Sometimes she felt a weight on her chest. She became alarmed and turned on the light in the middle of the night, looked at her sleeping child. She saw almost nothing of Nino; Gennaro reminded her, rather, of her brother. When he was younger, the child had followed her around, now instead he was bored, he yelled, he wanted to run off and play, he said bad words to her. I love him—Lila reflected—but do I love him just as he is? An ugly question. The more she observed her son, the more she felt that, even if the neighbor found him very intelligent, he wasn’t growing up as she would have liked. She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain, now it seemed to her wrong that the quality of a person depends on the quality of his early childhood. You had to be constant, and Gennaro had no constancy, nor did she. My mind is always scattering, she said to herself, I’m made badly and he’s made badly. Then she was ashamed of thinking like that, she whispered to the sleeping child: you’re clever, you already know how to read, you already know how to write, you can do addition and subtraction, your mother is stupid, she’s never satisfied. She kissed the little boy on the forehead and turned out the light.
But still she couldn’t sleep, especially when Enzo came home late and went to bed without asking her to study. On these occasions, Lila imagined that he had met some prostitute or had a lover, a colleague in the factory where he worked, an activist from the Communist cell he had immediately joined. Males are like that, she thought, at least the ones I’ve known: they have to have sex constantly, otherwise they’re unhappy. I don’t think Enzo is any different, why should he be. And besides I’ve rejected him, I’ve left him in the bed by himself, I can’t make any demands. She was afraid only that he would fall in love and send her away. She wasn’t worried about finding no roof over her head, she had a job at the sausage factory and felt strong, surprisingly, much stronger than when she had married Stefano and found herself with a lot of money but was subjugated by him. Rather, she was afraid of losing Enzo’s kindness, the attention he gave to all her anxieties, the tranquil strength he emanated and thanks to which he had saved her first from Nino’s absence, then from Stefano’s presence. All the more because, in her present situation, he was the only one who gave her any gratification, who continued to ascribe to her extraordinary capabilities.
“You know what that means?”
“No.”
“Look closely.”
“It’s German, Enzo, I don’t know German.”
“But if you concentrate, after a while you’ll know it,” he said to her, partly joking, partly serious.
Enzo had worked hard to get a diploma and had succeeded, but, even though she had stopped going to school in fifth grade, he believed that she had a much brighter intelligence than he did and attributed to her the miraculous quality of rapidly mastering any material. In fact, when, with very little to go on, he nevertheless became convinced that the languages of computer programming held the future of the human race, and that the élite who first mastered them would have a resounding part in the history of the world, he immediately turned to her.
“Help me.”
“I’m tired.”
“The life we lead is disgusting, Lina, we have to change.”
“For me it’s fine like this.”
“The child is with strangers all day.”
“He’s big, he can’t live in a bell jar.”
“Look what bad shape your hands are in.”
“They’re my hands and I’ll do as I like with them.”
“I want to earn more, for you and for Gennaro.”
“You take care of your things and I’ll take care of mine.”
Harsh reactions, as usual. Enzo enrolled in a correspondence course—it was expensive, requiring periodic tests to be sent to an international data processing center with headquarters in Zurich, which returned them corrected—and gradually he had involved Lila and she had tried to keep up. But she behaved in a completely different way than she had with Nino, whom she had assailed with her obsession to prove that she could help him in everything. When she studied with Enzo she was calm, she didn’t try to overpower him. The evening hours that they spent on the course were a struggle for him, for her a sedative. Maybe that was why, the rare times he returned late and seemed able to do without her, Lila remained wakeful, anxious, as she listened to the water running in the bathroom, with which she imagined Enzo washing off his body every trace of contact with his lovers.
29.
In the factory—she had immediately understood—overwork drove people to want to have sex not with their wife or husband in their own house, where they returned exhausted and empty of desire, but there, at work, morning or afternoon. The men reached out their hands at every opportunity, they propositioned you if they merely passed by; and women, especially the ones who were not so young, laughed, rubbed against them with their big bosoms, fell in love, and love became a diversion that mitigated the labor and the boredom, giving an impression of real life.
From Lila’s first days the men had tried to get close, as if to sniff her. Lila repulsed them, and they laughed or went off humming songs full of obscene allusions. One morning, to make things perfectly clear, she almost pulled off the ear of a man who passing by had made a lewd remark and pressed a kiss on her neck. He was a fairly attractive man in his forties, named Edo, who spoke to everyone in an allusive way and was good at telling dirty jokes. Lila grabbed the ear with one hand and twisted it, pulling with all her strength, her nails digging into the membrane, without letting go her grip even though the man was yelling, as he tried to parry the kicks she was giving him. After which, furious, she went to see Bruno Soccavo to protest.
Lila had seen him only a few times since he hired her––fleetingly, without paying him much attention. In that situation, however, she was able to observe him closely. He was standing behind the desk; he had risen deliberately, the way men do when a woman enters the room. Lila was amazed: Soccavo’s face was bloated, his eyes shrouded by dissipation, his chest heavy, and his flushed complexion clashed like magma against his black hair and the white of his wolfish teeth. She wondered: what does this man have to do with the young man, the friend of Nino who was studying law? And she felt there was no continuity between the time on Ischia and the sausage factory: between them stretched a void, and in the leap from one space to the other Bruno—maybe because his father had been ill recently and the weight of the business (the debts, some said) had fallen suddenly on his shoulders—had changed for the worse.
She told him her complaints, he began to laugh.
“Lina,” he warned her, “I did you a favor, but don’t make trouble for me. We all work hard here, don’t always have your gun aimed: people have to relax every so often, otherwise it causes problems for me.”
“The rest of you can relax with each other.”
He ran his eyes over her with a look of amusement.
“I thought you liked to joke.”
“I like it when I decide.”
Lila’s hard tone made him change his. He became serious, he said without looking at her: you’re the same as ever—so beautiful in Ischia. Then he pointed to the door: go to work, go on.
But from then on, when he met her in the factory, he never failed to speak to her in front of everyone, and he always gave her a good-humored compliment. That familiarity in the end sanctioned Lila’s situation in the factory: she was in the good graces of the young Soccavo, and so it was as well to leave her alone. This seemed to be confirmed when one afternoon, right after the lunch break, a large woman named Teresa stopped her and said teasingly: you’re wanted in the seasoning room. Lila went into the big room where the salamis were drying, a rectangular space crammed with salamis hanging from the ceiling in the yellow light. There she found Bruno, who appeared to be doing an inspection but in reality wanted to chat.
While he wandered around the room poking and sniffing with the air of
an expert, he asked her about Pinuccia, her sister-in-law, and—a thing that irritated Lila—said, without looking at her, in fact as he examined a soppressata: she was never happy with your brother, she fell in love with me that summer, like you and Nino. Then he passed by and, with his back to her, added: it was thanks to her that I discovered that pregnant women love to make love. Then, without giving her the time to comment or make a sarcastic remark or get angry, he stopped in the middle of the room and said that while the place as a whole had nauseated him ever since he was a child, here in the drying room he had always felt comfortable, there was something satisfying, solid, the product that was nearly finished, acquiring refinement, spreading its odor, being readied for the market. Look, touch it, he said to her, it’s compact, hard, smell the fragrance it gives off: it’s like the odor of man and woman when they embrace and touch—you like it?—if you knew how many girls I’ve brought here since I was a boy. And just then he grabbed her by the waist, slid his lips down her long neck, as he squeezed her bottom—he seemed to have a hundred hands, he was rubbing her on top of the apron, underneath it, at a frenetic and breathless speed, in an exploration without pleasure, a pure intrusive desire.
For Lila everything, except the smell of the salamis, reminded her of Stefano’s violence and for several seconds she felt annihilated, she was afraid of being murdered. Then fury seized her, and she hit Bruno in the face and between the legs, she yelled him, you are a shit of a man, you’ve got nothing down there; come here, pull it out so I can cut it off, you shit.
Bruno let go, retreated. He touched his lip, which was bleeding, he snickered in embarrassment, he mumbled: I’m sorry, I thought there might be at least a little gratitude. Lila shouted at him: You mean I have to pay a penalty, or you’ll fire me, is that it? He laughed again, shook his head: No, if you don’t want to you don’t want to, that’s all, I apologized, what else should I do? But she was beside herself, only now did she begin to feel on her body the traces of his hands, and she knew it would last, it wasn’t something she could wash off with soap. She backed up toward the door, she said to him: You were lucky right now, but whether you fire me or not, I swear I’ll make you curse the moment you touched me. As she was leaving he muttered: What did I do to you, I didn’t do anything, come here, as if these were real problems, let’s make peace.
She went back to her job. At the time she was working in the steamy vat room, as a kind of attendant who among other things was supposed to keep the floor dry, a fruitless task. Edo, the one whose ear she had almost torn off, looked at her with curiosity. All of them, men and women, kept their eyes on her as she returned, enraged, from the drying room. Lila didn’t exchange a glance with anyone. She grabbed a rag, slammed it down on the bricks, and began to wipe the floor, which was a swamp, uttering aloud, in a threatening tone: Let’s see if some other son of a bitch wants to try. Her companions concentrated on their work.
For days she expected to be fired, but she wasn’t. If she happened to run into Bruno, he smiled kindly, she responded with a cold nod. No consequences, then, except disgust at those short hands, and flashes of hatred. But since Lila continued to show the same contemptuous indifference toward the supervisors, they suddenly began to torment her again, by constantly changing her job, forcing her to work until she was worn out, making obscene remarks. A sign that they had been given permission.
She didn’t tell Enzo anything about almost tearing off the ear, about Bruno’s attack, about the everyday harassments and struggles. If he asked her how things were going at the sausage factory, she answered sarcastically: Why don’t you tell me how it is where you work? And since he was silent, Lila teased him a little and then together they turned to the exercises for the correspondence course. They took refuge there for many reasons, the most important being to avoid questions about the future: what were they to each other, why was he taking care of her and Gennaro, why did she accept it, why had they been living together for so long while Enzo waited in vain every night for her to join him, tossing and turning in the bed, going to the kitchen with the excuse of getting a drink of water, glancing at the door with the frosted glass to see if she had turned off the light yet and to look at her shadow. Mute tensions—I knock, I let him enter—his doubts, hers. In the end they preferred to dull their senses by competing with block diagrams as if they were equipment for gymnastics.
“Let’s do the diagram of the door opening,” Lila said.
“Let’s do the diagram of knotting the tie,” Enzo said.
“Let’s do the diagram of tying Gennaro’s shoes,” Lila said.
“Let’s do the diagram of making coffee in the napoletana,” Enzo said.
From the simplest actions to the most complicated, they racked their brains to diagram daily life, even if the Zurich tests didn’t require it. And not because Enzo wanted to but because, as usual, Lila, who had begun diffidently, grew more and more excited each day, and now, in spite of the cold at night, she was frantic to reduce the entire wretched world they lived in to the truth of 0s and 1s. She seemed to aspire to an abstract linearity—the abstraction that bred all abstractions—hoping that it would assure her a restful tidiness.
“Let’s diagram the factory,” she proposed one evening.
“The whole process?” he asked, bewildered.
“Yes.”
He looked at her, he said: “All right, let’s start with your job.”
An irritated scowl crossed her face; she said good night and went to her room.
30.
That equilibrium, already precarious, changed when Pasquale reappeared. He was working at a construction site in the area and had come to San Giovanni a Teduccio for a meeting of the local section of the Communist Party. He and Enzo met on the street, by chance, and immediately regained their old intimacy. They ended up talking about politics, and manifested the same dissatisfaction. Enzo expressed himself cautiously at first, but Pasquale, surprisingly, although he had an important local post—secretary of the section—proved to be anything but cautious, and he criticized the party, which was revisionist, and the union, which too often closed both eyes. The two spent so long talking that Lila found Pasquale in the house at dinnertime and had to feed him as well.
The evening began badly. She felt herself observed, and had to make an effort not to get angry. What did Pasquale want, to spy on her, report to the neighborhood how she was living? What right did he have to come there to judge her? He didn’t speak a single friendly word, he brought no news of her family—of Nunzia, of her brother Rino, of Fernando. Instead he gave her male looks, the kind she got in the factory, appraising, and if she became aware of them he turned his eyes elsewhere. He must have found that she had grown ugly. Surely he was thinking, How could I, as a boy, have fallen in love with this woman, I was a fool. And without a doubt he considered her a terrible mother, since she could have brought up her son in the comfort of the Carracci grocery stores and instead she had dragged him into that poverty. At a certain point Lila said huffily to Enzo, you clean up, I’m going to bed. But Pasquale, to her surprise, assumed a grandiose tone and said to her, with some emotion: Lina, before you go I have to tell you one thing. There is no woman like you, you throw yourself into life with a force that, if we all had it, the world would have changed a long time ago. Then, having broken the ice in this way, he told her that Fernando had gone back to resoling shoes, that Rino had become Stefano’s cross to bear, and was constantly begging him for money, that Nunzia he rarely saw, she never left the house. But you did well, he repeated: no one in the neighborhood has kicked the Carraccis and the Solaras in the face as much as you, and I’m on your side.
After that he showed up often, which cut into their studying. He would arrive at dinnertime with four hot pizzas, playing his usual role of someone who knows all about how the capitalist and anti-capitalist world functions, and the old friendship grew stronger. It was clear that he lived without emotional ties; his
sister Carmen was engaged and had little time for him. But he reacted to his solitude with an angry activism that Lila liked, that interested her. Although crushed by hard labor at the construction sites, he was involved in union activities: he threw blood-red paint at the American consulate, if there were fascists to be beaten up he was always on the front lines, he was a member of a worker-student committee where he continuously quarreled with the students. Not to mention the Communist Party: because of his critical position he expected at any moment to lose his post as secretary of the section. With Enzo and Lila he spoke freely, mixing personal resentments and political arguments. They tell me I’m an enemy of the party, he complained, they tell me I make too much of a fuss, I should calm down. But they are the ones who are destroying the party, they are the ones turning it into a cog in the system, they are the ones who’ve reduced anti-fascism to democratic oversight. But do you know who’s been installed as the head of the neighborhood fascists? The pharmacist’s son, Gino, an idiot slave of Michele Solara. And must I put up with the fact that the fascists are raising their heads again in my neighborhood? My father—he said, with emotion—gave his entire self to the party, and why: for this watered-down anti-fascism, for this shit we have today? When that poor man ended up in jail, innocent, completely innocent, he got angry—he didn’t murder Don Achille—the party abandoned him, even though he had been a loyal comrade, even though he had taken part in the Four Days of Naples, and fought at the Ponte della Sanità, even though after the war, in the neighborhood, he had been more exposed than anyone else. And Giuseppina, his mother? Had anyone helped her? As soon as he mentioned his mother, Pasquale picked up Gennaro and sat him on his lap, saying: See how pretty your mamma is, do you love her?
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Page 10
