The Neapolitan Novels

102.

After that night Lila lost many of the small freedoms that remained to her. Stefano’s behavior was completely contradictory. Since his wife now knew of his relationship with Ada, he abandoned all caution. Often he didn’t come home to sleep; every other Sunday he went out in the car with his lover. In August, he went on a vacation with her: they went to Stockholm in the sports car, even though officially Ada had gone to Turin, to visit a cousin who worked at Fiat. At the same time, a sick form of jealousy exploded in him: he didn’t want his wife to leave the house, he obliged her to do the shopping by phone and if she went out for an hour so that the baby could get some air he interrogated her on whom she had met, whom she had talked to. He felt more a husband than ever and he watched her. It was as if he feared that his betrayal of her authorized her to betray him. What he did in his encounters with Ada on the Rettifilo stirred his imagination and led him to detailed fantasies in which Lila did even more with her lovers. He was afraid of being made ridiculous by a possible unfaithfulness on her part, while he did nothing to hide his own.

He wasn’t jealous of all men, he had a hierarchy. Lila quickly understood that in particular he was preoccupied by Michele, by whom he felt cheated in everything and as if kept in a position of permanent subjugation. Although she had never said anything about the time Solara had tried to kiss her, or of his proposal that she become his lover, Stefano had perceived that to insult him by taking his wife was an important move in the process of ruining him in business. But on the other hand the logic of business meant that Lila should behave at least a little cordially. As a result whatever she did he didn’t like. At times he pressed her obsessively: “Did you see Michele, did you talk to him, did he ask you to design new shoes?” Sometimes he shouted at her: “You are not even to say hello to that shit, is that clear?” And he opened all her drawers, rummaged through them in search of evidence of her nature as a whore.

To further complicate the situation first Pasquale interfered, then Rino.

Pasquale naturally was the last to know, even after Lila, that his fiancée was Stefano’s lover. No one told him, he saw them with his own eyes, late on a Sunday afternoon in September, coming out of a doorway on the Rettifilo embracing. Ada had told him that she had things to do with Melina and couldn’t see him. Besides, he was always out at work or at his political meetings, and took little notice of his fiancée’s distortions and evasions. Seeing them caused him terrible pain, complicated by the fact that, while his immediate impulse would have been to kill them both, his education as a militant Communist prohibited him. Pasquale had recently become secretary of the neighborhood section of the Party and although in the past, like all the boys we had grown up with, he had classified us when necessary as whores, he now felt—since he kept himself up to date, read l’Unità, studied booklets, presided over debates in the section—that he could no longer do that, in fact he made an effort to consider us women not inferior, generally speaking, to men, with our feelings, our ideas, our freedoms. Caught, therefore, between rage and broad-mindedness, the next night, still dirty from work, he went to Ada and told her that he knew everything. She appeared relieved and admitted it, cried, begged forgiveness. When he asked if she had done it for money, she answered that she loved Stefano and that she alone knew what a good and generous and kind person he was. The result was that Pasquale punched the kitchen wall in the Cappuccio house, and returned home weeping, his knuckles sore. Afterward he talked to Carmen all night, the sister and brother suffered together, one because of Ada, the other because of Enzo, whom she couldn’t forget. Things really took a bad turn when Pasquale, although he had been betrayed, decided that he had to defend the dignity of both Ada and Lila. First he wanted to clarify things, and went to talk to Stefano; he made a complicated speech whose essence was that he should leave his wife and set up a household with his lover. Then he went to Lila and reproached her because she let Stefano trample on her rights as a wife and her feelings as a woman. One morning—it was six-thirty—Stefano confronted him just as he was leaving to go to work and good-naturedly offered him money so that he would stop bothering him, his wife, and Ada. Pasquale took the money, counted it, and threw it away, saying, “I’ve worked since I was a child, I don’t need you,” then, as if to apologize, he added that he had to go, otherwise he would be late and would be fired. But when he had gone some distance he had a second thought, he turned and shouted at the grocer, who was picking up the money scattered on the street: “You are worse than that fascist pig your father.” They fought, savagely, they had to be separated or they would have murdered each other.

Then came the trouble from Rino. He couldn’t bear the fact that his sister had stopped trying to make Dino a very intelligent child. He couldn’t bear the fact that his brother-in-law not only wouldn’t give him a cent but had even laid hands on him. He couldn’t bear the fact that the relation between Stefano and Ada had become public knowledge, with all the humiliating consequences for Lila. And he reacted in an unexpected way. Since Stefano beat Lila, he began to beat Pinuccia. Since Stefano had a lover, he found a lover. He started, that is, on a persecution of Stefano’s sister that mirrored what his sister was subjected to by Stefano.

This threw Pinuccia into despair: with tears, with entreaties, she begged him to end it. But no. If she merely opened her mouth Rino, blinded by rage, and frightening even Nunzia, shouted at her: “I should end it? I should calm down? Then go to your brother and tell him that he should leave Ada, that he should respect Lina, that we have to be a united family and that he should give me the money that he and the Solaras have cheated me of and are cheating me of.” The result was that Pinuccia very often ran out of the house, looking battered, and went to the grocery, to her brother, and sobbed in front of Ada and the customers. Stefano dragged her into the rear of the shop and she listed all her husband’s demands, but concluded, “Don’t give that bastard anything, come home now and kill him.”