“Are you saying that Lina isn’t in love, isn’t engaged, won’t soon marry Stefano, but has sold herself?”
We were all quiet. Antonio murmured, “No, Enzo, Pasquale doesn’t mean that; you know that he loves Lina as we all of us love her.”
Enzo nodded at him to be quiet.
“Be quiet, Anto’, let Pasquale answer.”
Pasquale said grimly, “Yes, she sold herself. And she doesn’t give a damn about the stink of the money she spends every day.”
I tried again to have my say, at that point, but Enzo touched my arm.
“Excuse me, Lenù, I want to know what Pasquale calls a girl who sells herself.”
Here Pasquale had an outburst of violence that we all read in his eyes and he said what for months he had wanted to say, to shout out to the whole neighborhood: “Whore, I call her a whore. Lina has behaved and is behaving like a whore.”
Enzo got up and said, almost in a whisper: “Come outside.”
Antonio jumped up, restrained Pasquale, who was getting up, and said, “Now, let’s not overdo it, Enzo. Pasquale is only saying something that’s not an accusation, it’s a criticism that we’d all like to make.”
Enzo answered, this time aloud, “Not me.” And he headed toward the door, announcing, “I’ll wait outside for both of you.”
We kept Pasquale and Antonio from following him, and nothing happened. They didn’t speak for several days, then everything was as before.
46.
I’ve recounted that quarrel to say how that year passed and what the atmosphere was around Lila’s choices, especially among the young men who had secretly or explicitly loved her, desired her, and in all probability loved and desired her still. As for me, it’s hard to say in what tangle of feelings I found myself. I always defended Lila, and I liked doing so, I liked to hear myself speak with the authority of one who is studying difficult subjects. But I also knew that I could have just as well recounted, and willingly, if with some exaggeration, how Lila had really been behind each of Stefano’s moves, and I with her, linking step to step as if it were a mathematics problem, to achieve that result: to settle herself, settle her brother, attempt to realize the plan of the shoe factory, and even get money to repair my glasses if they broke.
I passed Fernando’s old workshop and felt a vicarious sense of triumph. Lila, clearly, had made it. The shoemaker’s shop, which had never had a sign, now displayed over the door a kind of plaque that said “Cerullo.” Fernando, Rino, the three apprentices worked at joining, stitching, hammering, polishing, bent over their benches from morning till late at night. It was known that father and son often quarreled. It was known that Fernando maintained that the shoes, especially the women’s, couldn’t be made as Lila had invented them, that they were only a child’s fantasy. It was known that Rino maintained the opposite and that he went to Lila to ask her to intervene. It was known that Lila said she didn’t want to know about it, and so Rino went to Stefano and dragged him to the shop to give his father specific orders. It was known that Stefano went in and looked for a long time at Lila’s designs framed on the walls, smiled to himself and said tranquilly that he wanted the shoes to be exactly as they were in those pictures, he had hung them there for that purpose. It was known, in short, that things were proceeding slowly, that the workers first received instructions from Fernando and then Rino changed them and everything stopped and started over, and Fernando noticed the changes and changed them back, and Stefano arrived and so back to square one: they ended up yelling, breaking things.
I glanced in and immediately fled. But the pictures hanging on the walls made an impression. Those drawings, for Lila, were fantasies, I thought. Money has nothing to do with it, selling has nothing to do with it. All that activity is the result of a whim of hers, celebrated by Stefano merely out of love. She’s lucky to be so loved, to love. Lucky to be adored for what she is and for what she invents. Now that she’s given her brother what he wanted, now that she’s taken him out of danger, surely she’ll invent something else. So I don’t want to lose sight of her. Something will happen.
But nothing happened. Lila established herself in the role of Stefano’s fiancée. And even in our conversations, when she had time to talk, she seemed satisfied with what she had become, as if she no longer saw anything beyond it, didn’t want to see anything beyond it, except marriage, a house, children.
I was disappointed. She seemed sweeter, without the hardness she had always had. I realized this later, when through Gigliola Spagnuolo I heard disgraceful rumors about her. Gigliola said to me rancorously, in dialect, “Now your friend is acting like a princess. But does Stefano know that when Marcello went to her house she gave him a blow job every night?”
I didn’t know what a blow job was. The term had been familiar to me since I was a child but the sound of it recalled only a kind of disfigurement, something very humiliating.
“It’s not true.”
“Marcello says so.”
“He’s a liar.”
“Yes? And would he lie even to his brother?”
“Did Michele tell you?”
“Yes.”
I hoped that those rumors wouldn’t reach Stefano. Every day when I came home from school I said to myself: maybe I should warn Lila, before something bad happens. But I was afraid she would be furious and that, because of how she had grown up, because of how she was made, she would go directly to Marcello Solara with the shoemaker’s knife. But in the end I decided: it was better to report to her what I had learned, so she would be prepared to confront the situation. But I discovered that she already knew about it. Not only that: she was better informed than me about what a blow job was. I realized it from the fact that she used a clearer formulation to tell me it was so disgusting to her that she would never do it to any man, let alone Marcello Solara. Then she told me that Stefano had heard the rumor and he had asked her what type of relations she had had with Marcello during the period when he went to the Cerullo house. She had said angrily, “None, are you crazy?” And Stefano had said immediately that he believed her, that he had never had doubts, that he had asked the question only to let her know that Marcello was saying obscene things about her. Yet he seemed distracted, like someone who, even against his will, is following scenes of disaster that are forming in his mind. Lila had realized it and they had discussed it for a long time, she had confessed that she, too, felt a need for revenge. But what was the use? After talk and more talk, they had decided by mutual consent to rise a step above the Solaras, above the logic of the neighborhood.
“A step above?” I asked, marveling.
“Yes, to ignore them: Marcello, his brother, the father, the grandfather, all of them. Act as if they didn’t exist.”
So Stefano had continued to go to work, without defending the honor of his fiancée, Lila had continued her life as a fiancée without resorting to the knife or anything else, the Solaras had continued to spread obscenities. I was astonished. What was happening? I didn’t understand. The Solaras’ behavior seemed more comprehensible, it seemed to me consistent with the world that we had known since we were children. What, instead, did she and Stefano have in mind, where did they think they were living? They were behaving in a way that wasn’t familiar even in the poems that I studied in school, in the novels I read. I was puzzled. They weren’t reacting to the insults, even to that truly intolerable insult that the Solaras were making. They displayed kindness and politeness toward everyone, as if they were John and Jacqueline Kennedy visiting a neighborhood of indigents. When they went out walking together, and he put an arm around her shoulders, it seemed that none of the old rules were valid for them: they laughed, they joked, they embraced, they kissed each other on the lips. I saw them speeding around in the convertible, alone even in the evening, always dressed like movie stars, and I thought, They go wherever they want, without a chaperone, and not secretly but with the consent o
f their parents, with the consent of Rino, and do whatever they like, without caring what people say. Was it Lila who had persuaded Stefano to behave in a way that was making them the most admired and most talked about couple in the neighborhood? Was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighborhood by staying in the neighborhood? Did she want to drag us out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?
47.
Everything returned abruptly to the usual track when the rumors about Lila reached Pasquale. It happened one Sunday, when Carmela, Enzo, Pasquale, Antonio, and I were walking along the stradone. Antonio said, “I hear that Marcello Solara is telling everyone that Lina was with him.”
Enzo didn’t blink. Pasquale immediately flared up: “Was how?”
Antonio was embarrassed by my and Carmela’s presence and said, “You understand.”
They moved away, to talk among themselves. I saw and heard that Pasquale was increasingly enraged, that Enzo was becoming physically more compact, as if he no longer had arms, legs, neck, as if he were a block of hard material. Why is it, I wondered, that they are so angry? Lila isn’t a sister of theirs or even a cousin. And yet they feel it’s their duty to be indignant, all three of them, more than Stefano, much more than Stefano, as if they were the true fiancés. Pasquale especially seemed ridiculous. He who only a short time before had said what he had said shouted, at one point, and we heard him clearly, with our own ears: “I’ll smash the face of that shit, calling her a whore. Even if Stefano allows it, I’m not going to allow it.” Then silence, they rejoined us, and we wandered aimlessly, I talking to Antonio, Carmela between her brother and Enzo. After a while they took us home. I saw them going off, Enzo, who was the shortest, in the middle, flanked by Antonio and Pasquale.
The next day and on those which followed there was a big uproar about the Solaras’ 1100. It had been demolished. Not only that: the two brothers had been savagely beaten, but they couldn’t say by whom. They swore they had been attacked on a dark street by at least ten people, men from outside the neighborhood. But Carmela and I knew very well that there were only three attackers, and we were worried. We waited for the inevitable reprisal, one day, two, three. But evidently things had been done right. Pasquale continued as a construction worker, Antonio as a mechanic, Enzo made his rounds with the cart. The Solaras, instead, for some time went around only on foot, battered, a little dazed, always with four or five of their friends. I admit that seeing them in that condition pleased me. I was proud of my friends. Along with Carmen and Ada I criticized Stefano and also Rino because they had acted as if nothing had happened. Then time passed, Marcello and Michele bought a green Giulietta and began to act like masters of the neighborhood again. Alive and well, bigger bullies than before. A sign that perhaps Lila was right: with people like that, you had to fight them by living a superior life, such as they couldn’t even imagine. While I was taking my exams in the second year of high school, she told me that in the spring, when she was barely sixteen and a half, she would be married.
48.
This news upset me. When Lila told me about her wedding it was June, just before my oral exams. It was predictable, of course, but now that a date had been fixed, March 12th, it was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door. I had petty thoughts. I counted the months: nine. Maybe nine months was long enough so that Pinuccia’s treacherous resentment, Maria’s hostility, Marcello Solara’s gossip—which continued to fly from mouth to mouth throughout the neighborhood, like Fama in the Aeneid—would wear Stefano down, leading him to break the engagement. I was ashamed of myself, but I was no longer able to trace a coherent design in the division of our fates. The concreteness of that date made concrete the crossroads that would separate our lives. And, what was worse, I took it for granted that her fate would be better than mine. I felt more strongly than ever the meaninglessness of school, I knew clearly that I had embarked on that path years earlier only to seem enviable to Lila. And now instead books had no importance for her. I stopped preparing for my exams, I didn’t sleep that night. I thought of my meager experience of love: I had kissed Gino once, I had scarcely grazed Nino’s lips, I had endured the fleeting and ugly contact of his father: that was it. Whereas Lila, starting in March, at sixteen, would have a husband and within a year, at seventeen, a child, and then another, and another, and another. I felt I was a shadow, I wept in despair.
The next day I went unwillingly to take the exams. But something happened that made me feel better. Professor Gerace and Professor Galiani, who were part of the committee, praised my Italian paper to the skies. Gerace in particular said that my exposition was further improved. He wanted to read a passage to the rest of the committee. And only as I listened did I realize what I had tried to do in those months whenever I had to write: to free myself from my artificial tones, from sentences that were too rigid; to try for a fluid and engaging style like Lila’s in the Ischia letter. When I heard my words in the teacher’s voice, with Professor Galiani listening and silently nodding agreement, I realized that I had succeeded. Naturally it wasn’t Lila’s way of writing, it was mine. And it seemed to my teachers something truly out of the ordinary.
I was promoted to the third year with all tens, but at home no one was surprised or celebrated me. I saw that they were satisfied, yes, and I was pleased, but they gave the event no weight. My mother, in fact, found my scholastic success completely natural, my father told me to go right away to Maestra Oliviero to ask her to get ahead of time the books for next year. As I went out my mother cried, “And if she wants to send you to Ischia again, tell her that I’m not well and you have to help me in the house.”
The teacher praised me, but carelessly, partly because by now she took my ability for granted, partly because she wasn’t well, the illness she had in her mouth was very troublesome. She never mentioned my need to rest, her cousin Nella, Ischia. Instead, surprisingly, she began to talk about Lila. She had seen her on the street, from a distance. She was with her fiancé, she said, the grocer. Then she added a sentence that I will always remember: “The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.”
I had never heard her say a rude word since I had known her. That day she said “ass,” and then muttered, “Excuse me.” But that wasn’t what struck me. It was the regret, as if the teacher were realizing that something of Lila had been ruined because she, as a teacher, hadn’t protected and nurtured it well. I felt that I was her most successful student and went away relieved.
The only one who congratulated me without reserve was Alfonso, who had also been promoted, with all sevens. I felt that his admiration was genuine, and this gave me pleasure. In front of the posted grades, in the presence of our schoolmates and their parents, he, in his excitement, did something inappropriate, as if he had forgotten that I was a girl and he wasn’t supposed to touch me: he hugged me tight, and kissed me on the cheek, a noisy kiss. Then he became confused, apologized, and yet he couldn’t contain himself, he cried, “All tens, impossible, all tens.” On the way home we talked a lot about the wedding of his brother, of Lila. Since I felt especially at ease, I asked him for the first time what he thought of his future sister-in-law. He took some time before he answered. Then he said:
“You remember the competitions they made us do at school?”
“Who could forget them?”
“I was sure I would win, you were all afraid of my father.”
“Lina, too: in fact for a while she tried not to beat you.”
“Yes, but then she decided to win and she humiliated me. I went home crying.”
“It’s not nice to lose.”
“Not because of that: it seemed to me intolerable that everyone was terrified of my father, me first of all, and t
hat girl wasn’t.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“Are you kidding? She always made me uncomfortable.”
“In what sense?”
“In the sense that my brother really shows some courage in marrying her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you are better, and that if it were me choosing I would marry you.”
This, too, pleased me. We burst out laughing, we said goodbye, still laughing. He was condemned to spend the summer in the grocery store, I, thanks to a decision of my mother more than my father, had to find a job for the summer. We promised to meet, to go at least once to the beach together. We didn’t.
In the following days I reluctantly made the rounds of the neighborhood. I asked Don Paolo, the pharmacist on the stradone, if he needed a clerk. No. I asked the newspaper seller: I wasn’t useful to him, either. I went by the stationer’s, she started laughing: she needed someone, yes, but not now. I should come back in the fall when school began. I was about to go and she called me back. She said, “You’re a serious girl, Lenù, I trust you: would you be able to take my girls swimming?”
I was really happy when I left the shop. The stationer would pay me—and pay well—if I took her three little girls to the beach for the month of July and the first ten days of August. Sea, sun, and money. I was to go every day to a place between Mergellina and Posillipo that I knew nothing about, it had a foreign name: Sea Garden. I went home in great excitement, as if my life had taken a decisive turn. I would earn money for my parents, I would go swimming, I would become smooth and golden in the sun as I had during the summer in Ischia. How sweet everything is, I thought, when the day is fine and every good thing seems to be waiting for you alone.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 26
