The Neapolitan Novels

47.

Everything returned abruptly to the usual track when the rumors about Lila reached Pasquale. It happened one Sunday, when Carmela, Enzo, Pasquale, Antonio, and I were walking along the stradone. Antonio said, “I hear that Marcello Solara is telling everyone that Lina was with him.”

Enzo didn’t blink. Pasquale immediately flared up: “Was how?”

Antonio was embarrassed by my and Carmela’s presence and said, “You understand.”

They moved away, to talk among themselves. I saw and heard that Pasquale was increasingly enraged, that Enzo was becoming physically more compact, as if he no longer had arms, legs, neck, as if he were a block of hard material. Why is it, I wondered, that they are so angry? Lila isn’t a sister of theirs or even a cousin. And yet they feel it’s their duty to be indignant, all three of them, more than Stefano, much more than Stefano, as if they were the true fiancés. Pasquale especially seemed ridiculous. He who only a short time before had said what he had said shouted, at one point, and we heard him clearly, with our own ears: “I’ll smash the face of that shit, calling her a whore. Even if Stefano allows it, I’m not going to allow it.” Then silence, they rejoined us, and we wandered aimlessly, I talking to Antonio, Carmela between her brother and Enzo. After a while they took us home. I saw them going off, Enzo, who was the shortest, in the middle, flanked by Antonio and Pasquale.

The next day and on those which followed there was a big uproar about the Solaras’ 1100. It had been demolished. Not only that: the two brothers had been savagely beaten, but they couldn’t say by whom. They swore they had been attacked on a dark street by at least ten people, men from outside the neighborhood. But Carmela and I knew very well that there were only three attackers, and we were worried. We waited for the inevitable reprisal, one day, two, three. But evidently things had been done right. Pasquale continued as a construction worker, Antonio as a mechanic, Enzo made his rounds with the cart. The Solaras, instead, for some time went around only on foot, battered, a little dazed, always with four or five of their friends. I admit that seeing them in that condition pleased me. I was proud of my friends. Along with Carmen and Ada I criticized Stefano and also Rino because they had acted as if nothing had happened. Then time passed, Marcello and Michele bought a green Giulietta and began to act like masters of the neighborhood again. Alive and well, bigger bullies than before. A sign that perhaps Lila was right: with people like that, you had to fight them by living a superior life, such as they couldn’t even imagine. While I was taking my exams in the second year of high school, she told me that in the spring, when she was barely sixteen and a half, she would be married.