The Neapolitan Novels

25.

So it was. For the rest of the term Lila was totally uninterested in what I did in school. And when I asked her what books she was taking out of the library, what she was reading, she answered, spitefully, “I don’t take them out anymore, books give me a headache.”

Whereas I studied, reading now was like a pleasant habit. But I soon had to observe that, since Lila had stopped pushing me, anticipating me in my studies and my reading, school, and even Maestro Ferraro’s library, had stopped being a kind of adventure and had become only a thing that I knew how to do well and was much praised for.

I realized this clearly on two occasions.

Once I went to get some books out of the library. My card was dense with borrowings and returns, and the teacher first congratulated me on my diligence, then asked me about Lila, showing regret that she and her whole family had stopped taking out books. It’s hard to explain why, but that regret made me suffer. It seemed to be the sign of a true interest in Lila, something much stronger than the compliments for my discipline as a constant reader. It occurred to me that if Lila had taken out just a single book a year, on that book she would have left her imprint and the teacher would have felt it the moment she returned it, while I left no mark, I embodied only the persistence with which I added volume to volume in no particular order.

The other circumstance had to do with school exercises. The literature teacher, Gerace, gave back, corrected, our Italian papers (I still remember the subject: “The Various Phases of the Tragedy of Dido”), and while he generally confined himself to saying a word or two to justify the eight or nine I usually got, this time he praised me eloquently in front of the class and revealed only at the end that he had given me a ten. At the end of the class he called me into the corridor, truly impressed by how I had treated the subject, and when the religion teacher came by he stopped him and summarized my paper enthusiastically. A few days passed and I realized that Gerace had not limited himself to the priest but had circulated that paper of mine among the other teachers, and not only in my section. Some teachers in the upper grades now smiled at me in the corridors, or even made comments. For example, Professor Galiani, a woman who was highly regarded and yet avoided, because she was said to be a Communist, and because with one or two comments she could dismantle any argument that did not have a solid foundation, stopped me in the hall and spoke with particular admiration about the idea, central to my paper, that if love is exiled from cities, their good nature becomes an evil nature. She asked me:

“What does ‘a city without love’ mean to you?”

“A people deprived of happiness.”

“Give me an example.”

I thought of the discussions I’d had with Lila and Pasquale in September and I suddenly felt that they were a true school, truer than the one I went to every day.

“Italy under Fascism, Germany under Nazism, all of us human beings in the world today.”

She scrutinized me with increased interest. She said that I wrote very well, she recommended some reading, she offered to lend me books. Finally, she asked me what my father did, I answered, “He’s a porter at the city hall.” She went off with her head down.

The interest shown by Professor Galiani naturally filled me with pride, but it had no great consequence; the school routine returned to normal. As a result, even the fact that, in my first year, I was a student with a small reputation for being clever soon seemed to me unimportant. In the end what did it prove? It proved how fruitful it had been to study with Lila and talk to her, to have her as a goad and support as I ventured into the world outside the neighborhood, among the things and persons and landscapes and ideas of books. Of course, I said to myself, the essay on Dido is mine, the capacity to formulate beautiful sentences comes from me; of course, what I wrote about Dido belongs to me; but didn’t I work it out with her, didn’t we excite each other in turn, didn’t my passion grow in the warmth of hers? And that idea of the city without love, which the teachers had liked so much, hadn’t it come to me from Lila, even if I had developed it, with my own ability? What should I deduce from this?

I began to expect new praise that would prove my autonomous virtuosity. But Gerace, when he gave another assignment on the Queen of Carthage (“Aeneas and Dido: An Encounter Between Two Refugees”), was not enthusiastic, he gave me only an eight. Still, from Professor Galiani I got cordial nods of greeting and the pleasant discovery that she was the Latin and Greek teacher of Nino Sarratore. I urgently needed some reinforcements of attention and admiration, and hoped that maybe they would come from him. I hoped that, if his professor of literature had praised me in public, let’s say in his class, he would remember me and finally would speak to me. But nothing happened, I continued to glimpse him on the way out, on the way in, always with that absorbed expression, never a glance. Once I even followed him along Corso Garibaldi and Via Casanova, hoping he would notice me and say: Hello, I see we’re taking the same route, I’ve heard a lot about you. But he walked quickly, eyes down, and never turned. I got tired, I despised myself. Depressed, I turned onto Corso Novara and went home.

I kept on day after day, committed to asserting, with increasing thoroughness, to the teachers, to my classmates, to myself my application and diligence. But inside I felt a growing sense of solitude, I felt I was learning without energy. I tried to report to Lila Maestro Ferraro’s regret, I told her to go back to the library. I also mentioned to her how well the assignment on Dido had been received, without telling her what I had written but letting her know that it was also her success. She listened to me without interest, maybe she no longer even remembered what we had said about that character, she had other problems. As soon as I left her an opening she told me that Marcello Solara had not resigned himself like Pasquale but continued to pursue her. If she went out to do the shopping he followed her, without bothering her, to Stefano’s store, to Enzo’s cart, just to look at her. If she went to the window she found him at the corner, waiting for her to appear. This constancy made her anxious. She was afraid that her father might notice, and, especially, that Rino might notice. She was frightened by the possibility that one of those stories of men would begin, in which they end up fighting all the time—there were plenty of those in the neighborhood. “What do I have?” she said. She saw herself as scrawny, ugly: why had Marcello become obsessed with her? “Is there something wrong with me?” she said. “I make people do the wrong thing.”

Now she often repeated that idea. The conviction of having done more harm than good for her brother had solidified. “All you have to do is look at him,” she said. Even with the disappearance of the Cerullo shoe factory project, Rino was gripped by the mania of getting rich like the Solaras, like Stefano, and even more, and he couldn’t resign himself to the dailiness of the work in the shop. He said, trying to rekindle her old enthusiasm, “We’re intelligent, Lina, together no one can stop us, tell me what we should do.” He also wanted to buy a car, a television, and he detested Fernando, who didn’t understand the importance of these things. But when Lila showed that she wouldn’t support him anymore, he treated her worse than a servant. Maybe he didn’t even know that he had changed for the worse, but she, who saw him every day, was alarmed. She said to me once, “Have you seen that when people wake up they’re ugly, all disfigured, can’t see?”

Rino in her view had become like that.