“Is this right?”
“Yes.”
It was true. In a few hours she could swim better than I could, not to mention Pinuccia, and already she was making fun of our clumsiness.
That bullying air dissipated abruptly when, around four in the afternoon, Nino, who was very tall, and Bruno, who came up to his shoulders, appeared on the beach, just as a cool wind rose, taking away the desire to swim.
Pinuccia was the first to make them out as they advanced along the shore, among the children playing with shovels and pails. She burst out laughing in surprise and said: Look who’s coming, the long and the short of it. Nino and his friend, towels over their shoulder, cigarettes and lighters, advanced deliberately, looking for us among the bathers.
I had a sudden sense of power, I shouted, I waved to signal our presence. So Nino had kept his promise. So he had felt, already, the next day, the need to see me again. So he had come purposely from Forio, dragging along his mute companion, and since he had nothing in common with Lila and Pinuccia, it was obvious that he had taken that walk just for me, who alone was not married, or even engaged. I felt happy, and the more my happiness seemed justified—Nino spread his towel next to me, he sat down, he pointed to an edge of the blue fabric, and I, who was the only one sitting on the sand, quickly moved over—the more cordial and talkative I became.
Lila and Pinuccia instead were silent. They stopped teasing me, they stopped squabbling with each other; they listened to Nino as he told funny stories about how he and his friend had organized their life of study.
It was a while before Pinuccia ventured a few words, in a mixture of dialect and Italian. She said the water was nice and warm, that the man who sold fresh coconut hadn’t come by yet, that she had a great desire for some. But Nino paid little attention, absorbed in his witty stories, and it was Bruno, more attentive, who felt it his duty not to ignore what a pregnant woman was saying: worried that the child might be born with a craving for coconut, he offered to go in search of some. Pinuccia liked his voice, choked by shyness but kind, the voice of a person who doesn’t want to hurt anyone, and she eagerly began chatting with him, in a low voice, as if not to disturb.
Lila, however, remained silent. She took little interest in the platitudes that Pinuccia and Bruno were exchanging, but she didn’t miss a word of what Nino and I were saying. That attention made me uneasy, and a few times I said I would be glad to take a walk to the fumaroles, hoping that Nino would say: let’s go. But he had just begun to talk about the construction chaos on Ischia, so he agreed mechanically, then continued talking anyway. He dragged Bruno into it, maybe upset by the fact that he was talking to Pinuccia, and called on him as a witness to certain eyesores right next to his parents’ house. Nino had a great need to express himself, to summarize his reading, to give shape to what he had himself observed. It was his way of putting his thoughts in order—talk, talk, talk—but certainly, I thought, also a sign of solitude. I proudly felt that I was like him, with the same desire to give myself an educated identity, to impose it, to say: Here’s what I know, here’s what I’m going to be. But Nino didn’t leave me space to do it, even if occasionally, I have to say, I tried. I sat and listened to him, like the others, and when Pinuccia and Bruno exclaimed, “All right, we’re going for a walk now, we’re going to look for coconut,” I gazed insistently at Lila, hoping that she would go with her sister-in-law, leaving me and Nino finally alone to face each other, side by side, on the same towel. But she didn’t breathe, and when Pina realized that she was compelled to go for a walk by herself with a young man who was polite but nevertheless unknown, she asked me, in annoyance, “Lenù, come on, don’t you want to walk?” I answered, “Yes, but let us finish our conversation, then maybe we’ll join you.” And she, displeased, went with Bruno toward the fumaroles: they were exactly the same height.
We continued to talk about how Naples and Ischia and all Campania had ended up in the hands of the worst people, who acted like the best people. “Marauders,” Nino called them, his voice rising, “destroyers, bloodsuckers, people who steal suitcases of money and don’t pay taxes: builders, lawyers for builders, Camorrists, monarcho-fascists, and Christian Democrats who behave as if cement were mixed in Heaven, and God himself, with an enormous trowel, were throwing blocks of it on the hills, on the coasts.” But that the three of us were talking is an exaggeration. It was mainly he who talked, every so often I threw in some fact I had read in Cronache Meridionali. As for Lila, she spoke only once, and cautiously, when in the list of villains he included shopkeepers.
She asked, “Who are shopkeepers?”
Nino stopped in the middle of a sentence, looked at her in astonishment.
“Tradesmen.”
“And why do you call them shopkeepers?”
“That’s what they’re called.”
“My husband is a shopkeeper.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m not offended.”
“Do you pay taxes?”
“I’ve never heard of them till now.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Taxes are important for planning the economic life of a community.”
“If you say so. You remember Pasquale Peluso?”
“No.”
“He’s a construction worker. Without all that cement he would lose his job.”
“Ah.”
“But he’s a Communist. His father, also a Communist, in the court’s opinion murdered my father-in-law, who had made money on the black market and as a loan shark. And Pasquale is like his father, he has never agreed on the question of peace, not even with the Communists, his comrades. But, even though my husband’s money comes directly from my father-in-law’s money, Pasquale and I are close friends.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
Lila made a self-mocking face.
“I don’t, either, I was hoping to understand by listening to the two of you.”
That was it, she said nothing else. But in speaking she hadn’t used her normal aggressive tone of voice, she seriously seemed to want us to help her understand, since the life of the neighborhood was a tangled skein. She had spoken in dialect most of the time, as if to indicate, modestly: I don’t use tricks, I speak as I am. And she had summarized disparate things frankly, without seeking, as she usually did, a thread that would hold them together. And in fact neither she nor I had ever heard that word-formula loaded with cultural and political contempt: shopkeepers. And in fact neither she nor I knew anything about taxes: our parents, friends, boyfriends, husbands, relatives acted as if they didn’t exist, and school taught nothing that had to do even vaguely with politics. Yet Lila still managed to disrupt what had until that moment been a new and thrilling afternoon. Right after that exchange, Nino tried to return to his subject but he faltered, he went back to telling funny anecdotes about life with Bruno. He said they ate only fried eggs and salami, he said that they drank a lot of wine. Then he seemed embarrassed by his own stories and appeared relieved when Pinuccia and Bruno, their hair wet, came back, eating coconut.
“That was really fun,” Pina exclaimed, but with the air of one who wants to say: You two bitches, you sent me off by myself with someone I don’t even know.
When the two boys left I walked with them a little way, just to make it clear that they were my friends and had come because of me.
Nino said moodily, “Lina really got lost, what a shame.”
I nodded yes, said goodbye, stood for a while with my feet in the water to calm myself.
When we got home, Pinuccia and I were lively, Lila thoughtful. Pinuccia told Nunzia about the visit of the two boys and appeared unexpectedly pleased with Bruno, who had taken the trouble to make sure that her child wasn’t born with a craving for coconut. He’s well brought up, she said, a student but not too boring: he seems not to care about how he’s d
ressed but everything he has on, from his bathing suit to his shirt and his sandals, is expensive. She appeared curious about the fact that someone could be wealthy in a fashion different from that of her brother, Rino, the Solaras. She made a remark that struck me: At the bar on the beach he bought me this and that without showing off.
Her mother-in-law, who, for the entire length of that vacation, never went to the beach but took care of the shopping, the house, preparing dinner and also the lunch that we carried to the beach the next day, listened as if her daughter-in-law were recounting to her an enchanted world. Naturally she noticed immediately that her daughter was preoccupied, and kept glancing at her questioningly. But Lila was just distracted. She caused no trouble of any type, she allowed Pinuccia to sleep with her again, she wished everyone good night. Then she did something completely unexpected. I had just gone to bed when she appeared in the little room.
“Will you give me one of your books?” she asked.
I looked at her in bewilderment. She wanted to read? How long since she had opened a book, three, four years? And why now had she decided to start again? I took the volume of Beckett, the one I used to kill the mosquitoes, and gave it to her. It seemed the most accessible text I had.
47.
The week passed, between long waits and encounters that ended too quickly. The two boys kept to a rigorous schedule. They woke at six in the morning, they studied until lunchtime, at three they set out for their date with us, at seven they went home, had dinner, and resumed studying. Nino never came by himself. He and Bruno, although so different in every way, got along well, and especially when it came to us they seemed to gain confidence from each other’s presence.
Pinuccia from the start did not share the hypothesis of their companionship. She claimed that they were neither particularly friendly nor particularly close. In her view it was a relationship that was sustained completely by the patience of Bruno, who was good-natured and so accepted without complaint the fact that Nino talked his head off from morning till night with all that nonsense that was constantly coming out of his mouth. “Nonsense, yes,” she repeated, but then apologized, with a touch of sarcasm, for having described in that way the talk that I, too, liked so much. “You’re students,” she said, “and it’s logical that you’re the only ones who understand what you’re saying; but wouldn’t you agree, at least, that the rest of us get a little fed up?”
Those words pleased me greatly. They ratified in the presence of Lila, a mute witness, that between Nino and me there was a sort of exclusive relationship, in which it was hard to interfere. But one day Pinuccia said to Bruno and to Lila, in a disparaging tone, “Let’s leave those two to act like intellectuals and go swimming, the water is lovely.” Act like intellectuals was clearly a way of saying that the things we talked about didn’t interest us seriously, it was an attitude, a performance. And while I didn’t particularly mind that formulation, it annoyed Nino a lot, and he broke off in the middle of a sentence. He jumped to his feet, ran off and dived into the water, paying no attention to the temperature, splashed us as we started in, shivering and begging him to stop, then went on to fight with Bruno as if he wanted to drown him.
There, I thought, he’s full of grand thoughts, but if he wants to he can also be lighthearted and fun. So why does he only show me his serious side? Has Professor Galiani convinced him that all I’m interested in is studying? Or is it me, do I create that impression, with my glasses, the way I speak?
From that moment I noticed with increasing bitterness that the afternoons slipped away, leaving words burdened with his anxiety to express himself and mine to anticipate a concept, to hear him say that he agreed with me. He never took me by the hand, never invited me to sit on the edge of his towel. When I saw Bruno and Pinuccia laughing at silly things I envied them, I thought: How much I would like to laugh with Nino like that—I don’t want anything, I don’t expect anything, I’d just like a little intimacy, even if it’s polite, the way it is between Pinuccia and Bruno.
Lila seemed to have other problems. For the whole week she seemed tranquil. She spent a great part of the morning in the water, swimming back and forth, following a line parallel to the shore and a few meters away from it. Pinuccia and I kept her company, insisting on instructing her even though by now she swam much better than we did. But soon we got cold and went to lie on the hot sand, while she continued to exercise with steady arm strokes, feet kicking lightly, rhythmic mouthfuls of air as Sarratore the father had taught her. She always has to overdo it, Pinuccia grumbled in the sun, caressing her belly. And often I got up and shouted, “Enough swimming, you’ve been in the water too long, you’ll catch cold.” But Lila paid no attention and came out only when she was livid, her eyes white, her lips blue, her fingertips wrinkled. I waited for her on the shore with her towel, warmed in the sun; I put it around her shoulders and rubbed her energetically.
When the two boys, who didn’t skip a single day, arrived, either we took another swim together—though Lila generally refused, she stayed on her towel, watching us from the shore—or we all went for a walk and she lagged behind, picking up shells, or, if Nino and I started talking about the world, she listened attentively but rarely said anything. In the meantime, small habits became established, and I was struck by her insistence that they be respected. For example, Bruno always arrived with cold drinks that he bought on the way, at a bar on the beach, and one day she pointed out to him that he had brought me a soda whereas usually I had orangeade; I said, “Thanks, Bruno, this is fine,” but she made him go and exchange it. For example, Pinuccia and Bruno at a certain point in the afternoon went to get fresh coconut, and although they invited us to go with them, it never occurred to Lila to do so, or to me or Nino: it thus became completely normal for them to go off dry, return wet from a swim, and bring coconut, with the whitest flesh, and so if it seemed that they might forget Lila would say, “And where’s the coconut today?”
Also, she was very interested in Nino’s and my conversations. When there was too much talk about nothing in particular she would say to him, “Didn’t you read anything interesting today?” Nino smiled, pleased, rambled a bit, then started on the subjects he cared about. He talked and talked, but there were never real frictions between us: I found myself almost always in agreement with him, and if Lila interrupted to make an objection she did it briefly, with tact, without ever accentuating the disagreement.
One afternoon he was quoting an article that was very critical of the functioning of the public schools, and he went on without a break to speak disparagingly of the elementary school in our neighborhood. I agreed, I recalled how Maestra Oliviero rapped us on the knuckles when we made a mistake and also the brutal competitions to see who was smartest that she subjected us to. But Lila, surprising me, said that elementary school for her had been extremely important, and she praised our teacher in an Italian I hadn’t heard from her in a long time, so precise, so intense, that Nino didn’t interrupt her to say what he thought, but listened to her attentively, and in the end made some generic remarks about the different requirements we have and about how the same experience can satisfy the needs of one and be insufficient for the needs of someone else.
There was also another case where Lila revealed a disagreement politely and in a cultivated Italian. I felt increasingly drawn to arguments based on the theory that the right kind of interventions, carried out over time, would resolve problems, eliminate injustices, and prevent conflicts. I had quickly learned that system of reasoning—I was always very good at that—and I applied it every time Nino brought up subjects about which he had read here and there: colonialism, neocolonialism, Africa. But one afternoon Lila said softly that there was nothing that could eliminate the conflict between the rich and the poor.
“Why?”
“Those who are on the bottom always want to be on top, those who are on top want to stay on top, and one way or another they always reach the point where they
’re kicking and spitting at each other.”
“That’s exactly why problems should be resolved before violence breaks out.”
“And how? Putting everyone on top, putting everyone on the bottom?”
“Finding a point of equilibrium between the classes.”
“A point where? Those from the bottom meet those from the top in the middle?”
“Let’s say yes.”
“And those on top will be willing to go down? And those on the bottom will give up on going any higher?”
“If people work to solve all the problems well, yes. You’re not convinced?”
“No. The classes aren’t playing cards, they’re fighting, and it’s a fight to the death.”
“That’s what Pasquale thinks,” I said.
“I think so, too, now,” she said calmly.
Apart from those few one-on-one exchanges, there were rarely, between Nino and Lila, words that were not mediated by me. Lila never addressed him directly, nor did Nino address her, they seemed embarrassed by one another. She appeared much more comfortable with Bruno, who, though quiet, managed, with his kindness, and the pleasant tone in which he would call her Signora Carracci, to establish a certain familiarity. For example, once when we all went in the water together—and Nino, surprisingly, did not go on one of the long swims that made me anxious—she turned to Bruno, and not to him, to show her after how many strokes she should take her head out of the water to breathe. He promptly gave her a demonstration. But Nino was annoyed that he hadn’t been asked, given his mastery of swimming, and he interrupted, making fun of Bruno’s short arms, his lack of rhythm. Then he showed Lila the right way. She observed him with attention and immediately imitated him. In the end Lila’s swimming led Bruno to call her the Esther Williams of Ischia.
When the end of the week arrived—I remember it was a splendid Saturday morning, the air was still cool and the sharp odor of the pines accompanied us all the way to the beach—Pinuccia reasserted categorically, “Sarratore’s son is really unbearable.”
The Neapolitan Novels Page 51
