The Neapolitan Novels

41.

Everything happened in little more than a month and Lila in the end seemed to me happy. She had found an outlet for the shoe project, she had given an opportunity to her brother and the whole family, she had gotten rid of Marcello Solara and had become the fiancée of the most respectable wealthy young man in the neighborhood. What more could she want? Nothing. She had everything. When school began again I felt the dreariness of it more than usual. I was reabsorbed by the work and, so that the teachers would not find me unprepared, I went back to studying until eleven and setting my alarm for five-thirty. I saw Lila less and less.

On the other hand, my relationship with Stefano’s brother, Alfonso, solidified. Although he had worked in the grocery all summer, he had passed the makeup exams successfully, with seven in each of the subjects: Latin, Greek, and English. Gino, who had hoped that he would fail so that they could repeat the first year of high school together, was disappointed. When he realized that the two of us, now in our second year, went to school and came home together every day, he grew even more bitter and became mean. He no longer spoke to me, his former girlfriend, or to Alfonso, his former deskmate, even though he was in the classroom next to ours and we often met in the hallways, as well as in the streets of the neighborhood. But he did worse: soon I heard that he was telling nasty stories about us. He said that I was in love with Alfonso and touched him during class even though Alfonso didn’t respond, because, as he knew very well, he who had sat next to him for a year, he didn’t like girls, he preferred boys. I reported this to Alfonso, expecting him to beat up Gino, as was the rule in such cases, but he confined himself to saying, contemptuously, in dialect, “Everyone knows that he’s the fag.”

Alfonso was a pleasant, fortunate discovery. He gave an impression of cleanliness and good manners. Although his features were very similar to Stefano’s, the same eyes, same nose, same mouth; although his body, as he grew, was taking the same form, the large head, legs slightly short in relation to the torso; although in his gaze and in his gestures he manifested the same mildness, I felt in him a total absence of the determination that was concealed in every cell of Stefano’s body, and that in the end, I thought, reduced his courtesy to a sort of hiding place from which to jump out unexpectedly. Alfonso was soothing, that type of human being, rare in the neighborhood, from whom you know you needn’t expect any cruelty. We didn’t talk a lot, but we didn’t feel uncomfortable. He always had what I needed and if he didn’t he hurried to get it. He loved me without any tension and I felt quietly affectionate toward him. The first day of school we ended up sitting at the same desk, a thing that was audacious at the time, and even if the other boys made fun of him because he was always near me and the girls asked me continuously if he was my boyfriend, neither of us decided to change places. He was a trusted person. If he saw that I needed my own time, he either waited for me at a distance or said goodbye and went off. If he realized that I wanted him to stay with me, he stayed even if he had other things to do.

I used him to escape Nino Sarratore. When, for the first time after Ischia, we saw each other from a distance, Nino came toward me in a friendly way, but I dismissed him with a few cold remarks. And yet I liked him so much, if his tall slender figure merely appeared I blushed and my heart beat madly. And yet now that Lila was really engaged, officially engaged—and to such a fiancé, a man of twenty-two, not a boy: kind, decisive, courageous—it was more urgent than ever that I, too, should have an enviable fiancé and so rebalance our relationship. It would be lovely to go out as four, Lila with her betrothed, I with mine. Of course, Nino didn’t have a red convertible. Of course, he was a student in the fourth year of high school, and thus didn’t have a lira. But he was a lot taller than I, while Stefano was an inch or so shorter than Lila. And he spoke a literary Italian, when he wanted to. And he read and discussed everything and was aware of the great questions of the human condition, while Stefano lived shut off in his grocery, spoke almost exclusively in dialect, had not gone past the vocational school, at the cash register had his mamma, who did the accounts better than he, and, though he had a good character, was sensitive above all to the profitable turnover of money. Yet, although passion consumed me, although I saw clearly the prestige I would acquire in Lila’s eyes if I were bound to him, for the second time since seeing him and falling in love I felt incapable of establishing a relationship. The motive seemed to me much stronger than that of childhood. Seeing him brought immediately to mind Donato Sarratore, even if they didn’t resemble each other at all. And the disgust, the rage aroused by the memory of what his father had done without my being able to repulse him extended to Nino. Of course, I loved him. I longed to talk to him, walk with him, and at times I thought, racking my brains: Why do you behave like that, the father isn’t the son, the son isn’t the father, behave as Stefano did with the Pelusos. But I couldn’t. As soon as I imagined kissing him, I felt the mouth of Donato, and a wave of pleasure and revulsion mixed father and son into a single person.

An alarming episode occurred, which made the situation more complicated. Alfonso and I had got into the habit of walking home. We went to Piazza Nazionale and then reached Corso Meridionale. It was a long walk, but we talked about homework, teachers, classmates, and it was pleasant. Then one day, just beyond the ponds, at the start of the stradone, I turned and seemed to see on the railway embankment, in his conductor’s uniform, Donato Sarratore. I started with rage and horror, and immediately turned away. When I looked again, he was gone.

Whether that apparition was true or false, the sound my heart made in my chest, like a gunshot, stayed with me, and, I don’t know why, I thought of the passage in Lila’s letter about the sound that the copper pot had made when it burst. That same sound returned the next day, at the mere sight of Nino. Then, frightened, I took cover in affection for Alfonso, and at both the start and the end of school I kept near him. As soon as the lanky figure of the boy I loved appeared, I turned to the younger son of Don Achille as if I had the most urgent things to tell him, and we walked away chattering.

It was, in other words, a confusing time, I would have liked to be attached to Nino and yet I was careful to stay glued to Alfonso. In fact, out of fear that he would get bored and leave me for other company, I behaved more and more kindly toward him, sometimes I even spoke sweetly. But as soon as I realized that I risked encouraging his liking me I changed my tone. What if he misunderstands and says he loves me? I worried. It would have been embarrassing, I would have had to reject him: Lila, my contemporary, was engaged to a man, Stefano, and it would be humiliating to be with a boy, the little brother of her fiancé. Yet my mind swirled without restraint, I daydreamed. Once, as I walked home along Corso Meridionale, with Alfonso beside me like a squire escorting me through the thousand dangers of the city, it seemed to me right that the duty had fallen to two Carraccis, Stefano and him, to protect, if in different forms, Lila and me from the blackest evil in the world, from that very evil that we had experienced for the first time going up the stairs that led to their house, when we went to retrieve the dolls that their father had stolen.