The Neapolitan Novels

23.

As I said, many things about that night escaped me. But above all, overwhelmed by the atmosphere of celebration and danger, by the swirl of males whose bodies gave off a heat hotter than the fires in the sky, I neglected Lila. And yet it was then that her first inner change took place.

I didn’t realize, as I said, what had happened to her, the action was difficult to perceive. But I was aware of the consequences almost immediately. She became lazier. Two days later, I got up early, even though I didn’t have school, to go with her to open the shop and help her do the cleaning, but she didn’t appear. She arrived late, sullen, and we walked through the neighborhood avoiding the shoemaker’s shop.

“You’re not going to work?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like it anymore.”

“And the new shoes?”

“They’re nowhere.”

“And so?”

It seemed to me that even she didn’t know what she wanted. The only definite thing was that she seemed very worried about her brother, much more than I had seen recently. And it was precisely as a result of that worry that she began to modify her speeches about wealth. There was always the pressure to become wealthy, there was no question about it, but the goal was no longer the same as in childhood: no treasure chests, no sparkle of coins and precious stones. Now it seemed that money, in her mind, had become a cement: it consolidated, reinforced, fixed this and that. Above all, it fixed Rino’s head. The pair of shoes that they had made together he now considered ready, and wanted to show them to Fernando. But Lila knew well (and according to her so did Rino) that the work was full of flaws, that their father would examine the shoes and throw them away. So she told him that they had to try and try again, that the route to the shoe factory was a difficult one; but he was unwilling to wait longer, he felt an urgent need to become like the Solaras, like Stefano, and Lila couldn’t make him see reason. Suddenly it seemed to me that wealth in itself no longer interested her. She no longer spoke of money with any excitement, it was just a means of keeping her brother out of trouble. But since it wasn’t around the corner, she wondered, with cruel eyes, what she had to come up with to soothe him.

Rino was in a frenzy. Fernando, for example, never reproached Lila for having stopped coming to the shop, in fact he let her understand that he was happy for her to stay home and help her mother. Her brother instead got furious and in early January I witnessed another ugly quarrel. Rino approached us with his head down, he blocked our path, he said to her, “Come to work right now.” Lila answered that she wouldn’t think of it. He then dragged her by the arm, she defied him with a nasty insult, Rino slapped her, shouted at her, “Then go home, go and help Mamma.” She obeyed, without even saying goodbye to me.

The climax came on the day of the Befana.1 She, it seems, woke up and found next to her bed a sock full of coal. She knew it was from Rino and at breakfast she set the table for everyone but him. Her mother appeared: Rino had left a sock full of candies and chocolate hanging on a chair, which had moved her, she doted on that boy. So, when she realized that Rino’s place wasn’t set, she tried to set it but Lila prevented her. While mother and daughter argued, Rino appeared and Lila immediately threw a piece of coal at him. Rino laughed, thinking it was a game, that she had appreciated the joke, but when he realized that his sister was serious he tried to hit her. Then Fernando arrived, in underpants and undershirt, a cardboard box in his hand.

“Look what the Befana brought me,” he said, and it was clear that he was furious.

He pulled out of the box the new shoes that his children had made in secret. Lila was openmouthed with surprise. She didn’t know anything about it. Rino had decided on his own to show his father their work, as if it were a gift from the Befana.

When she saw on her brother’s face a small smile that was amused and at the same time tormented, when she caught his worried gaze on his father’s face, it seemed to her she had the confirmation of what had frightened her on the terrace, amid the smoke and fireworks: Rino had lost his usual outline, she now had a brother without boundaries, from whom something irreparable might emerge. In that smile, in that gaze she saw something unbearably wretched, the more unbearable the more she loved her brother, and felt the need to stay beside him to help him and be helped.

“How beautiful they are,” said Nunzia, who was ignorant of the whole business.

Fernando, without saying a word, and now looking like an angry Randolph Scott, sat down and put on first the right shoe, then the left.

“The Befana,” he said, “made them precisely for my feet.”

He got up, tried them, walked back and forth in the kitchen as his family watched.

“Very comfortable,” he commented.

“They’re gentleman’s shoes,” his wife said, giving her son admiring looks.

Fernando sat down again. He took them off, he examined them above, below, inside and outside.

“Whoever made these shoes is a master,” he said, but his face didn’t brighten at all. “Brava, Befana.”

In every word you heard how much he suffered and how that suffering was charging him with a desire to smash everything. But Rino didn’t seem to realize it. At every sarcastic word of his father’s he became prouder, he smiled, blushing, formulated half-phrases: I did like this, Papa, I added this, I thought that. Lila wanted to get out of the kitchen, out of the way of her father’s imminent rage, but she couldn’t make up her mind, she didn’t want to leave her brother alone.

“They’re light but also strong,” Fernando continued, “there’s no cutting corners. And I’ve never seen anything like them on anyone’s feet, with this wide tip they’re very original.”

He sat down, he put them on again, he laced them. He said to his son: “Turn around Rinù, I have to thank the Befana.”

Rino thought it was a joke that would conclusively end the whole long controversy and he appeared happy and embarrassed. But as soon as he started to turn his back his father kicked him violently in the rear, called him animal, idiot, and threw at him whatever came to hand, finally even the shoes.

Lila got involved only when she saw that her brother, at first intent only on protecting himself from punching and kicking, began shouting, too, overturning chairs, breaking plates, crying, swearing that he would kill himself rather than continue to work for his father for nothing, terrorizing his mother, the other children, and the neighbors. But in vain. Father and son first had to explode until they wore themselves out. Then they went back to working together, mute, shut up in the shop with their desperations.

There was no mention of the shoes for a while. Lila decided that her role was to help her mother, do the marketing, cook, wash the clothes and hang them in the sun, and she never went to the shoemaker’s shop. Rino, saddened, sulky, felt the thing as an incomprehensible injustice and began to insist that he find socks and underpants and shirts in order in his drawer, that his sister serve him and show him respect when he came home from work. If something wasn’t to his liking he protested, he said unpleasant things like you can’t even iron a shirt, you shit. She shrugged, she didn’t resist, she continued to carry out her duties with attention and care.

He himself, naturally, wasn’t happy with the way he was behaving, he was tormented, he tried to calm down, he made not a few efforts to return to being what he had been. On good days, Sunday mornings for example, he wandered around joking, taking on a gentle tone of voice. “Are you mad at me because I took all the credit for the shoes? I did it,” he said, lying, “to keep Papa from getting angry at you.” And then he asked her, “Help me, what should we do now? We can’t stop here, I have to get out of this situation.” Lila was silent: she cooked, she ironed, at times she kissed him on the cheek to let him know that she wasn’t mad anymore. But in the meantime he would get angry again, he always ended up smashing something. He shouted that she had betrayed him, and would betray him yet again, when, sooner or later, she would marry some imbecile and go away, leaving him to live in this wretchedness forever.

Sometimes, when no one was home, Lila went into the little room where she had hidden the shoes and touched them, looked at them, marveled to herself that for good or ill there they were and had come into being as the result of a design on a sheet of graph paper. How much wasted work.

1 In Italian folklore, the Befana is an old woman who delivers gifts to children, mostly in southern Italy, on the eve of the Epiphany (the night of January 5th), like St. Nicholas or Santa Claus.