The Neapolitan Novels

48.

The day slid by slowly. While Lila and I sat calmly in the sun waiting until the time when Nino and Bruno would arrive with cool drinks, Pinuccia’s mood began, for no reason, to darken. She kept uttering nervous remarks. Now she was afraid that they wouldn’t come, now she exclaimed that we couldn’t waste our time waiting for them to show up. When, punctually, the boys appeared with the drinks, she was surly, and said she felt tired. But a few minutes later, though still in a bad mood, she changed her mind and agreed, grumbling, to go get the coconut.

As for Lila, she did something I didn’t like. For the whole week she had never said anything about the book I had lent her, and so I had forgotten about it. But as soon as Pinuccia and Bruno left, she didn’t wait for Nino to start talking, and immediately asked him, “Have you ever been to the theater?”

“A few times.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was all right.”

“I’ve never been, but I’ve seen it on television.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“I know, but better than nothing.”

And at that point she took out of her bag the book I had given her, the volume of Beckett’s plays, and showed it to him.

“Have you read this?”

Nino took the book, examined it, admitted uneasily, “No.”

“So there is something you haven’t read.”

“Yes.”

“You should read it.”

Lila began to talk to us about the book. To my surprise she was very deliberate, she talked the way she used to, choosing the words so as to make us see people and things, and also the emotion she gave them, portraying them anew, keeping them there, present, alive. She said that we didn’t have to wait for nuclear war, in the book it was as if it had already happened. She told us at length about a woman named Winnie who at a certain point announced, another happy day, and she herself declaimed the phrase, becoming so upset that, in uttering it, her voice trembled slightly: another happy day, words that were insupportable, because nothing, nothing, she explained, in Winnie’s life, nothing in her gestures, nothing in her head, was happy, not that day or the preceding days. But, she added, the biggest impression had been made on her by a Dan Rooney. Dan Rooney, she said, is blind but he’s not bitter about it, because he believes that life is better without sight, and in fact he wonders whether, if one became deaf and mute, life would not be still more life, life without anything but life.

“Why did you like it?” Nino asked.

“I don’t know yet if I liked it.”

“But it made you curious.”

“It made me think. What does it mean that life is more life without sight, without hearing, even without words?”

“Maybe it’s just a gimmick.”

“No, what gimmick. There’s a thing here that suggests a thousand others, it’s not a gimmick.”

Nino didn’t reply. He said only, staring at the cover of the book as if that, too, needed to be deciphered, “Have you finished it?”

“Yes.”

“Will you lend it to me?”

That request disturbed me, I felt pained. Nino had said, I remembered it clearly, that he had little interest in literature, what he read was different. I had given that Beckett to Lila just because I knew that I couldn’t use it in conversation with him. And now that she was talking about it he was not only listening but asked to borrow it.

I said, “It’s Professor Galiani’s, she gave it to me.”

“Have you read it?” he asked me.

I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I added right away, “I was thinking of starting tonight.”

“When you’re finished will you give it to me?”

“If it interests you so much,” I said quickly, “you read it first.”

Nino thanked me, scratched away with his nail the trace of a mosquito from the cover, said to Lila, “I’ll read it overnight and tomorrow we can talk about it.”

“Not tomorrow, we won’t see each other.”

“Why?”

“I’ll be with my husband.”

“Oh.”

He seemed annoyed. I waited fearfully for him to ask me if the two of us would see each other. But he had a burst of impatience, he said, “I can’t tomorrow, either. Bruno’s parents arrive tonight and I have to go sleep in Barano. I’ll be back on Monday.”

Barano? Monday? I hoped that he would ask me to join him at the Maronti. But he was distracted, maybe his mind was still on Dan Rooney, who, not content with being blind, wished to become deaf and mute, too. He didn’t ask me anything.