The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (18 page)

I felt that in some part of me a long painful tension was relaxing, and her wet eyes, her fragile smile moved me. But it didn’t last. She continued to speak, she touched her forehead with a gesture that was customary with her, she said, regretfully, “I always have to prove that I can be better,” and she added darkly, “When we opened this place, Stefano showed me how to cheat on the weight; and at first I shouted you’re a thief, that’s how you make money, and then I couldn’t resist, I showed him that I had learned and immediately found my own ways to cheat and I showed him, and I was constantly thinking up new ones: I’ll cheat you all, I cheat you on the weight and a thousand other things, I cheat the neighborhood, don’t trust me, Lenù, don’t trust what I say and do.”

I was uneasy. In the space of a few seconds she had changed, already I no longer knew what she wanted. Why was she speaking to me like this now? I didn’t know if she had decided to or if the words came out of her mouth unwittingly, an impetuous stream in which the intention of reinforcing the bond between us—a real intention—was immediately swept away by the equally real need to deny it specificity: you see, with Stefano I behave the way I do with you, I act like this with everyone, I’m beauty and the beast, good and evil. She interlaced her long thin fingers, clasped them tight, asked, “Did you hear that Gigliola says the photograph caught fire by itself?”

“It’s stupid, Gigliola is mad at you.”

She gave a little laugh that was like a shock, something in her twisted too abruptly.

“I have something that hurts here, behind the eyes, something is pressing. You see the knives there? They’re too sharp—I just gave them to the knife grinder. While I’m slicing salami I think how much blood there is in a person’s body. If you put too much stuff in things, they break. Or they catch fire and burn. I’m glad the wedding picture burned. The marriage should burn, too, the shop, the shoes, the Solaras, everything.”

I realized that, no matter how she struggled, worked, proclaimed, she couldn’t get out of it: since the day of her wedding she had been pursued by an ever greater, increasingly ungovernable unhappiness, and I felt pity. I told her to be calm, she nodded yes.

“You have to try to relax.”

“Help me.”

“How.”

“Stay near me.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s not true. I tell you all my secrets, even the worst, you tell me hardly anything about yourself.”

“You’re wrong. The only person I don’t hide anything from is you.”

She shook her head no energetically, she said, “Even if you’re better than me, even if you know more things, don’t leave me.”

They pressured her, wearing her down, and so she pretended to give in. She told Stefano that she would design the new shoes, and at the first opportunity she also told Michele. Then she summoned Rino and spoke to him exactly as he had always wanted her to: “You design them, I can’t. Design them with papa, you’re in the business, you know how to do it. But until you put them on the market and sell them, don’t tell anyone that I didn’t do them, not even Stefano.”

“And if they don’t go well?”

“It will be my fault.”

“And if they do well?”

“I’ll say how things are and you’ll get the credit you deserve.”

Rino was very pleased with that lie. He set to work with Fernando, but every so often he went to Lila in complete secrecy to show her what he had in mind. She examined the styles and at first pretended to admire them, partly because she couldn’t tolerate his anxious expression, partly to get rid of him quickly. But soon she herself marveled at how genuinely good the new shoes were—they resembled the ones now selling and yet were different. “Maybe,” she said to me one day, in an unexpectedly lighthearted tone, “I really didn’t think up those shoes, they really are my brother’s work.” And at that point she truly did seem to be rid of a weight. She rediscovered her affection for Rino, or rather she realized that she had exaggerated: that bond couldn’t be dissolved, it would never be dissolved, whatever he did, even if a rat came out of his body, a skittish horse, any sort of animal. The lie—she hypothesized—has relieved Rino of the anxiety of being inadequate, and that has taken him back to the way he was as a boy, and now he is discovering that he knows his job, that he’s good at it. As for Rino himself, he was increasingly satisfied with his sister’s praise. At the end of every consultation, he asked in a whisper for the house key and, also in complete secrecy, went to spend an hour there with Pinuccia.

For my part, I tried to show her that I would always be her friend, and on Sundays I often invited her to go out with me. Once we ventured as far as the Mostra d’Oltremare neighborhood with two of my schoolmates, who were intimidated, however, when they found out that she had been married for more than a year, and behaved respectfully, sedately, as if I had compelled them to go out with my mother. One asked her hesitantly:

“Do you have a child?”

Lila shook her head no.

“They haven’t come?”

She shook her head no.

From that moment on the evening was more or less a failure.

In mid-May I dragged her to a cultural club where, because Professor Galiani had urged me to, I felt obliged to go to a talk by a scientist named Giuseppe Montalenti. It was the first time we had had an experience of that type: Montalenti gave a kind of lesson, not for children but, rather, for the adults who had come to hear him. We sat at the back of the bare room and I was quickly bored. The professor had sent me but she hadn’t shown up. I murmured to Lila, “Let’s go.” But Lila refused, she whispered that she wasn’t bold enough to get up, she was afraid of disrupting the lecture. But it wasn’t her type of worry; it was the sign of an unexpected submissiveness, or of an interest that she didn’t want to admit. We stayed till the end. Montalenti talked about Darwin; neither of us knew who Darwin was. As we left, I said jokingly, “He said a thing that I already knew: you’re a monkey.”

But she didn’t want to joke: “I don’t want to ever forget it,” she said.

“That you’re a monkey?”

“That we’re animals.”

“You and I?”

“Everyone.”

“But he said there are a lot of differences between us and the apes.”

“Yes? Like what? That my mother pierced my ears and so I’ve worn earrings since I was born, but the mothers of monkeys don’t, so their offspring don’t wear earrings?”

A fit of laughter possessed us, as we listed differences, one after the other, each more ridiculous than the last: we were enjoying ourselves. But when we returned to the neighborhood our good mood vanished. We met Pasquale and Ada taking a walk on the
stradone
and learned from them that Stefano was looking everywhere for Lila, very upset. I offered to go home with her, she refused. Instead she agreed to let Pasquale and Ada take her in the car.

I found out the next day why Stefano had been looking for her. It wasn’t because we were late. It wasn’t even because he was annoyed that his wife sometimes spent her free time with me and not with him. It was something else. He had just learned that Pinuccia was often seen with Rino at his house. He had just learned that the two were together in his bed, that Lila gave them the keys. He had just learned that Pinuccia was pregnant. But what had most infuriated him was that when he slapped his sister because of the disgusting things she and Rino had done, Pinuccia shouted at him, “You’re jealous because I’m a woman and Lina isn’t, because Rino knows how to behave with women and you don’t.” Lila, seeing him so upset, listening to him—and recalling the composure he had always shown when they were engaged—had burst out laughing, and Stefano had gone for a drive, so as not to murder her. According to her, he had gone to look for a prostitute.

The preparations for Rino and Pinuccia’s wedding were carried out in a rush. I was not much concerned with it, I had my final class essays, the final oral exams. And then something else happened that caused me great agitation. Professor Galiani, who was in the habit of violating the teachers’ code of behavior with indifference, invited me—me and no one else in the school—to her house, to a party that her children were giving.

It was unusual enough that she lent me books and newspapers, that she had directed me to a march for peace and a demanding lecture. Now she had gone over the limit: she had taken me aside and given me that invitation. “Come as you like,” she had said, “alone or with someone, with your boyfriend or without: the important thing is to come.” Like that, a few days before the end of the school year, without worrying about how much I had to study, without worrying about the earthquake that it set off inside me.

I had immediately said yes, but I quickly discovered that I would never have the courage to go. A party at any professor’s house was unthinkable, imagine at the house of Professor Galiani. For me it was as if I were to present myself at the royal palace, curtsey to the queen, dance with the princes. A great pleasure but also an act of violence, like a yank: to be dragged by the arm, forced to do a thing that, although it appeals to you, you know is not suitable—you know that, if circumstances did not oblige you, you would happily avoid doing it. Probably it didn’t even occur to Professor Galiani that I had nothing to wear. In class I wore a shapeless black smock. What did she expect there was, the professor, under that smock: clothes and slips and underwear like hers? There was inadequacy, rather, there was poverty, poor breeding. I possessed a single pair of worn-out shoes. My only nice dress was the one I had worn to Lila’s wedding, but now it was hot, the dress was fine for March but not for the end of May. And yet the problem was not just what to wear. There was the solitude, the awkwardness of being among strangers, kids with ways of talking among themselves, joking, with tastes I didn’t know. I thought of asking Alfonso if he would go with me, he was always kind to me. But—I recalled—Alfonso was a schoolmate and Professor Galiani had addressed the invitation to me alone. What to do? For days I was paralyzed by anxiety, I thought of talking to the professor and coming up with some excuse. Then it occurred to me to ask Lila’s advice.

She was as usual in a difficult period, she had a yellow bruise under one cheekbone. She didn’t welcome the news.

“Why are you going there?”

“She invited me.”

“Where does this professor live?”

“Corso Vittorio Emanuele.”

“Can you see the sea from her house?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does her husband do?”

“A doctor at the Cotugno.”

“And the children are still in school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want one of my dresses?”

“You know they don’t fit me.”

“You just have a bigger bust.”

“Everything of me is bigger, Lila.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I shouldn’t go?”

“It’s better.”

“O.K., I won’t go.”

She was visibly satisfied with that decision. I said goodbye, left the grocery, turned onto a street where stunted oleander bushes grew. But I heard her calling me, I turned back.

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

“Where?”

“To the party.”

“Stefano won’t let you.”

“We’ll see. Tell me if you want to take me or not.”

“Of course I want to.”

She became at that point so pleased that I didn’t dare try to make her change her mind. But already on the way home I felt that my situation had become worse. None of the obstacles that prevented me from going to the party had been removed, and that offer of Lila’s confused me even more. The reasons were tangled and I had no intention of enumerating them, but if I had I would have been confronted by contradictory statements. I was afraid that Stefano wouldn’t let her come. I was afraid that Stefano would let her. I was afraid that she would dress in an ostentatious fashion, the way she had when she went to the Solaras. I was afraid that, whatever she wore, her beauty would explode like a star and everyone would be eager to grab a fragment of it. I was afraid that she would express herself in dialect, that she would say something vulgar, that it would become obvious that school for her had ended with an elementary-school diploma. I was afraid that, if she merely opened her mouth, everyone would be hypnotized by her intelligence and Professor Galiani herself would be entranced. I was afraid that the professor would find her both presumptuous and naïve and would say to me: Who is this friend of yours, stop seeing her. I was afraid she would understand that I was only Lila’s pale shadow and would be interested not in me any longer but in her, she would want to see her again, she would undertake to make her go back to school.

For a while I avoided the grocery. I hoped that Lila would forget about the party, that the day would come and I would go almost secretly, and then I would tell her: you didn’t let me know. Instead she soon came to see me, which she hadn’t done for a long time. She had persuaded Stefano not only to take us but also to come and get us, and she wanted to know what time we were to be at the professor’s house.

“What are you going to wear?” I asked anxiously.

“Whatever you wear.”

“I’m going to wear a blouse and skirt.”

“Then I will, too.”

“And Stefano is sure that he’ll take us and then come and get us?”

“Yes.”

“How did you persuade him?”

She made a face, cheerfully, saying that by now she knew how to handle him. “If I want something,” she whispered, as if she herself didn’t want to hear, “I just have to act a little like a whore.”

She said it like that, in dialect, and added other crude, self-mocking expressions, to make me understand the revulsion her husband provoked in her, the disgust she felt at herself. My anxiety increased. I should tell her, I thought, that I’m not going to the party, I should tell her that I changed my mind. I knew, naturally, that behind the appearance of the disciplined Lila, at work from morning to night, there was a Lila who was anything but submissive; yet, in particular now that I was assuming the responsibility of introducing her into the house of Professor Galiani, the recalcitrant Lila frightened me, seemed to me increasingly spoiled by her very refusal to surrender. What would happen if, in the presence of the professor, something made her rebel? What would happen if she decided to use the language she had just used with me? I said cautiously: