The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (13 page)

I couldn’t contain myself, I asked right away how Nino had done on his graduation exams. She made a face of disgust.

“All A’s and A-minuses. As soon as he found out the results he went off on his own to England, without a lira. He says he’ll find a job there and stay until he learns English.”

“Then?”

“Then I don’t know, maybe he’ll enroll in economy and business.”

I had a thousand other questions, I even looked for a way to ask who the girl was who waited outside school, and if he had really gone alone or in fact with her, when Alfonso said, embarrassed, “Lina’s here, too.” Then he added, “Antonio brought us in the car.”

Antonio?

Alfonso must have noticed how my expression changed, the flush that was spreading over my face, the jealous amazement in my eyes. He smiled, and said quickly, “Stefano had some work to do about the counters in the new grocery and couldn’t come. But Lina was extremely eager to see you, she has something to tell you, and so she asked Antonio if he would take us.”

“Yes, she has something urgent to tell you,” Marisa said emphatically, clapping her hands gleefully to let me know that she already knew the thing.

What thing? Judging from Marisa, it seemed good. Maybe Lila had soothed Antonio and he wanted to be with me again. Maybe the Solaras had finally roused their acquaintances at the recruiting office and Antonio didn’t have to go. These hypotheses came to mind immediately. But when the two appeared I eliminated both right away. Clearly Antonio was there only because obeying Lila gave meaning to his empty Sunday, only because to be her friend seemed to him a piece of luck and a necessity. But his expression was still unhappy, his eyes frightened, and he greeted me coldly. I asked about his mother, but he gave me scarcely any news. He looked around uneasily and immediately dived into the water with the girls, who welcomed him warmly. As for Lila, she was pale, without lipstick, her gaze hostile. She didn’t seem to have anything urgent to tell me. She sat on the concrete, picked up the book I was reading, leafed through it without a word.

Marisa, in the face of those silences, became ill at ease; she tried to make a show of enthusiasm for everything in the world, then she got flustered and she, too, went to swim. Alfonso chose a place as far from us as possible and, sitting motionless in the sun, concentrated on the bathers, as if the sight of naked people going in and out of the water were utterly absorbing.

“Who gave you this book?” Lila asked.

“My professor of Latin and Greek.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it would interest you.”

“Do you know what is of interest to me and what isn’t?”

I immediately resorted to a conciliatory tone, but I also felt a need to brag.

“As soon as I finish I’ll lend it to you. These are books that the professor gives the good students to read. Nino reads them, too.”

“Who is Nino?”

Did she do it on purpose? Did she pretend not even to remember his name in order to diminish him in my eyes?

“The one in the wedding film, Marisa’s brother, Sarratore’s oldest son.”

“The ugly guy you like?”

“I told you that I don’t like him anymore. But he does great things.”

“What?”

“Now, for instance, he’s in England. He’s working, traveling, learning to speak English.”

I was excited merely by summarizing Marisa’s words. I said to Lila, “Imagine if you and I could do things like that. Travel. Work as waiters to support ourselves. Learn to speak English better than the English. Why can he be free to do that and we can’t?”

“Did he finish school?”

“Yes, he got his diploma. Afterward, though, he’s going to do a difficult course at the university.”

“Is he smart?”

“As smart as you.”

“I don’t go to school.”

“Yes, but: you lost the bet and now you have to go back to books.”

“Stop it, Lenù.”

“Stefano won’t let you?”

“There’s the new grocery, I’m supposed to manage it.”

“You’ll study in the grocery.”

“No.”

“You promised. You said we’d get our diploma together.”

“No.”

“Why?”

Lila ran her hand back and forth over the cover of the book, ironing it.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. And without waiting for me to react she muttered, “It’s so hot,” left the book, went to the edge of the concrete, hurled herself without hesitation into the water, yelling at Antonio, who was playing and splashing with Marisa and the children, “Tonì, save me!”

She flew for a few seconds, arms wide, then clumsily hit the surface of the water. She didn’t know how to swim.

In the days that followed, Lila started on a period of feverish activity. She began with the new grocery, involving herself as if it were the most important thing in the world. She woke up early, before Stefano. She threw up, made coffee, threw up again. He had become very solicitous, he wanted to drive her, but Lila refused, she said she wanted to walk, and she went out in the cool air of the morning, before the heat exploded, along the deserted streets, past the newly constructed buildings, most of them still empty, to the store that was being fitted out. She pulled up the shutter, washed the paint-splattered floor, waited for the workers and suppliers who were delivering scales, slicers, and furnishings, gave orders on where to place them, moved things around herself, trying out new, more efficient arrangements. Large threatening men, rough-mannered boys were ordered about and submitted to her whims without protesting. Since she had barely finished giving an order when she undertook some other heavy job, they cried in apprehension: Signora Carracci, and did all they could to help her.

Lila, in spite of the heat, which sapped her energy, did not confine herself to the shop in the new neighborhood. Sometimes she went with her sister-in-law to the small work site in Piazza dei Martiri, where Michele generally presided, but often Rino, too, was there, feeling he had the right to monitor the work both as the maker of Cerullo shoes and as the brother-in-law of Stefano, who was the Solaras’ partner. Lila would not stay still in that space, either. She inspected it, she climbed the workmen’s ladders, she observed the place from high up, she came down, she began to move things. At first she hurt everybody’s feelings, but soon, one after the other, they reluctantly gave in. Michele, although the most sarcastically hostile, seemed to grasp most readily the advantages of Lila’s suggestions.

“
Signó
,” he said teasing, “come and rearrange the bar, too, I’ll pay you.”

Naturally she wouldn’t think of laying a hand on the Bar Solara, but when she had brought enough disorder to Piazza dei Martiri she moved on to the kingdom of the Carracci family, the old grocery, and installed herself there. She made Stefano keep Alfonso at home because he had to study for his makeup exams, and urged Pinuccia to go out more and more often, with her mother, to poke into the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. So, little by little, she reorganized the two adjacent spaces in the old neighborhood to make the work easier and more efficient. In a short time she demonstrated that both Maria and Pinuccia were substantially superfluous; she gave Ada a bigger job, and got Stefano to increase her pay.

When, in the late afternoon, I returned from the Sea Garden and delivered the girls to the stationer, I almost always stopped at the grocery to see how Lila was doing, if her stomach had started to swell. She was nervous, and her complexion wasn’t good. To cautious questions about her pregnancy she either didn’t respond or dragged me outside the store and said nonsensical things like: “I don’t want to talk about it, it’s a disease, I have an emptiness inside me that weighs me down.” Then she started to tell me about the new grocery and the old one, and Piazza dei Martiri, with her usual exhilarating delivery, just to make me believe that these were places where marvelous things were happening and I, poor me, was missing them.

But by now I knew her tricks, I listened but didn’t believe her, although I always ended up hypnotized by the energy with which she played both servant and mistress. Lila was able to talk to me, talk to the customers, talk to Ada, all at the same time, while continuing to unwrap, cut, weigh, take money, and give change. She erased herself in the words and gestures, she became exhausted, she seemed truly engaged in an unrelenting struggle to forget the weight of what she still described, incongruously, as “an emptiness inside.”

What impressed me most, though, was her casual behavior with money. She went to the cash register and took what she wanted. Money for her was that drawer, the treasure chest of childhood that opened and offered its wealth. In the (rare) case that the money in the drawer wasn’t enough, she had only to glance at Stefano. He, who seemed to have reacquired the generous solicitude of their engagement, pulled up his smock, dug in the back pocket of his pants, took out a fat wallet, and asked, “How much do you need?” Lila made a sign with her fingers, her husband reached out his right arm with the fist closed, she extended her long, thin hand.

Ada, behind the counter, looked at her the way she looked at the movie stars in the pages of magazines. I imagine that in that period Antonio’s sister felt as if she were living in a fairy tale. Her eyes sparkled when Lila opened the drawer and gave her money. She handed it out freely, as soon as her husband turned his back. She gave Ada money for Antonio, who was going into the Army, she gave money to Pasquale, who urgently needed three teeth extracted. In early September she took me aside, too, and asked if I needed money for books.

“What books?”

“The ones for school but also the ones not for school.”

I told her that Maestra Oliviero was still not out of the hospital, that I didn’t know if she would help me get the textbooks, as usual, and here already Lila wanted to stick the money in my pocket. I withdrew, I refused, I didn’t want to seem a kind of poor relative forced to ask for money. I told her I had to wait till school started, I told her that the stationer had extended the Sea Garden job until mid-September, I told her that I would therefore earn more than expected and would manage by myself. She was sorry, she insisted that I come to her if the teacher couldn’t help me out.

It wasn’t just me; certainly all of us, faced with that generosity of hers, had some difficulties. Pasquale, for example, didn’t want to accept the money for the dentist, he felt humiliated, and finally took it only because his face was disfigured, his eye was inflamed, and the lettuce compresses were of no use. Antonio, too, was offended, to the point where to take money that our friend gave Ada in addition to her regular pay he had to be persuaded that it was making up for the disgraceful pay that Stefano had given her before. We had never had a lot of money, and we attached great importance even to ten lire; if we found a coin on the street it was a celebration. So it seemed to us a mortal sin that Lila handed out money as if it were a worthless metal, waste paper. She did it silently, with an imperious gesture resembling those with which as a child she had organized games, assigned parts. Afterward, she talked about other things, as if that moment hadn’t existed. On the other hand—Pasquale said to me one evening, in his obscure way—mortadella sells, so do shoes, and Lina has always been our friend, she’s on our side, our ally, our companion. She’s rich now, but by her own merit: yes, by her own merit, because the money didn’t come to her from the fact that she is Signora Carracci, the future mother of the grocer’s child, but because it’s she who invented Cerullo shoes, and even if no one seemed to remember that now, we, her friends, remembered.

All true. How many things Lila had made happen in the space of a few years. And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine. Lila herself confirmed this bitterly when, one Sunday when the sea was smooth and the sky white, she appeared, to my surprise, at the Sea Garden around three in the afternoon, by herself: a truly unusual event. She had taken the subway, a couple of buses, and now was here, in a bathing suit, with a greenish complexion and an outbreak of pimples on her forehead. “Seventeen years of shit,” she said in dialect, with apparent cheer, her eyes full of sarcasm.

She had quarreled with Stefano. In the daily exchanges with the Solaras the truth came out about the management of the store in Piazza dei Martiri. Michele had tried to insist on Gigliola, had harshly threatened Rino, who supported Pinuccia, had finally launched into a tense negotiation with Stefano, in which they had come close to blows. And in the end what happened? Neither winners nor losers, it seemed. Gigliola and Pinuccia would manage the store
together
. Provided that Stefano reconsider an old decision.

“What?” I asked.

“See if you can guess.”

I couldn’t guess. Michele had asked Stefano, in his teasing tone of voice, to concede on the photograph of Lila in her wedding dress. And this time her husband had done so.

“Really?”

“Really. I told you you just had to wait. They’re going to display me in the shop. In the end I’ve won the bet, not you. Start studying—this year you’ll have to get top marks.”

Here she changed her tone, became serious. She said that she hadn’t come because of the photograph, since she had known for a long time that as far as that shit was concerned she was merchandise to barter. She had come because of the pregnancy. She talked about it for a long time, nervously, as if it were something to be crushed in a mortar, and she did it with cold firmness. It has no meaning, she said, not concealing her anguish. Men insert their thingy in you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside. I’ve got it, it’s here, and it’s repulsive to me. I throw up continuously, it’s my very stomach that can’t bear it. I know I’m supposed to think beautiful things, I know I have to resign myself, but I can’t do it, I see no reason for resignation and no beauty. Besides the fact, she added, that I feel incapable of dealing with children. You, yes, you are, just look how you take care of the stationer’s children. Not me, I wasn’t born with that gift.