60.
The days that followed clarified the situation further. Usually Nino arrived with a newspaper, a book: no more. Animated conversations about the human condition faded, were reduced to distracted phrases that sought an opening for more private words. Lila and Nino got in the habit of swimming far out together, until they were indistinguishable from the shore. Or they compelled us to long walks that consolidated the division into couples. And never, absolutely never, was I beside Nino, nor was Lila with Bruno. It became natural for the two of them to be behind. Whenever I turned around suddenly I had the impression of having caused a painful laceration: hands, mouths springing backward as if because of some nervous tic.
I suffered but, I have to admit, with a permanent undercurrent of disbelief that caused the suffering to come in waves. It seemed to me that I was watching a performance without substance: they were playing at being together, both knowing well that they were not and couldn’t be: the one already had a girlfriend, the other was actually married. I looked at them at times like fallen divinities: once so clever, so intelligent, and now so stupid, involved in a stupid game. I planned to say to Lila, to Nino, to both of them: who do you think you are, come back to earth.
I couldn’t do it. In the space of two or three days things changed further. They began to hold hands without hiding it, with an offensive shamelessness, as if they had decided that with us it wasn’t worth pretending. They often quarreled jokingly, then grabbed each other, hit each other, held each other tight, tumbled on the sand together. When we were walking, if they spotted an abandoned hut, an old bath house reduced to its foundations, a path that got lost among the wild vegetation, they decided like children to go exploring and didn’t invite us to follow. They went off with him in the lead, she behind, in silence. When they lay in the sun, they lessened the distance between them as much as possible. At first they were satisfied with the slight contact of shoulders, their arms, legs, feet just grazing. Later, returning from that interminable daily swim, they lay beside each other on Lila’s towel, which was bigger, and soon, with a natural gesture, Nino put his arm around her shoulders, she rested her head on his chest. They even, once, went so far as to kiss on the lips, a light, quick kiss. I thought: she’s mad, they’re mad. If someone from Naples who knows Stefano sees them? If the supplier who got the house for us passes by? Or if Nunzia, now, should decide to make a visit to the beach?
I couldn’t believe such recklessness, and yet time and time again they crossed the limit. Seeing each other during the day no longer seemed sufficient; Lila decided that she had to call Stefano every night, but she rudely rejected Nunzia’s offer to go with us. After dinner she obliged me to go to Forio. She made a quick phone call to her husband and then we went walking, she with Nino, I with Bruno. We never returned home before midnight and the two boys came with us along the dark beach.
On Friday night, that is, the day before Stefano returned, she and Nino argued, unexpectedly, not in fun but seriously. We were eating ice cream at the table, Lila had gone to telephone. Nino, grim-faced, took out of his pocket a number of pages with writing on both sides and began to read, giving no explanation, but isolating himself from the dull conversation between Bruno and me. When she returned, he didn’t even glance at her, he didn’t put the pages back in his pocket, but went on reading. Lila waited half a minute, then asked in a lighthearted tone:
“Is it so interesting?”
“Yes,” Nino said, without looking up.
“Then read aloud, we want to hear it.”
“It’s my business, it has nothing to do with the rest of you.”
“What is it?” Lila asked, but it was clear that she knew already.
“A letter.”
“From whom?”
“From Nadia.”
With a sudden, lightning-like move, she reached out and tore the pages from his grasp. Nino started, as if a giant insect had stung him, but he made no effort to get the letter back, even when Lila began to read it to us in declamatory tones, in a loud voice. It was a rather childish love letter, carrying on from line to line with sentimental variations on the theme of missing. Bruno listened silently, with an embarrassed smile, and I, seeing that Nino showed no sign of taking the thing as a joke, but was staring darkly at his sandaled, suntanned feet, whispered to Lila, “That’s enough, give it back to him.”
As soon as I spoke she stopped reading, but her expression of amusement lingered, and she didn’t give the letter back.
“You’re embarrassed, eh?” she asked. “You’re the one to blame. How can you have a girlfriend who writes like that?”
Nino said nothing, he went on staring at his feet. Bruno interrupted, also lightheartedly: “Maybe, when you fall in love with someone, you don’t make her take an exam to see if she can write a love letter.”
But Lila didn’t even turn to look at him, she spoke to Nino as if they were continuing in front of us one of their secret conversations:
“Do you love her? And why? Explain it to us. Because she lives on Corso Vittorio Emanuele in a house full of books and old paintings? Because she speaks in a simpering little voice? Because she’s the daughter of the professor?”
Finally Nino roused himself and said abruptly, “Give me back those pages.”
“I’ll only give them back if you tear them up immediately, here, in front of us.”
Countering Lila’s tone of amusement Nino uttered grave monosyllables, with obvious aggressive undertones. “And then?”
“Then we’ll all write Nadia a letter together in which you tell her you’re leaving her.”
“And then?”
“We’ll mail it tonight.”
He said nothing for a moment, then he agreed. “Let’s do it.”
Lila pointed to the pages in disbelief.
“You’re really going to tear them up?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll leave her?”
“Yes. But on one condition.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“That you leave your husband. Now. Let’s all of us go together to the phone and you’ll tell him.”
Those words provoked in me a violent emotion. At the time I didn’t know why. As he spoke he raised his voice so unexpectedly that it cracked. And Lila’s eyes, as she listened to him, suddenly narrowed to slits, following a mode of behavior that I knew well. Now she would change her tone. Now, I thought, she’ll turn mean. She said to him, in fact: How dare you. She said to him: To whom do you think you’re speaking. She said to him: “How can you think of putting this letter, your foolishness with that whore from a good family, on the same plane as me, my husband, my marriage and everything that is my life? You really think you’re something, but you don’t get the joke. In fact you don’t understand a thing. Nothing, you heard me, and don’t make that face. Let’s go to bed, Lenù.”
61.
Nino did nothing to restrain us, Bruno said, “See you tomorrow.” We took a mini cab and returned to the house. But during the journey Lila began to tremble, she grabbed my hand and gripped it hard. She began to confess to me in a chaotic way everything that had happened between her and Nino. She had yearned for him to kiss her, she had let herself be kissed. She had wanted to feel his hands on her, she had let him. “I can’t sleep. If I fall asleep I wake with a start, I look at the clock, I hope it’s already day, that we have to go to the beach. But it’s night, I can’t sleep anymore, I have in my head all the words he said, all the ones that I can’t wait to tell him. I resisted. I said: I’m not like Pinuccia, I can do what I like, I can start and stop, it’s a game. I kept my lips pressed together, then I said to myself well, really, what’s a kiss, and I discovered what it was, I didn’t know—I swear to you that I didn’t know—and now I can’t do without it. I gave him my hand, I entwined my fingers with his, tight, and it seemed to me painful to let go. How many things I’ve missed
that now are landing on me all at once. I go around like a girlfriend, when I’m married. I’m frantic, my heart is pounding here in my throat and in my temples. And I like everything. I like that he drags me into secluded places, I like the fear that someone might see us, I like the idea that they might see us. Did you do those things with Antonio? Did you suffer when you had to leave him and you couldn’t wait to see him again? Is it normal, Lenù? Was it like that for you? I don’t know how it began and when. At first I didn’t like him: I liked how he talked, what he said, but physically no. I thought: How many things he knows, this man, I should listen, I should learn. Now, when he speaks, I can’t even concentrate. I look at his mouth and I’m ashamed of looking at it, I turn my eyes in another direction. In a short time I’ve come to love everything about him: his hands, the delicate fingernails, that thinness, the ribs under his skin, his slender neck, the beard that he shaves badly so it’s always rough, his nose, the hair on his chest, his long, slender legs, his knees. I want to caress him. And I think of things that disgust me, they really disgust me, Lenù, but I would like to do them to give him pleasure, to make him be happy.”
I listened to her for a good part of the night, in her room, the door closed, the light out. She was lying on the window side and in the moon’s glow the hair on her neck gleamed, and the curve of her hip. I was lying on the door side, Stefano’s side, and I thought: Her husband sleeps here, every weekend, on this side of the bed, and draws her to him, in the afternoon, at night, and embraces her. And yet here, in this bed, she is telling me about Nino. The words for him take away her memory, they erase from these sheets every trace of conjugal love. She speaks of him and in speaking of him she calls him here, she imagines him next to her, and since she has forgotten herself she perceives no violation or guilt. She confides, she tells me things that she would do better to keep to herself. She tells me how much she desires the person I’ve desired forever, and she does so convinced that I—through insensitivity, through a less acute vision, through incapacity to grasp what she, instead, is able to grasp—have never truly understood that same person, never realized his qualities. I don’t know if it’s in bad faith or if she’s really convinced—it’s my fault, my tendency to conceal myself—that since elementary school I’ve been deaf and blind, so that it took her to discover, here on Ischia, the power unleashed by the son of Sarratore. Ah, how I hate this presumption of hers, it poisons my blood. Yet I don’t know how to say to her, That’s enough, I can’t go to my room to cry in silence, but I stay here, and now and then I interrupt her, I try to calm her.
I pretended a detachment I didn’t have. “It’s the sea,” I said to her, “the fresh air, the vacation. And Nino knows how to confuse you; the way he talks he makes everything look easy. But, unfortunately, tomorrow Stefano arrives and you’ll see, Nino will seem like a boy to you. Which he really is, I know him well. To us he seems like somebody, but if you think how Professor Galiani’s son treats him—you remember?—you understand immediately that we overestimate him. Of course, compared to Bruno he seems extraordinary, but after all he’s only the son of a railroad worker who got it in his head to study. Remember that Nino was from the neighborhood, he comes from there. Remember that at school you were smarter, even if he was older. And then you see how he takes advantage of his friend, makes him pay for everything, drinks, ice cream.”
It cost me to say those things, I considered them lies. And it was of little use: Lila grumbled, she objected hesitantly, I refuted her. Until she really got mad and began to defend Nino in the tone of someone who says: I’m the only one who knows what sort of person he is. She asked why I was always disparaging him. She asked me what I had against him. “He helped you,” she said, “he even wanted to publish that nonsense of yours in a review. Sometimes I don’t like you, Lenù, you diminish everything and everyone, even people who are lovable if you just look at them.”
I lost control, I couldn’t bear it anymore. I had spoken ill of the person I loved in order to do something to make her feel better and now she insulted me. Finally I managed to say, “Do what you like, I’m going to bed.” But she immediately changed her tone, she embraced me, she hugged me tight, to keep me there, she whispered, “Tell me what to do.” I pushed her away with annoyance, I whispered that she had to decide herself, I couldn’t decide in her place. “Pinuccia,” I said, “how did she do it? In the end she behaved better than you.”
She agreed, we sang the praises of Pinuccia and abruptly she sighed: “All right, tomorrow I won’t go to the beach and the day after I’ll go back to Naples with Stefano.”
62.
It was a terrible Saturday. She really didn’t go to the beach, and I didn’t go, either, but I thought only of Nino and Bruno, who were waiting for us in vain. And I didn’t dare say: I’ll make a quick trip to the sea, time for a swim and then I’ll come back. Nor did I dare ask: What should I do, pack the suitcases, are we going, are we staying? I helped Nunzia clean the house, cook lunch and dinner, every so often checking on Lila, who didn’t even get up. She stayed in bed reading and writing in her notebook, and when her mother called her to eat she didn’t answer, and when she called her again she slammed the door of her room so violently that the whole house shook.
“Too much sea makes one nervous,” Nunzia said, as we ate lunch alone.
“Yes.”
“And she’s not even pregnant.”
“No.”
In the late afternoon Lila left her bed, ate something, spent hours in the bathroom. She washed her hair, put on her makeup, chose a pretty green dress, but her face remained sullen. Still, she greeted her husband affectionately and he, seeing her, gave her a movie kiss, a long intense kiss, with Nunzia and I as embarrassed spectators. Stefano brought greetings from my family, said that Pinuccia had made no more scenes, recounted in minute detail how happy the Solaras were with the new shoe styles that Rino and Fernando were working on. Lila wasn’t pleased by Stefano’s reference to the new styles, and things between them were spoiled. Until that moment she had kept a forced smile on her face, but as soon as she heard the name of the Solaras she became aggressive, and said she didn’t give a damn about those two, she wouldn’t live her life according to what they thought about this or that. Stefano was disappointed, he frowned. He realized that the enchantment of the previous weeks was over, but he answered her with his usual agreeable half smile, he said that he was only telling her what had happened in the neighborhood, there was no need to take that tone. It was little use. Lila rapidly transformed the evening into a relentless conflict. Stefano couldn’t say a word without hostile criticism from her. They went to bed squabbling and I heard them quarreling until I fell asleep.
I woke at dawn. I didn’t know what to do: gather my things, wait for Lila to make a decision; go to the beach, with the risk of running into Nino, something that Lila would not have forgiven; rack my brains all day as I was already doing, shut in my room. I decided to leave a note saying that I was going to the Maronti but would be back in the early afternoon. I wrote that I couldn’t leave Ischia without seeing Nella. I wrote in good faith, but today I know what was going on in my mind: I wanted to trust myself to chance; Lila couldn’t reproach me if I ran into Nino when he had gone to ask his parents for money.
The result was a muddled day and a modest waste of money. I hired a boat, to take me to the Maronti. I went to the place where the Sarratores usually camped and found only the umbrella. I looked around, and saw Donato, who was swimming, and he saw me. He waved in greeting, hurried out of the water, told me that his wife and children had gone to spend the day in Forio, with Nino. I was extremely disappointed, the situation was not only ironic, it was contemptuous; it had taken away the son and delivered me to the sickening patter of the father.
When I tried to get away to go and see Nella, Sarratore wouldn’t let me go, he gathered up his things and insisted on coming with me. On the road he assumed a sentimental tone and without any e
mbarrassment began to speak of what had happened between us years earlier. He asked me to forgive him, he murmured that one cannot command one’s heart, he spoke in a melancholy tone of my beauty then and above all of my present beauty.
“What an exaggeration,” I said, and, while I knew I should be serious and aloof, I began to laugh out of nervousness.
And though he was encumbered by the umbrella and his things, he would not relinquish a somewhat breathless, rambling discourse. He said that in substance the problem of youth was the lack of eyes to see oneself and feelings to feel about oneself with objectivity.
“There’s the mirror,” I replied, “and that is objective.”
“The mirror? The mirror is the last thing you can trust. I’ll bet that you feel less pretty than your two friends.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you are much, much more beautiful than they are. Trust me. Look what lovely blond hair you have. And what a bearing. You need to confront and resolve two problems only: the first is your bathing suit, it’s not adequate to your potential; the second is the style of your glasses. This is really wrong, Elena: too heavy. You have such a delicate face, so remarkably shaped by the things you study. What you need is daintier glasses.”
As I listened my irritation diminished; he was like a scientist of female beauty. Mainly he spoke with such detached expertise that at a certain point he led me to think: and if it’s true? Maybe I don’t know how to value myself. On the other hand where is the money to buy suitable clothes, a suitable bathing suit, suitable glasses? I was about to yield to a complaint about poverty and wealth when he said to me with a smile, “Besides, if you don’t trust my judgment, you’ll be aware, I hope, of how my son looked at you the time you came to see us.”
Only then did I realize that he was lying to me. His words were intended to appeal to my vanity, to make me feel good and drive me toward him in the need for gratification. I felt stupid, wounded not by him, with his lies, but by my own stupidity. I cut him short with an increasing rudeness that froze him.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 56
