78.
After Christmas I found out from Alfonso that Pinuccia had given birth, she had had a boy, named Fernando. I went to see her, thinking that I would find her in bed, happy, with the baby at her breast. Instead, she was up, but in nightgown and slippers, sulking. She rudely sent away her mother, who said to her, “Get in bed, don’t tire yourself,” and when she led me to the cradle she said grimly, “Nothing ever works out for me, look how ugly he is, it upsets me just to look at him, let alone touch him.” And although Maria, standing in the doorway, murmured, like a soothing formula, “What are you talking about, Pina, he’s beautiful,” she continued to repeat angrily, “He’s ugly, he’s uglier than Rino, that whole family is ugly.” Then she drew in her breath and exclaimed desperately, with tears in her eyes, “It’s my fault, I made a bad choice of a husband, but when you’re a girl you don’t think about it, and now look at what a child I’ve had, he has a pug nose just like Lina.” Then, with no interruption, she began to insult her sister-in-law grossly.
I learned from her that Lila, the whore, had already in two weeks done and redone as she liked the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. Gigliola had had to give in, she had returned to the Solaras’ pastry shop; she herself, Pinuccia, had had to give in, chained to the child until goodness knows when; they had all had to give in, Stefano above all, as usual. And now, every day, Lila was up to something new: she went to work dressed up as if she were Mike Bongiorno’s assistant, and if her husband wouldn’t take her in the car she had no scruples about getting Michele to drive her; she had spent who knows how much for two paintings that you couldn’t understand what they were of, and had hung them in the shop for who knows what purpose; she had bought a lot of books and, instead of shoes, she put those on the shelf; she had fitted out a sort of living room, with couches, chairs, ottomans, and a crystal bowl where she kept chocolates from Gay Odin, available to whoever wanted them, free, as if she were there not to notice the stink of the customers’ feet but to play the great lady in her castle.
“And it’s not only that,” she said, “there’s something even worse.”
“What?”
“You know what Marcello Solara did?”
“No.”
“You remember the shoes that Stefano and Rino gave him?”
“The ones made exactly the way Lina designed them?”
“Yes, a wretched shoe, Rino always said that the water got in.”
“Well, what happened?”
Pina overwhelmed me with a laborious, sometimes confused story, involving money, treacherous plots, deception, debts. Marcello, dissatisfied with the new models made by Rino and Fernando—and certainly in agreement with Michele—had had shoes like those manufactured, but not in the Cerullo factory, in another factory, in Afragola. Then, at Christmas, he had distributed them under the Solara name in the stores, including the one on Piazza dei Martiri.
“And he could do that?”
“Of course, they’re his: my brother and my husband, those two shits, gave them to him, he can do what he likes.”
“So?”
“So,” she said, “now there are Cerullo shoes and Solara shoes circulating in Naples. And the Solara shoes are selling really well, better than the Cerullos. And all the profit is the Solaras’. So Rino is extremely upset, because he expected some competition, of course, but not from the Solaras themselves, his partners, and with a shoe he made with his own hands and then stupidly threw away.”
I remembered Marcello when Lila threatened him with the shoemaker’s knife. He was slower than Michele, more timid. What need had he to be so offensive? The Solaras had numerous businesses, some legitimate, others not, and they were getting bigger every day. They had had powerful friendships since the days of their grandfather, they did favors and received them. Their mother was a loan shark and had a book that struck fear into half the neighborhood, maybe now the Cerullos and the Carraccis, too. For Marcello, then, and for his brother, the shoes and the shop on Piazza dei Martiri were only one of the many wells into which their family dipped, and surely not among the most important. So why?
Pinuccia’s story began to disturb me. Behind the appearance of money I felt something depressing. Marcello’s love for Lila was over, but the wound had remained and become infected. No longer dependent, he felt free to hurt those who had humiliated him in the past. “Rino,” Pinuccia in fact said, “went with Stefano to protest, but it was pointless.” The Solaras had treated them contemptuously, they were people used to doing what they wanted, her brother and husband might as well have been talking to themselves. Finally Marcello had said vaguely that he and his brother were thinking of an entire Solara line that would repeat, with variations, the features of the shoe that had been made as a trial. And then he had added, without a clear connection, “Let’s see how your new products go and if it’s worth the trouble to keep them on the market.” Understood? Understood. Marcello wanted to eliminate the Cerullo brand, replace it with Solara, and thus cause not insignificant economic damage to Stefano. I have to get out of the neighborhood, out of Naples, I said to myself, what do I care about their quarrels? But in the meantime I asked:
“And Lina?”
Pinuccia’s eyes blazed.
“She’s the real problem.”
Lina had laughed at that story. When Rino and her husband got angry she made fun of them: “You gave him those shoes, not me; you did business with the Solaras, not me. If you two are idiots, what can I do?” She wouldn’t cooperate, you couldn’t tell where she stood, with the family or with the Solaras. So when Michele again insisted that he wanted her in Piazza dei Martiri, she had suddenly said yes, and had tormented Stefano to let her go.
“And why in the world did Stefano give in?” I asked.
Pinuccia let out a long sigh of impatience. Stefano had given in because he hoped that Lila, seeing that Michele valued her so much, and seeing that Marcello had always had a weakness for her, would manage to settle things. But Rino didn’t trust his sister, he was frightened, he couldn’t sleep at night. He liked the old shoe that he and Fernando had thrown away and that Marcello had had made in its original form; it sold well. What would happen if the Solaras began to deal with Lila directly and if she, a bitch since the day she was born, after refusing to design new shoes for the family, went on to design shoes for them?
“It won’t happen,” I said to Pinuccia.
“Did she tell you?”
“No, I haven’t seen her since the summer.”
“So?”
“I know what she’s like. Lina gets curious about a thing and she’s utterly caught up in it. But once she’s done it, the desire goes away, she doesn’t care about it anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Maria was content with those words of mine, she clung to them to soothe her daughter.
“You hear?” she said. “Everything is fine, Lenuccia knows what she’s talking about.”
But in fact I knew nothing, the less pedantic part of me was well aware of Lila’s unpredictability, so I couldn’t wait to get out of that house. What do I have to do with it, I thought, with these wretched stories, with the petty vendetta of Marcello Solara, with this struggle and worry over money, cars, houses, furniture and knickknacks and vacations? And how could Lila, after Ischia, after Nino, go back to jousting with those thugs? I’ll get my diploma, I’ll take the entrance exams, I’ll win. I’ll get out of this muck, go as far away as possible. I said, softening toward the baby, whom Maria was now holding in her arms: “How cute he is.”
79.
But I couldn’t resist. I put it off for a long time and finally I gave in: I asked Alfonso if one Sunday we could go for a walk, he and Marisa and I. Alfonso was pleased, we went to a pizzeria on Via Foria. I asked about Lidia, the children, especially Ciro, and then I asked what Nino was up to. She answered reluctantly, talking about her broth
er upset her. She said that he had gone through a long period of madness, and her father, whom she adored, had had a difficult time with him; Nino had gone so far as to lay hands on him. What the cause of the madness was they never found out: he didn’t want to study anymore, he wanted to leave Italy. Then suddenly it was over: he returned to himself and had just begun to take his exams.
“So he’s all right?”
“Who knows.”
“He’s happy?”
“As far as somebody like him is capable of being happy, yes.”
“And all he does is study?”
“You mean does he have a girlfriend?”
“No, of course not, I mean does he go out, does he have fun, does he go dancing.”
“How should I know, Lenù? He’s always out. Now he’s obsessed with movies, novels, art, and the rare times he comes by the house he starts arguing with Papa, just to insult him and quarrel with us.”
I felt relieved that Nino had come to his senses, but I was also bitter. Movies, novels, art? How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins. I felt stupid, I had neglected the things I liked to conform to what Nino liked. Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path. I only hoped that Marisa would not tell him that she had seen me and that I had asked about him. Not even to Alfonso, after that evening, did I mention Nino or Lila.
I withdrew even more into my duties, I multiplied them in order to cram my days and nights. That year I studied obsessively, punctiliously, and I even took on a new private lesson, for a lot of money. I imposed on myself an iron discipline, much harsher than what I had enforced since childhood. A marking of time, a straight line that went from dawn until late at night. In the past there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now everything I was I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen, I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone.
The last year of high school slipped by like a single day. I struggled with astronomical geography, with geometry, with trigonometry. It was a sort of race to know everything, when in fact I took it for granted that my inadequacy was constitutional and so couldn’t be eliminated. Yet I liked to do my best. I didn’t have time to go to the movies? I learned titles and plots. Hadn’t been to the archeological museum? I ran through it in half a day. Hadn’t been to the picture gallery of Capodimonte? I made a flying visit, two hours and done. I had too much to do, in short. What did I care about shoes and the shop on Piazza dei Martiri? I never went there.
Sometimes I met Pinuccia, disheveled-looking, as she pushed Fernando in his carriage. I stopped a moment, listened absent-mindedly to her complaints about Rino, Stefano, Lila, Gigliola, everyone. Sometimes I ran into Carmen, who was increasingly bitter about how badly things had been going in the new grocery since Lila left, abandoning her to the oppression of Maria and Pinuccia, and I let her vent for a few minutes about how she missed Enzo Scanno, how she counted the days as she waited for him to finish his military service, how her brother Pasquale slaved, between his construction work and his Communist activities. Sometimes I ran into Ada, who had begun to hate Lila, while she was very pleased with Stefano, and spoke of him tenderly, and not only because he had recently increased her salary but also because he was a hard worker, available to everyone, and didn’t deserve that wife who treated him like dirt.
It was she who told me that Antonio had been discharged early because of a severe nervous breakdown.
“What happened?”
“You know what he’s like, he already had a breakdown with you.”
It was a mean statement that wounded me, I tried not to think about it. One Sunday in winter I ran into Antonio and scarcely recognized him, he was so thin. I smiled at him, expecting him to stop, but he seemed not to notice me and kept going. I called him, he turned, with a disoriented smile.
“Hello, Lenù.”
“Hello, I’m so glad to see you.”
“Me, too.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re not going back to the workshop?”
“There’s no job.”
“You’re good, you’ll find something somewhere else.”
“No, if I don’t get better I can’t work.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Fear.”
He said it just like that: fear. In Cordenons, one night, while he was on guard duty, he had remembered a game that his father played when he was still alive and he himself was very small: with a pen his father would draw eyes and mouths on the five fingers of his left hand, and then he would move them and make them talk as if they were people. It was such a sweet game that, as he remembered it, tears came to his eyes. But that night, during his shift, he had had the impression that his father’s hand had entered his and that now he had real people inside his fingers, tiny but fully formed, who were laughing and singing. That was the source of the fear. He banged his hand against the sentry box until it bled, but the fingers went on laughing and singing, without stopping, not for an instant. He recovered only when his shift was over and he went to sleep. A little rest and the next morning it was gone. But the terror that the illness in his hand would return remained. In fact it did return, and, with increasing frequency, his fingers began to laugh and sing even in the daytime. Until he had gone mad and they had sent him to the doctor.
“It’s gone now,” he said, “but it could always start again.”
“Tell me how I can help you.”
He thought for a while, as if he were really evaluating a series of possibilities. He muttered, “No one can help me.”
I immediately understood that he no longer felt anything for me, I had definitively gone out of his mind. So after that encounter I got in the habit of going every Sunday to his windows and calling. We would take a walk around the courtyard, talking about this and that, and when he said he was tired we said goodbye. Sometimes Melina came down with him, garishly made up, and he and his mother and I walked. Sometimes we met Ada and Pasquale and took a longer walk, but then it was generally the three of us who talked, Antonio was silent. In other words it became a peaceful routine. I went with him to the funeral of Nicola Scanno, the fruit-and-vegetable seller, who died suddenly of pneumonia; Enzo came home on leave but wasn’t in time to see him alive. We also went together to console Pasquale, Carmen, and their mother, Giuseppina, when they learned that their father, the former carpenter who had killed Don Achille, had died in prison from a heart attack. And we were together also when we learned that Don Carlo Resta, the seller of soap and various household items, had been beaten to death in his cellar. We talked about it for a long time, the whole neighborhood talked about it, the talk spread truths and cruel rumors, someone said that the beating wasn’t enough and they had stuck a file in his nose. Some vagrants were blamed for the crime, people who had stolen the day’s cash. But Pasquale, later, told us he had heard rumors that in his view were well founded: Don Carlo was in debt to the mother of the Solaras, because he had the vice of gambling and went to her so that he could pay his debts.
“So what?” asked Ada, who was always skeptical when her fiancé came up with reckless hypotheses.
“So he wouldn’t pay what he owed the loan shark and they had him murdered.”
“Come on, you always talk such nonsense.”
It’s likely that Pasquale was exaggerating, but, first of all, no one knew who had killed Don Carlo Resta, and, second, it was, precisely, the Solaras who took over the shop, along with its stock, for very little money, even though they left Don Carlo’s wife and oldest son there to manage it.
“Out of generosity,” said Ada.
“Because they’re bastards,” said Pasquale.
/> I don’t remember if Antonio made comments on that episode. He was crushed by his illness, which Pasquale’s speeches in some way made more acute. It seemed to him that the dysfunction of his body was spreading to the whole neighborhood and was manifested in the bad things that happened.
The worst thing for us happened on a warm Sunday in the spring, when Pasquale and Ada and he and I were waiting in the courtyard for Carmela, who had gone up to get a pullover. Five minutes passed; Carmen looked out the window, shouted to her brother: “Pasquà, I can’t find mamma. The door of the bathroom is locked from the inside but she doesn’t answer.”
Pasquale took the stairs two at a time and we followed. We found Carmela standing anxiously in front of the bathroom door, and Pasquale knocked, politely, again and again, but no one answered. Antonio then said to his friend, indicating the door: don’t worry, I’ll put it back in place, and, grabbing the handle, he practically tore it off.
The door opened. Giuseppina Peluso had been a radiant woman, energetic, hardworking, kindly, capable of confronting all adversities. She had continued, without fail, to occupy herself with her imprisoned husband, whose arrest—I remembered—she had opposed with all her strength, when he was accused of killing Don Achille Carracci. She had thoughtfully accepted Stefano’s invitation to spend New Year’s Eve together four years earlier, pleased with that reconciliation between the families. And she had been happy when her daughter found work, thanks to Lila, in the grocery in the new neighborhood. But now, with her husband dead, evidently she was worn out, she had become in a short time a tiny woman, skin and bone, without her old vigor. She had unfastened the lamp in the bathroom, a metal plate hanging on a chain, and had attached a clothesline to the hook set in the ceiling. Then she had hanged herself by the neck.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 62
