The Neapolitan Novels

2.

When Lila’s cast was removed and her arm reappeared, pale but perfectly functioning, her father, Fernando, came to an agreement with himself and, without saying so directly, but through Rino and his wife, Nunzia, allowed her to go to a school to learn I don’t know exactly what, stenography, bookkeeping, home economics, or all three.

She went unwillingly. Nunzia was summoned by the teachers because her daughter was often absent without an excuse, disrupted the class, if questioned refused to answer, if she had to do exercises did them in five minutes and then harassed her classmates. At some point she got a nasty flu, she who never got sick, and seemed to welcome it with a sort of abandon, so that the virus quickly sapped her energy. Days passed and she didn’t get better. As soon as she tried to go out again, paler than usual, the fever returned. One day I saw her on the street and she looked like a spirit, the spirit of a child who had eaten poisonous berries, such as I had seen illustrated in a book belonging to Maestra Oliviero. Later a rumor spread that she would soon die, which caused me an unbearable anxiety. She recovered, almost in spite of herself. But, with the excuse that her health was poor, she went to school less and less often, and at the end of the year she failed.

Nor did I do well in my first year of middle school. At first I had great expectations, and even if I didn’t say so clearly to myself I was glad to be there with Gigliola Spagnuolo rather than with Lila. In some very secret part of myself I looked forward to a school where she would never enter, where, in her absence, I would be the best student, and which I would sometimes tell her about, boasting. But immediately I began to falter, many of the others proved to be better than me. I ended up with Gigliola in a kind of swamp, we were little animals frightened of our own mediocrity, and we struggled all year not to end up at the bottom of the class. I was extremely disappointed. The idea began to quietly form that without Lila I would never feel the pleasure of belonging to that exclusive group of the best.

Every so often, at the entrance to school, I ran into Alfonso, the young son of Don Achille, but we pretended not to know each other. I didn’t know what to say to him, I thought that Alfredo Peluso had done a good thing in murdering his father, and words of consolation did not come to me. I couldn’t even feel moved by the fact that he had been orphaned, it was as if he bore some responsibility for the fear that for years Don Achille had inspired in me. He had a black band sewn on his jacket, he never laughed, he was always on his own. He was in a different class from mine, and the rumor was that he was really smart. At the end of the year we found out that he had been promoted with an average of eight, which depressed me hugely. Gigliola had to repeat Latin and mathematics, I managed to pass with sixes.

When the grades came out, the teacher summoned my mother, told her in my presence that I had passed Latin only thanks to her generosity, and that without private lessons the next year I certainly wouldn’t make it. I felt a double humiliation: I was ashamed because I hadn’t done as well as I had in elementary school, and I was ashamed of the difference between the harmonious, modestly dressed figure of the teacher, between her Italian that slightly resembled that of the Iliad, and the misshapen figure of my mother, her old shoes, her dull hair, the dialect bent into an ungrammatical Italian.

My mother, too, must have felt the weight of that humiliation. She went home in a surly mood, she told my father that the teachers weren’t happy with me, she needed help in the house and I ought to leave school. They discussed it at length, they quarreled, and in the end my father decided that, since I at least had been promoted, while Gigliola had been held back in two subjects, I deserved to continue.

I spent the summer lethargically, in the courtyard, at the ponds, generally with Gigliola, who often talked about the young university student who came to her house to give her private lessons and who, according to her, was in love with her. I listened but I was bored. Every so often I saw Lila with Carmela Peluso; she, too, had gone to a school for something or other, and she, too, had failed. I felt that Lila no longer wanted to be my friend, and that idea brought on a weary exhaustion. Sometimes, hoping that my mother wouldn’t see me, I lay down on the bed and dozed.

One afternoon I really fell asleep and when I woke I felt wet. I went to the bathroom to see what was wrong and discovered that my underpants were stained with blood. Terrified by I don’t know what, maybe a scolding from my mother for having hurt myself between my legs, I washed the underpants carefully, wrung them out, and put them on again wet. Then I went out into the heat of the courtyard. My heart was pounding.

I met Lila and Carmela, and walked with them to the parish church. I felt that I was getting wet again, but I tried to calm down by telling myself it was the wet underpants. When the fear became unbearable I whispered to Lila, “I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I want to tell just you.”

I took her by the arm, trying to drag her away from Carmela, but Carmela followed us. I was so worried that in the end I confessed to them both, but addressing only Lila.

“What can it be?” I asked.

Carmela knew all about it. She had had that bleeding for a year already, every month.

“It’s normal,” she said. “Girls have it naturally: you bleed for a few days, your stomach and your back hurt, but then it goes away.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Lila’s silence pushed me toward Carmela. The naturalness with which she had said what she knew reassured me and made me like her. I spent all afternoon talking to her, until dinner time. You wouldn’t die from that wound, I learned. Rather, “it means that you’re grown-up and you can make babies, if a man sticks his thingy in your stomach.”

Lila listened without saying anything, or almost anything. We asked if she had blood like us and saw her hesitate, then reluctantly answer no. Suddenly she seemed small, smaller than I had ever seen her. She was three or four inches shorter, all skin and bones, very pale in spite of the days spent outside. And she had failed. And she didn’t know what the blood was. And no boy had ever made a declaration to her.

“You’ll get it,” we both said, in a falsely comforting tone.

“What do I care,” she said. “I don’t have it because I don’t want to, it makes me sick. And anyone who has it makes me sick.”

She started to leave but then stopped and asked me, “How’s Latin?”

“Wonderful.”

“Are you good at it?”

“Very.”

She thought about it and muttered, “I failed on purpose. I don’t want to go to any school anymore.”

“What will you do?”

“Whatever I want.”

She left us there in the middle of the courtyard.

For the rest of the summer she didn’t appear. I became very friendly with Carmela Peluso, who, although she laughed too much and then complained too much, had absorbed Lila’s influence so potently that she became at times a kind of surrogate. In speech Carmela imitated her tone of voice, used some of her recurring expressions, gesticulated in a similar way, and when she walked tried to move like her, even though physically she was more like me: pretty and plump, bursting with health. That sort of misappropriation partly repulsed and partly attracted me. I wavered between irritation at a remake that seemed a caricature and fascination because, even diluted, Lila’s habits still enchanted me. It was with those that Carmela finally bound me to her. She told me how terrible the new school had been: everyone teased her and the teachers couldn’t stand her. She told of going to the prison of Poggioreale with her mother and siblings to see her father, and how they all wept. She told me that her father was innocent, that it was a black creature who killed Don Achille, part male but mostly female, who lived with the rats and came out of the sewer grates, even in daytime, and did whatever terrible thing had to be done before escaping underground. She told me unexpectedly, with a fatuous little smile, that she was in love with Alfonso Carracci. Right afterward her smile turned to tears: it was a love that tortured her, and sapped her strength, the daughter of the murderer was in love with the son of the victim. It was enough for her to see him crossing the courtyard or passing by on the stradone to feel faint.

This was a confidence that made a great impression on me and consolidated our friendship. Carmela swore that she had never talked about it to anyone, not even Lila: if she had decided to open up to me it was because she couldn’t bear to keep it inside anymore. I liked her dramatic tone. We examined all the possible consequences of that passion until school started again and I no longer had time to listen to her.

What a story! Not even Lila, perhaps, would have been able to make up such a tale.