The Neapolitan Novels

65.

There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings. Today I know that in other circumstances, after some resistance, I would have given in to Bruno’s advances. I wasn’t attracted to him, certainly, but I hadn’t been especially attracted to Antonio, either. One becomes affectionate toward men slowly, whether they coincide or not with whomever in the various phases of life we have taken as the model of a man. And Bruno Soccavo, in that phase of his life, was courteous and generous; it would have been easy to harbor some affection for him. But the reasons for rejecting him had nothing to do with anything really disagreeable about him. The truth was that I wanted to restrain Lila. I wanted to be a hindrance to her. I wanted her to be aware of the situation she was getting into and getting me into. I wanted her to say to me: Yes, you’re right, I’m making a mistake, I won’t go off in the dark with Nino anymore, I won’t leave you alone with Bruno; starting now I will behave as befits a married woman.

Naturally it didn’t happen. She confined herself to saying, “I’ll talk to Nino about it and you’ll see, Bruno won’t bother you anymore.” So day after day we continued to meet the boys at nine in the morning and separated at midnight. But on Tuesday night after the call to Stefano, Nino said, “You’ve never been to see Bruno’s house. You want to come over?”

I immediately said no, I pretended I had a stomachache and wanted to go home. Nino and Lila looked uncertainly at each other, Bruno said nothing. I felt the weight of their discontent and added, embarrassed, “Maybe another night.”

Lila said nothing but when we were alone she exclaimed, “You can’t make my life unhappy, Lenù.” I answered, “If Stefano finds out that we went alone to their house, he’ll be angry not just at you but also at me.” And I didn’t stop there. At home I stirred up Nunzia’s displeasure and used it to urge her to reproach her daughter for too much sun, too much sea, staying out till midnight. I even went so far as to say, as if I wished to make peace between mother and daughter, “Signora Nunzia, tomorrow night come and have ice cream with us, you’ll see we’re not doing anything wrong.” Lila became furious, she said that she had had a miserable life all year, always shut up in the grocery, and now she had the right to a little freedom. Nunzia also lost her temper: “Lina, what are you saying? Freedom? What freedom? You are married, you must be accountable to your husband. Lenuccia can want a little freedom, you can’t.” Her daughter went to her room and slammed the door.

But the next day Lila won: her mother stayed home and we went to telephone Stefano. “You must be here at eleven on the dot,” Nunzia said, grumpily, addressing me, and I answered, “All right.” She gave me a long, questioning look. By now she was alarmed: she was our guard but she wasn’t guarding us; she was afraid we were getting into trouble, but she thought of her own sacrificed youth and didn’t want to keep us from some innocent amusement. I repeated to reassure her: “At eleven.”

The phone call to Stefano lasted a minute at most. When Lila came out of the booth Nino asked, “Are you feeling well tonight, Lenù? Come see the house?”

“Come on,” Bruno urged me. “You can have a drink and then go.”

Lila agreed, I said nothing. On the outside the building was old, shabby, but inside it had been renovated: the cellar white and well lighted, full of wine and cured meats; a marble staircase with a wrought-iron banister; sturdy doors on which gold handles shone; windows with gilded fixtures. There were a lot of rooms, yellow couches, a television; in the kitchen, cupboards painted aquamarine and in the bedrooms wardrobes that were like gothic churches. I thought, for the first time clearly, that Bruno really was rich, richer than Stefano. I thought that if ever my mother had known that the student son of the owner of Soccavo mortadella had courted me, and that I had been, no less, a guest at his house, and that instead of thanking God for the good fortune he had sent me and seeking to marry him I had rejected him twice, she would have beaten me. On the other hand it was precisely the thought of my mother, of her lame leg, that made me feel unfit even for Bruno. In that house I was intimidated. Why was I there, what was I doing there? Lila acted nonchalant, she laughed often; I felt as if I had a fever, a nasty taste in my mouth. I began to say yes to avoid the embarrassment of saying no. Do you want a drink of this, do you want to put on this record, do you want to watch television, do you want some ice cream. When, finally, I realized that Nino and Lila had disappeared, I was worried. Where had they gone? Was it possible that they were in Nino’s bedroom? Possible that Lila was willing to cross even that limit? Possible that—I didn’t want to think about it. I jumped up, I said to Bruno:

“It’s late.”

He was kind, but with an undertone of sadness. He murmured, “Stay a little longer.” He said that the next day he had to leave very early, to attend a family celebration. He announced that he would be gone until Monday and those days without me would be a torment. He took my hand delicately, said that he loved me and other things like that. I gently took my hand away, he didn’t try for any other contact. Instead, he spoke at length about his feelings for me, he who in general said little, and I had trouble interrupting him. When I did I said, “I really have to go,” then, in a louder voice, “Lila, please come, it’s quarter after ten.”

Some minutes passed, the two reappeared. Nino and Bruno took us to a taxi, Bruno said goodbye as if he were going not to Naples for a few days but to America for the rest of his life. On the way home Lila, her tone pointed, as if she were delivering important news: “Nino told me that he has a lot of admiration for you.”

“Not me,” I answered right away, in a rude voice. And then I whispered: “What if you get pregnant?”

She said in my ear: “There’s no danger. We’re just kissing and holding.”

“Oh.”

“And anyway I don’t stay pregnant.”

“It happened once.”

“I told you, I don’t stay pregnant. He knows how to manage.”

“He who?”

“Nino. He would use a condom.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know, he called it that.”

“You don’t know what it is and you trust it?”

“It’s something that he puts over it.”

“Over where?”

I wanted to force her to name things. I wanted her to understand what she was saying. First she assured me that they were only kissing, then she spoke of him as someone who knew how not to get her pregnant. I was enraged, I expected that she would be ashamed. Instead she seemed pleased with everything that had happened to her and that would happen to her. So much so that when we got home she was nice to Nunzia, pointed out that we had returned early, got ready for bed. But she left her door open and when she saw me going to my room she called me, she said, “Stay here a minute, close the door.”

I sat on the bed, but trying to make it clear that I was tired of her and everything.

“What do you have to tell me?”

She whispered, “I want to go and sleep at Nino’s.”

I was astonished.

“And Nunzia?”

“Wait, don’t get mad. There’s not much time left, Lenù. Stefano will arrive on Saturday, he’ll stay for ten days, then we go back to Naples. And everything will be over.”

“Everything what?”

“This, these days, these evenings.”

We discussed it for a long time, she seemed very lucid. She murmured that nothing like this would ever happen to her again. She whispered that she loved him, that she wanted him. She used that verb, amare, that we had found only in books and in the movies, that no one used in the neighborhood, I would say it at most to myself, we all preferred voler bene. She no, she loved. She loved Nino. But she knew very well that that love had to be suffocated, every occasion for it to breathe had to be removed. And she would do it, she would do it starting Saturday night. She had no doubts, she would be capable of it, and I had to trust her. But the very little time that remained she wished to devote to Nino.

“I want to stay in a bed with him for a whole night and a whole day,” she said. “I want to sleep holding him and being held, and kiss him when I feel like it, caress him when I feel like it, even while he’s sleeping. Then that’s it.”

“It’s impossible.”

“You have to help me.”

“How?”

“You have to convince my mother that Nella has invited us to spend two days at Barano and that we’ll spend the night there.”

I was silent for a moment. So she already had a project, she had a plan. Clearly she had worked it out with Nino, maybe he had even sent Bruno away on purpose. For how long had they been deciding the how, the where? No more speeches on neocapitalism, on neocolonialism, on Africa, on Latin America, on Beckett, on Bertrand Russell. Mere doodles. Nino no longer talked about anything. Their brilliant minds now were exercised only on how to deceive Nunzia and Stefano, using me.

“You’re out of your mind,” I said, furiously, “even if your mother believes you your husband never will.”

“You persuade her to send us to Barano and I’ll persuade her not to tell Stefano.”

“No.”

“Aren’t we friends anymore?”

“No.”

“You’re not Nino’s friend anymore?”

“No.”

But Lila knew how to draw me in. And I was unable to resist: on the one hand I said that’s enough, on the other I was depressed at the idea of not being part of her life, of the means by which she invented it for herself. What was that deception but another of her fantastic moves, which were always full of risks? The two of us together, allied with each other, in the struggle against all. We would devote the next day to overcoming Nunzia’s opposition. The day after that we would leave early, together. At Forio we would separate. She would go to Bruno’s house with Nino, I would take the boat for the Maronti. She would spend the whole day and the whole night with Nino, I would be at Nella’s and sleep in Barano. The next day I would return to Forio for lunch, we would see each other at Bruno’s, and together would return home. Perfect. The more her mind was ignited as, in minute detail, she planned how to make every part of the ruse add up, the more skillfully she ignited mine, too, and she hugged me, begged me. Here was a new adventure, together. Here was how we would take what life didn’t want to give us. Here. Or would I rather that she be deprived of that joy, that Nino should suffer, that both should lose the light of reason and end up not capably managing their desire but being dangerously overwhelmed by it? There was a moment, that night, when, by following her along the thread of her arguments, I came to think that to support her in this undertaking, besides being an important milestone for our long sisterhood, was also the way of manifesting my love—she said friendship, but I desperately thought: love, love love—for Nino. And it was at that point that I said:

“All right, I’ll help you.”