But by now I knew her tricks, I listened but didn’t believe her, although I always ended up hypnotized by the energy with which she played both servant and mistress. Lila was able to talk to me, talk to the customers, talk to Ada, all at the same time, while continuing to unwrap, cut, weigh, take money, and give change. She erased herself in the words and gestures, she became exhausted, she seemed truly engaged in an unrelenting struggle to forget the weight of what she still described, incongruously, as “an emptiness inside.”
What impressed me most, though, was her casual behavior with money. She went to the cash register and took what she wanted. Money for her was that drawer, the treasure chest of childhood that opened and offered its wealth. In the (rare) case that the money in the drawer wasn’t enough, she had only to glance at Stefano. He, who seemed to have reacquired the generous solicitude of their engagement, pulled up his smock, dug in the back pocket of his pants, took out a fat wallet, and asked, “How much do you need?” Lila made a sign with her fingers, her husband reached out his right arm with the fist closed, she extended her long, thin hand.
Ada, behind the counter, looked at her the way she looked at the movie stars in the pages of magazines. I imagine that in that period Antonio’s sister felt as if she were living in a fairy tale. Her eyes sparkled when Lila opened the drawer and gave her money. She handed it out freely, as soon as her husband turned his back. She gave Ada money for Antonio, who was going into the Army, she gave money to Pasquale, who urgently needed three teeth extracted. In early September she took me aside, too, and asked if I needed money for books.
“What books?”
“The ones for school but also the ones not for school.”
I told her that Maestra Oliviero was still not out of the hospital, that I didn’t know if she would help me get the textbooks, as usual, and here already Lila wanted to stick the money in my pocket. I withdrew, I refused, I didn’t want to seem a kind of poor relative forced to ask for money. I told her I had to wait till school started, I told her that the stationer had extended the Sea Garden job until mid-September, I told her that I would therefore earn more than expected and would manage by myself. She was sorry, she insisted that I come to her if the teacher couldn’t help me out.
It wasn’t just me; certainly all of us, faced with that generosity of hers, had some difficulties. Pasquale, for example, didn’t want to accept the money for the dentist, he felt humiliated, and finally took it only because his face was disfigured, his eye was inflamed, and the lettuce compresses were of no use. Antonio, too, was offended, to the point where to take money that our friend gave Ada in addition to her regular pay he had to be persuaded that it was making up for the disgraceful pay that Stefano had given her before. We had never had a lot of money, and we attached great importance even to ten lire; if we found a coin on the street it was a celebration. So it seemed to us a mortal sin that Lila handed out money as if it were a worthless metal, waste paper. She did it silently, with an imperious gesture resembling those with which as a child she had organized games, assigned parts. Afterward, she talked about other things, as if that moment hadn’t existed. On the other hand—Pasquale said to me one evening, in his obscure way—mortadella sells, so do shoes, and Lina has always been our friend, she’s on our side, our ally, our companion. She’s rich now, but by her own merit: yes, by her own merit, because the money didn’t come to her from the fact that she is Signora Carracci, the future mother of the grocer’s child, but because it’s she who invented Cerullo shoes, and even if no one seemed to remember that now, we, her friends, remembered.
All true. How many things Lila had made happen in the space of a few years. And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine. Lila herself confirmed this bitterly when, one Sunday when the sea was smooth and the sky white, she appeared, to my surprise, at the Sea Garden around three in the afternoon, by herself: a truly unusual event. She had taken the subway, a couple of buses, and now was here, in a bathing suit, with a greenish complexion and an outbreak of pimples on her forehead. “Seventeen years of shit,” she said in dialect, with apparent cheer, her eyes full of sarcasm.
She had quarreled with Stefano. In the daily exchanges with the Solaras the truth came out about the management of the store in Piazza dei Martiri. Michele had tried to insist on Gigliola, had harshly threatened Rino, who supported Pinuccia, had finally launched into a tense negotiation with Stefano, in which they had come close to blows. And in the end what happened? Neither winners nor losers, it seemed. Gigliola and Pinuccia would manage the store together. Provided that Stefano reconsider an old decision.
“What?” I asked.
“See if you can guess.”
I couldn’t guess. Michele had asked Stefano, in his teasing tone of voice, to concede on the photograph of Lila in her wedding dress. And this time her husband had done so.
“Really?”
“Really. I told you you just had to wait. They’re going to display me in the shop. In the end I’ve won the bet, not you. Start studying—this year you’ll have to get top marks.”
Here she changed her tone, became serious. She said that she hadn’t come because of the photograph, since she had known for a long time that as far as that shit was concerned she was merchandise to barter. She had come because of the pregnancy. She talked about it for a long time, nervously, as if it were something to be crushed in a mortar, and she did it with cold firmness. It has no meaning, she said, not concealing her anguish. Men insert their thingy in you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside. I’ve got it, it’s here, and it’s repulsive to me. I throw up continuously, it’s my very stomach that can’t bear it. I know I’m supposed to think beautiful things, I know I have to resign myself, but I can’t do it, I see no reason for resignation and no beauty. Besides the fact, she added, that I feel incapable of dealing with children. You, yes, you are, just look how you take care of the stationer’s children. Not me, I wasn’t born with that gift.
These words hurt me, what could I say?
“You don’t know if you have a gift or not, you have to try,” I sought to reassure her, and pointed to the daughters of the stationer who were playing a little distance away. “Sit with them for a while, talk to them.”
She laughed. She said maliciously that I had learned to use the sentimental voice of our mothers. But then, uneasily, she ventured to say a few words to the girls, retreated, began talking to me again. I equivocated, pressed her, urged her to take care of Linda, the smallest of the stationer’s daughters. I said to her, “Go on, let her play her favorite game, drinking from the fountain next to the bar or spraying the water by putting your thumb over it.”
She led Linda away unwillingly, holding her hand. Time passed and they didn’t come back. I called the other two girls and went to see what was happening. Everything was fine, Lila had been happily made a prisoner by Linda. She held the child suspended over the jet, letting her drink or spray water. They were both laughing, and their laughter sounded like cries of joy.
I was relieved. I left Linda’s sisters with her, too, and went to sit at the bar, in a place where I could keep an eye on all four and also read. She’ll become that, I thought, looking at her. What seemed insupportable before is cheering her up now. Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It’s a good sentence, she’ll like it. Lucky her, she’s got everything that counts.
For a while I tried to follow, line by line, the arguments of Rousseau. Then I looked up, I saw that something was wrong. Shouts. Maybe Linda had leaned over too far, maybe one of her sisters had given her a shove, certainly she had escaped Lila’s grasp and had hit her chin on the edge of the basin. I ran over in fear. Lila, as soon as she saw me, cried immediately, in a childish voice that I had never heard from her, not even when s
he was a child:
“It was her sister who made her fall, not me.”
She was holding Linda, who was bleeding, screaming, crying, as her sisters looked elsewhere with small nervous movements and tight smiles, as if the thing had nothing to do with them, as if they couldn’t hear, couldn’t see.
I tore the child from Lila’s arms and tilted her toward the jet of water, washing her face with resentful hands. There was a horizontal cut under her chin. I’ll lose the money from the stationer, I thought, my mother will be angry. Meanwhile I ran for the attendant, who somehow cajoled Linda into calming down, surprised her with an inundation of rubbing alcohol, making her shriek again, then stuck a gauze bandage on her chin and went back to soothing her. Nothing serious, in other words. I bought ice cream for the three girls and went back to the concrete platform.
Lila had left.
25.
The stationer didn’t seem especially upset by Linda’s wound, but when I asked if I should come the next day at the usual time to pick up the girls, she said that her daughters had had too much swimming that summer and there was no need for me anymore.
I didn’t tell Lila that I had lost my job. She on the other hand never asked me how things had turned out, she didn’t even ask about Linda and her cut. When I saw her again she was extremely busy with the opening of the new grocery store and gave me the impression of an athlete in training, jumping rope more and more frantically.
She dragged me to the printer, from whom she had ordered a large number of flyers announcing the opening of the new store. She wanted me to go to the priest to set a time to come by for the blessing of the place and the stock. She announced that she had hired Carmela Peluso, at a salary a lot higher than what she was making at the notions store, but first of all she told me that in everything, truly everything, she was waging a serious war against her husband, Pinuccia, her mother-in-law, her brother Rino. She didn’t seem especially aggressive, however. She spoke in a low voice, in dialect, doing a thousand other things that seemed more important than what she was saying. She enumerated the wrongs that her relatives, by marriage and by birth, had done and were doing to her. “They have placated Michele,” she said, “just as they placated Marcello. They used me—to them I’m not a person but a thing. Let’s give him Lina, let’s stick her on a wall, since she’s a zero, an absolute zero.” As she spoke her eyes shone, full of movement, within dark circles, her skin was stretched over the cheekbones, her teeth flashed white, in quick nervous smiles. But she didn’t convince me. It seemed to me that behind that raucous activity was a person who was exhausted and looking for a way out.
“What do you intend to do?” I asked.
“Nothing. All I know is they’ll have to kill me to do what they want with my photograph.”
“Forget it, Lila. Ultimately it’s a nice thing, think about it: they only put actresses on billboards.”
“And am I an actress?”
“No.”
“So? If my husband has decided to sell himself to the Solaras, do you think he can sell me as well?”
I tried to soothe her, I was afraid that Stefano would lose patience and hit her. I said so, she started laughing: since she’d been pregnant her husband hadn’t dared to give her even a slap. But now, just as she uttered that remark, the suspicion dawned on me that the photograph was an excuse, that really she wanted to infuriate all of them, to be massacred by Stefano, by the Solaras, by Rino, provoke them to the point where their blows would help her to crush the impatience, the pain, the living thing she had in her belly.
My hypothesis found support the night the grocery opened. She seemed to be wearing her shabbiest clothes. In front of everyone she treated her husband like a servant. She sent away the priest she had had me call on before he could bless the store, contemptuously sticking some money in his hand. She went on to slice prosciutto and stuff sandwiches, handing them out free to anyone, along with a glass of wine. And this last move was so successful that the store had scarcely opened when it was jammed with customers; she and Carmela were besieged, and Stefano, who was elegantly dressed, had to help them deal with the situation as he was, without an apron, so that his good clothes got all greasy.
When they came home, exhausted, her husband made a scene and Lila did her best to provoke his fury. She shouted that if he wanted someone who obeyed, and that’s all, he was out of luck; she was not his mother or his sister, she would always make life difficult for him. And she started with the Solaras, with the business of the photograph, insulting him grossly. First he let her have her say, then he responded with even worse insults. But he didn’t beat her. When, the next day, she told me what had happened, I said that although Stefano had his faults, certainly he loved her. She denied it. “He understands only this,” she replied, rubbing together thumb and index finger. And in fact the grocery was already popular throughout the new neighborhood, and was crowded from the moment it opened. “The cash drawer is already full. Thanks to me. I bring him wealth, a son, what more does he want?”
“What more do you want?” I asked, with a stab of rage that surprised me, and immediately I smiled, hoping she hadn’t noticed.
I remember that she looked bewildered; she touched her forehead with her fingers. Maybe she didn’t even know what she wanted, she felt only that she couldn’t find peace.
As the other opening, that of the shop on Piazza dei Martiri, approached, she became unbearable. But maybe that adjective is excessive. Let’s say that she poured out onto all of us, even me, the confusion that she felt inside. On the one hand, she made Stefano’s life hell, she squabbled with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, she went to Rino and quarreled with him in front of the workers and Fernando, who, more hunched than usual, labored over his bench, pretending not to hear; on the other, she herself perceived that she was spinning around in her unhappiness, unresigned, and at times I caught her in the new grocery store, in a rare moment when it was empty or she wasn’t dealing with suppliers, with a vacant look, one hand on her forehead, in her hair, as if to stanch a wound, and the expression of someone who is trying to catch her breath.
One afternoon I was at home; it was still very hot, although it was the end of September. School was about to begin, I felt at the mercy of the days. My mother reproached me for wasting time. Nino—who knows where he was, in England or in that mysterious space that was the university. I no longer had Antonio, or even the hope of getting back together with him; he had left, along with Enzo Scanno, for his military service, saying goodbye to everyone except me. I heard someone calling me from the street. It was Lila. Her eyes were shining, as if she had a fever, and she said she had found a solution.
“Solution to what?”
“The photograph. If they want to display it, they have to do it the way I say.”
“And what do you say?”
She didn’t tell me, maybe at that moment it wasn’t clear to her. But I knew what sort of person she was, and I recognized in her face the expression she got when, from the dark depths of herself, a signal arrived that fired her brain. She asked me to go with her that evening to Piazza dei Martiri. There we would find the Solaras, Gigliola, Pinuccia, her brother. She wanted me to help her, support her, and I realized that what she had in mind would ferry her beyond her permanent war: a violent but conclusive outlet for the accumulated tensions; or a way of freeing her head, her body, from pent-up energies.
“All right,” I said, “but promise not to be crazy.”
“Yes.”
After the stores closed she and Stefano came to get me in the car. From the few words they exchanged I understood that not even her husband knew what she had in mind and that this time my presence, rather than reassuring him, alarmed him. Lila had finally appeared to be accommodating. She had told him that, if there was no possibility of abandoning the photograph, she wanted at least to have her say on how it was displayed.
�
�A question of frame, wall, lighting?” he had asked.
“I have to see.”
“But then that’s it, Lina.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
It was a beautiful warm evening; the brilliant lights of the shop’s interior spread their glow into the square. The gigantic image of Lila in her wedding dress could be seen at a distance, leaning against the center wall. Stefano parked, we went in, making our way among the boxes of shoes, piled up haphazardly, cans of paint, ladders. Marcello, Rino, Gigliola, and Pinuccia were visibly irritated: for varying reasons they had no wish to submit yet again to Lila’s caprices. The only one who greeted us cordially was Michele, who turned to my friend with a mocking laugh.
“Lovely signora, will you let us know, at last, what you have in mind or do you just want to ruin the evening?”
Lila looked at the panel leaning against the wall, asked them to lay it on the floor. Marcello said cautiously, with the dark timidity that he always showed toward Lila, “What for?”
“I’ll show you.”
Rino interrupted: “Don’t be an idiot, Lina. You know how much this thing cost? If you ruin it, you’re in trouble.”
The Solaras laid the image on the floor. Lila looked around, with her brow furrowed, her eyes narrowed. She was looking for something that she knew was there, that perhaps she had bought herself. In a corner she spied a roll of black paper, and she took a pair of big scissors and a box of drawing pins from a shelf. Then, with that expression of extreme concentration which enabled her to isolate herself from everything around her, she went back to the panel. Before our astonished and, in the cases of some, openly hostile eyes, she cut strips of black paper, with the manual precision she had always possessed, and pinned them here and there to the photograph, asking for my help with slight gestures or quick glances.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 42