The Neapolitan Novels

20.

As the New Year’s Eve celebration approached, Rino was seized by the desire to set off more fireworks than anyone else, especially the Solaras. Lila made fun of him, but sometimes she became harsh with him. She told me that her brother, who at first had been skeptical about the possibility of making money with the shoes, had now begun to count on it too heavily, already he saw himself as the owner of the Cerullo shoe factory and didn’t want to go back to repairing shoes. This worried her, it was a side of Rino she didn’t know. He had always seemed to her only generously impetuous, sometimes aggressive, but not a braggart. Now, though, he posed as what he was not. He felt he was close to wealth. A boss. Someone who could give the neighborhood the first sign of the good fortune the new year would bring by setting off a lot of fireworks, more than the Solara brothers, who had become in his eyes the model of the young man to emulate and indeed to surpass, people whom he envied and considered enemies to be beaten, so that he could assume their role.

Lila never said, as she had with Carmela and the other girls in the courtyard: maybe I planted a fantasy in his head that he doesn’t know how to control. She herself believed in the fantasy, felt it could be realized, and her brother was an important element of that realization. And then she loved him, he was six years older, she didn’t want to reduce him to a child who can’t handle his dreams. But she often said that Rino lacked concreteness, he didn’t know how to confront difficulties with his feet on the ground, he tended to get carried away. Like that competition with the Solaras, for example.

“Maybe he’s jealous of Marcello,” I said once.

“What?”

She smiled, pretending not to understand, but she had told me herself. Marcello Solara passed by and hung around in front of the shoemaker’s shop every day, both on foot and in the 1100, and Rino must have been aware of it, since he had said many times to his sister, “Don’t you dare get too familiar with that shit.” Maybe, who knows, since he wasn’t able to beat up the Solaras for chasing after his sister, he wished to demonstrate his strength by means of fireworks.

“If that’s true, you’ll agree that I’m right?”

“Right about what?”

“That he’s acting like a big shot: where’s he going to get the money for the fireworks?”

It was true. The last night of the year was a night of battle, in the neighborhood and throughout Naples. Dazzling lights, explosions. The dense smoke from the gunpowder made everything hazy, it entered the houses, burned your eyes, made you cough. But the pop of the poppers, the hiss of the rockets, the cannonades of the missiles had a cost and as usual those who set off the most were those with the most money. We Grecos had no money, at my house the contribution to the end-of-the-year fireworks was small. My father bought a box of sparklers, one of wheels, and one of slender rockets. At midnight he put in my hand, since I was the oldest, the stem of a sparkler or of a Catherine wheel, and lighted it, and I stood motionless, excited and terrified, staring at the whirling sparks, the brief swirls of fire a short distance from my fingers. He then stuck the shafts of the rockets in glass bottles on the marble windowsill, burned the fuses with the tip of his cigarette, and, excitedly, launched the luminous whistles into the sky. Then he threw the bottles, too, into the street.

Similarly at Lila’s house they set off just a few or none, and Rino rebelled. From the age of twelve he had gotten into the habit of going out to celebrate midnight with people more daring than his father, and his exploits in recovering unexploded bottles were famous—as soon as the chaos of the celebration was over he would go in search of them. He would assemble them all near the ponds, light them, and delight in the high flare, trac trac trac, the final explosion. He still had a dark scar on one hand, a broad stain, from a time when he hadn’t pulled back fast enough.

Among the many reasons, open and secret, for that challenge at the end of 1958, it should therefore be added that maybe Rino wanted to make up for his impoverished childhood. So he got busy collecting money here and there to buy fireworks. But we knew—he knew himself, despite the frenzy for grandeur that had seized him—that there was no way to compete with the Solaras. As they did every year, the two brothers went back and forth for days in their 1100, the trunk loaded with explosives that on New Year’s Eve would kill birds, frighten dogs, cats, mice, make the buildings quake from the cellars up to the roofs. Rino observed them from the shop with resentment and meanwhile was dealing with Pasquale, with Antonio, and above all with Enzo, who had a little more money, to procure an arsenal that would at least make for a good show.

Things took a small, unexpected turn when Lila and I were sent to Stefano Carracci’s grocery by our mothers to do the shopping for the dinner. The shop was full of people. Behind the counter, besides Stefano and Pinuccia, Alfonso was serving customers, and he gave us an embarrassed smile. We settled ourselves for a long wait. But Stefano addressed to me, unequivocally to me, a nod of greeting, and said something in his brother’s ear. My classmate came out from behind the counter and asked if we had a list. We gave him our lists and he slipped away. In five minutes our groceries were ready.

We put everything in our bags, paid Signora Maria, and went out. But we hadn’t gone far when not Alfonso but Stefano, Stefano himself, called to me with his lovely man’s voice, “Lenù.”

He joined us. He had a confident expression, a friendly smile. Only his white grease-stained apron spoiled him slightly. He spoke to both of us, in dialect, but looking at me: “Would you like to come and celebrate the new year at my house? Alfonso would really be pleased.”

The wife and children of Don Achille, even after the murder of the father, led a very retiring life: church, grocery, home, at most some small celebration they couldn’t skip. That invitation was something new. I answered, nodding at Lila: “We’re already busy, we’ll be with her brother and some friends.”

“Tell Rino, too, tell your parents: the house is big and we’ll go out on the terrace for the fireworks.”

Lila interjected in a dismissive tone: “Pasquale and Carmen Peluso and their mother are coming to celebrate with us.”

It was supposed to be a phrase that eliminated any further talk: Alfredo Peluso was at Poggioreale because he had murdered Don Achille, and the son of Don Achille could not invite the children of Alfredo to toast the new year at his house. Instead, Stefano looked at her, very intensely, as if until that moment he hadn’t seen her, and said, in the tone one uses when something is obvious: “All right, all of you come: we’ll drink spumante, dance—new year, new life.”

The words moved me. I looked at Lila, she, too, was confused. She murmured, “We have to talk to my brother.”

“Let me know.”

“And the fireworks?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll bring ours, and you?”

Stefano smiled. “How many fireworks do you want?”

“Lots.”

The young man again addressed me: “Come to my house and I promise you that we’ll still be setting them off at dawn.”