’s got into your head?”
“I’m staying here.”
“You want me to go mad?”
“Yes, that makes two of us.”
Lila closed the book, took the baby without saying anything and withdrew into the room where, a long time earlier, I had studied, and where Rinuccio now sle
pt. Stefano whispered to his lover, “You’ll ruin me, like this. It’s not true that you love me, Ada, you want me to lose all my customers, you want to reduce me to a pauper, and you know that circumstances are already not good. Please, tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”
“I want to be with you always.”
“Yes, but not here.”
“Here.”
“This is my house, there’s Lina, there’s Rinuccio.”
“From now on I’m here, too: I’m pregnant.”
Stefano sat down. In silence he gazed at Ada’s stomach as she stood before him, as if he were seeing through her dress, her underpants, her skin, as if he were seeing the baby already formed, a living being, all ready, about to jump out. Then there was a knock at the door.
It was a waiter from the Bar Solara, a boy of sixteen who had just been hired. He told Stefano that Michele and Marcello wanted to see him right away. Stefano roused himself, at that moment he considered the demand a salvation, given the storm he had in the house. He said to Ada, “Don’t move.” She smiled, she nodded yes. He went out, got in the Solaras’ car. What a mess I’ve got myself into, he thought. What should I do? If my father were alive he would break my legs with an iron bar. Women, debts, Signora Solara’s red book. Something hadn’t worked. Lina. She had ruined him. What the fuck do Marcello and Michele want, at this hour, so urgently?
They wanted, he discovered, the old grocery. They didn’t say it but they let him understand it. Marcello spoke merely of another loan that they were willing to give him. But, he said, the Cerullo shoes have to come definitively to us, we’re finished with that lazy brother-in-law of yours, he’s not reliable. And we need a guarantee, an activity, a property, you think about it. That said, he left, he said he had things to do. At that point Stefano was alone with Michele. They talked for a long time to see if Rino and Fernando’s factory could be saved, if he could do without what Marcello had called the guarantee.
But Michele shook his head, he said, “We need guarantees, scandals aren’t good for business.”