The Story of a New Name

21

When I saw Lila again, I realized immediately that she felt bad and tended to make me feel bad, too. We spent a morning at her house in an atmosphere that seemed to be playful. In fact she insisted, with growing spitefulness, that I try on all her clothes, even though they didn’t fit me. The game became torture. She was taller and thinner; everything of hers that I put on made me look ridiculous. But she wouldn’t admit it, she said all you need is an adjustment here or there, and yet her mood darkened as she gazed at me, as if my appearance offended her.

At a certain point she exclaimed that’s enough: she looked as if she had seen a ghost. Then she pulled herself together, and, assuming a frivolous tone, told me that a couple of nights earlier she had gone to have ice cream with Pasquale and Ada.

I was in my slip, helping her put the clothes back on the hangers.

“With Pasquale and Ada?”

“Yes.”

“And Stefano, too?”

“Just me.”

“Did they invite you?”

“No, I asked them.”

And, as though she wanted to surprise me, she added that she hadn’t confined herself to that brief visit to the old world of her girlhood: the next day she had gone to have a pizza with Enzo and Carmela.

“Also by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And what does Stefano say?”

She made a grimace of indifference. “Being married doesn’t mean leading the life of an old lady. If he wants to come with me, fine; if he’s too tired in the evening, I go out by myself.”

“How was it?”

“I had fun.”

I hoped she couldn’t read the disappointment in my face. We saw each other frequently, she could have said: Tonight I’m going out with Ada, Pasquale, Enzo, Carmela, do you want to come? Instead she had said nothing, she had arranged and managed those outings by herself, in secret, as if they had been not our friends forever but only hers. And now she was telling me in detail, with an air of satisfaction, everything they had said: Ada was worried, Melina ate almost nothing and threw up whatever she did eat, Pasquale was anxious about his mother, Giuseppina, who couldn’t sleep, felt a heaviness in her legs, had palpitations, and when she returned from visiting her husband in prison wept inconsolably. I listened. I noticed that, more than usual, she had an involved way of talking. She chose emotionally charged words, she described Melina Cappuccio and Giuseppina Peluso as if their bodies had seized hers, imposing on it the same contracted or inflated forms, the same bad feelings. As she spoke, she touched her face, her breast, her stomach, her hips as if they were no longer hers, and showed that she knew everything about those women, down to the tiniest details, in order to prove that no one told me anything but told her everything, or, worse, in order to make me feel that I was wrapped in a fog, unable to see the suffering of the people around me. She spoke of Giuseppina as if she had kept up with her, despite the vortex of her engagement and marriage; she spoke of Melina as if the mother of Ada and Antonio had always been in her mind and she were thoroughly familiar with her madness. Then she went on to enumerate many other people in the neighborhood, people whom I hardly knew but whose histories she seemed to know, as if she had a sort of long-distance involvement in their lives. Finally she announced:

“I also had ice cream with Antonio.”

That name was a punch in the stomach.

“How is he?”

“Fine.”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“No, nothing.”

“When does he leave?”

“In September.”

“Marcello did nothing to help him.”

“It was predictable.”

Predictable? If it was predictable, I thought, that the Solaras would do nothing, why did you take me there? And why do you, who are married, now want to see your friends again, like that, by yourself? And why did you have ice cream with Antonio without telling me, knowing that he is my old boyfriend and that though he doesn’t want to see me anymore I would like to see him? Do you want revenge because I went driving with your husband and didn’t report to you a word of what we said to each other? I dressed nervously, mumbled that I had things to do, had to go.

“I have something else to tell you.”

In a serious voice she said that Rino, Marcello, and Michele had wanted Stefano to go to Piazza dei Martiri to see how well the shop was coming along, and that the three of them, amid sacks of cement and cans of paint and brushes, had pointed out the wall opposite the entrance and told him they were thinking of putting the enlargement of the photograph of her in her wedding dress there. Stefano had listened, then he had answered that certainly it would be a good advertisement for the shoes, but that it didn’t seem to him suitable. The three had insisted, he had said no to Marcello, no to Michele, and no to Rino as well. In other words I had won the bet: her husband had not given in to the Solaras.

I said, making an effort to appear enthusiastic, “See? Always saying mean things about poor Stefano. And instead I was right. Now you have to start studying.”

“Wait.”

“Wait for what? A bet is a bet and you lost.”

“Wait,” Lila repeated.

My bad mood got worse. She doesn’t know what she wants, I thought. She’s unhappy that she was wrong about her husband. Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe she appreciated Stefano’s refusal, but she expects a more ferocious clash of men around her image, and she’s disappointed because the Solaras weren’t insistent enough. I saw that she was lazily running a hand over her hip and along one leg, like a caress of farewell, and in her eyes appeared for a moment that mixture of suffering, fear, and disgust that I had noticed the night of Melina’s disappearance. I thought: and if, instead, she secretly wants her picture to be on display, enlarged, in the center of the city, and is sorry that Michele didn’t succeed in forcing it on Stefano? Why not, she wants to be first in everything, she’s made like that: the most beautiful, the most elegant, the wealthiest. Then I said to myself: above all, the most intelligent. And at the idea that Lila would really start studying again I felt a regret that discouraged me. Of course she would make up for all the years of school she had missed. Of course I would find her beside me, elbow to elbow, taking the high-school graduation exam. And I realized that the prospect was intolerable. But it was even more intolerable to discover that feeling in myself. I was ashamed and immediately started telling her how wonderful it would be if we studied together again, and insisting that she should find out how to proceed. She shrugged, so I said, “Now I really have to go.”

This time she didn’t stop me.