The Neapolitan Novels

43.

The months of pregnancy passed quickly for me, in spite of my worries, and very slowly for Lila. We couldn’t avoid noting that the feelings of expecting were very different for each of us. I said things like I’m already at the fourth month, she said things like I’m only at the fourth month. Of course, Lila’s complexion soon improved, her features softened. But our bodies, although undergoing the same process of reproducing life, continued to experience the phases in different ways, mine with active collaboration, hers with dull resignation. And even the people we dealt with were surprised at how time hurried along for me and dragged for her.

I remember that one Sunday we were walking along Toledo with the children and we ran into Gigliola. That encounter was important; it was disturbing to me and proved that Lila really had had something to do with Michele Solara’s crazy behavior. Gigliola was wearing heavy makeup but she was shabbily dressed, her hair was uncombed, she flaunted her uncontainable breasts and hips, her broad buttocks. She seemed happy to see us, she wouldn’t let us go. She made a fuss over Dede and Elsa, she dragged us to Gambrinus, she ordered all sorts of things, both salty and sweet, and ate greedily. She soon forgot about my children, and they her: when she began to tell us in detail, in a very loud voice, about all the wrongs Michele had done to her, they got bored and, curious, went off to explore the restaurant.

Gigliola couldn’t accept the way she had been treated. He’s a beast, she said. He went so far as to shout at her: Don’t just threaten to do it, kill yourself for real, jump off the balcony, die. Or he thought he could fix everything with no concern for her feelings, sticking in her bosom and in her pocket hundreds of thousands of lire. She was furious, she was desperate. She recounted—turning to me, because I had been away for a long time and wasn’t up to date—that her husband had thrown her out of the house on Posillipo, kicking and hitting her, that he had sent her to live, with the children in the old neighborhood, in two dark rooms. But the moment she began to wish on Michele all the most atrocious diseases she could think of and a terrible death, she switched listeners, and addressed herself exclusively to Lila. I was amazed, she spoke to her as if she could help her make the curses effective, she considered her an ally. You did well, she said excitedly, to make him pay dearly for your work and then quit. In fact, even better if you screwed him out of some money. Lucky you, you know how to treat him, you have to keep making him bleed. She screamed: What he can’t bear is that you don’t care, he can’t accept that the less you see him the better off you are, well done, well done, make him go nuts for good, make him die cursed.

At that point she drew a sigh of false relief. She remembered our two pregnant bellies, she wanted to touch them. She placed her broad hand almost on my pubic bone, she asked what month I was in. As soon as I said the fourth she exclaimed: No way you’re already in the fourth. Of Lila, on the other hand, she said, suddenly unfriendly: There are women who never give birth, they want to keep the child inside forever, you’re one of those. It was pointless to remind her that we were in the same month, that we would both give birth in January of the following year. She shook her head, she said to Lila: Just think, I was sure you’d already had it. And she added, with an incoherent note of pain: The more Michele sees you with that belly, the more he suffers; so make it last a long time, you can manage, stick it in front of him, let him drop dead. Then she announced that she had very urgent things to do, but meanwhile she repeated two or three times that we ought to see each other more often (Let’s reestablish the group from when we were girls, ah, how nice it was, we should have said fuck off to all those shits and thought only of ourselves). She didn’t even wave goodbye to the children, who were now playing outside, and she went off after making some obscene remarks to the waiter, laughing.

“She’s an idiot,” Lila said, sulkily. “What’s wrong with my stomach?”

“Nothing.”

“And me?”

“Nothing, don’t worry.”