I still didn’t know anything about what she secretly called, in herself, after the bad experience of New Year’s, dissolving margins. But I knew the story of the exploded pot, it was always lying in ambush in some corner of my mind; I thought about it over and over again. And I remember that, one night at home, I reread the letter she had sent me on Ischia. How seductive was her way of talking about herself and how distant it seemed now. I had to acknowledge that the Lila who had written those words had disappeared. In the letter there was still the girl who had written The Blue Fairy, who had learned Latin and Greek on her own, who had consumed half of Maestro Ferraro’s library, even the girl who had drawn the shoes framed and hanging in the shoe store. But in the life of every day I no longer saw her, no longer heard her. The tense, aggressive Cerullo was as if immolated. Although we both continued to live in the same neighborhood, although we had had the same childhood, although we were both living our fifteenth year, we had suddenly ended up in two different worlds. I was becoming, as the months ran by, a sloppy, disheveled, spectacled girl bent over tattered books that gave off a moldy odor, volumes bought at great sacrifice at the secondhand store or obtained from Maestra Oliviero. She went around on Stefano’s arm in the clothes of an actress or a princess, her hair styled like a diva’s.
I looked at her from the window, and felt that her earlier shape had broken, and I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter, of the cracked and crumpled copper. It was an image that I used all the time, whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.
45.
After the terrible evening in the restaurant in Santa Lucia there were no more occasions like that, and not because the boyfriends didn’t ask us again but because we now got out of it with one excuse or another. Instead, when I wasn’t exhausted by my homework, I let myself be drawn out to a dance at someone’s house, to have a pizza with the old group. I preferred to go, however, only when I was sure that Antonio would come; for a while he had been courting me, discreetly, attentively. True, his face was shiny and full of blackheads, his teeth here and there were bluish; he had broad hands and strong fingers—he had once effortlessly unscrewed the screws on the punctured tire of an old car that Pasquale had acquired. But he had black wavy hair that made you want to caress it, and although he was very shy the rare times he opened his mouth he said something witty. Besides, he was the only one who noticed me. Enzo seldom appeared; he had a life of which we knew little or nothing, and when he was there he devoted himself, in his detached, slow way, and never excessively, to Carmela. As for Pasquale, he seemed to have lost interest in girls after Lila’s rejection. He took very little notice even of Ada, who flirted with him tirelessly, even if she kept saying that she couldn’t stand always seeing our mean faces.
Naturally on those evenings we sooner or later ended up talking about Lila, even if it seemed that no one wanted to name her: the boys were all a little disappointed, each one would have liked to be in Stefano’s place. But the most unhappy was Pasquale: if his hatred for the Solaras hadn’t been of such long standing, he would probably have sided publicly with Marcello against the Cerullo family. His sufferings in love had dug deep inside him and a mere glimpse of Lila and Stefano together dimmed his joy in life. Yet he was by nature honest and good-hearted, so he was careful to keep his reactions under control and to take sides according to what was just. When he found out that Marcello and Michele had confronted Rino one evening, and though they hadn’t laid a finger on him had grossly insulted him, Pasquale had entirely taken Rino’s part. When he found out that Silvio Solara, the father of Michele and Marcello, had gone in person to Fernando’s renovated shoe store and calmly reproached him for not having brought up his daughter properly, and then, looking around, had observed that the shoemaker could make all the shoes he wanted, but then where would he sell them, he would never find a store that would take them, not to mention that with all that glue around, with all that thread and pitch and wooden forms and soles and heels, it wouldn’t take much to start a fire, Pasquale had promised that, if there was a fire at the Cerullo shoe shop, he would go with a few trusted companions and burn down the Solara bar and pastry shop. But he was critical of Lila. He said that she should have run away from home rather than allow Marcello to go there and court her all those evenings. He said she should have smashed the television with a hammer and not watched it with anyone who knew that he had bought it only to have her. He said, finally, that she was a girl too intelligent to be truly in love with a hypocritical idiot like Stefano Carracci.
On those occasions I was the only one who did not remain silent but explicitly disagreed with Pasquale’s criticisms. I refuted him, saying things like: It’s not easy to leave home; it’s not easy to go against the wishes of the people you love; nothing is easy, especially when you criticize her rather than being angry at your friend Rino��he’s the one who got her in that trouble with Marcello, and if Lila hadn’t found a way of getting out of it, she would have had to marry Marcello. I concluded by praising Stefano, who of all the boys who had known Lila since she was a child and loved her was the only one with the courage to support her and help her. A terrible silence fell and I was very proud of having countered every criticism of my friend in a tone and language that, among other things, had subdued him.
But one night we ended up quarreling unpleasantly. We were all, including Enzo, having a pizza on the Rettifilo, in a place where a margherita and a beer cost fifty lire. This time it was the girls who started: Ada, I think, said she thought Lila was ridiculous going around always fresh from the hairdresser and in clothes like Princess Soraya, even though she was sprinkling roach poison in front of the house door. We all, some more, some less, laughed. Then, one thing leading to another, Carmela ended up saying outright that Lila had gone with Stefano for the money, to settle her brother and the rest of the family. I was starting my usual official defense when Pasquale interrupted me and said, “That’s not the point. The point is that Lina knows where that money comes from.”
“Now you want to drag in Don Achille and the black market and the trafficking and loan sharking and all the nonsense of before and after the war?” I said.
“Yes, and if your friend were here now she would say I was right.”
“Stefano is just a shopkeeper who’s a good salesman.”
“And the money he put into the Cerullos’ shoe store he got from the grocery?”
“Why, what do you think?”
“It comes from the gold objects taken from mothers and hidden by Don Achille in the mattress. Lina acts the lady with the blood of all the poor people of this neighborhood. And she is kept, she and her whole family, even before she’s married.”
I was about to answer when Enzo interrupted with his usual detachment: “Excuse me, Pascà, what do you mean by ‘is kept’?”
As soon as I heard that question I knew that things would turn ugly. Pasquale turned red, embarrassed. “Keep means keep. Who pays, please, when Lina goes to the hairdresser, when she buys dresses and purses? Who put money into the shoe shop so that the shoe-repair man can play at making shoes?”
“Are you saying that Lina isn’t in love, isn’t engaged, won’t soon marry Stefano, but has sold herself?”
We were all quiet. Antonio murmured, “No, Enzo, Pasquale doesn’t mean that; you know that he loves Lina as we all of us love her.”
Enzo nodded at him to be quiet.
“Be quiet, Anto’, let Pasquale answer.”
Pasquale said grimly, “Yes, she sold herself. And she doesn’t give a damn about the stink of the money she spends every day.”
I tried again to have my say, at that point, but Enzo touched my arm.
“Excuse me, Lenù, I want to know what Pasquale calls a girl who sells herself.”
Here Pasquale had an outburst of viol
ence that we all read in his eyes and he said what for months he had wanted to say, to shout out to the whole neighborhood: “Whore, I call her a whore. Lina has behaved and is behaving like a whore.”
Enzo got up and said, almost in a whisper: “Come outside.”
Antonio jumped up, restrained Pasquale, who was getting up, and said, “Now, let’s not overdo it, Enzo. Pasquale is only saying something that’s not an accusation, it’s a criticism that we’d all like to make.”
Enzo answered, this time aloud, “Not me.” And he headed toward the door, announcing, “I’ll wait outside for both of you.”
We kept Pasquale and Antonio from following him, and nothing happened. They didn’t speak for several days, then everything was as before.
46.
I’ve recounted that quarrel to say how that year passed and what the atmosphere was around Lila’s choices, especially among the young men who had secretly or explicitly loved her, desired her, and in all probability loved and desired her still. As for me, it’s hard to say in what tangle of feelings I found myself. I always defended Lila, and I liked doing so, I liked to hear myself speak with the authority of one who is studying difficult subjects. But I also knew that I could have just as well recounted, and willingly, if with some exaggeration, how Lila had really been behind each of Stefano’s moves, and I with her, linking step to step as if it were a mathematics problem, to achieve that result: to settle herself, settle her brother, attempt to realize the plan of the shoe factory, and even get money to repair my glasses if they broke.
I passed Fernando’s old workshop and felt a vicarious sense of triumph. Lila, clearly, had made it. The shoemaker’s shop, which had never had a sign, now displayed over the door a kind of plaque that said “Cerullo.” Fernando, Rino, the three apprentices worked at joining, stitching, hammering, polishing, bent over their benches from morning till late at night. It was known that father and son often quarreled. It was known that Fernando maintained that the shoes, especially the women’s, couldn’t be made as Lila had invented them, that they were only a child’s fantasy. It was known that Rino maintained the opposite and that he went to Lila to ask her to intervene. It was known that Lila said she didn’t want to know about it, and so Rino went to Stefano and dragged him to the shop to give his father specific orders. It was known that Stefano went in and looked for a long time at Lila’s designs framed on the walls, smiled to himself and said tranquilly that he wanted the shoes to be exactly as they were in those pictures, he had hung them there for that purpose. It was known, in short, that things were proceeding slowly, that the workers first received instructions from Fernando and then Rino changed them and everything stopped and started over, and Fernando noticed the changes and changed them back, and Stefano arrived and so back to square one: they ended up yelling, breaking things.
I glanced in and immediately fled. But the pictures hanging on the walls made an impression. Those drawings, for Lila, were fantasies, I thought. Money has nothing to do with it, selling has nothing to do with it. All that activity is the result of a whim of hers, celebrated by Stefano merely out of love. She’s lucky to be so loved, to love. Lucky to be adored for what she is and for what she invents. Now that she’s given her brother what he wanted, now that she’s taken him out of danger, surely she’ll invent something else. So I don’t want to lose sight of her. Something will happen.
But nothing happened. Lila established herself in the role of Stefano’s fiancée. And even in our conversations, when she had time to talk, she seemed satisfied with what she had become, as if she no longer saw anything beyond it, didn’t want to see anything beyond it, except marriage, a house, children.
I was disappointed. She seemed sweeter, without the hardness she had always had. I realized this later, when through Gigliola Spagnuolo I heard disgraceful rumors about her. Gigliola said to me rancorously, in dialect, “Now your friend is acting like a princess. But does Stefano know that when Marcello went to her house she gave him a blow job every night?”
I didn’t know what a blow job was. The term had been familiar to me since I was a child but the sound of it recalled only a kind of disfigurement, something very humiliating.
“It’s not true.”
“Marcello says so.”
“He’s a liar.”
“Yes? And would he lie even to his brother?”
“Did Michele tell you?”
“Yes.”
I hoped that those rumors wouldn’t reach Stefano. Every day when I came home from school I said to myself: maybe I should warn Lila, before something bad happens. But I was afraid she would be furious and that, because of how she had grown up, because of how she was made, she would go directly to Marcello Solara with the shoemaker’s knife. But in the end I decided: it was better to report to her what I had learned, so she would be prepared to confront the situation. But I discovered that she already knew about it. Not only that: she was better informed than me about what a blow job was. I realized it from the fact that she used a clearer formulation to tell me it was so disgusting to her that she would never do it to any man, let alone Marcello Solara. Then she told me that Stefano had heard the rumor and he had asked her what type of relations she had had with Marcello during the period when he went to the Cerullo house. She had said angrily, “None, are you crazy?” And Stefano had said immediately that he believed her, that he had never had doubts, that he had asked the question only to let her know that Marcello was saying obscene things about her. Yet he seemed distracted, like someone who, even against his will, is following scenes of disaster that are forming in his mind. Lila had realized it and they had discussed it for a long time, she had confessed that she, too, felt a need for revenge. But what was the use? After talk and more talk, they had decided by mutual consent to rise a step above the Solaras, above the logic of the neighborhood.
“A step above?” I asked, marveling.
“Yes, to ignore them: Marcello, his brother, the father, the grandfather, all of them. Act as if they didn’t exist.”
So Stefano had continued to go to work, without defending the honor of his fiancée, Lila had continued her life as a fiancée without resorting to the knife or anything else, the Solaras had continued to spread obscenities. I was astonished. What was happening? I didn’t understand. The Solaras’ behavior seemed more comprehensible, it seemed to me consistent with the world that we had known since we were children. What, instead, did she and Stefano have in mind, where did they think they were living? They were behaving in a way that wasn’t familiar even in the poems that I studied in school, in the novels I read. I was puzzled. They weren’t reacting to the insults, even to that truly intolerable insult that the Solaras were making. They displayed kindness and politeness toward everyone, as if they were John and Jacqueline Kennedy visiting a neighborhood of indigents. When they went out walking together, and he put an arm around her shoulders, it seemed that none of the old rules were valid for them: they laughed, they joked, they embraced, they kissed each other on the lips. I saw them speeding around in the convertible, alone even in the evening, always dressed like movie stars, and I thought, They go wherever they want, without a chaperone, and not secretly but with the consent of their parents, with the consent of Rino, and do whatever they like, without caring what people say. Was it Lila who had persuaded Stefano to behave in a way that was making them the most admired and most talked about couple in the neighborhood? Was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighborhood by staying in the neighborhood? Did she want to drag us out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?
47.
Everything returned abruptly to the usual track when the rumors about Lila reached Pasquale. It happened one Sunday, when Carmela, Enzo, Pasquale, Antonio, and I were walking along the stradone. Antonio said, “I hear that Marcello Solara is telling everyone that Lina was with him.”
Enzo
didn’t blink. Pasquale immediately flared up: “Was how?”
Antonio was embarrassed by my and Carmela’s presence and said, “You understand.”
They moved away, to talk among themselves. I saw and heard that Pasquale was increasingly enraged, that Enzo was becoming physically more compact, as if he no longer had arms, legs, neck, as if he were a block of hard material. Why is it, I wondered, that they are so angry? Lila isn’t a sister of theirs or even a cousin. And yet they feel it’s their duty to be indignant, all three of them, more than Stefano, much more than Stefano, as if they were the true fiancés. Pasquale especially seemed ridiculous. He who only a short time before had said what he had said shouted, at one point, and we heard him clearly, with our own ears: “I’ll smash the face of that shit, calling her a whore. Even if Stefano allows it, I’m not going to allow it.” Then silence, they rejoined us, and we wandered aimlessly, I talking to Antonio, Carmela between her brother and Enzo. After a while they took us home. I saw them going off, Enzo, who was the shortest, in the middle, flanked by Antonio and Pasquale.
My Brilliant Friend Page 25
