Finally, the reactions of both to the departure of their husbands annoyed me. Pinuccia became cheerful, she wanted to wash her hair, which—she said aloud—was full of sand. Lila lounged about the house listlessly, then she lay down on her unmade bed, paying no attention to the mess in the room. When I went to say good night I saw that she hadn’t even undressed: she was reading the book about Hiroshima, frowning, eyes narrowed. I didn’t reproach her, I said only, perhaps a little sharply:
“How is it that you suddenly feel like reading again?”
“It’s none of your business,” she answered.
51.
On Monday Nino appeared, like a ghost evoked by my desire, not at four in the afternoon, as usual, but, surprisingly, at ten in the morning. We three girls had just arrived at the beach, resentful, each convinced that the others had spent too much time in the bathroom, Pinuccia particularly upset about how her hair had been ruined by her sleeping on it. It was she who spoke first, stern, almost aggressive. She asked Nino, even before he could explain to us, why in the world he had turned his schedule upside down:
“Why didn’t Bruno come, he had better things to do?”
“His parents are still here, they’re leaving at noon.”
“Then he’ll come?”
“I think so.”
“Because if he’s not coming I’m going back to sleep, with just the three of you I’ll be bored.”
And while Nino was telling us how terrible his Sunday in Barano had been, and so he had left early and, since he couldn’t go to Bruno’s, had come straight to the beach, she interrupted once or twice, asking in a whine: Who’s going to go swimming with me? Since both Lila and I ignored her, she went into the water angrily by herself.
Never mind. We preferred to listen attentively to the list of wrongs that Nino suffered at the hands of his father. A cheater, he called him, a malingerer. He had settled himself in Barano, extending his leave from work on the ground of some feigned illness, which had been properly certified, however, by a health-service doctor who was a friend of his. “My father,” he said in disgust, “is in everything and for everything the negation of the general interest.” And then, without a break, he did something unpredictable. With a sudden movement that made me jump he leaned over and gave me a big, noisy kiss on the cheek, followed by the remark: “I’m really glad to see you.” Then, slightly embarrassed, as if he had realized that with that effusiveness toward me he might be acting rudely toward Lila, he said: “May I also give you a kiss?”
“Of course,” Lila answered, affably, and he gave her a light kiss, with no sound, a barely perceptible contact. After that he began to talk excitedly about the plays of Beckett: Ah, how he liked those guys buried in the ground up to their necks; and how beautiful the statement was about the fire that the present kindles inside you; and, even though among the thousand evocative things that Maddy and Dan Rooney said he had had a hard time picking out the precise point cited by Lila, well, the concept that life is felt more when you are blind, deaf, mute, and maybe without taste or touch was objectively interesting in itself. In his view it meant: Let’s get rid of all the filters that prevent us from fully savoring our being here and now, real.
Lila appeared bewildered, she said that she had thought about it and that life in the pure state frightened her. She expressed herself with some emphasis, she exclaimed, “Life without seeing and without speaking, without speaking and listening, life without a covering, without a container, is shapeless.” She didn’t use exactly those words, but certainly she said “shapeless” and she said it with a gesture of revulsion. Nino repeated reluctantly, “shapeless,” as if it were a curse word. Then he started talking again, even more overwrought, until, with no warning, he took off his shirt, revealing himself in all his dark thinness, grabbed us both by the hand, and dragged us into the water, as I cried happily, “No, no, no, I’m cold, no,” and he answered, “Here finally another happy day,” and Lila laughed.
So, I thought contentedly, Lila is wrong. So there certainly exists another Nino: not the gloomy boy, not the one who gets excited only when he’s thinking about the general state of the world, but this boy, this boy who plays, who drags us furiously into the water, who mocks us, grips us, pulls us toward him, swims away, lets us reach him, lets us grab him, lets us push him under the water and pretends to be overpowered, pretends that we’re drowning him.
When Bruno arrived things got even better. We all took a walk together and Pinuccia’s good humor slowly returned. She wanted to swim again, she wanted to eat coconut. Starting then, and for the whole week that followed, we found it completely natural that the boys should join us on the beach at ten in the morning and remain until sunset, when we said, “We have to go or Nunzia will get mad,” and they resigned themselves to going off to do some studying.
How intimate we were now. If Bruno called Lila Signora Carracci to tease her, she punched him playfully on the shoulder, chased him, threatening. If he showed too much reverence toward Pinuccia because she was carrying a child, Pinuccia linked arms with him, said, “Come on, let’s run, I want a soda.” As for Nino, now he often took my hand, put an arm around my shoulders, and then put an arm around Lila’s, too, he took her index finger, her thumb. The wary distances receded. We became a group of five friends who were having a good time doing little or nothing. We played games, whoever lost paid a fine. The fines were almost always kisses, but joke kisses, obviously: Bruno had to kiss Lila’s sandy feet, Nino my hand, and then cheeks, forehead, ear, with a pop in the auricle. We also had long games of tamburello. The ball flew through the air and was sent back with a sharp crack against the taut hide of the tambourines; Lila was good, Nino, too. But most agile of all, most precise, was Bruno. He and Pinuccia always won, against Lila and me, against Lila and Nino, against Nino and me. They won partly because we had all developed a sort of automatic tenderness toward Pina. She ran, she jumped, she tumbled on the sand, forgetting her condition, and so we ended by letting her win, sometimes just to soothe her. Bruno reproached her gently, made her sit down, said, that’s enough and cried, “Point for Pinuccia, excellent.”
A thread of happiness thus began to extend through the hours and days. I no longer minded that Lila took my books, in fact it seemed to me a good thing. I didn’t mind that, when the discussions got going, she more and more often said what she thought and Nino listened attentively and seemed to lack the words for a response. I found it thrilling, in fact, that in those circumstances he would suddenly stop talking to her and start up with me, as if that helped him rediscover his convictions.
That was what happened the time Lila showed off her reading on Hiroshima. A tense discussion arose, because Nino, I saw, was so critical of the United States and didn’t like the fact that the Americans had a military base in Naples, but he was also attracted by their way of life, he said he wanted to study it, and he was disappointed when Lila said, more or less, that dropping atomic bombs on Japan had been a war crime, in fact more than a war crime—the war had scarcely anything to do with it—it had been a crime of pride.
“Can I remind you of Pearl Harbor?” he said hesitantly.
I didn’t know what Pearl Harbor was but I discovered that Lila did. She told him that Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima were two things that couldn’t be compared, that Pearl Harbor was a vile act of war and Hiroshima was an idiotic, fierce, vindictive horror, worse, much worse, than the Nazi massacres. And she concluded: the Americans should be tried like the worst criminals, those who do terrible things to terrorize the living and keep them on their knees. She was so passionate that Nino, instead of moving to the counterattack, was silent, very thoughtful. Then he turned to me, as if she weren’t there. He said that the problem wasn’t ferocity or revenge but the urgency to bring an end to the most atrocious of wars and, at the same time, by using that terrible new weapon, to all wars. He spoke in a low tone, looking me straight in the eyes, as if he were inter
ested only in my agreement. It was a wonderful moment. He himself was wonderful, when he was like that. I was so filled with emotion that tears rose to my eyes and I had trouble repressing them.
Then Friday came again, a very hot day that we spent mostly in the water. And suddenly something went bad again.
We had just left the two boys and were going back to the house, the sun was low, the sky pinkish-blue, when Pinuccia, unexpectedly silent after many long hours of extravagant playfulness, threw her bag on the ground, sat down on the side of road, and began to cry with rage, small thin cries, almost a moaning.
Lila narrowed her eyes, stared at her as if she saw not her sister-in-law but something ugly for which she wasn’t prepared. I went back, frightened, asked, “Pina, what’s the matter, don’t you feel well?”
“I can’t bear this wet bathing suit.”
“We all have wet bathing suits.”
“It bothers me.”
“Calm down, come on, aren’t you hungry?”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. You irritate me when you tell me to calm down. I can’t stand you anymore, Lenù, you and your calm down.”
And she started moaning again, and hitting her thighs.
I sensed that Lila was going on without waiting for us. I sensed that she had decided to do so not out of annoyance or indifference but because there was something in that behavior, something scorching, and if she got too close it would burn her. I helped Pinuccia get up, I carried her bag.
52.
Eventually she became quieter, but she spent the evening sulking, as if we had somehow offended her. When she was rude even to Nunzia, brusquely criticizing the way the pasta was cooked, Lila flared up and, breaking into a fierce dialect, dumped on her all the fantastic insults she was capable of. Pina decided to sleep with me that night.
She tossed and turned in her sleep. And with two people in the room the heat made it almost impossible to breathe. Soaked with sweat, I resigned myself to opening the window and was tormented by the mosquitoes. Then I couldn’t sleep at all, I waited for dawn, I got up.
Now I, too, was in a bad mood, I had three or four disfiguring bites on my face. I went to the kitchen, Nunzia was washing our dirty clothes. Lila, too, was already up, she had had her bread-and-milk, and was reading another of my books, who knows when she had stolen it from me. As soon as she saw me, she gave me a searching glance and asked, with a genuine concern that I didn’t expect: “How is Pinuccia?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you angry?”
“Yes, I didn’t sleep a wink, and look at my face.”
“You can’t see anything.”
“You can’t see anything.”
“Nino and Bruno won’t see anything, either.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“You still like Nino?”
“I’ve told you no a hundred times.”
“Calm down.”
“I am calm.”
“Let’s think about Pinuccia.”
“You think about her, she’s your sister-in-law, not mine.”
“You’re angry.”
“Yes, I am.”
The day was even hotter than the one before. We went to the beach apprehensively, the bad mood traveled from one to the other like an infection.
Halfway there Pinuccia realized she had forgotten her towel and had another attack of nerves. Lila kept going, head down, without even turning around.
“I’ll go get it,” I offered.
“No, I’m going back to the house, I don’t feel like the beach.”
“Do you feel sick?”
“I’m perfectly fine.”
“Then what?”
“Look at the belly I’ve got.”
I looked at her belly, I said to her without thinking: “What about me? Don’t you see these bites on my face?”
She started yelling, she called me an idiot, and ran away to catch up with Lila.
Once at the beach she apologized, muttering, You’re so good that sometimes you make me mad.
“I’m not good.”
“I meant that you’re clever.”
“I’m not clever.”
Lila, who was trying in any case to ignore us, staring at the sea in the direction of Forio, said coldly, “Stop it, they’re coming.”
Pinuccia started. “The long and the short of it,” she murmured, with a sudden softness in her voice, and she put on some lipstick even though she already had enough.
The boys’ mood was just as bad as ours. Nino had a sarcastic tone, he said to Lila, “Tonight the husbands arrive?”
“Of course.”
“And what nice things will you do?”
“We’ll eat, drink, and sleep.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we’ll eat, drink, and sleep.”
“Do they stay Sunday night, too?”
“No, on Sunday we eat, drink, and sleep only in the afternoon.”
Hiding behind a tone of self-mockery, I forced myself to say, “I’m free: I’m not eating or drinking or going to sleep.”
Nino looked at me as if he were becoming aware of something he had never noticed, so that I passed a hand over my right cheek, where I had an especially big mosquito bite. He said to me seriously, “Good, we’ll meet here tomorrow morning at seven and then climb the mountain. When we get back, the beach till late. What do you say?”
I felt in my veins the warmth of elation, I said with relief, “All right, at seven, I’ll bring food.”
Pinuccia asked, unhappily, “And us?”
“You have husbands,” he said, and pronounced “husbands” as if he were saying toads, snakes, spiders, so that she got up abruptly and went to the water’s edge.
“She’s a little oversensitive at the moment,” I said in apology, “but it’s because of her interesting condition, usually she’s not like that.”
Bruno said in his patient voice, “I’ll take her to get some coconut.”
We watched him as, small but well proportioned, his chest powerful, his thighs strong, he moved over the sand at a steady pace, as if the sun had neglected to burn the grains he walked on. When Bruno and Pina set off for the beach bar, Lila said, “Let’s go swimming.”
53.
The three of us moved together toward the sea, me in the middle, between them. It’s hard to explain the sudden sense of fullness that had possessed me when Nino said: We’ll meet here tomorrow morning at seven. Of course I was sorry about the swings in Pinuccia’s moods, but it was a weak sorrow, it couldn’t dent my state of well-being. I was finally content with myself, with the long, exciting Sunday that awaited me; and at the same time I felt proud to be there, at that moment, with the people who had always been important in my life, whose importance couldn’t be compared even to that of my parents, my siblings. I took them both by the hand, I gave a shout of happiness, I dragged them into the cold water, spraying icy splinters of foam. We sank as if we were a single organism.
As soon as we were underwater we let go of the chain of our fingers. I’ve never liked the cold of the water in my hair, on my head, in my ears. I re-emerged immediately, spluttering. But I saw that they were already swimming and I began to swim, in order not to lose them. I had trouble right away: I wasn’t capable of swimming straight, head in the water, with steady strokes; my right arm was stronger than the left, and I veered right; I had to be careful not to swallow the salt water. I tried to keep up by not losing sight of them, in spite of my myopic vision. They’ll stop, I thought. My heart was pounding, I slowed down, I finally stopped and floated, admiring their confident progress toward the horizon, side by side.
Maybe they were going too far. I, too, in the grip of enthusiasm, had ventured beyond the reassuring imaginary line that normally allowed me to return to the shore in
a few strokes, and beyond which Lila herself had never gone. Now there she was, competing with Nino. Despite her inexperience she wouldn’t give in, she wanted to stay even, she pushed on, farther and farther.
I began to worry. If her strength failed. If she felt ill. Nino is expert, he’ll help her. But if he gets a cramp, if he collapses, too. I looked around, the current was dragging me to the left. I can’t wait for them here, I have to go back. I glanced down, and it was a mistake. The azure immediately turned bluer, darkened like night, even though the sun was shining, the surface of the sea sparkled, and pure white shreds of cloud were stretching across the sky. I perceived the abyss, I sensed its liquidness, with nothing to hold on to, I felt it as a pit of the dead from which anything might rise up in a flash, touch me, grab me, sink its teeth into me, drag me to the bottom.
I tried to calm myself: I shouted Lila. My eyes without glasses were of no use, defeated by the sparkle of the water. I thought of my outing with Nino the following day. Slowly I turned around, on my back, paddling with legs and arms until I reached the shore.
I sat there, half in the water, half on the beach, I could just make out their heads, black dots like abandoned buoys on the surface of the sea, I felt relieved. Lila not only was safe but she had done it, she had stayed with Nino. How stubborn she is, how she overdoes it, how courageous she is. I got up, joined Bruno, who was sitting beside our things.
“Where’s Pinuccia?” I asked.
He gave a timid smile that seemed to conceal a worry.
“She left.”
“Where did she go?”
“Home, she says she has to pack her bags.”
“Her bags?”
“She wants to go, she doesn’t feel she can leave her husband alone for so long.”
I took my things and, after insisting that he not lose sight of Nino and especially Lila, I left, still dripping wet, to try to find out what else was happening to Pina.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 53
