The Neapolitan Novels

31.

Both Rino and Michele blamed Gigliola for the fire, because she smoked secretly and so had a tiny lighter. According to Rino, Gigliola had done it on purpose: while they were all occupied by their wrangling, she had set fire to the panel, which, loaded with paper, glue, paint, had instantly burst into flames. Michele was more circumspect: Gigliola, he knew, continuously toyed with the lighter and so, unintentionally, caught up in the argument, hadn’t realized that the flame was too close to the photograph. But the girl couldn’t bear either the first hypothesis or the second, and with a fiercely combative look blamed Lila herself, that is, she blamed the disfigured image, which had caught fire spontaneously, like the Devil, who, attempting to corrupt the saints, assumed the features of a woman, but the saints called on Jesus, and the demon was transformed into flames. She added, in confirmation of her version, that Pinuccia herself had told her that her sister-in-law had the ability not to stay pregnant, and, in fact, if she was unsuccessful she would let the child drain out, rejecting the gifts of the Lord.

This gossip grew worse when Michele Solara began to go regularly to the new grocery store. He spent a lot of time joking with Lila, joking with Carmen, so that Carmen hypothesized that he came for her and on the one hand was afraid that someone would tell Enzo, doing his military service in Piedmont, while on the other she was flattered and began to flirt. Lila instead made fun of the young Solara. She heard the rumors spread by his fiancée and so she said to him: “You’d better go, we’re witches here, we’re very dangerous.”

But when I went to see her, during that period, I never found her truly cheerful. She assumed an artificial tone and was sarcastic about everything. Did she have a bruise on her arm? Stefano had caressed her too passionately. Were her eyes red from crying? Those were tears of happiness, not grief. Be careful of Michele, he liked to hurt people? No, she said, all he has to do is touch me and he’ll burn: it’s I who hurt people.

On that last point there had always been modest agreement. But Gigliola especially had no doubts by now: Lila was a witch-whore, she had cast a spell on her fiancé; that’s why he wanted her to manage the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. And for days, jealous, desperate, she wouldn’t go to work. Then she decided to talk to Pinuccia, they became allies, and moved to the offensive. Pinuccia worked on her brother, insisting that he was a happy cuckold, and then she attacked Rino, her fiancé, telling him that he wasn’t a boss but Michele’s servant. So one evening Stefano and Rino waited for Michele outside the bar, and when he appeared they made a very general speech that in substance, however, meant: leave Lila alone, you’re making her waste time, she has to work. Michele immediately got the message and replied coldly:

“What the fuck are you saying?”

“If you don’t understand it means you don’t want to understand.”

“No, my fine friends, it’s you who don’t want to understand our commercial needs. And if you won’t understand them, I necessarily have to see to them.”

“Meaning?” Stefano asked.

“Your wife is wasted in the grocery.”

“In what sense?”

“In Piazza dei Martiri she would make in a month what your sister and Gigliola couldn’t make in a hundred years.”

“Explain yourself.”

“Lina needs to command, Ste’. She needs to have a responsibility. She should invent things. She ought to start thinking right away about the new shoe styles.”

They argued and finally, amid a thousand fine distinctions, came to an agreement. Stefano absolutely refused to let his wife go and work in Piazza dei Martiri: the new grocery was going well and to take Lila out of there would be foolish; but he agreed to have her design new models right away, at least for winter. Michele said that not to let Lila run the shoe store was stupid, and with a vaguely threatening coolness he put off the discussion until after the summer; he considered it a done deal that she would start designing new shoes.

“They have to be chic,” he urged, “you have to insist on that point.”

“She’ll do what she wants, as usual.”

“I can advise her, she’ll listen to me,” said Michele.

“There’s no need.”

I went to see Lila shortly after that agreement, and she spoke to me about it herself. I had just come from school, the weather was already getting hot, and I was tired. She was alone in the grocery and for the moment she seemed as if relieved. She said that she wouldn’t design anything, not even a sandal, not even a slipper.

“They’ll get mad.”

“What can I do about it?”

“It’s money, Lila.”

“They already have enough.”

It was her usual sort of obstinacy, I thought. She was like that, as soon as someone told her to focus on something the wish to do so vanished. But I soon realized that it wasn’t a matter of her character or even of disgust with the business affairs of her husband, Rino, and the Solaras, reinforced by the Communist arguments of Pasquale and Carmen. There was something more and she spoke slowly, seriously, about it.

“Nothing comes to mind,” she said.

“Have you tried?”

“Yes. But it’s not the way it was when I was twelve.”

The shoes—I understood—had come out of her brain only that one time and they wouldn’t again, she didn’t have any others. That game was over, she didn’t know how to start it again. The smell of leather repelled her, of skins, what she had done she no longer knew how to do. And then everything had changed. Fernando’s small shop had been consumed by the new spaces, by the workers’ benches, by three machines. Her father had as it were grown smaller, he didn’t even quarrel with his oldest son, he worked and that was all. Even affections were as if deflated. If she still felt tender toward her mother when she came to the grocery to fill her shopping bags, free, as if they still lived in poverty, if she still gave little gifts to her younger siblings, she could no longer feel the bond with Rino. Ruined, broken. The need to help and protect him had diminished. Thus the motivations for the fantasy of the shoes had vanished, the soil in which they had germinated was arid. It was most of all, she said suddenly, a way of showing you that I could do something well even if I had stopped going to school. Then she laughed nervously, glancing obliquely at me to see my reaction.

I didn’t answer, prevented by a strong emotion. Lila was like that? She didn’t have my stubborn diligence? She drew out of herself thoughts, shoes, words written and spoken, complicated plans, rages and inventions, only to show me something of herself? Having lost that motivation, she was lost? Even the treatment to which she had subjected her wedding photograph—even that she would never be able to repeat? Everything, in her, was the result of the chaos of an occasion?

I felt that in some part of me a long painful tension was relaxing, and her wet eyes, her fragile smile moved me. But it didn’t last. She continued to speak, she touched her forehead with a gesture that was customary with her, she said, regretfully, “I always have to prove that I can be better,” and she added darkly, “When we opened this place, Stefano showed me how to cheat on the weight; and at first I shouted you’re a thief, that’s how you make money, and then I couldn’t resist, I showed him that I had learned and immediately found my own ways to cheat and I showed him, and I was constantly thinking up new ones: I’ll cheat you all, I cheat you on the weight and a thousand other things, I cheat the neighborhood, don’t trust me, Lenù, don’t trust what I say and do.”

I was uneasy. In the space of a few seconds she had changed, already I no longer knew what she wanted. Why was she speaking to me like this now? I didn’t know if she had decided to or if the words came out of her mouth unwittingly, an impetuous stream in which the intention of reinforcing the bond between us—a real intention—was immediately swept away by the equally real need to deny it specificity: you see, with Stefano I behave the way I do with you, I act like this with everyone, I’m beauty and the beast, good and evil. She interlaced her long thin fingers, clasped them tight, asked, “Did you hear that Gigliola says the photograph caught fire by itself?”

“It’s stupid, Gigliola is mad at you.”

She gave a little laugh that was like a shock, something in her twisted too abruptly.

“I have something that hurts here, behind the eyes, something is pressing. You see the knives there? They’re too sharp—I just gave them to the knife grinder. While I’m slicing salami I think how much blood there is in a person’s body. If you put too much stuff in things, they break. Or they catch fire and burn. I’m glad the wedding picture burned. The marriage should burn, too, the shop, the shoes, the Solaras, everything.”

I realized that, no matter how she struggled, worked, proclaimed, she couldn’t get out of it: since the day of her wedding she had been pursued by an ever greater, increasingly ungovernable unhappiness, and I felt pity. I told her to be calm, she nodded yes.

“You have to try to relax.”

“Help me.”

“How.”

“Stay near me.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s not true. I tell you all my secrets, even the worst, you tell me hardly anything about yourself.”

“You’re wrong. The only person I don’t hide anything from is you.”

She shook her head no energetically, she said, “Even if you’re better than me, even if you know more things, don’t leave me.”