I heard the key turn in the lock, that sound terrified me. I had seen with my own eyes, in those long moments, that Stefano really was inhabited by the ghost of his father, that the shadow of Don Achille could swell the veins of his neck and the blue network under the skin of his forehead. But, although I was frightened, I felt that I couldn’t stay still, sitting at the table, like Nunzia. I grabbed the doorknob and began to shake it, to pound the wooden door with my fist, begging, “Stefano, please, it’s not true, leave her alone. Stefano, don’t hurt her.” But by now he was sealed within his rage, I could hear him yelling that he wanted the truth, and since Lila didn’t respond—in fact, it was as if she were no longer in the room—he seemed to be talking to himself and meanwhile hitting himself, striking himself, breaking things.
“I’m going to call the landlady,” I said to Nunzia, and I ran down the stairs. I wanted to ask the woman if she had another key or if her grandson was there, a large man who could have broken down the door. But I knocked in vain, the woman wasn’t there, or if she was she didn’t open the door. Meanwhile Stefano’s shouts shattered the walls, spread through the street, through the reeds, toward the sea, and yet they seemed to find no ears but mine, no one looked out of the neighboring houses, no one came running. All that came was Nunzia’s pleas, in a low tone, alternating with the threat that if Stefano continued to hurt her daughter she would tell Fernando and Rino everything, and they, as God was her witness, would kill him.
I ran back, I didn’t know what to do. I hurled myself with all the weight of my body against the door, I cried that I had called the police, they were coming. Then, since Lila still showed no signs of life, I shrieked: “Lila, are you all right? Please, Lila, tell me you’re all right.” Only then did we hear her voice. She spoke not to us but to her husband, coldly:
“You want the truth? Yes, the son of Sarratore and I go swimming and we hold hands. Yes, we go into the deep sea and kiss each other and touch each other. Yes, I’ve been fucked by him a hundred times and so I discovered that you’re a shit, that you’re worthless, that you only demand disgusting things that make me throw up. Is that what you want? Are you happy?”
Silence. After those words Stefano didn’t take a breath, I stopped pounding on the door, Nunzia stopped crying. Outside noises returned, the cars passing, some distant voices, the hens beating their wings.
Some minutes passed and it was Stefano who began speaking again, but so softly that we couldn’t hear what he was saying. I realized, though, that he was looking for a way to calm down: short, disconnected phrases, show me that you’re done, be good, stop it. Lila’s confession must have seemed so unbearable that he had ended by taking it as a lie. He had seen in it something she resorted to in order to hurt him, an exaggeration equivalent to a solid punch to bring his feet back to the ground, words that in short meant: if you still don’t realize what groundless things you’re accusing me of, now I’m going to make it clear to you, you just listen.
But to me Lila’s words seemed as terrible as Stefano’s blows. I felt that if the excessive violence he repressed behind his polite manners and his meek face terrified me, I now couldn’t bear her courage, that audacious impudence that allowed her to cry out the truth as if it were a lie. Every single word that she had addressed to Stefano had returned him to his senses, because he considered it a lie, but had pierced me painfully, because I knew the truth. When the voice of the grocer reached us more clearly, both Nunzia and I felt that the worst had passed, Don Achille was withdrawing from his son and returning him to his gentle, pliable side. And Stefano, restored to the part of himself that had made him a successful shopkeeper, was bewildered, he didn’t understand what had happened to his voice, his hands, his arms. Even though the image of Lila and Nino holding hands probably persisted in his mind, what Lila had evoked for him with that hail of words could not help but have the flashing features of unreality.
The door didn’t open, the key didn’t turn in the lock until it was day. But Stefano’s voice became sad, a depressed pleading, and Nunzia and I waited outside for hours, keeping each other company with despondent, barely heard remarks. Whispered words inside, whispered words outside. “If I tell Rino,” Nunzia murmured, “he’ll kill him, surely he’ll kill him.” And I whispered, as if I believed her: “Please, don’t tell him.” But meanwhile I thought: Rino, and even Fernando, after the wedding never moved a finger for Lila; not to mention that ever since she was born they’ve hit her whenever they wanted. And then I said to myself: men are all made of the same clay, only Nino is different. And I sighed, while my resentment grew stronger: now it’s absolutely clear that Lila will have him, even if she’s married, and together they’ll get out of this filth, while I will be here forever.
76.
At the first light of dawn Stefano came out of his bedroom, Lila didn’t. He said, “Pack your bags, we’re leaving.”
Nunzia couldn’t contain herself and bitterly pointed out the damage he had done to the landlady’s things, saying that he would have to compensate her. He answered—as if many of the words she had shouted at him hours earlier had stayed in his mind and he felt the need to dot the “i”s—that he always paid and would continue to pay. “I paid for this house,” he enumerated in a tired voice, “I paid for your vacation, everything you, your husband, your son have I’ve given you: so don’t be a pain in the neck, pack the bags and let’s go.”
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 we
re 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.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 61