The Neapolitan Novels

55.

I also asked Antonio to go with me to Lila’s wedding, not to leave me alone, and maybe always to dance with me. I dreaded that day, I felt it as a definitive break, and I wanted someone there who would support me.

This request was to complicate life further. Lila had sent invitations to everyone. In the houses of the neighborhood the mothers, the grandmothers had been working for months to make dresses, to get hats and purses, to shop for a wedding present, I don’t know, a set of glasses, of plates, of silverware. It wasn’t so much for Lila that they made that effort; it was for Stefano, who was very decent, and allowed you to pay at the end of the month. But a wedding was, above all, an occasion where no one should make a bad showing, especially girls without fiancés, who there would have a chance of finding one and getting settled, marrying, in their turn, within a few years.

It was really for that last reason that I wanted Antonio to go with me. I had no intention of making the thing official—we were careful to keep our relationship absolutely hidden—but I wished to keep under control my anxiety about being attractive. I wanted, that day, to feel calm, tranquil, despite my glasses, the modest dress made by my mother, my old shoes, and at the same time think: I have everything a sixteen-year-old girl should have, I don’t need anything or anyone.

But Antonio didn’t take it like that. He loved me, he considered me the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him. He often asked aloud, with a hint of anguish straining under an appearance of amusement, how in the world I had chosen him, who was stupid and couldn’t put two words together. In fact, he couldn’t wait to appear at my parents’ house and make our relationship official. And so at that request of mine he must have thought that I had finally decided to let him come out of hiding, and he went into debt to buy a suit, in addition to what he was spending for the wedding gift, clothes for Ada and the other children, a presentable appearance for Melina.

I didn’t notice anything. I struggled on, between school, the urgent consultations whenever things got tangled up between Lila and her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, the pleasant nervousness about the article that I might see published at any time. I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print, and as I waited for that day I didn’t pay much attention to Antonio, who had got the idea of completing his wedding outfit with a pair of Cerullo shoes. Every so often he asked me, “Do you know what point they’ve reached?” I answered, “Ask Rino, Lila doesn’t know anything.”

It was true. In November the Cerullos summoned Stefano without bothering to show the shoes to Lila first, even though she was still living at home with them. Instead, Stefano showed up for the occasion with his fiancée and Pinuccia, all three looking as if they had emerged from the television screen. Lila told me that, on seeing the shoes she had designed years earlier made real, she had felt a very violent emotion, as if a fairy had appeared and fulfilled a wish. The shoes really were as she had imagined them at the time. Even Pinuccia was amazed. She wanted to try on a pair she liked and she complimented Rino effusively, letting him understand that she considered him the true craftsman of those masterpieces of sturdy lightness, of dissonant harmony. The only one who seemed displeased was Stefano. He interrupted the warm greetings Lila was giving her father and brother and the workers, silenced the sugary voice of Pinuccia, who was congratulating Rino, raising an ankle to show him her extraordinarily shod foot, and, style after style, he criticized the modifications made to the original designs. He was especially persistent in the comparison between the man’s shoe as it had been made by Rino and Lila in secret from Fernando, and the same shoe as the father and son had refined it. “What’s this fringe, what are these stitches, what is this gilded pin?” he asked in annoyance. And no matter how Fernando explained all the modifications, for reasons of durability or to disguise some defect in the idea, Stefano was adamant. He said he had invested too much money to obtain ordinary shoes and not—precisely identical—Lila’s shoes.

The tension was extreme. Lila gently defended her father, she told her fiancé to let it go: her designs were the fantasies of a child, and surely the modifications were necessary, and, besides, were not so great. But Rino supported Stefano and the discussion went on for a long time. It broke off only when Fernando, utterly worn out, sat down in a corner and, looking at the pictures on the wall, said, “If you want the shoes for Christmas take them like that. If you want them exactly the way my daughter designed them, have someone else make them.”

Stefano gave in, Rino, too, gave in.

At Christmas the shoes appeared in the window, a window with the comet star made of cotton wool. I went by to see them: they were elegant objects, carefully finished: just to look at them gave an impression of wealth that did not accord with the humble shop window, with the desolate landscape outside, with the shop’s interior, all pieces of hide and leather and benches and awls and wooden forms and boxes of shoes piled up to the ceiling, waiting for customers. Even with Fernando’s modifications, they were the shoes of our childish dreams, not invented for the reality of the neighborhood.

In fact at Christmas not a single pair sold. Only Antonio appeared, asked Rino for a 44, tried it. Later he told me the pleasure he had had in feeling so well shod, imagining himself with me at the wedding, in his new suit, with those shoes on his feet. But when he asked the price and Rino told him, he was dumbstruck: “Are you crazy?” and when Rino said, “I’ll sell them to you on a monthly installment,” he responded, laughing, “Then I’ll buy a Lambretta.”