I joined in with the devotion that I had felt ever since we were children. Those moments were thrilling, it was a pleasure to be beside her, slipping inside her intentions, to the point of anticipating her. I felt that she was seeing something that wasn’t there, and that she was struggling to make us see it, too. I was suddenly happy, feeling the intensity that invested her, that flowed through her fingers as they grasped the scissors, as they pinned the black paper.
Finally, she tried to lift the canvas, as if she were alone in that space, but she couldn’t. Marcello readily intervened, I intervened, we leaned it against the wall. Then we all backed up toward the door, some sneering, some grim, some appalled. The body of the bride Lila appeared cruelly shredded. Much of the head had disappeared, as had the stomach. There remained an eye, the hand on which the chin rested, the brilliant stain of the mouth, the diagonal stripe of the bust, the line of the crossed legs, the shoes.
Gigliola began, scarcely containing her rage: “I cannot put a thing like that in my shop.”
“I agree,” Pinuccia exploded. “We have to sell here, and with that grotesque thing people will run away. Rino, say something to your sister, please.”
Rino pretended to ignore her, but he turned to Stefano as if his brother-in-law were to blame for what was happening. “I told you, you can’t reason with her. You have to say yes, no, and that’s it, or you see what happens? It’s a waste of time.”
Stefano didn’t answer, he stared at the panel leaning against the wall and it was evident that he was looking for a way out. He asked me, “What do you think, Lenù?”
I said in Italian, “To me it seems very beautiful. Of course, I wouldn’t want it in the neighborhood, that’s not the right place for it. But here it’s something else, it will attract attention, it will please. In Confidenze just last week I saw that in Rossano Brazzi’s house there is a painting like this.”
Hearing that, Gigliola got even angrier. “What do you mean? That Rossano Brazzi knows what’s what, that you two know everything, and Pinuccia and I don’t?”
At that point I felt the danger. I had only to glance at Lila to realize that, if when we arrived at the shop she had really felt willing to give in should the attempt prove fruitless, now that the attempt had been made and had produced that image of disfigurement she wouldn’t yield an inch. Those minutes of work on the picture had broken ties: at that moment she was overwhelmed by an exaggerated sense of herself, and it would take time for her to retreat into the dimension of the grocer’s wife, she wouldn’t accept a sigh of dissent. In fact, while Gigliola was speaking, she was already muttering: Like this or not at all. And she wanted to quarrel, she wanted to break, shatter, she would have happily hurled herself at Gigliola with the scissors.
I hoped for a word of support from Marcello. But Marcello remained silent, head down: I understood that his residual feelings for Lila were vanishing at that moment, his old depressed passion couldn’t carry them forward any longer. It was his brother who broke in, lashing Gigliola, his fiancée, in his most aggressive voice. “Shut up,” he told her. And as soon as she tried to protest he became threatening, without even looking at her, staring, rather, at the panel: “Shut up, Gigliò.” Then he turned to Lila.
“I like it, signò. You’ve erased yourself deliberately and I see why: to show the thigh, to show how well a woman’s thigh goes with those shoes. Excellent. You’re a pain in the ass, but when you do a thing you do it right.”
Silence.
With her fingertips Gigliola dried silent tears that she couldn’t hold back. Pinuccia stared at Rino, she stared at her brother, as if she wanted to say to them: Speak, defend me, don’t let that bitch walk all over me.
Stefano instead murmured softly, “Yes, it convinces me, too.”
And Lila said suddenly, “It’s not finished.”
“What do you still have to do?” Pinuccia shot back.
“I have to add a little color.”
“Color?” Marcello mumbled, even more disoriented. “We’re supposed to open in three days.”
Michele laughed: “If we have to wait another little bit, we’ll wait. Get to work, signò, do what you like.”
That masterful tone, of one who makes and unmakes as he wishes, Stefano didn’t like.
“There’s the new grocery,” he said, to let it be understood that he needed his wife there.
“Figure it out,” Michele answered. “We have more interesting things to do here.”
26.
We spent the last days of September shut up in the shop, the two of us and three workmen. They were magnificent hours of play, of invention, of freedom, such as we hadn’t experienced together perhaps since childhood. Lila drew me into her frenzy. We bought paste, paint, brushes. With extreme precision (she was demanding) we attached the black paper cutouts. We traced red or blue borders between the remains of the photograph and the dark clouds that were devouring it. Lila had always been good with lines and colors, but here she did something more, though I wouldn’t have been able to say what it was; hour after hour it engulfed me.
For a while it seemed to me that she had fashioned that occasion to bring to an effective end the years that had begun with the designs for the shoes, when she was still the girl Lina Cerullo. And I still think that much of the pleasure of those days was derived from the resetting of the conditions of her, or our, life, from the capacity we had to lift ourselves above ourselves, to isolate ourselves in the pure and simple fulfillment of that sort of visual synthesis. We forgot about Antonio, Nino, Stefano, the Solaras, my problems with school, her pregnancy, the tensions between us. We suspended time, we isolated space, there remained only the play of glue, scissors, paper, paint: the play of shared creation.
But there was something else. I was soon reminded of the word Michele had used: erase. Likely, yes, very likely the black stripes did set the shoes apart and make them more visible: young Solara wasn’t stupid, he knew how to look. But at times, and with growing intensity, I felt that that wasn’t the true goal of our pasting and painting. Lila was happy, and she was drawing me deeper and deeper into her fierce happiness, because she had suddenly found, perhaps without even realizing it, an opportunity that allowed her to portray the fury she directed against herself, the insurgence, perhaps for the first time in her life, of the need—and here the verb used by Michele was appropriate—to erase herself.
Today, in the light of many subsequent events, I’m quite sure that that is really what happened. With the black paper, with the green and purple circles that Lila drew around certain parts of her body, with the blood-red lines with which she sliced and said she was slicing it, she completed her own self-destruction in an image, presented to the eyes of all in the space bought by the Solaras to display and sell her shoes.
It’s likely that it was she who provoked in me that impression, who motivated it. While we worked, she began to talk about when she had begun to realize that she was now Signora Carracci. At first I didn’t really understand what she was saying, her observations seemed to me banal. When, as girls, of course, we were in love, we would try out the sound of our name joined to the last name of the beloved. I, for example, still have a notebook from the first year of high school in which I practiced signing myself Elena Sarratore, and I clearly remember how I would very faintly whisper that name. But it wasn’t what Lila meant. I soon realized that she was confessing exactly the opposite, a game like mine had never occurred to her. Nor, she said, had the formula of her new designation at first made much of an impression: Raffaella Cerullo Carracci. Nothing exciting, nothing serious. In the beginning, that “Carracci” had been no more absorbing than an exercise in logical analysis, of the sort that Maestra Oliviero had hammered into us in elementary school. What was it, an indirect object of place? Did it mean that she now lived not with her parents but with Stefano? Did it mean that the new house where she was going to live would have on the
door a brass plate that said “Carracci”? Did it mean that if I were to write to her I would no longer address the letter to Raffaella Cerullo but to Raffaella Carracci? Did it mean that in everyday usage Cerullo would soon disappear from Raffaella Cerullo Carracci, and that she herself would define herself, and sign, only as Raffaella Carracci, and that her children would have to make an effort to recall their mother’s surname, and that her grandchildren would be completely ignorant of their grandmother’s surname?
Yes. A custom. Everything according to the rules, then. But Lila, as usual, hadn’t stopped there, she had soon gone further. As we worked with brushes and paints, she told me that she had begun to see in that formula an indirect object of place to which, as if Cerullo Carracci somehow indicated that Cerullo goes toward Carracci, falls into it, is sucked up by it, is dissolved in it. And, from the abrupt assignment of the role of speech maker at her wedding to Silvio Solara, from the entrance into the restaurant of Marcello Solara, wearing on his feet, no less, the shoes that Stefano had led her to believe he considered a sacred relic, from her honeymoon and the beatings, up until that installation—in the void that she felt inside, the living thing determined by Stefano—she had been increasingly oppressed by an unbearable sensation, a force pushing down harder and harder, crushing her. That impression had been getting stronger, had prevailed. Raffaella Cerullo, overpowered, had lost her shape and had dissolved inside the outlines of Stefano, becoming a subsidiary emanation of him: Signora Carracci. It was then that I began to see in the panel the traces of what she was saying. “It’s a thing that’s still going on,” she said in a whisper. And meanwhile we pasted paper, laid on color. But what were we really doing, what was I helping her do?
The workmen, in great bewilderment, attached the panel to the wall. We were sad but we didn’t say so; the game was over. We cleaned the shop thoroughly. Lila changed her mind once again about the position of a sofa, of an ottoman. Finally we withdrew together to the door and contemplated our work. She burst out laughing as I had never heard her laugh, a free, self-mocking laugh. I, on the other hand, was so enthralled by the upper part of the panel, where Lila’s head no longer was, that I couldn’t take in the whole. All you could see, at the top, was a very vivid eye, encircled by midnight blue and red.
27.
The day of the opening Lila arrived in Piazza dei Martiri sitting in the convertible next to her husband. When she got out, I saw in her the uncertain gaze of someone who is afraid something bad is going to happen. The overexcitement of the days of the panel had dissipated; she had again taken on the sickly look of a woman who is unwillingly pregnant. Yet she was carefully dressed, she seemed to have stepped out of a fashion magazine. She immediately left Stefano and dragged me off to look at the shopwindows of Via dei Mille.
We walked for a while. She was tense, she kept asking me if anything was out of place.
“Do you remember,” she said suddenly, “the girl dressed all in green, the one with the derby?”
I remembered. I remembered the uneasiness we had felt when we saw her, on that same street, years before, and the fight between our boys and the local boys, and the intervention of the Solaras, and Michele with the iron bar, and the fear. I realized that she wanted to hear something soothing, I said:
“It was just a matter of money, Lila. Today it’s all changed, you’re much prettier than the girl in green.”
But I thought: It’s not true, I’m lying to you. There was something malevolent in the inequality, and now I knew it. It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money. The cash of two grocery stores, and even of the shoe factory and the shoe store, was not sufficient to hide our origin. Lila herself, even if she had taken from the cash drawer more money than she had taken, even if she had taken millions, thirty, even fifty, couldn’t do it. I had understood this, and finally there was something that I knew better than she did, I had learned it not on those streets but outside the school, looking at the girl who came to meet Nino. She was superior to us, just as she was, unwittingly. And this was unendurable.
We returned to the shop. The afternoon went on like a kind of marriage feast: food, sweets, a lot of wine; all the guests in the clothes they had worn to Lila’s wedding, Fernando, Nunzia, Rino, the entire Solara family, Alfonso, we girls, Ada, Carmela, and I. There was a crowd of cars haphazardly parked, there was a crowd in the shop, the clamor of voices grew louder. The entire time, Gigliola and Pinuccia competed to act like the proprietor, each striving harder than the other, and both worn out by the strain. The panel with Lila’s picture loomed over everything. Some paused to look at it with interest, some gave it a skeptical glance or even laughed. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Lila was no longer recognizable. What remained was a seductive, tremendous form, the image of a one-eyed goddess who thrust her beautifully shod feet into the center of the room.
In the crush I was amazed by Alfonso, who was lively, cheerful, elegant. I had never seen him like that, at school or in the neighborhood or in the grocery, and Lila herself pondered him for a long time, perplexed. I said to her, laughing, “He’s not himself anymore.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.”
Alfonso was the true good news of that afternoon. Something that had been silent in him awakened, in the brightly lit shop. It was as if he had unexpectedly discovered that this part of the city made him feel good. He became unusually active. We saw him arrange this object and that, start up conversations with the stylish people who came in out of curiosity, who examined the shoes or grabbed a pastry and a glass of vermouth. At a certain point he joined us and in a self-assured tone praised effusively the work we had done on the photograph. He was in a state of such mental freedom that he overcame his timidity and said to his sister-in-law, “I’ve always known you were dangerous,” and he kissed her on both cheeks. I stared at him perplexed. Dangerous? What had he perceived, in the panel, that had escaped me? Was Alfonso capable of seeing beyond appearances? Did he know how to look with imagination? Is it possible, I wondered, that his real future is not in studying but in this affluent part of the city, where he’ll be able to use the little he’s learning in school? Ah yes, he concealed inside himself another person. He was different from all the boys of the neighborhood, and mainly he was different from his brother, Stefano, who, sitting on an ottoman in a corner, was silent but ready to respond with a tranquil smile to anyone who spoke to him.
Evening fell. Suddenly a bright light flared outside. The Solaras, grandfather, father, mother, sons, rushed out to see, gripped by a noisy familial enthusiasm. We all went out into the street. Above the windows and the entrance shone the word “SOLARA.”
Lila grimaced, she said to me, “They gave in on that, too.”
She pushed me reluctantly toward Rino, who seemed happiest of all, and said to him, “If the shoes are Cerullo, why is the shop Solara?”
Rino took her by the arm and said in a low voice, “Lina, why do you always want to be a pain in the ass? You remember the mess you got me into in this very square? What am I supposed to do, you want another mess? Be satisfied for once. We are here, in the center of Naples, and we are the masters. Those shits who wanted to beat us up less than three years ago—do you see them now? They stop, they look in the windows, they go in, they take a pastry. Isn’t that enough for you? Cerullo shoes, Solara shop. What do you want to see up there, Carracci?”
Lila was evasive, saying to him, without aggression, “I’m perfectly calm. Enough to tell you that you’d better not ask me for anything ever again. What do you think you’re doing? Do you borrow money from Signora Solara? Does Stefano borrow money from her? Are you both in debt to her, and so you always say yes? From now on, every man for himself, Rino.”
She abandoned us, headed straight toward Michele Solara, in a playfully flirtatious way. I saw that she went off with him to the square, they walked around the stone lions. I saw that her husband followed her wit
h his gaze. I saw that he didn’t take his eyes off her all the while she and Michele walked, talking. I saw that Gigliola grew furious, she whispered in Pinuccia’s ear and they both stared at her.
Meanwhile the shop emptied, someone turned off the large, luminous sign. The square darkened for a few seconds, then the street lamps regained their strength. Lila left Michele laughing, but as she entered the shop her face was suddenly drained of life, she shut herself in the back room where the toilet was.
Alfonso, Marcello, Pinuccia, and Gigliola began to straighten up. I went to help.
Lila came out of the bathroom and Stefano, as if he had been waiting in ambush, immediately grabbed her by the arm. She wriggled free, irritated, and joined me. She was very pale. She whispered, “I’ve had some blood. What does it mean, is the baby dead?”
28.
Lila’s pregnancy lasted scarcely more than ten weeks; then the midwife came and scraped away everything. The next day she went back to work in the new grocery with Carmen Peluso. This marked the beginning of a long period in which, sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce, she stopped running around, having apparently decided to compress her whole life into the orderliness of that space fragrant with mortar and cheese, filled with sausages, bread, mozzarella, anchovies in salt, hunks of cicoli, sacks overflowing with dried beans, bladders stuffed with lard.
This behavior was greatly appreciated in particular by Stefano’s mother, Maria. As if she had recognized in her daughter-in-law something of herself, she suddenly became more affectionate, and gave her some old earrings of red gold. Lila accepted them with pleasure and wore them often. For a while her face remained pale, she had pimples on her forehead, her eyes were sunk deep into the sockets, the skin was stretched so tight over her cheekbones that it seemed transparent. Then she revived and put even more energy into promoting the shop. Already by Christmastime the profits had risen and within a few months surpassed those of the grocery in the old neighborhood.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 43
