The Neapolitan Novels

46.

Yet something wasn’t right. It was a sensation of indeterminacy, which I felt even when everything appeared explicit and it seemed only one of Lila’s old childish diversions: to orchestrate situations in which she let you perceive that under the facts there was something else.

One morning—again at Basic Sight—I exchanged a few words with Rino, whom I hadn’t seen for many years. He seemed unrecognizable. He was thin, his eyes were dull, he greeted me with exaggerated affection, he even touched me as if I were made of rubber. He talked a lot of nonsense about computers, about the great business affairs he managed. Then suddenly he changed, he was seized by a kind of asthma attack, and for no evident reason he began, in a low voice, to rail against his sister. I said: Calm down, and wanted to get him a glass of water, but he stopped me in front of Lila’s closed door and disappeared as if he were afraid that she would reprimand him.

I knocked and went in. I asked her warily if her brother was sick. She had an expression of irritation, she said: You know what he’s like. I nodded yes, I thought of Elisa, I said that with siblings things aren’t always straightforward. Meanwhile I thought of Peppe and Gianni, I said my mother was worried about them, she wanted to get them away from Marcello Solara and had asked me to see if she had any way of giving them a job. But those phrases—get them away from Marcello Solara, give them a job—made her narrow her eyes, she looked at me as if she wanted to know how far my knowledge when it came to meaning of the words I had uttered. Since she must have decided that I didn’t know their real meaning, she said bitterly: I can’t take them here, Lenù; Rino’s already enough, not to mention the risks that Gennaro runs. At first I didn’t know how to answer. Gennaro, my brothers, hers, Marcello Solara. I returned to the subject, but she retreated, she talked about other things.

That evasiveness happened later in the case of Alfonso, too. He now worked for Lila and Enzo, but not like Rino, who hung around there without a job. Alfonso had become very good, they sent him to the companies they consulted for to collect data. The bond between him and Lila, however, immediately seemed to me much stronger than anything to do with work. It wasn’t the attraction-repulsion that Alfonso had confessed to me in the past but something more. There was on his part a need—I don’t know how to put it—not to lose sight of her. It was a singular relationship, based on a secret flow that, moving from her, remodeled him. I was soon convinced that the closing of the shop in Piazza dei Martiri and the firing of Alfonso had to do with that flow. But if I tried to ask questions—what happened with Michele, how did you manage to get rid of him, why did he fire Alfonso—Lila gave a little laugh, she said: what can I say, Michele doesn’t know what he wants, he closes, he opens, he creates, he destroys, and then he gets mad at everyone.

The laugh wasn’t of mockery, of contentment, or of satisfaction. The laugh served to prevent me from insisting. One afternoon we went shopping on Via dei Mille and since that area had for years been Alfonso’s domain, he offered to go with us, he had a friend with a shop that would suit us. People knew by now of his homosexuality. He continued formally to live with Marisa, but Carmen had confirmed to me that his children were Michele’s, and she had whispered: Marisa is now Stefano’s lover—yes, Stefano, Alfonso’s brother, Lila’s ex-husband, that was the new gossip. But—she added with explicit under­standing—Alfonso doesn’t give a damn, he and his wife lead separate lives and they get on. So I wasn’t surprised that the shopkeeper friend—as Alfonso himself introduced him, smiling—was a homosexual. What surprised me instead was the game that Lila led him into.

We were trying on maternity clothes. We came out of the dressing rooms, looked at ourselves in the mirror, and Alfonso and his friend admired, recommended, recommended against, in a generally pleasant atmosphere. Then for no reason Lila began to get restless, scowling. She didn’t like anything, she touched her pointy stomach, she was tired, she made remarks to Alfonso like: What are you saying, don’t give me bad advice, would you wear a color like this?

I perceived in what was happening around me the usual oscillation between the visible and the hidden. At a certain point Lila grabbed a beautiful dark dress and, as if the mirror in the shop were broken, said to her former brother-in-law: show me how it looks on me. She said those incongruous words as if they expressed a normal request, so that Alfonso didn’t wait to be asked again, he grabbed the dress and shut himself up in the dressing room for a long time.

I continued to try on clothes. Lila looked at me absent-mindedly, the owner of the shop complimented every item I put on, and I waited in bewilderment for Alfonso to reappear. When he did I was speechless. My old desk mate, with his hair down, in the elegant dress, was a copy of Lila. His tendency to resemble her, which I had long noted, came abruptly into focus, and maybe at that moment he was even handsomer, more beautiful than she, a male-female of the type I had talked about in my book, ready, male and female, to set off on the road leading to the black Madonna of Montevergine.

He asked Lila with some anxiety: Do you like it, this way? And the shop owner applauded enthusiastically, he said conspiratorially: I know exactly who’d like you, you’re beautiful. Allusions. Facts that I didn’t know and they did. Lila had a malicious smile, she muttered: I want to give it to you. Nothing more. Alfonso accepted it happily but nothing else was said, as if Lila had commanded him and his friend, silently, that it was enough, I had seen and heard enough.