The Neapolitan Novels

57.

The long day passed in that way, without rain but dark. And then began a reversal that rapidly changed a phase of apparent growth in the relationship between Lila and me into a desire to cut it off and return to taking care of my own life. Or maybe it had begun before that, in tiny details that I scarcely noticed as they struck me, and now instead were starting to add up. The trip had been useful, and yet I came home unhappy. What sort of friendship was mine and Lila’s, if she had been silent about Alfonso for years, though she knew I had a close relationship with him? Was it possible that she hadn’t realized Michele’s absolute dependence on her, or for her own reasons had she decided not to say anything? On the other hand, I—how many things had I kept hidden from her?

For the rest of the day I inhabited a chaos of places, times, various people: the haunted Signora Manuela, the vacuous Rino, Gigliola in elementary school, Gigliola in middle school, Gigliola seduced by the potent good looks of the Solara boys, Gigliola dazzled by the Fiat 1100, and Michele who attracted women like Nino but, unlike him, was capable of an absolute passion, and Lila, Lila who had aroused that passion, a rapture that was fed not only by a craving for possession, by thuggish bragging, by revenge, by low-level desire, as she might say, but was an obsessive form of appreciation of a woman, not devotion, not subservience, but rather a sought-after form of male love, a complex feeling that was capable—with determination, with a kind of ferocity—of making a woman the chosen among women. I felt close to Gigliola, I understood her humiliation.

That night I went to see Lila and Enzo. I didn’t say anything about that exploration I had made for love of her and also to protect the man she lived with. I took advantage instead of a moment when Lila was in the kitchen feeding the child to tell Enzo that she wanted to go back to the neighborhood. I decided not to hide my opinion. I said it didn’t seem like a good idea to me, but that anything that could help stabilize her—she was healthy, she had only to regain some equilibrium—or that she considered such, should be encouraged. All the more since time had passed and, as far as I knew, in the neighborhood they wouldn’t be worse off than in San Giovanni a Teduccio. Enzo shrugged.

“I have nothing against it. I’ll have to get up earlier in the morning, return a little later in the evening.”

“I saw that Don Carlo’s old apartment is for rent. The children have gone to Caserta and the widow wants to join them.”

“What’s the rent?”

I told him: in the neighborhood the rents were lower than in San Giovanni a Teduccio.

“All right,” Enzo agreed.

“You realize you’ll have some problems anyway.”

“There are problems here, too.”

“The irritations will increase, and also the claims.”

“We’ll see.”

“You’ll stay with her?”

“As long as she wants, yes.”

We joined Lila in the kitchen. She had just had a fight with Gennaro. Now that the child spent more time with his mother and less with the neighbor he was disoriented. He had less freedom, he was forced to give up a set of habits, and he rebelled by insisting, at the age of five, on being fed with a spoon. Lila had started yelling, he had thrown the plate, which shattered on the floor. When we went into the kitchen she had just slapped him. She said to me aggressively:

“Was it you who pretended the spoon was an airplane?”

“Just once.”

“You shouldn’t.”

I said: “It won’t happen again.”

“No, never again, because you’re going to be a writer and I have to waste my time like this.”

Slowly she grew calmer, I wiped up the floor. Enzo told her that looking for a place in the neighborhood was fine with him, and I told her about Don Carlo’s apartment, smothering my resentment. She listened unwillingly as she comforted the child, then she reacted as if it were Enzo who wanted to move, as if I were the one encouraging that choice. She said: All right, I’ll do as you like.

The next day we all went to see the apartment. It was in poor condition, but Lila was enthusiastic: she liked that it was on the edge of the neighborhood, almost near the tunnel, and that from the windows you could see the gas pump of Carmen’s fiancé. Enzo observed that at night they would be disturbed by the trucks that passed on the stradone and by the trains at the shunting yard. But since she found pleasure even in the sounds that had been part of our childhood, they came to an agreement with the widow for a suitable rent. From then on, every evening Enzo, instead of returning to San Giovanni a Teduccio, went to the neighborhood to carry out a series of improvements that would transform the apartment into a worthy home.

It was now almost May, the date of my wedding was approaching, and I was going back and forth to Florence. But Lila, as if she considered that deadline irrelevant, drew me into shopping for the finishing touches for the apartment. We bought a double bed, a cot for Gennaro, we went together to apply for a telephone line. People saw us on the street, some greeted only me, some both, others pretended not to have seen either of us. Lila seemed in any case relaxed. Once we ran into Ada; she was alone, she nodded cordially, and kept going as if she were in a hurry. Once we met Maria, Stefano’s mother, Lila and I greeted her, she turned her head. Once Stefano himself passed in the car and stopped of his own initiative; he got out of the car, spoke only to me, cheerfully, asked about my wedding, praised Florence, where he had been recently with Ada and the child; finally patted Gennaro, gave a nod to Lila, and left. Once we saw Fernando, Lila’s father: bent and very aged, he was standing in front of the elementary school, and Lila became agitated, she told Gennaro that she wanted him to meet his grandfather. I tried to restrain her, but she wanted to go anyway, and Fernando, behaving as if his daughter weren’t present, looked at his grandson for a few seconds and said plainly, If you see your mother, tell her she’s a whore, and went off.

But the most disturbing encounter, even if at the time it seemed the least significant, was a few days before she finally moved to the new apartment. Just as we came out of the house, we ran into Melina, who was holding by the hand her granddaughter Maria, the child of Stefano and Ada. She had her usual absent-minded air but she was nicely dressed, she had peroxided her hair, her face was heavily made up. She recognized me but not Lila, or maybe at first she chose to speak only to me. She talked to me as if I were still the girlfriend of her son, Antonio: she said that he would be back soon from Germany and that in his letters he always asked about me. I complimented her warmly on her dress and her hair, she seemed pleased. But she was even more pleased when I praised her granddaughter, who timidly clung to her grandmother’s skirt. At that point she must have felt obliged to say something nice about Gennaro, and she turned to Lila: Is he your son? Only then did she seem to remember her. Until that moment she had stared at her without saying a word, and it must have occurred to her that here was the woman whose husband her own daughter Ada had taken. Her eyes were sunk deep in the large sockets, she said seriously: Lina, you’ve gotten ugly and thin, of course Stefano left you, men like flesh, otherwise they don’t know where to put their hands and they leave. Then with a rapid jerk of her head she turned to Gennaro, and pointing to the little girl almost screamed: You know that’s your sister? Give each other a kiss, come on, my goodness how cute you are. Gennaro immediately kissed the girl, who let herself be kissed without protesting, and Melina, seeing the two faces next to each other, exclaimed: They both take after their father, they’re identical. After that statement, as if she had urgent things to do, she tugged her granddaughter and left without another word.

Lila had stood mute the whole time. But I understood that something extremely violent had happened to her, like the time when, as a child, she had seen Melina walking on the stradone eating soap flakes. As soon as the woman and the child were some distance away, she started, she ruffled her hair with one hand, she blinked, she said: I’ll become like that. Then she tried to smooth her hair, saying:

“Did you hear what she said?”

“It’s not true that you’re ugly and skinny.”

“Who gives a damn if I’m ugly and skinny, I’m talking about the resemblance.”

“What resemblance?”

“Between the two children. Melina’s right, they’re both identical to Stefano.”

“Come on, the girl is, but Gennaro is different.”

She burst out laughing: after a long time her old, mean laugh was back.

She repeated: “They’re two peas in a pod.”