The Neapolitan Novels

44.

In the role of fiancée, Lila was much envied and caused quite a lot of resentment. After all, her behavior had been irritating when she was a skinny little child, imagine now that she was a very fortunate young girl. She herself told me of an increasing hostility on the part of Stefano’s mother and, especially, Pinuccia. Their spiteful thoughts were stamped clearly on their faces. Who did the shoemaker’s daughter think she was? What evil potion had she made Stefano drink? How was it that as soon as she opened her mouth he opened his wallet? She wants to come and be mistress in our house?

If Maria confined herself to a surly silence, Pinuccia couldn’t contain herself, she exploded, speaking to her brother like this: “Why do you buy all those things for her, while for me you’ve never bought anything, and as soon as I buy something nice you criticize me, you say I’m wasting money?”

Stefano displayed his tranquil half smile and didn’t answer. But soon, in accord with his habit of accommodation, he began to give his sister presents, too. Thus a contest began between the two girls, they went to the hairdresser together, they bought the same dresses. This, however, only embittered Pinuccia the more. She wasn’t ugly, she was a few years older than us, maybe her figure was more developed, but there was no comparison between the effect made by any dress or object when Lila had it on and when Pinuccia wore it. It was her mother who realized this first. Maria, when she saw Lila and Pinuccia ready to go out, with the same hairstyle, in similar dresses, always found a way to digress and, by devious means, end up criticizing her future daughter-in-law, with false good humor, for something she had done days earlier—leaving the light on in the kitchen or the tap open after getting a glass of water. Then she turned the other way, as if she had a lot to do, and muttered, “Be home soon.”

We girls of the neighborhood soon had similar problems. On holidays Carmela, who still wanted to be called Carmen, and Ada and Gigliola started dressing up, without admitting it, without admitting it to themselves, in competition with Lila. Gigliola in particular, who worked in the pastry shop, and who, although she wasn’t officially with Michele Solara, bought and had him buy pretty things, just to show off on walks or in the car. But there was no contest, Lila seemed inaccessible, a dazzling figurine against the light.

At first we tried to keep her, to impose on her the old habits. We drew Stefano into our group, embraced him, coddled him, and he seemed pleased, and so one Saturday, perhaps impelled by his sympathy for Antonio and Ada, he said to Lila, “See if Lenuccia and Melina’s children will come and eat with us tomorrow evening.” By “us” he meant the two of them plus Pinuccia and Rino, who now liked to spend his free time with his future brother-in-law. We accepted, but it was a difficult evening. Ada, afraid of making a bad impression, borrowed a dress from Gigliola. Stefano and Rino chose not a pizzeria but a restaurant in Santa Lucia. Neither I nor Antonio nor Ada had ever been in a restaurant, it was something for rich people, and we were overcome by anxiety: how should we dress, what would it cost? While the four of them went in the Giardinetta, we took the bus to Piazza Plebiscito and walked the rest of the way. At the restaurant, they casually ordered many dishes, and we almost nothing, out of fear that the bill would be more than we could afford. We were almost silent the whole time, because Rino and Stefano talked, mainly about money, and never thought of involving even Antonio in their conversations. Ada, not resigned to marginality, tried all evening to attract Stefano’s attention by flirting outrageously, which upset her brother. Then, when it was time to pay, we discovered that Stefano had already taken care of the bill, and, while it didn’t bother Rino at all, Antonio went home in a rage, because although he was the same age as Stefano and Lila’s brother, although he worked as they did, he felt he had been treated like a pauper. But the most significant thing was that Ada and I, with different feelings, realized that in a public place, outside of our intimate, neighborhood relationship, we didn’t know what to say to Lila, how to treat her. She was so well dressed, so carefully made up, that she seemed right for the Giardinetta, the convertible, the restaurant in Santa Lucia, but physically unsuited now to go on the metro with us, to travel on the bus, to walk around the neighborhood, to get a pizza in Corso Garibaldi, to go to the parish cinema, to dance at Gigliola’s house.

That evening it became evident that Lila was changing her circumstances. In the days, the months, she became a young woman who imitated the models in the fashion magazines, the girls on television, the ladies she had seen walking on Via Chiaia. When you saw her, she gave off a glow that seemed a violent slap in the face of the poverty of the neighborhood. The girl’s body, of which there were still traces when we had woven the plot that led to her engagement to Stefano, was soon banished to dark lands. In the light of the sun she was instead a young woman who, when on Sundays she went out on the arm of her fiancé, seemed to apply the terms of their agreement as a couple, and Stefano, with his gifts, seemed to wish to demonstrate to the neighborhood that, if Lila was beautiful, she could always be more so; and she seemed to have discovered the joy of dipping into the inexhaustible well of her beauty, and to feel and show that no shape, however beautifully drawn, could contain her conclusively, since a new hairstyle, a new dress, a new way of making up her eyes or her mouth were only more expansive outlines that dissolved the preceding ones. Stefano seemed to seek in her the most palpable symbol of the future of wealth and power that he intended; and she seemed to use the seal that he was placing on her to make herself, her brother, her parents, her other relatives safe from all that she had confusedly confronted and challenged since she was a child.

I still didn’t know anything about what she secretly called, in herself, after the bad experience of New Year’s, dissolving margins. But I knew the story of the exploded pot, it was always lying in ambush in some corner of my mind; I thought about it over and over again. And I remember that, one night at home, I reread the letter she had sent me on Ischia. How seductive was her way of talking about herself and how distant it seemed now. I had to acknowledge that the Lila who had written those words had disappeared. In the letter there was still the girl who had written The Blue Fairy, who had learned Latin and Greek on her own, who had consumed half of Maestro Ferraro’s library, even the girl who had drawn the shoes framed and hanging in the shoe store. But in the life of every day I no longer saw her, no longer heard her. The tense, aggressive Cerullo was as if immolated. Although we both continued to live in the same neighborhood, although we had had the same childhood, although we were both living our fifteenth year, we had suddenly ended up in two different worlds. I was becoming, as the months ran by, a sloppy, disheveled, spectacled girl bent over tattered books that gave off a moldy odor, volumes bought at great sacrifice at the secondhand store or obtained from Maestra Oliviero. She went around on Stefano’s arm in the clothes of an actress or a princess, her hair styled like a diva’s.

I looked at her from the window, and felt that her earlier shape had broken, and I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter, of the cracked and crumpled copper. It was an image that I used all the time, whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.