The Neapolitan Novels

111.

With the departure of Antonio the bond between Gigliola and Ada became very tight. Gigliola suggested to her what the daughter of Melina had had in mind for some time, that is, that she shouldn’t wait any longer, the matrimonial situation of Stefano should be resolved. “Lina has to get out of that house,” she said, “and you have to go in: if you wait too long, the enchantment will be broken and you’ll lose everything, even the job in the grocery, because she’ll regain ground and force Stefano to get rid of you.” Gigliola went so far as to confide to her that she was speaking from experience, she had the same problem with Michele. “If I wait for him to make up his mind to marry me,” she whispered, “I’ll get old; so I’m tormenting him: either we marry by the spring of 1968 or I’m leaving and fuck him.”

Thus Ada went on to envelop Stefano in a net of true, sticky desire that made him feel special, and meanwhile she murmured between kisses, “You have to decide, Ste’, either me or her; I’m not saying you have to throw her out in the street with the child, that’s your son, you have responsibilities; but do what lots of actors and important people do today: give her some money and that’s it. Everybody in the neighborhood knows that I’m your real wife, so I want to stay with you, always.”

Stefano said yes and hugged her tight in the uncomfortable narrow bed on the Rettifilo, but then he didn’t do much, except return home to Lila and yell, because there were no clean socks, or because he had seen her talking to Pasquale or someone else.

At that point Ada began to despair. One Sunday morning she ran into Carmen, who spoke to her in accusatory tones of the working conditions in the two groceries. One thing led to another, they began to talk venomously about Lila, whom both of them, for different reasons, considered the origin of their troubles. Finally Ada couldn’t resist and recounted her romantic situation, forgetting that Carmen was the sister of her former fiancé. And Carmen, who couldn’t wait to be part of the network of gossip, listened willingly, often interrupted to fan the flames, tried with her advice to do as much damage to Ada, who had betrayed Pasquale, and to Lila, who had betrayed her. But, I should say, apart from the resentments, there was the pleasure of having something to do with a person, her childhood friend, who found herself in the role of lover of a married man. And although since childhood we girls of the neighborhood had wanted to become wives, growing up we had almost always sympathized with the lovers, who seemed to us more spirited, more combative, and, especially, more modern. On the other hand we hoped that the legitimate wife would get gravely ill and die (in general she was a very wicked or at least unfaithful woman), and that the lover would stop being a lover and crown her dream of love by becoming a wife. We were, in short, on the side of the violation, but only because it reaffirmed the value of the rule. As a result Carmen, although amid much devious advice, ended up by passionately taking Ada’s side, her feelings were genuine, and one day she said to her, in all honesty: “You can’t go on like this, you have to get rid of that bitch, marry Stefano, give him your own children. Ask the Solaras if they know anyone in the Sacra Rota.”

Ada immediately added Carmen’s suggestions to Gigliola’s and one night, in the pizzeria, she turned directly to Michele: “Can you get to this Sacra Rota?”

He answered ironically, “I don’t know, I can ask, one always finds a friend. But just take what’s yours, that’s the most urgent thing. And don’t worry about anything: if someone gives you trouble, send him to me.”

Michele’s words were very important, Ada felt supported, never in her life had she felt so surrounded by approval. Yet Gigliola’s hammering, Carmen’s advice, that unexpected promise of protection on the part of an important male authority, and even her anger at the fact that in August Stefano wouldn’t take a trip abroad as he had the year before but had only gone to the Sea Garden a few times, were not enough to push her to attack. It took a true, concrete new fact: the discovery that she was pregnant.

The pregnancy made Ada furiously happy, but she kept the news to herself, she didn’t speak of it even to Stefano. One afternoon she took off her smock, left the grocery as if to go out for some fresh air, and instead went to Lila’s house.

“Did something happen?” Signora Carracci asked in bewilderment as she opened the door.

Ada answered, “Nothing has happened that you don’t already know.”

She came in and told her everything, in the presence of the child. She began calmly, she talked about actors and also cyclists, she called herself a kind of “white lady”—like the lover of the famous cyclist Fausto Coppi—but more modern, and she mentioned the Sacra Rota to demonstrate that even the Church and God in certain cases where love is very strong would dissolve a marriage. Since Lila listened without interrupting, something that Ada would never have expected—rather, she hoped that she would say just half a word, so that she could beat her bloody—she got nervous and began to walk around the apartment, first to demonstrate that she had been in the house often and knew it well, and, second, to reproach her: “Look at this mess, dirty dishes, the dust, socks and underwear on the floor, it’s not possible that that poor man has to live like this.” Finally, in an uncontrollable frenzy, she began to pick the dirty clothes up off the bedroom floor, shrieking, “Starting tomorrow I’m coming here to tidy up. You don’t even know how to make the bed, look here, Stefano can’t bear the sheet to be folded like this, he told me he’s explained it to you a thousand times and you pay no attention.”

Here she stopped suddenly, confused, and said in a low voice, “You have to go, Lina, because if you don’t I’ll kill the child.”

Lila managed to respond only, “You’re behaving like your mother, Ada.”

Those were the words. I imagine her voice now: she wasn’t capable of emotional tones, she must have spoken as usual with cold malice, or with detachment. And yet years later she told me that, seeing Ada in the house in that state, she had remembered the cries of Melina, the abandoned lover, when the Sarratore family left the neighborhood, and she had seen again the iron that flew out the window and almost killed Nino. The long flame of suffering, which then had much impressed her, was flickering again in Ada; only now it wasn’t the wife of Sarratore feeding it but her, Lila. A cruel game of mirrors that at the time escaped us all. But not her, and so it’s likely that instead of resentment, instead of her usual determination to do harm, bitterness was triggered in her, and pity. Certainly she tried to take her hand, she said, “Sit down, I’ll make you a cup of chamomile tea.”

But Ada, in all Lila’s words, from first to last, and above all in that gesture, saw an insult. She withdrew abruptly, she rolled her eyes in a striking way, showing the white, and when the pupils reappeared she shouted, “Are you saying that I’m mad? That I’m mad like my mother? Then you had better pay attention, Lina. Don’t touch me, get out of the way, make yourself a chamomile. I’m going to clean up this disgusting house.”

She swept, she washed the floors, she remade the bed, and she didn’t say another word.

Lila followed her with her gaze, afraid that she would break, like an artificial body subjected to excessive acceleration. Then she took the child and went out, she walked around the new neighborhood for a long time, talking to Rinuccio, pointing out things, naming them, inventing stories. But she did it more to keep her anguish under control than to entertain the child. She went back to the house only when, from a distance, she saw Ada go out the front door and hurry off as if she were late.