The Neapolitan Novels

3.

At first the events disappointed me. I sat with Alfonso and Marisa, paying no attention to their conversation. I waited for signs of revolt, but nothing happened. To be inside Lila’s head was, as usual, difficult: I didn’t hear her shouting, I didn’t hear her threatening. Stefano reappeared half an hour later, very friendly. He had changed his clothes; the white patch on his forehead and around his eyes had vanished. He strolled about among friends and relatives waiting for his wife to arrive, and when she returned to the hall not in her wedding dress but in her traveling outfit, a pastel-blue suit, with very pale buttons, and a blue hat, he joined her immediately. Lila distributed sugared almonds to the children, taking them from a crystal bowl with a silver spoon, then she moved among the tables handing out the wedding favors, first to her relatives, then to Stefano’s. She ignored the entire Solara family and even her brother Rino, who asked her with an anxious half-smile: Don’t you love me anymore? She didn’t answer, but gave the wedding favor to Pinuccia. She had an absent gaze, her cheekbones appeared more prominent than usual. When she got to me, she distractedly handed me, without even a smile of complicity, the white tulle-wrapped ceramic basket full of sugared almonds.

The Solaras were irritated by that discourtesy, but Stefano made up for it, embracing them one by one, with a pleasant, soothing expression, and murmuring, “She’s tired, be patient.”

He kissed Rino, too, on the cheeks, but his brother-in-law gave a sign of displeasure, and I heard him say, “It’s not tiredness, Ste’, she was born twisted and I’m sorry for you.”

Stefano answered seriously, “Twisted things get straightened out.”

Afterward I saw him hurry after his wife, who was already at the door, while the orchestra spewed drunken sounds and people crowded around for the final goodbyes.

No rupture, then, we would not run away together through the streets of the world. I imagined the newlyweds, handsome, elegant, getting into the convertible. Soon they would be on the Amalfi coast, in a luxurious hotel, and every bloodcurdling insult would have changed into a bad mood that was easily erased. No second thoughts. Lila had detached herself from me definitively and—it suddenly seemed to me—the distance was in fact greater than I had imagined. She wasn’t only married, her submission to conjugal rites would not be limited merely to sleeping with a man every night. There was something I hadn’t understood, which at that moment seemed to me obvious. Lila—bowing to the fact that some business arrangement or other between her husband and Marcello had been sealed by her girlish labors—had admitted that she cared about him more than any other person or thing. If she had already yielded, if she had already swallowed that insult, her bond with Stefano must truly be strong. She loved him, she loved him like the girls in the photonovels. For her whole life she would sacrifice to him every quality of her own, and he wouldn’t even be aware of the sacrifice, he would be surrounded by the wealth of feeling, intelligence, imagination that were hers, without knowing what to do with them, he would ruin them. I, I thought, am not capable of loving anyone like that, not even Nino, all I know is how to get along with books. And for a fraction of a second I saw myself identical to a dented bowl in which my sister Elisa used to feed a stray cat, until he disappeared, and the bowl stood empty, gathering dust on the landing. At that point, with a sharp sense of anguish, I felt sure that I had ventured too far. I must go back, I said to myself, I should be like Carmela, Ada, Gigliola, Lila herself. Accept the neighborhood, expel pride, punish presumption, stop humiliating the people who love me. When Alfonso and Marisa went off to meet Nino, I, making a large detour to avoid my mother, joined my boyfriend on the terrace.

My dress was too light: the sun had gone, it was beginning to get cold. As soon as he saw me, Antonio lit a cigarette and pretended to look at the sea again.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Go yourself, with Sarratore’s son.”

“I want to go with you.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Why?”

“Because if he wanted you, you would leave me here without so much as a goodbye.”

It was true, but it enraged me that he said it so openly, heedless of the words. I hissed, “If you don’t understand that I’m here running the risk that at any moment my mother might show up and start hitting me because of you, then it means that you’re thinking only of yourself, that I don’t matter to you at all.”

He heard scarcely any dialect in my voice, he noted the long sentence, the subjunctives, and he lost his temper. He threw away the cigarette, grabbed me by the wrist with a barely controlled force and cried—a cry locked in his throat—that he was there for me, only for me, that it was I who had told him to stay near me in the church and at the celebration, yes, I, and you made me swear, he gasped, swear, you said, that you won’t ever leave me alone, and so I had a suit made, and I’m deep in debt to Signora Solara, and to please you, to do as you asked, I didn’t spend even a minute with my mother or my sisters and brothers: and what is my reward, my reward is that you treat me like shit, you talk the whole time to the poet’s son and humiliate me in front of my friends, you make me look ridiculous, because to you I’m no one, because you’re so educated and I’m not, because I don’t understand the things you say, and it’s true, it’s very true that I don’t understand you, but God damn it, Lenù, look at me, look me in the face: you think you can order me around, you think I’m not capable of saying That’s enough, and yet you’re wrong, you know everything, but you don’t know that if you go out of that door with me now, if now I tell you O.K. and we go out, but then I discover that you see that jerk Nino Sarratore at school, and who knows where else, I’ll kill you, Lenù, so think about it, leave me here this minute, he said in despair, leave me, because it’s better for you, and meanwhile he looked at me, his eyes red and very large, and uttered the words with his mouth wide open, shouting at me without shouting, his nostrils flaring, black, and in his face such suffering that I thought Maybe he’s hurting himself inside, because the words, shouted in his throat like that, in his chest, but without exploding in the air, are like bits of sharp iron piercing his lungs and his pharynx.

I had a confused need for that aggression. The vise on my wrist, the fear that he would hit me, that river of painful words ended by consoling me: it seemed to me that at least he valued me.

“You’re hurting me,” I muttered.

He slowly relaxed his grip, but remained staring at me with his mouth open. The skin of my wrist was turning purple, giving him weight and authority, anchoring me to him.

“What do you choose?” he asked.

“I want to stay with you,” I said, but sullenly.

He closed his mouth, his eyes filled with tears, he looked at the sea to give himself time to suppress them.

Soon afterward we were in the street. We didn’t wait for Pasquale, Enzo, the girls, we didn’t say goodbye to anyone. The most important thing was not to be seen by my mother, so we slipped away on foot; by now it was dark. For a while we walked beside each other without touching, then Antonio hesitantly put an arm around my shoulders. He wanted me to understand that he expected to be forgiven, as if he were the guilty one. Because he loved me, he had decided to consider the hours that, right before his eyes, I had spent with Nino, seducing and seduced, a time of hallucinations.

“Did I leave a bruise?” he asked, trying to take my wrist.

I didn’t answer. He grasped my shoulder with his broad hand, I made a movement of annoyance that immediately caused him to relax his grip. He waited, I waited. When he tried again to send out that signal of surrender, I put an arm around his waist.