The Neapolitan Novels

77.

Then school began again. Only when I entered the classroom on the first of October did I realize that I was in my last year of high school, that I was eighteen years old, that the years of school, in my case already miraculously long, were about to end. So much the better. Alfonso and I talked a lot about what we would do after we graduated. He knew as much as I did. We’ll take a civil-service exam, he said, but in fact we didn’t have clear ideas on what the exams entailed; we said sit the exam, pass the exam, but the concept was vague: did you have to do a written exercise, take an oral test? And what did you get once you’d taken it, a salary?

Alfonso confided that he was thinking of getting married, once he had taken the exam and gained a post.

“To Marisa?”

“Yes, of course.”

Sometimes I asked him warily about Nino, but he didn’t like Nino, they didn’t even say hello to each other. He had never understood what I found in him. He’s ugly, he said, all out of proportion, skin and bone. Marisa, on the other hand, seemed pretty to him. But he immediately added, careful not to wound me, “You’re pretty, too.” He liked beauty, and especially appreciated care for one’s body. He himself was attentive to his appearance, he smelled of the barber, he bought clothes, he lifted weights every day. He told me that he had a good time at the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. It wasn’t like the grocery. There you could be elegant, in fact you had to be. There you could speak Italian, the people were respectable, had gone to school. There, even when you were on your knees in front of the customers, men and women, trying on the shoes, you could do it with pleasant manners, like the knight in a courtly love story. But unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to stay in the shop.

“Why?”

“Well . . . ”

At first he was vague and I didn’t insist. Then he told me that Pinuccia was staying home now because she didn’t want to get tired, she had a belly like a torpedo; and anyway it was clear that once she had the baby she wouldn’t have time to work. This in theory should have cleared a path for him, the Solaras were pleased with him, maybe he would be able to establish himself there after he graduated. But it wasn’t possible, and here suddenly the name of Lila came up. Just hearing it my stomach flared up.

“What does she have to do with it?”

I knew she had returned from the vacation like a madwoman. She still wasn’t pregnant, the swimming had been of no use, she was behaving oddly. Once she had broken all the flowerpots on her balcony. She said she was going to the grocery, instead she left Carmen alone and went walking around. Stefano woke up at night and she wasn’t in bed: she was wandering through the house, she read and wrote. Then suddenly she calmed down. Or rather she focused her entire capacity to spoil Stefano’s life on a single objective: for Gigliola to work in the new grocery, and she in Piazza dei Martiri.

I was amazed.

“It’s Michele who wants her in the shop,” I said, “but she doesn’t want to go.”

“Once. Now she’s changed her mind, she’s moving heaven and earth to get herself there. The only obstacle is Stefano, he’s against it. But of course in the end my brother does what she wants.”

I asked no other questions, I wanted in no way to be reabsorbed into Lila’s affairs. But for a while I surprised myself by wondering: what could she have in mind, why all of a sudden does she want to go and work in the city? Then I forgot about it, taken up by other problems: the bookstore, school, the class interrogations, the textbooks. Some I bought, most I stole from the bookstore without too many scruples. I began studying rigorously again, mainly at night. In the afternoon, in fact, until Christmas vacation, when I quit, I was busy at the bookstore. And right after that Professor Galiani herself arranged a couple of private pupils for me, and I worked hard for them. Between school, lessons, and study, there was no room for anything else.

When at the end of the month I gave my mother the money I earned, she put it in her pocket without saying anything, but in the morning she got up early to make breakfast for me, sometimes even a beaten egg, which she devoted such care to—while I was still in bed half asleep, I heard the clack clack of the spoon against the cup as she beat in the sugar—that it melted in my mouth like a cream, the sugar completely dissolved. As for the teachers at school, it seemed that they couldn’t help considering me a brilliant student, as if the sluggish operation of the entire dusty scholastic machine had decided it. I had no trouble defending my position as first in the class and, with Nino gone, I ranked among the best in the whole school. But I soon realized that although Professor Galiani continued to be very generous, she blamed me for some offense that kept her from being as friendly as she had been in the past. For example, when I gave her back her books she was annoyed, because they were sandy, and took them away without promising to give me others. For example, she no longer offered me her newspapers, and for a while I forced myself to buy Il Mattino, then I stopped, it bored me, it was a waste of money. For example, she never invited me to her house, although I would have liked to see her son Armando again. Yet she continued to praise me publicly, to give me high grades, to advise me about important lectures and even films that were shown in a parish hall in Port’Alba. Until once, near Christmas vacation, she called as school was letting out and we walked some way together. Bluntly she asked what I knew about Nino.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Tell me the truth.”

“It’s the truth.”

It slowly emerged that Nino, after the summer, had not been in touch either with her or with her daughter.

“He broke up with Nadia in a very unpleasant way,” she said, with the resentment of a mother. “He sent her a few lines in a letter from Ischia and caused her a lot of suffering.” Then she contained herself and added, resuming her role as a professor again: “Never mind, you’re all young, suffering helps one grow.”

I nodded yes, she asked me: “Did he leave you, too?”

I turned red. “Me?”

“Didn’t you see each other on Ischia?”

“Yes, but there was nothing between us.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Nadia is convinced that he left her for you.”

I denied it forcefully, I said I would be happy to see Nadia and tell her that between me and Nino there had never been anything and never would be. She was pleased, she assured me that she would report that. I didn’t mention Lila, naturally, and not only because I had decided to mind my own business but also because to talk about it would have depressed me. I tried to change the subject, but she returned to Nino. She said that various rumors were circulating about him. There were some who said that not only had he not taken his exams in the autumn but he had stopped studying; and there were some who swore they had seen him one afternoon on Via Arenaccia, alone, completely drunk, lurching along, and every so often taking a swig from a bottle. But not everyone, she concluded, found him likable and maybe there were people who enjoyed spreading nasty rumors about him. If, however, they were true, what a pity.

“Surely they’re lies,” I said.

“Let’s hope so. But it’s hard to keep up with that boy.”

“Yes.”

“He’s very smart.”

“Yes.”

“If you have a way of finding out what’s happening, let me know.”

We parted. I hurried off to give a Greek lesson to a girl in middle school who lived in Parco Margherita. But it was difficult. The large, permanently semi-dark room where I was greeted respectfully held heavy furniture, rugs with hunting scenes, old photographs of high-ranking soldiers, and various other signs of a long history of authority and ease that produced in my pale fourteen-year-old pupil a dullness of body and intelligence, and in me a feeling of impatience. That day I had to struggle to supervise declensions and conjugations. The picture of Nino as Professor Galiani had evoked him kept returning to my mind: worn jacket, tie flying, long legs staggering, the empty bottle that after the last swallow shattered on the stones of Via Arenaccia. What had happened between him and Lila, after Ischia? Contrary to my predictions, she had evidently seen her mistake, it was all over, she had returned to herself. Nino hadn’t: from a studious youth with a well-formulated response to everything he had become a vagrant, undone by the pain of love for the grocer’s wife. I thought of asking Alfonso again if he had news. I thought of going to Marisa myself and asking her about her brother. But soon I forced the idea out of my mind. It will pass, I said to myself. Has he come to see me? No. Has Lila come to see me? No. Why should I worry about him, or her, when they don’t care about me? I continued the lesson and went on my way.