The Neapolitan Novels

24.

I returned to school, I was dragged inside the torturous rhythms that the teachers imposed on us. Many of my companions began to give up, the class thinned out. Gino got low marks and asked me to help him. I tried to but really all he wanted was for me to let him copy my homework. I did, but reluctantly: even when he copied he didn’t pay attention, he didn’t try to understand. Even Alfonso, although he was very disciplined, had difficulties. One day he burst into tears during the Greek interrogation, something that for a boy was considered very humiliating. It was clear that he would have preferred to die rather than shed a single tear in front of the class, but he couldn’t control it. We were all silent, extremely disturbed, except Gino, who, perhaps for the satisfaction of seeing that even for his deskmate things could go badly, burst out laughing. As we left school I told him that because of that laughter he was no longer my boyfriend. He responded by asking me, worried, “You like Alfonso?” I explained that I simply didn’t like him anymore. He stammered that we had scarcely started, it wasn’t fair. Not much had happened between us as boyfriend and girlfriend: we’d kissed but without tongues, he had tried to touch my breasts and I had got angry and pushed him away. He begged me to continue just for a little, I was firm in my decision. I knew that it would cost me nothing to lose his company on the way to school and the way home.

A few days had passed since the break with Gino when Lila confided that she had had two declarations almost at the same time, the first in her life. Pasquale, one morning, had come up to her while she was doing the shopping. He was marked by fatigue, and extremely agitated. He had said that he was worried because he hadn’t seen her in the shoemaker’s shop and thought she was sick. Now that he found her in good health, he was happy. But there was no happiness in his face at all as he spoke. He broke off as if he were choking and, to free his voice, had almost shouted that he loved her. He loved her so much that, if she agreed, he would come and speak to her brother, her parents, whoever, immediately, so that they could be engaged. She was dumbstruck, for a few minutes she thought he was joking. I had said a thousand times that Pasquale had his eyes on her, but she had never believed me. Now there he was, on a beautiful spring day, almost with tears in his eyes, and was begging her, telling her his life was worth nothing if she said no. How difficult the sentiments of love were to untangle. Lila, very cautiously, but without ever saying no, had found words to refuse him. She had said that she loved him, but not as one should love a fiancé. She had also said that she would always be grateful to him for all the things he had explained to her: Fascism, the Resistance, the monarchy, the republic, the black market, Comandante Lauro, the neo-fascists, Christian Democracy, Communism. But to be his girlfriend, no, she would never be anyone’s girlfriend. And she had concluded: “I love all of you, Antonio, you, Enzo, the way I love Rino.” Pasquale had then murmured, “I, however, don’t love you the way I do Carmela.” He had escaped and gone back to work.

“And the other declaration?” I asked her, curious but also a little anxious.

“You’d never imagine.”

The other declaration had come from Marcello Solara.

In hearing that name I felt a pang. If Pasquale’s love was a sign of how much someone could like Lila, the love of Marcello—a young man who was handsome and wealthy, with a car, who was harsh and violent, a Camorrist, used, that is, to taking the women he wanted—was, in my eyes, in the eyes of all my contemporaries, and in spite of his bad reputation, in fact perhaps even because of it, a promotion, the transition from skinny little girl to woman capable of making anyone bend to her will.

“How did it happen?”

Marcello was driving the 1100, by himself, without his brother, and had seen her as she was going home along the stradone. He hadn’t driven up alongside her, he hadn’t called to her from the window. He had left the car in the middle of the street, with the door open, and approached her. Lila had kept walking, and he followed. He had pleaded with her to forgive him for his behavior in the past, he admitted she would have been absolutely right to kill him with the shoemaker’s knife. He had reminded her, with emotion, how they had danced rock and roll so well together at Gigliola’s mother’s party, a sign of how well matched they might be. Finally he had started to pay her compliments: “How you’ve grown up, what lovely eyes you have, how beautiful you are.” And then he told her a dream he had had that night: he asked her to become engaged, she said yes, he gave her an engagement ring like his grandmother’s, which had three diamonds in the band of the setting. At last Lila, continuing to walk, had spoken. She had asked, “In that dream I said yes?” Marcello confirmed it and she replied, “Then it really was a dream, because you’re an animal, you and your family, your grandfather, your brother, and I would never be engaged to you even if you tell me you’ll kill me.”

“You told him that?”

“I said more.”

“What?”

When Marcello, insulted, had replied that his feelings were delicate, that he thought of her only with love, night and day, that therefore he wasn’t an animal but one who loved her, she had responded that if a person behaved as he had behaved with Ada, if that same person on New Year’s Eve started shooting people with a gun, to call him an animal was to insult animals. Marcello had finally understood that she wasn’t joking, that she really considered him less than a frog, a salamander, and he was suddenly depressed. He had murmured weakly, “It was my brother who was shooting.” But even as he spoke he had realized that that excuse would only increase her contempt. Very true. Lila had started walking faster and when he tried to follow had yelled, “Go away,” and started running. Marcello then had stopped as if he didn’t remember where he was and what he was supposed to be doing, and so he had gone back to the 1100.

“You did that to Marcello Solara?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy: don’t tell anyone you treated him like that.”

At the moment it seemed to me superfluous advice, I said it just to demonstrate that I was concerned. Lila by nature liked talking and fantasizing about facts, but she never gossiped, unlike the rest us, who were continuously talking about people. And in fact she spoke only to me of Pasquale’s love, I never discovered that she had told anyone else. But she told everyone about Marcello Solara. So that when I saw Carmela she said, “Did you know that your friend said no to Marcello Solara?” I met Ada, who said to me, “Your friend said no to Marcello Solara, no less.” Pinuccia Carracci, in the shop, whispered in my ear, “Is it true that your friend said no to Marcello Solara?” Even Alfonso said to me one day at school, astonished, “Your friend said no to Marcello Solara?”

When I saw Lila I said to her, “You shouldn’t have told everyone, Marcello will get angry.”

She shrugged. She had work to do, her siblings, the housework, her mother, her father, and she didn’t stop to talk much. Now, as she had been since New Year’s Eve, she was occupied only with domestic things.