But there were two episodes in particular, in that period, that were significant for Lila. Once Pasquale insisted that she come to hear an important comrade, a woman. Lila accepted the invitation; she was curious. But she heard almost none of the speech—a speech more or less about the party and the working class—because the important comrade arrived late and when the meeting finally began Gennaro was fidgety, and she had to amuse him, taking him out to the street to play, bringing him back inside, taking him out again. Yet the little she heard was enough for her to understand how much dignity the woman had, and how distinct she was in every way from the working- and lower-middle-class audience. So when she noticed that Pasquale, Enzo, and some others weren’t satisfied with what the speaker was saying, she thought that they were unfair, that they should be grateful to that educated woman who had come to waste her time with them. And when Pasquale made a speech so argumentative that the comrade delegate lost her temper and, her voice cracking, exclaimed, in irritation, That’s enough, I’m going to get up and leave, that reaction pleased her, she took her side. But evidently her feelings were, as usual, muddled. When Enzo shouted, in support of Pasquale: Comrade, without us you don’t even exist, so you stay as long as we want you to, and go only when we tell you, she changed her mind, with sudden sympathy for the violence of that we—it seemed to her that the woman deserved it. She went home angry at the child, who had ruined the evening for her.
Much more lively was a meeting of the committee that Pasquale, with his thirst for engagement, had joined. Lila went not only because it meant a lot to him but because it seemed to her that the restlessness that drove him to try and to understand was good. The committee met in Naples, in an old house on Via dei Tribunali. They arrived one night in Pasquale’s car, and climbed up crumbling, monumental stairs. The place was large, and there weren’t many people present. Lila noticed how easy it was to distinguish the faces of the students from those of the workers, the fluency of the leaders from the stuttering of the followers. And she quickly became irritated. The students made speeches that seemed to her hypocritical; they had a modest manner that clashed with their pedantic phrases. The refrain, besides, was always the same: We’re here to learn from you, meaning from the workers, but in reality they were showing off ideas that were almost too obvious about capital, about exploitation, about the betrayal of social democracy, about the modalities of the class struggle. Furthermore—she discovered—the few girls, who were mostly silent, flirted eagerly with Enzo and Pasquale. Especially Pasquale, who was the more sociable, and was treated with great friendliness. He was a worker who—although he carried a Communist Party card, and was the head of a section—had chosen to bring his experience of the proletariat into a revolutionary meeting. When he and Enzo spoke, the students, who among themselves did nothing but quarrel, always registered approval. Enzo as usual said only a few, loaded words. Pasquale, on the other hand, recounted, with an inexhaustible patter, half in Italian, half in dialect, the progress that the political work was making at the construction sites around Naples, hurling small polemical darts at the students, who hadn’t been very active. At the conclusion, without warning, he dragged her, Lila, into it. He introduced her by her name and last name, he called her a worker comrade who had a job in a small food factory, and he heaped praises on her.
Lila furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes: she didn’t like them all looking at her like a rare animal. And when, after Pasquale, a girl spoke—the first of the girls to speak—she became even more annoyed, first of all because the girl expressed herself like a book, second because she kept referring to her, calling her Comrade Cerullo, and, third, because Lila already knew her: it was Nadia, the daughter of Professor Galiani, Nino’s little girlfriend, who had written him love letters on Ischia.
For a moment she was afraid that Nadia had in turn recognized her, but although the girl addressed her as she spoke, she gave no sign of remembering her. Besides, why should she? Who could say how many rich people’s parties she had gone to and what crowd of shadows inhabited her memory? For Lila, on the other hand, there had been that one long-ago occasion, and she remained struck by it. She recalled the apartment on Corso Vittorio Emanuele precisely, along with Nino and all those young people from good families, the books, the paintings, and her own agonizing experience of it, the unease it had inspired. She couldn’t bear it, she got up while Nadia was still speaking and went out with Gennaro, carrying inside her an evil energy that, finding no precise outlet, writhed in her stomach.
After a while, however, she returned; she had decided to have her say, in order not to feel inferior. A curly-headed youth was speaking with great expertise about Italsider and piecework. Lila waited for him to finish and, ignoring Enzo’s look of bewilderment, asked to speak. She spoke for a long time, in Italian, with Gennaro fussing in her arms. She began slowly, then she continued on amid a general silence, perhaps her voice was too loud. She said jokingly that she knew nothing about the working class. She said she knew only the workers, men and women, in the factory where she worked, people from whom there was absolutely nothing to learn except wretchedness. Can you imagine, she asked, what it means to spend eight hours a day standing up to your waist in the mortadella cooking water? Can you imagine what it means to have your fingers covered with cuts from slicing the meat off animal bones? Can you imagine what it means to go in and out of refrigerated rooms at twenty degrees below zero, and get ten lire more an hour—ten lire—for cold compensation? If you imagine this, what do you think you can learn from people who are forced to live like that? The women have to let their asses be groped by supervisors and colleagues without saying a word. If the owner feels the need, someone has to follow him into the seasoning room; his father used to ask for the same thing, maybe also his grandfather; and there, before he jumps all over you, that same owner makes you a tired little speech on how the odor of salami excites him. Men and women both are subjected to body searches, because at the exit there’s something called the “partial,” and if the red light goes on instead of the green, it means that you’re stealing salamis or mortadellas. The “partial” is controlled by the guard, who’s a spy for the owner, and turns on the red light not only for possible thieves but especially for shy pretty girls and for troublemakers. That is the situation in the factory where I work. The union has never gone in and the workers are nothing but poor victims of blackmail, dependent on the law of the owner, that is: I pay you and so I possess you and I possess your life, your family, and everything that surrounds you, and if you don’t do as I say I’ll ruin you.
At first no one breathed. Then other speakers followed, who all quoted Lila devotedly. At the end Nadia came to give her a hug. She was full of compliments, How pretty you are, how clever, you speak so well. She thanked her, and said seriously: You’ve made us understand how much work we still have to do. But in spite of her lofty, almost solemn tone, to Lila she seemed more childish than she remembered when, that night years earlier, she had seen her with Nino. What did they do, she and the son of Sarratore, did they dance, did they talk, did they stroke each other, did they kiss? She no longer knew. Certainly, the girl had a loveliness that was unforgettable. And now Lila thought, seeing Nadia right before her, she seemed even purer than she had then, pure and fragile and so genuinely open to the suffering of others that she appeared to feel their torments in her own body to an unendurable extent.
“Will you come back?”
“I have the child.”
“You have to come back, we need you.”
But Lila shook her head uneasily, she repeated to Nadia: I have the child, and pointed to him, and to Gennaro she said, Say hello to the lady, tell her you know how to read and write, let her hear how well you speak. And since Gennaro hid his face against her neck while Nadia smiled vaguely but didn’t seem to notice him, she said again to her: I have the child, I work eight hours a day not counting overtime, people in my situation want only to sleep at night. She le
ft in a daze, with the impression of having exposed herself too fully to people who, yes, were good-hearted but who, even if they understood it in the abstract, in the concrete couldn’t understand a thing. I know—it stayed in her head without becoming sound—I know what a comfortable life full of good intentions means, you can’t even imagine what real misery is.
Once she was on the street her uneasiness increased. As they went toward the car, she felt that Pasquale and Enzo were sulking, she guessed that her speech had wounded them. Pasquale took her gently by the arm, closing a physical gap that before that moment he had never tried to close, and asked her:
“You really work in those conditions?”
She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: “And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?”
They didn’t answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions she worked in; they couldn’t tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. “Fuck off,” she said, “you and the working class.”
They got in the car, exchanging only trite remarks all the way to San Giovanni a Teduccio. But when Pasquale left them at their house he said to her seriously: There’s nothing to do, you’re always the best, and then he left again for the neighborhood. Enzo, instead, with the child asleep in his arms, muttered darkly:
“Why didn’t you say anything? People in the factory put their hands on you?”
They were tired, she decided to soothe him. She said:
“With me they don’t dare.”
32.
A few days later the trouble began. Lila arrived at work early in the morning, worn out by her innumerable tasks and completely unprepared for what was about to happen. It was very cold, she’d had a cough for days, it felt like flu coming on. At the entrance she saw a couple of kids, they must have decided to skip school. One of them greeted her with some familiarity and gave her not a flyer as sometimes happened but a pamphlet several pages long. She responded to his greeting but she was bewildered; she had seen the boy at the committee meeting on Via dei Tribunali. Then she put the pamphlet in her coat pocket and passed Filippo, the guard, without deigning to look at him, so he shouted after her: Not even a good morning, eh.
She worked extremely hard as usual—at that time she was in the gutting section—and forgot about the boy. At lunchtime she went into the courtyard with her lunchbox to find a sunny corner, but as soon as Filippo saw her he left the guard booth and joined her. He was a man of about fifty, short, heavy, full of the most disgusting obscenities but also inclined to a sticky sentimentality. He had recently had his sixth child, and he easily became emotional, pulling out his wallet to show off a picture of the baby. Lila thought he had decided to show it to her as well, but no. The man pulled the pamphlet out of his jacket pocket and said to her in an extremely aggressive tone:
“Cerù, listen carefully to what I’m telling you: if you said to these shits the things that are written here, you’ve got yourself in deep trouble, you know?”
She answered coldly:
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, let me eat.”
Filippo, angrily throwing the pamphlet in her face, snapped:
“You don’t know, eh? Read it, then. We were all happy and in harmony here, and only a whore like you could spread these things. I turn on the ‘partial’ as I please? I put my hands on the girls? I, the father of a family? Look out, or don Bruno will make you pay, and dearly, or by God I’ll smash your face myself.”
He turned and went back to the guard booth.
Lila calmly finished eating, then she picked up the pamphlet. The title was pretentious: “Investigation Into the Condition of Workers in Naples and the Provinces.” She scanned the pages, and found one devoted entirely to the Soccavo sausage factory. She read word for word everything that had come out of her mouth at the meeting on Via dei Tribunali.
She pretended it was nothing. She left the pamphlet on the ground, she went inside without even looking at the guard booth and returned to work. But she was furious with whoever had gotten her into that mess, and without even warning her, especially saintly Nadia. Surely she had written that stuff, it was all tidily in order and full of maudlin emotion. As she worked the knife on the cold meat and the odor made her sick and her rage increased, she felt around her the hostility of the other workers, male and female. They had all known one another a long time, they knew they were complicit victims, and they had no doubt about who the whistleblower was: she, the only one who behaved from the start as if the need to work didn’t go hand in hand with the need to be humiliated.
In the afternoon Bruno appeared and soon afterward he sent for her. His face was redder than usual, and he had the pamphlet in his hand.
“Was it you?”
“No.”
“Tell me the truth, Lina: there are already too many people out there making trouble, you’ve joined them?”
“I told you no.”
“No, eh? There is no one here, however, who has the ability and the impudence to make up all these lies.”
“It must have been one of the office workers.”
“The office workers least of all.”
“Then what do you want from me, little birds sing, get mad at them.”
He snorted, he seemed truly strained. He said:
“I gave you a job. I said nothing when you joined the union, my father would have kicked you out. All right, I did something foolish, there in the drying room, but I apologized, you can’t say I persecuted you. And you, what do you do, you take revenge by casting a bad light on my factory and setting it down in black and white that I take my women workers into the drying room? For chrissake, when? Me, the workers, are you mad? You’re making me regret the favor I did you.”
“The favor? I work hard and you pay me a few cents. It’s more the favor I do you than what you do for me.”
“You see? You talk like those shits. Have the courage to admit that you wrote this crap.”
“I didn’t write anything.”
Bruno twisted his mouth, he looked at the pages in front of him, and she understood that he was hesitating, he couldn’t make up his mind: move to a harsher tone, threaten her, fire her, retreat and try to find out if there were other initiatives like that being prepared? She made up her mind, and said in a low voice—reluctantly but with a small charming expression that clashed with the memory of his violence, still vivid in her body—three conciliatory phrases:
“Trust me, I have a small child, I honestly didn’t do this thing.”
He nodded yes, but he also muttered, unhappily: “You know what you’re forcing me to do?”
“No, and I don’t want to know.”
“I’ll tell you just the same. If those are your friends, warn them: as soon as they come back and make a scene out front here, I’ll have them beaten to a pulp. As for you, be careful: stretch the cord too far and it will snap.”
But the day didn’t end there. On the way out, when Lila passed, the red light of the partial went on. It was the usual ritual: every day the guard cheerfully chose three or four victims, the shy girls, eyes lowered, let him feel them up, the savvy older women laughed, saying: Filì, if you have to touch go on, but hurry up, I’ve got to go make dinner. This time, Filippo stopped only Lila. It was cold, a strong wind was blowing. The guard came out of his booth. Lila shivered, she said: “If you so much as brush me, by God I’ll murder you or have you murdered.”
Filippo, grim, pointed to a small café table that was always next to the booth.
“Empty your pockets one at a time, put the stuff there.”
Lila found a fresh sausage in her coat, with disgust she felt the soft meat inside the casing. She pulled it out and burst into laughter, saying, “What shits you people are, all of you.”
33.
Threats to report her for theft. Deductions from her salary, fines. And insults, Filippo’s hurled at her, and hers at Filippo. Bruno didn’t appear, and yet he was surely still in the factory, his car was in the courtyard. Lila guessed that from then on things would get even worse for her.
She went home wearier than usual; she got angry at Gennaro, who wanted to stay at the neighbor’s; she made dinner. She told Enzo that he would have to study on his own and she went to bed early. Since she couldn’t get warm under the covers, she got up and put on a wool sweater over her nightgown. She was getting back in bed when suddenly, for no obvious reason, her heart was in her throat and began pounding so hard that it seemed like someone else’s.
She already knew those symptoms, they went along with the thing that later—eleven years later, in 1980—she called dissolving boundaries. But the signs had never manifested themselves so violently, and this was the first time it had happened when she was alone, without people around who for one reason or another set off that effect. Then she realized with a jolt of horror that she wasn’t alone. From her unstuck head figures and voices of the day were emerging, floating through the room: the two boys from the committee, the guard, her fellow-workers, Bruno in the drying room, Nadia—all moving too rapidly, as in a silent film. Even the flashes of red light from the partial came at very narrow intervals, and Filippo who was tearing the sausage out of her hands and yelling threats. All a trick of the mind: except for Gennaro, in the cot beside her, with his regular breathing, there were no real persons or sounds in the room. But that didn’t soothe her, in fact it magnified the fear. Her heartbeats were now so powerful that they seemed capable of exploding the interlocking solidity of objects. The tenacity of the grip that held the walls of the room together had weakened, the violent knocking in her throat was shaking the bed, cracking the plaster, unsoldering the upper part of her skull, maybe it would shatter the child, yes, it would shatter him like a plastic puppet, splitting open his chest and stomach and head to reveal his insides. I have to get him away, she thought; the closer he is to me, the more likely he’ll break. But she remembered another baby that she had pushed out, the baby that had never taken shape in her womb, Stefano’s child. I pushed him out, or at least that’s what Pinuccia and Gigliola said behind my back. And maybe I really did, I expelled him deliberately. Why hasn’t anything, so far, really gone well for me? And why should I keep the things that haven’t worked? The beating showed no sign of diminishing, the figures of smoke pursued her with the sound of their voices, she got out of the bed again, and sat on the edge. She was soaked with a sticky sweat, it felt like frozen oil. She placed her bare feet against Gennaro’s bed, pushed it gently, to move it away but not too far: if she kept him next to her she was afraid of breaking him, if she pushed him too far away she was afraid of losing him. She went into the kitchen, taking small steps and leaning on the furniture, the walls, but repeatedly looking behind her out of fear that the floor would cave in and swallow up Gennaro. She drank from the faucet, washed her face, and suddenly her heart stopped, throwing her forward as if it had braked abruptly.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 88
