The Story of a New Name

9

She was still in that state when, there on the stairs that led to the house of her mother-in-law, I took off her glasses, unwound her scarf. The skin around her eye had a yellowish color, and her lower lip was a purple stain with fiery red stripes.

To her friends and relatives she said that she had fallen on the rocks in Amalfi on a beautiful sunny morning, when she and her husband had taken a boat to a beach just at the foot of a yellow wall. During the engagement lunch for her brother and Pinuccia she had used, in telling that lie, a sarcastic tone and they had all sarcastically believed her, especially the women, who knew what had to be said when the men who loved them and whom they loved beat them severely. Besides, there was no one in the neighborhood, especially of the female sex, who did not think that she had needed a good thrashing for a long time. So the beatings did not cause outrage, and in fact sympathy and respect for Stefano increased — there was someone who knew how to be a man.

But when I saw her so battered, my heart leaped to my throat, I embraced her. And when she said she hadn’t come to visit because she didn’t want me to see her in that state, tears came to my eyes. The story of her honeymoon, as the photonovels put it, although stripped down, almost cold, made me angry, pained me. And yet, I have to admit, I also felt a tenuous pleasure. I was content to discover that Lila now needed help, maybe protection, and that admission of fragility not toward the neighborhood but toward me moved me. I felt that the distances had unexpectedly gotten shorter again and I was tempted to tell her right away that I had decided to quit school, that school was useless, that I didn’t have the right qualities. It seemed to me that the news would comfort her.

But her mother-in-law looked out over the banister on the top floor and called her. Lila ended her story with a few hurried sentences, she said that Stefano had tricked her, that he was just like his father.

“You remember that Don Achille gave us money instead of the dolls?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“We shouldn’t have taken it.”

“We bought Little Women.”

“We were wrong: ever since that moment I’ve been wrong about everything.”

She wasn’t upset, she was sad. She put her dark glasses back on, she reknotted the scarf. I was pleased about that we (we shouldn’t have taken it, we were wrong), but the abrupt transition to the I annoyed me: I have been wrong about everything. We, I would have liked to correct her, always we, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that she was trying to comprehend her new condition, and that she urgently needed to know what she could hold on to in order to confront it. Before starting up the flight of stairs she asked, “Would you like to come and study at my house?”

“When?”

“This afternoon, tomorrow, every day.”

“Stefano will be annoyed.”

“If he is the master, I am the master’s wife.”

“I don’t know, Lila.”

“I’ll give you a room, I’ll shut you in.”

“What’s the point?”

She shrugged.

“To know that you’re there.”

I didn’t say yes or no. I went off, and wandered through the city as usual. Lila was sure that I would never quit school. She had assigned me the role of the friend with glasses and pimples, always bent over her books, smart in school, and she couldn’t even imagine that I might change. But I didn’t want that role anymore. It seemed to me that, thanks to the humiliation of the unpublished article, I had thoroughly understood my inadequacy. Even though Nino was born and had grown up like Lila and me in that wretched outlying neighborhood, he was able to use school with intelligence, I was not. So stop deluding myself, stop striving. Accept your lot, as Carmela, Ada, Gigliola, and, in her way, Lila herself have long since done. I didn’t go to her house that afternoon or the following ones, and I continued to skip school, tormenting myself.

One morning I went wandering not far from the school, along Via Veterinaria, behind the Botanic Garden. I thought of the conversations I had had recently with Antonio: he was hoping to avoid military service, as the son of a widowed mother and the sole support of the family; he wanted to ask for a raise in the shop, and also save so that he could take over the management of a gas pump along the stradone; we would get married, I would help out at the pump. The choice of a simple life, my mother would approve. I can’t always please Lila, I said to myself. But how hard it was to erase from my mind the ambitions inspired by school. At the time when classes were over, I went, almost without intending it, to the neighborhood of the school, and walked around there. I was afraid of being seen by the teachers, and yet, I realized, I wished them to see me. I wanted to be either branded irremediably as a no longer model student or recaptured by the rhythms of school and submit to the obligation to go back.

The first groups of students appeared. I heard someone calling me, it was Alfonso. He was waiting for Marisa, but she was late.

“Are you going together?” I asked, teasing.

“No, she’s the one who’s got a crush.”

“Liar.”

“You’re the liar, telling me you were sick, and look at you, you’re fine. Professor Galiani is always asking about you, I told her you had a bad fever.”

“I did, in fact.”

“Obviously.”

He was carrying his books, tied up with elastic, under his arm, his face was strained by the tension of the hours of school. Did Alfonso also conceal Don Achille, his father, in his breast, despite his delicate appearance? Is it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?

I asked him, “Did you see what your brother did to Lina?”

Alfonso was embarrassed. “Yes.”

“And you didn’t say anything to him?”

“You have to see what Lina did to him.”

“Would you be able to act the same way with Marisa?”

He laughed timidly. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you, because we talk, because we go to school together.”

At the moment, I didn’t understand: what did “I know you” mean, what did “we talk” and “we go to school together” mean? I saw Marisa at the end of the street, she was running because she was late.

“Your girlfriend’s coming,” I said.

He didn’t turn, he shrugged, he mumbled, “Come back to school, please.”

“I’m sick,” I repeated, and left.

I didn’t want to exchange even a hello with Nino’s sister, any sign that evoked him made me anxious. But Alfonso’s obscure words did me good, I turned them over in my mind as I walked. He had said that because he knew me, we talked to each other, we sat at the same desk, he would never impose his authority on a possible wife by beating her. He had expressed himself with a frank sincerity, he wasn’t afraid of attributing to me, even if in a confused way, the capacity to influence him, a male, to change his behavior. I was grateful to him for that tangled message, which consoled me and set in motion a reconciliation between me and myself. It doesn’t take much for a conviction that has become fragile to weaken to the point of giving way. The next day I forged my mother’s signature and returned to school. That evening, at the ponds, clinging to Antonio to escape the cold, I promised him: I’ll finish the school year and we’ll get married.