The Story of a New Name

39

I was tempted to join her, I immediately changed my mind. She must be very upset and would surely be mean to me, which would make things even worse between us. I decided to return to my table when Fernando, her father, came up to me and asked timidly if I’d like to dance.

I didn’t dare refuse, we danced a waltz in silence. He led me confidently around the room, among the tipsy couples, holding my hand too tight with his sweaty hand. His wife must have entrusted him with the task of telling me something important, but he couldn’t get up his courage. Finally, at the end of the waltz, he muttered, addressing me, surprisingly, with formality: “If it’s not too much trouble for you, talk to Lina a little, her mother is worried.” Then he added awkwardly, “When you need shoes, come by, don’t stand on ceremony,” and he returned quickly to his table.

That hint at a kind of reward for my possibly devoting time to Lila bothered me. I asked Alfonso and Marisa to go, which they were happy to do. I felt Nunzia’s gaze on me right up until we left the restaurant.

As the days passed, I began to lose confidence. I had thought that working in a bookstore meant having a lot of books available to me and time to read them, but I was unlucky. The owner treated me like a servant, he couldn’t stand my being still for a moment: he forced me to unload boxes, pile them up, empty them, arrange the new books, rearrange the old ones, dust them, and he sent me up and down a ladder just so he could look under my skirt. Besides, Armando, after that first foray when he had seemed so friendly, hadn’t showed up again. And Nino hadn’t reappeared, either with Nadia or by himself. Had their interest in me been so short-lived? I began to feel solitude, boredom. The heat, the work, disgust at the bookseller’s looks and his coarse remarks depressed me. The hours dragged. What was I doing in that dark cave, while along the sidewalk boys and girls filed past on their way to the mysterious university building, a place where I would almost certainly never go? Where was Nino? Had he gone to Ischia to study? He had left me the review, his article, and I had studied them as if for an examination, but would he ever come back to examine me? Where had I gone wrong? Had I been too reserved? Was he expecting me to seek him out and for that reason did not look for me? Should I talk to Alfonso, get in touch with Marisa, ask her about her brother? And why? Nino had a girlfriend, Nadia: What point was there in asking his sister where he was, what he was doing. I would make myself ridiculous.

Day by day the sense of myself that had so unexpectedly expanded after the party diminished, I felt dispirited. Get up early, hurry to Mezzocannone, slave all day, go home tired, the thousands of words learned in school packed into my head, unusable. I got depressed not only when I recalled conversations with Nino but also when I thought of the summers at the Sea Garden with the stationer’s daughters, with Antonio. How stupidly our affair had ended, he was the only person who had truly loved me, there would never be anyone else. In bed at night, I recalled the odor of his skin, the meetings at the ponds, our kissing and petting at the old canning factory.

I was in this state of discouragement when, one evening, after dinner, Carmen, Ada, and Pasquale, who had one hand bandaged because he had injured it at work, came looking for me. We got ice cream, and ate it in the gardens. Carmen, coming straight to the point, asked me, somewhat aggressively, why I never stopped by the grocery anymore. I said I was working at Mezzocannone and didn’t have time. Ada said, coldly, that if one is attached to a person one finds the time, but if that’s how I was going to be, never mind. I asked, “Be how?” and she answered, “You have no feelings, just look how you treated my brother.” I reminded her with an angry snap that it was her brother who had left me, and she replied, “Yes, anyone who believes that is lucky: there are people who leave and people who know how to be left.” Carmen agreed: “Also friendships,” she said. “You think they break off because of one person and instead, if you look hard, it’s the other person’s fault.” At that point I got upset, I declared, “Listen, if Lina and I aren’t friends anymore, it’s not my fault.” Here Pasquale intervened, he said, “Lenù, it’s not important whose fault it is, it’s important for us to support Lina.” He brought up the story of his bad teeth, of how she had helped him, he talked about the money she still gave Carmen under the counter, and how she also sent money to Antonio, who, even if I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, was having a bad time in the Army. I tried cautiously to ask what was happening to my old boyfriend and they told me, in different tones of voice, some hostile, some less, that he had had a nervous breakdown, that he was ill, but that he was tough, he wouldn’t give in, he would make it. Lina, on the other hand.

“What’s wrong with Lina?”

“They want to take her to a doctor.”

“Who wants to take her?”

“Stefano, Pinuccia, relatives.”

“Why?”

“To find out why she’s only gotten pregnant once and then never again.”

“And she?”

“She acts like a madwoman, she doesn’t want to go.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “What can I do?”

“You take her.”