The Neapolitan Novels

78.

After Christmas I found out from Alfonso that Pinuccia had given birth, she had had a boy, named Fernando. I went to see her, thinking that I would find her in bed, happy, with the baby at her breast. Instead, she was up, but in nightgown and slippers, sulking. She rudely sent away her mother, who said to her, “Get in bed, don’t tire yourself,” and when she led me to the cradle she said grimly, “Nothing ever works out for me, look how ugly he is, it upsets me just to look at him, let alone touch him.” And although Maria, standing in the doorway, murmured, like a soothing formula, “What are you talking about, Pina, he’s beautiful,” she continued to repeat angrily, “He’s ugly, he’s uglier than Rino, that whole family is ugly.” Then she drew in her breath and exclaimed desperately, with tears in her eyes, “It’s my fault, I made a bad choice of a husband, but when you’re a girl you don’t think about it, and now look at what a child I’ve had, he has a pug nose just like Lina.” Then, with no interruption, she began to insult her sister-in-law grossly.

I learned from her that Lila, the whore, had already in two weeks done and redone as she liked the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. Gigliola had had to give in, she had returned to the Solaras’ pastry shop; she herself, Pinuccia, had had to give in, chained to the child until goodness knows when; they had all had to give in, Stefano above all, as usual. And now, every day, Lila was up to something new: she went to work dressed up as if she were Mike Bongiorno’s assistant, and if her husband wouldn’t take her in the car she had no scruples about getting Michele to drive her; she had spent who knows how much for two paintings that you couldn’t understand what they were of, and had hung them in the shop for who knows what purpose; she had bought a lot of books and, instead of shoes, she put those on the shelf; she had fitted out a sort of living room, with couches, chairs, ottomans, and a crystal bowl where she kept chocolates from Gay Odin, available to whoever wanted them, free, as if she were there not to notice the stink of the customers’ feet but to play the great lady in her castle.

“And it’s not only that,” she said, “there’s something even worse.”

“What?”

“You know what Marcello Solara did?”

“No.”

“You remember the shoes that Stefano and Rino gave him?”

“The ones made exactly the way Lina designed them?”

“Yes, a wretched shoe, Rino always said that the water got in.”

“Well, what happened?”

Pina overwhelmed me with a laborious, sometimes confused story, involving money, treacherous plots, deception, debts. Marcello, dissatisfied with the new models made by Rino and Fernando—and certainly in agreement with Michele—had had shoes like those manufactured, but not in the Cerullo factory, in another factory, in Afragola. Then, at Christmas, he had distributed them under the Solara name in the stores, including the one on Piazza dei Martiri.

“And he could do that?”

“Of course, they’re his: my brother and my husband, those two shits, gave them to him, he can do what he likes.”

“So?”

“So,” she said, “now there are Cerullo shoes and Solara shoes circulating in Naples. And the Solara shoes are selling really well, better than the Cerullos. And all the profit is the Solaras’. So Rino is extremely upset, because he expected some competition, of course, but not from the Solaras themselves, his partners, and with a shoe he made with his own hands and then stupidly threw away.”

I remembered Marcello when Lila threatened him with the shoemaker’s knife. He was slower than Michele, more timid. What need had he to be so offensive? The Solaras had numerous businesses, some legitimate, others not, and they were getting bigger every day. They had had powerful friendships since the days of their grandfather, they did favors and received them. Their mother was a loan shark and had a book that struck fear into half the neighborhood, maybe now the Cerullos and the Carraccis, too. For Marcello, then, and for his brother, the shoes and the shop on Piazza dei Martiri were only one of the many wells into which their family dipped, and surely not among the most important. So why?

Pinuccia’s story began to disturb me. Behind the appearance of money I felt something depressing. Marcello’s love for Lila was over, but the wound had remained and become infected. No longer dependent, he felt free to hurt those who had humiliated him in the past. “Rino,” Pinuccia in fact said, “went with Stefano to protest, but it was pointless.” The Solaras had treated them contemptuously, they were people used to doing what they wanted, her brother and husband might as well have been talking to themselves. Finally Marcello had said vaguely that he and his brother were thinking of an entire Solara line that would repeat, with variations, the features of the shoe that had been made as a trial. And then he had added, without a clear connection, “Let’s see how your new products go and if it’s worth the trouble to keep them on the market.” Under­stood? Understood. Marcello wanted to eliminate the Cerullo brand, replace it with Solara, and thus cause not insignificant economic damage to Stefano. I have to get out of the neighborhood, out of Naples, I said to myself, what do I care about their quarrels? But in the meantime I asked:

“And Lina?”

Pinuccia’s eyes blazed.

“She’s the real problem.”

Lina had laughed at that story. When Rino and her husband got angry she made fun of them: “You gave him those shoes, not me; you did business with the Solaras, not me. If you two are idiots, what can I do?” She wouldn’t cooperate, you couldn’t tell where she stood, with the family or with the Solaras. So when Michele again insisted that he wanted her in Piazza dei Martiri, she had suddenly said yes, and had tormented Stefano to let her go.

“And why in the world did Stefano give in?” I asked.

Pinuccia let out a long sigh of impatience. Stefano had given in because he hoped that Lila, seeing that Michele valued her so much, and seeing that Marcello had always had a weakness for her, would manage to settle things. But Rino didn’t trust his sister, he was frightened, he couldn’t sleep at night. He liked the old shoe that he and Fernando had thrown away and that Marcello had had made in its original form; it sold well. What would happen if the Solaras began to deal with Lila directly and if she, a bitch since the day she was born, after refusing to design new shoes for the family, went on to design shoes for them?

“It won’t happen,” I said to Pinuccia.

“Did she tell you?”

“No, I haven’t seen her since the summer.”

“So?”

“I know what she’s like. Lina gets curious about a thing and she’s utterly caught up in it. But once she’s done it, the desire goes away, she doesn’t care about it anymore.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Maria was content with those words of mine, she clung to them to soothe her daughter.

“You hear?” she said. “Everything is fine, Lenuccia knows what she’s talking about.”

But in fact I knew nothing, the less pedantic part of me was well aware of Lila’s unpredictability, so I couldn’t wait to get out of that house. What do I have to do with it, I thought, with these wretched stories, with the petty vendetta of Marcello Solara, with this struggle and worry over money, cars, houses, furniture and knickknacks and vacations? And how could Lila, after Ischia, after Nino, go back to jousting with those thugs? I’ll get my diploma, I’ll take the entrance exams, I’ll win. I’ll get out of this muck, go as far away as possible. I said, softening toward the baby, whom Maria was now holding in her arms: “How cute he is.”