The Neapolitan Novels

124.

I arrived at the site of the Soccavo factory by a dirt path, amid trash of every type, a thread of black smoke in the frozen sky. Before I even saw the boundary wall I noticed a sickening odor of animal fat mixed with burned wood. The guard said, derisively, you don’t go visiting your girlfriend during working hours. I asked to speak to Bruno Soccavo. He changed his tone, stammered that Bruno almost never came to the factory. Call him at home, I replied. He was embarrassed, he said that he couldn’t bother him for no reason. “If you don’t call,” I said, “I’ll go and find a telephone and do it myself.” He gave me a nasty look, he didn’t know what to do. A man came by on a bicycle, braked, said something obscene to him in dialect. The guard appeared relieved to see him. He began to talk to him as if I no longer existed.

At the center of the courtyard a bonfire was burning. The flame cut the cold air for a few seconds as I passed. I reached a low building of a yellow color, I pushed open a heavy door, I entered. The smell of fat, already strong outside, was unendurable. I met a girl who, obviously angry, was fixing her hair with agitated gestures. I said Excuse me, she passed by with her head down, took three or four steps, stopped.

“What is it?” she asked rudely.

“I’m looking for someone called Cerullo.”

“Lina?”

“Yes.”

“Look in sausage-stuffing.”

I asked where it was, she didn’t answer, she walked away. I pushed open another door. I was assailed by a warmth that made the odor of fat even more nauseating. The place was big, there were tubs full of a milky, steaming water in which dark bodies floated, stirred by slow, bent silhouettes, workers immersed up to their hips. I didn’t see Lila. I asked a man who, lying on the swampy tile floor, was fixing a pipe: “Do you know where I could find Lina?”

“Cerullo?”

“Cerullo.”

“In the mixing department.”

“They told me stuffing.”

“Then why are you asking me, if you know?”

“Where is mixing?”

“Straight ahead.”

“And stuffing?”

“To the right. If you don’t find her there, look where they’re stripping the meat off the carcasses. Or in the storerooms. They’re always moving her.”

“Why?”

He had a malicious smile.

“Is she a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Forget it.”

“Tell me.”

“You won’t be offended?”

“No.”

“She’s a pain in the ass.”

I followed the directions, no one stopped me. The workers, both men and women, seemed to be enveloped in a bitter indifference; even when they laughed or shouted insults they seemed remote from their very laughter, from their voices, from the swill they handled, from the bad smell. I emerged among women in blue smocks who worked with the meat, caps on their heads: the machines produced a clanking sound and a mush of soft, ground, mixed matter. But Lila wasn’t there. And I didn’t see her where they were stuffing skins with the rosy pink paste mixed with bits of fat, or where, with sharp knives, they skinned, gutted, cut, using the blades with a dangerous frenzy. I found her in the storerooms. She came out of a refrigerator along with a sort of white breath. With the help of a short man, she was carrying a reddish block of frozen meat on her back. She placed it on a cart, she started to go back into the cold. I immediately saw that one hand was bandaged.

“Lila.”

She turned cautiously, stared at me uncertainly. “What are you doing here?” she said. Her eyes were feverish, her cheeks more hollow than usual, and yet she seemed large, tall. She, too, wore a blue smock, but over it a kind of long coat, and on her feet she wore army boots. I wanted to embrace her but I didn’t dare: I was afraid, I don’t know why, that she would crumble in my arms. It was she, instead, who hugged me for long minutes. I felt the damp material that gave off a smell even more offensive than the smell in the air. “Come,” she said, “let’s get out of here,” and shouted at the man who was working with her: “Two minutes.” She drew me into a corner.

“How did you find me?”

“I came in.”

“And they let you pass?”

“I said I was looking for you and that I was a friend of Bruno’s.”

“Good, that way they’ll be convinced that I give the son of the owner blow jobs and they’ll leave me alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s how it works.”

“Here?”

“Everywhere. Did you get your degree?”

“Yes. But an even more wonderful thing happened, Lila. I wrote a novel and it’s being published in April.”

Her complexion was gray, she seemed bloodless, and yet she flared up. I saw the red move up along her throat, her cheeks, up to the edge of her eyes, so close that she squeezed them as if fearing that the flame would burn the pupils. Then she took my hand and kissed it, first on the back, then on the palm.

“I’m happy for you,” she murmured.

But at the moment I scarcely noticed the affection of the gesture, I was struck by the swelling of her hands and the wounds, cuts old and new, a fresh one on the thumb of her left hand whose edges were inflamed, and I could imagine that under the bandage on her right hand she had an even worse injury.

“What have you done to yourself?”

She immediately withdrew, put her hands in her pockets.

“Nothing. Stripping meat off the bones ruins your fingers.”

“You strip the meat?”

“They put me where they like.”

“Talk to Bruno.”

“Bruno is the worst shit of them all. He shows up only to see who of us he can fuck in the aging room.”

“Lila.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Are you ill?”

“I’m very well. Here in the storerooms they give me ten lire more an hour for cold damage.”

The man called: “Cerù, the two minutes are up.”

“Coming,” she said.

I murmured, “Maestra Oliviero died.”

She shrugged, said, “She was sick, it was bound to happen.”

I added in a hurry, because I saw that the man next to the cart was getting anxious, “She let me have The Blue Fairy.”

“What’s The Blue Fairy?”

I looked at her to see if it was true that she didn’t remember and she seemed sincere.

“The book you wrote when you were ten.”

“Book?”

“That’s what we called it.”

Lila pressed her lips together, shook her head. She was alarmed, she was afraid of getting in trouble at work, but in my presence she acted the part of someone who does as she likes. I have to go, I thought.

She said, “A long time has passed since then,” and shivered.

“Do you have a fever?”

“No.”

I looked for the packet in my purse, gave it to her. She took it, recognized it, but showed no emotion.

“I was an arrogant child,” she muttered.

I quickly contradicted her.

“The story is still beautiful today,” I said. “I read it again and discovered that, without realizing it, I’ve always had it in my mind. That’s where my book comes from.”

“From this nonsense?” she laughed loudly, nervously. “Then whoever printed it is crazy.”

The man shouted, “I’m waiting for you, Cerullo.”

“You’re a pain in the ass,” she answered.

She put the packet in her pocket and took me under the arm. We went toward the exit. I thought of how I had dressed up for her and how hard it had been to get to that place. I had imagined tears, confidences, talk, a wonderful morning of confessions and reconciliation. Instead here we were, walking arm in arm, she bundled up, dirty, scarred, I disguised as a young lady of good family. I told her that Rinuccio was cute and very intelligent. I praised the neighbor, asked about Enzo. She was glad that I had found the child well, she in turn praised the neighbor. But it was the mention of Enzo that kindled her, she lighted up, became talkative.

“He’s kind,” she said, “he’s good, he’s not afraid of anything, he’s extremely smart and he studies at night, he knows so many things.”

I had never heard her talk about anyone in that way. I asked, “What does he study?”

“Mathematics.”

“Enzo?”

“Yes. He read something about electronic calculators or saw an ad, I don’t know, and he got excited. He says a calculator isn’t like you see in the movies, all colored lights that light up and go out with a bip. He said it’s a question of languages.”

“Languages?”

She had that familiar narrow gaze.

“Not languages for writing novels,” she said, and the dismissive tone in which she uttered the word “novels” disturbed me, the laugh that followed disturbed me. “Programming languages. At night, after the baby goes to sleep, Enzo starts studying.”

Her lower lip was dry, cracked by the cold, her face marred by fatigue. And yet with what pride she had said: he starts studying. I saw that, in spite of the third person singular, it wasn’t only Enzo who was excited about the subject.

“And what do you do?”

“I keep him company: he’s tired and if he’s by himself he feels like sleeping. But together it’s great, one of us says one thing, one another. You know what a flow chart is?”

I shook my head. Her eyes then became very small, she let go of my arm, she began to talk, drawing me into that new passion. In the courtyard, with the odor of the bonfire and the stink of animal fats, flesh, nerves, this Lila, wrapped up in an overcoat but also wearing a blue smock, her hands cut, disheveled, very pale, without a trace of makeup, regained life and energy. She spoke of the reduction of everything to the alternative true-false, she quoted Boolean algebra and many other things I knew nothing about. And yet her words, as usual, fascinated me. As she spoke, I saw the wretched house at night, the child sleeping in the other room; I saw Enzo sitting on the bed, worn out from work on the locomotives in who knows what factory; I saw her, after the day at the cooking tubs or in the gutting room or in the storerooms at twenty below zero, sitting with him on the blanket. I saw them both in the terrible light of sacrificed sleep, I heard their voices: they did exercises with the flow charts, they practiced cleaning the world of the superfluous, they charted the actions of the day according to only two values of truth: zero and one. Obscure words in the miserable room, whispered so as not to wake Rinuccio. I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

“Do you like living with him?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Will you have children?”

She had an expression of feigned amusement.

“We’re not together.”

“No?”

“No, I don’t feel like it.”

“And he?”

“He’s waiting.”

“Maybe he’s like a brother.”

“No, I like him.”

“So?”

“I don’t know.”

We stopped beside the fire, she gestured toward the guard. “Look out for him,” she said. “When you go out he’s liable to accuse you of stealing a mortadella just so he can search you and put his hands all over you.”

We embraced, we kissed each other. I said I would see her again, I didn’t want to lose her, and I was sincere. She smiled, she said, “Yes, I don’t want to lose you, either.” I felt that she, too, was sincere.

I went away in great agitation. Inside was the struggle to leave her, the old conviction that without her nothing truly important would ever happen to me, and yet I felt the need to get away, to free my nostrils of that stink of fat. After a few quick steps I couldn’t help it, I turned to wave again. I saw her standing beside the bonfire, without the shape of a woman in that outfit, as she leafed through the pages of the Blue Fairy. Suddenly she threw it on the fire.