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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.
fuck
I listened, I understood and I didn’t understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker’s knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As a result, since Stefano was not the hateful Marcello but the young man to whom she had declared her love, whom she had married, and with whom she had decided to live forever, she assumed complete responsibility for her choice. And yet it didn’t add up. In my eyes Lila was Lila, not an ordinary girl of the neighborhood. Our mothers, after they were slapped by their husbands, did not have that expression of calm disdain. They despaired, they wept, they confronted their man sullenly, they criticized him behind his back, and yet, more and less, they continued to respect him (my mother, for example, plainly admired my father’s devious deals). Lila instead displayed an acquiescence without respect.
That was it, she had nothing else to do. I soon realized that, being married, she was more alone than before. I sometimes went out with Carmela, with Ada, even with Gigliola, and at school I had made friends with girls in my class and other classes, so that sometimes I met them for ice cream on Via Foria. But she saw only Pinuccia, her sister-in-law. As for the boys, if during the period of her engagement they still stopped to exchange a few words, now, after her marriage, they gave a nod of greeting, at most, when they met on the street. And yet she was beautiful and she dressed like the pictures in the women’s magazines that she bought in great numbers. But the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea. Pasquale, Enzo, Antonio himself would never have ventured onto the unshaded white streets of newly built houses, to her doorway, to her apartment, to talk a little or invite her to take a walk. And even the telephone, a black object attached to the kitchen wall, seemed a useless ornament. The whole time I studied at her house, it seldom rang and when it did it was usually Stefano, who had put one in the grocery as well, to take orders from customers. Their conversations as newlyweds were brief, she answered listlessly, yes, no.
“Too late, she’s already engaged,” said Lila. And slowly she managed to lead the two brothers around to Antonio, evoking his family situation, including a vivid picture of how much worse it would be if he had to go into the Army. It wasn’t just her skill with words that struck me, that I knew. What struck me was a new tone, a shrewd dose of impudence and assurance. There she was, her mouth flaming with lipstick. She made Marcello believe that she had put a seal on the past, made Michele believe that his sly arrogance amused her. And, to my great amazement, toward both she behaved like a woman who knows what men are, who has nothing more to learn on the subject and in fact would have much to teach: and she wasn’t playing a part, the way we had as girls, imitating novels in which fallen ladies appeared; rather, it was clear that her knowledge was true, and this did not embarrass her. Then abruptly she became aloof, she sent out signals of refusal, I know you want me but I don’t want you. Thus she retreated, throwing them off balance, so that Marcello became self-conscious and Michele darkened, irresolute, with a hard gaze that meant: Watch it, because, Signora Carracci or not, I’m ready to slap you in the face, you whore. At that point she changed her tone again, again drew them toward her, appeared to be amused and amused them. The result? Michele didn’t commit himself, but Marcello said: “Antonio doesn’t deserve it, but Lenuccia’s a good girl, so to make her happy I can ask a friend and find out if something can be done.”
I looked at his broad hands gripping the steering wheel, his face. With tears in his eyes, he admitted that on their wedding night he had had to beat her, that he had been forced to do it, that every morning, every evening she drew slaps from his hands on purpose to humiliate him, forcing him to act in a way that he never, ever, ever would have wanted. Here he assumed an almost frightened tone: I had to beat her again, she shouldn’t have gone to the Solaras’ dressed like that. But she has a force inside that I can’t subdue. It’s an evil force that makes good manners—everything—useless. A poison. You see she’s not pregnant? Months pass and nothing happens. Relatives, friends, customers ask, and you can see the mockery on their faces: any news? And I have to say, what news, pretending not to understand. Because if I understood I would have to answer. And what can I answer? There are things you know that can’t be said. With that force she has, she murders the children inside, Lenù, and she does it on purpose to make people think I don’t know how to be a man, to show me up in front of everyone. What do you think? Am I exaggerating? You don’t know what a favor you’re doing to listen to me.
[...] That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself?
How much that evening had hurt her I learned later from her notebooks. She admitted that she had asked to go with me. She admitted she had thought she could at least for one evening get away from the grocery and be comfortable with me, share in that sudden widening of my world, meet Professor Galiani, talk to her. She admitted she thought she would find a way of making a good impression. She admitted she had been sure she would be attractive to the males, she always was. Instead she immediately felt voiceless, graceless, deprived of movement, of beauty. She listed details: even when we were next to each other, people chose to speak only to me; they had brought me pastries, a drink, no one had done anything for her; Armando had shown me a family portrait, something from the seventeenth century, he had talked to me about it for a quarter of an hour; she had been treated as if she weren’t capable of understanding. They didn’t want her. They didn’t want to know anything about what sort of person she was. That evening for the first time it had become clear to her that her life would forever be Stefano, the grocery stores, the marriage of her brother and Pinuccia, the conversations with Pasquale and Carmen, the petty war with the Solaras. This she had written, and more, maybe that very night, maybe in the morning, in the store. There, for the entire evening, she had felt irrefutably lost.
Who knows if Michele Solara had kept to himself what he had seen. Who knows if everything was going smoothly. Who knows if Nunzia was already asleep in the house on the road in Cuotto or was trying to calm her son-in-law who had arrived unexpectedly on the last boat, hadn’t found his wife and was furious. Who knows if Lila had telephoned her husband and, reassured that he was in Naples, far away, in the apartment in the new neighborhood, was now in bed with Nino, without fear, a secret couple, a couple intent on enjoying the night. Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. I understood suddenly why I hadn’t had Nino, why Lila had had him. I wasn’t capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn’t know how to be drawn beyond the limits. I didn’t possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting. She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. She deserved Nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.
Fortunately I didn’t read her notebooks until later. There were pages and pages about that day and night with Nino, and what those pages said was exactly what I hadn’t had and couldn’t say. Lila wrote not even a word about sexual pleasures, nothing that might be useful in comparing her experience with mine. She talked instead about love and she did so in a surprising way. She said that from the day of her marriage until those days on Ischia she had been, without realizing it, on the point of dying. She described minutely a sensation of imminent death: lack of energy, lethargy, a strong pressure in the middle of her head, as if between the brain and the skull there was an air bubble that was continually expanding, the impression that everything was moving in a hurry to leave, that the speed of every movement of persons and things was excessive and hit her, wounded her, caused her physical pain in her stomach and in her eyes. She said that all this was accompanied by a dulling of the senses, as if they had been wrapped in cotton wool, and her wounds came not from the real world but from a hollow space between her body and the mass of cotton wool in which she felt she was wrapped. She admitted on the other hand that imminent death seemed to her so assured that it took away her respect for everything, above all for herself, as if nothing counted anymore and everything deserved to be ruined. At times she was overwhelmed by a mania to express herself with no mediation: express herself for the last time, before becoming like Melina, before crossing the stradone just as a truck was coming, and be hit, dragged away. Nino had changed that state, he had snatched her away from death. And he had done it when he had asked her to dance, at Professor Galiani’s house, and she had refused, frightened by that offer of salvation. Then, on Ischia, day by day, he had assumed the power of the savior. He had restored to her the capacity to feel. He had above all brought back to life her sense of herself. Yes, brought to life. Lines and lines and lines had at their center the concept of resurrection: an ecstatic rising, the end of every bond and yet the inexpressible pleasure of a new bond, a revival that was also a revolt: he and she, she and he together learned life again, banished its poison, reinvented it as the pure joy of thinking and living.
I withdrew even more into my duties, I multiplied them in order to cram my days and nights. That year I studied obsessively, punctiliously, and I even took on a new private lesson, for a lot of money. I imposed on myself an iron discipline, much harsher than what I had enforced since childhood. A marking of time, a straight line that went from dawn until late at night. In the past there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now everything I was I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen, I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone.