The Neapolitan Novels

73.

If in the past I had believed somewhat in his recurring hostility toward Lila, now I found it less and less convincing, partly because it was joined not infrequently to moments when, as had happened a few nights earlier, he demonstrated a completely different feeling. He was trying to finish an essay on work and the automation of Fiat, but I saw that he was in trouble (What precisely is a microprocessor, what’s a chip, how does this stuff function in practice). I had said to him: talk to Enzo Scanno, he’s smart. He had asked absentmindedly: Who is Enzo Scanno? Lina’s companion, I answered. He said with a half smile: Then I prefer to talk to Lina, she certainly knows more. And, as if the memory had returned, he added, with a trace of resentment: Wasn’t Scanno the idiot son of the fruit seller?

That tone struck me. Enzo was the founder of a small, innovative business—a miracle, considering that the office was in the heart of the old neighborhood. Precisely because he was a scholar, Nino should have displayed interest and admiration toward him. Instead, he had returned him, thanks to that imperfect—was—to the time of elementary school, when he helped his mother in the shop or went around with his father and the cart and didn’t have time to study and didn’t shine. He had, with irritation, taken every virtue away from Enzo, and given them all to Lila. That was how I realized that if I had forced him to delve into himself, it would have emerged that the highest example of female intelligence—maybe his own worship of female intelligence, even certain lectures claiming that the waste of women’s intellectual resources was the greatest waste of all—had to do with Lila, and that if our season of love was already darkening, the season of Ischia would always remain radiant for him. The man for whom I left Pietro, I thought, is what he is because his encounter with Lila reshaped him that way.