The Neapolitan Novels

63.

He came with me almost to the house, so that I was afraid of meeting Stefano and Lila. I said goodbye in a hurry and went up the stairs.

“Tomorrow morning at nine,” he shouted.

I stopped.

“If we leave I’ll see you in the neighborhood. Look for me there.”

Nino made a sign of no, decisively.

“You won’t leave,” he said, as if he were giving a threatening order to fate.

I gave him a final wave and hurried up the stairs sorry that I hadn’t had a chance to examine what was in the envelope.

In the house I found an unpleasant atmosphere. Stefano and Nunzia were whispering together. Lila must be in the bathroom or the bedroom. When I went in they both looked at me resentfully. Stefano said grimly, without preamble, “Will you tell me what you and she are getting up to?”

“In what sense?”

“She says she’s tired of Ischia, she wants to go to Amalfi.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Nunzia intervened but not in her usual motherly way.

“Lenù, don’t put wrong ideas in her head, you can’t throw money out the window. What does Amalfi have to do with anything? We’ve paid to stay here until September.”

I got mad, I said, “You are both mistaken: it’s I who do what Lina wants, not the opposite.”

“Then go and tell her to be reasonable,” Stefano muttered. “I’ll be back next week, we’ll be together for the mid-August holiday and you’ll see, I’ll show you a good time. But now I don’t want to hear any nonsense. Shit. You think I’ll take you to Amalfi? And if you don’t like Amalfi, where do I take you, to Capri? And then? Cut it out, Lenù.”

His tone intimidated me.

“Where is she?” I asked.

Nunzia indicated the bedroom. I went to Lila sure that I would find the suitcases packed and her determined to leave, even at the risk of a beating. Instead she was in her slip, and was sleeping on the unmade bed. All around was the usual disorder, but the suitcases were piled in a corner, empty. I shook her.

“Lila.”

She started, asked me right away with a look veiled by sleep: “Where have you been, did you see Nino?”

“Yes. This is for you.”

I gave her the envelope reluctantly. She opened it, took out a sheet of paper. She read it and in a flash became radiant, as if an injection of stimulants had swept away drowsiness and despair.

“What does it say?” I asked cautiously.

“To me nothing.”

“So?”

“It’s for Nadia, he’s leaving her.”

She put the letter back in the envelope and gave it to me, urging me to keep it carefully hidden.

I stood, confused, with the envelope in my hands. Nino was leaving Nadia? And why? Because Lila had asked him to? So she would win? I was disappointed. He was sacrificing the daughter of Professor Galiani to the game that he and the wife of the grocer were playing. I said nothing, I stared at Lila while she got dressed, put on her makeup. Finally I said, “Why did you ask Stefano that absurd thing, to go to Amalfi? I don’t understand you.”

She smiled.

“I don’t, either.”

We left the room. Lila kissed Stefano affectionately, rubbing against him happily, and we decided to go with him to the Port, Nunzia and I in the minicab, he and Lila on the Lambretta. We had some ice cream while we waited for the boat. Lila was nice to her husband, gave him a thousand bits of advice, promised to telephone every night. Before he started up the gangplank he put an arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear:

“I’m sorry, I was really angry. Without you I don’t know how it would have ended, this time.”

It was a polite statement, and yet I felt in it a sort of ultimatum that meant: Tell your friend, please, that if she goes too far again, it’s all over.