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We went into the city center early in the morning, dressed in our best clothes. And something happened that first of all amazed me. My father had taken on the task of tour guide. He showed our guest the Maschio Angioino, the royal palace, the statues of the kings, Castel dell’Ovo, Via Caracciolo, and the sea. Pietro listened attentively. But at a certain point he, who was coming to our city for the first time, began modestly to tell us about it, to make us discover our city. It was wonderful. I had never had a particular interest in the background of my childhood and adolescence, I marveled that Pietro could talk about it with such learned admiration. He showed that he knew the history of Naples, the literature, fables, legends, anecdotes, the visible monuments and those hidden by neglect. I imagined that he knew about the city in part because he was a man who knew everything, and in part because he had studied it thoroughly, with his usual rigor, because it was mine, because my voice, my gestures, my whole body had been subjected to its influence. Naturally my father soon felt deposed, my brothers were annoyed. I realized it, I hinted to Pietro to stop. He blushed, and immediately fell silent. But my mother, with one of her unpredictable twists, hung on his arm and said:
“Go on, I like it, no one ever told me those things.”
Of course, they didn’t sleep together. Lila couldn’t do it. They shut themselves in their rooms, and she heard him moving on the other side of the wall until every noise stopped and there remained only the sounds of the apartment, the building, the street. She had trouble falling asleep, in spite of her exhaustion. In the dark all the reasons for unhappiness that she had prudently left nameless got mixed up and were concentrated on Gennaro, little Rino. She thought: What will this child become? She thought: I mustn’t call him Rinuccio, that would drive him to regress into dialect. She thought: I also have to help the children he plays with if I don’t want him to be ruined by being with them. She thought: I don’t have time, I myself am not what I once was, I never pick up a pen, I no longer read books.
Sometimes she felt a weight on her chest. She became alarmed and turned on the light in the middle of the night, looked at her sleeping child. She saw almost nothing of Nino; Gennaro reminded her, rather, of her brother. When he was younger, the child had followed her around, now instead he was bored, he yelled, he wanted to run off and play, he said bad words to her. I love him—Lila reflected—but do I love him just as he is? An ugly question. The more she observed her son, the more she felt that, even if the neighbor found him very intelligent, he wasn’t growing up as she would have liked. She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain, now it seemed to her wrong that the quality of a person depends on the quality of his early childhood. You had to be constant, and Gennaro had no constancy, nor did she. My mind is always scattering, she said to herself, I’m made badly and he’s made badly. Then she was ashamed of thinking like that, she whispered to the sleeping child: you’re clever, you already know how to read, you already know how to write, you can do addition and subtraction, your mother is stupid, she’s never satisfied. She kissed the little boy on the forehead and turned out the light.
From the simplest actions to the most complicated, they racked their brains to diagram daily life, even if the Zurich tests didn’t require it. And not because Enzo wanted to but because, as usual, Lila, who had begun diffidently, grew more and more excited each day, and now, in spite of the cold at night, she was frantic to reduce the entire wretched world they lived in to the truth of 0s and 1s. She seemed to aspire to an abstract linearity—the abstraction that bred all abstractions—hoping that it would assure her a restful tidiness.
“Let’s diagram the factory,” she proposed one evening.
“The whole process?” he asked, bewildered.
“Yes.”
He looked at her, he said: “All right, let’s start with your job.”
An irritated scowl crossed her face; she said good night and went to her room.
[...] But Pasquale, to her surprise, assumed a grandiose tone and said to her, with some emotion: Lina, before you go I have to tell you one thing. There is no woman like you, you throw yourself into life with a force that, if we all had it, the world would have changed a long time ago. Then, having broken the ice in this way, he told her that Fernando had gone back to resoling shoes, that Rino had become Stefano’s cross to bear, and was constantly begging him for money, that Nunzia he rarely saw, she never left the house. But you did well, he repeated: no one in the neighborhood has kicked the Carraccis and the Solaras in the face as much as you, and I’m on your side.
Lila didn’t answer, so that she wouldn’t yell something hostile at him. But the boy’s disoriented face, wearing the expression people have when they feel they are right and don’t understand how it is that others don’t share their opinion, stayed in her mind. She thought that she ought to explain to him carefully why she had said the things she had said at the meeting, and why she found it intolerable that those things had ended up in the pamphlet, and why she judged it pointless and stupid that the four of them, instead of still being in bed or about to enter a classroom, were standing there in the cold handing out a densely written leaflet to people who had difficulty reading, and who, besides, had no reason to subject themselves to the effort of reading, since they already knew those things, they lived them every day, and could tell even worse: unrepeatable sounds that no one would ever say, write, or read, and that nevertheless held as potential the real causes of their inferiority. But she had a fever, she was tired of everything, it would cost her too much effort. And anyway she had reached the gate, and there the situation was becoming complicated.
In the car she got mad at Pasquale (Have you become the servant of those people?) and he let her vent. Only when it seemed to him that she had come to the end of her recriminations did he start off with his political formulas: the condition of workers in the South, the condition of slavery in which they lived, the permanent blackmail, the weakness if not absence of unions, the need to force situations and reach the point of struggle. Lina, he said in dialect, his tone heartfelt, you’re afraid of losing the few cents they give you and you’re right, Gennaro has to grow up. But I know that you are a true comrade, I know that you understand: here we workers have never even been within the regular wage scales, we’re outside all the rules, we’re less than zero. So, it’s blasphemy to say: leave me alone, I have my own problems and I want to mind my own business. Each of us, in the place assigned to us, has to do what he can.
The next morning Edo and the woman from the gutting room, Teresa, began to hang around her with timid, friendly words and gestures. And Lila not only didn’t rebuff them but treated the other workers courteously as well. She showed herself available to those who were complaining, understanding to those who were angry, sympathetic toward those who cursed the abuses. She steered the trouble of one toward the trouble of another, joining all together with eloquent words. Above all, in the following days, she let Edo and Teresa and their tiny group talk, transforming the lunch break into a time for secret meeting. Since she could, when she wanted, give the impression that it wasn’t she who was proposing and disposing but the others, she found more and more people happy to hear themselves say that their general complaints were just and urgent necessities. She added the claims of the gutting room to those of the refrigerated rooms, and those of the vats, and discovered to her surprise that the troubles of one department depended on the troubles of another, and that all together were links in the same chain of exploitation. She made a detailed list of the illnesses caused by the working conditions: damage to the hands, the bones, the lungs. She gathered enough information to demonstrate that the entire factory was in terrible shape, that the hygienic conditions were deplorable, that the raw material they handled was sometimes spoiled or of uncertain origin. When she was able to talk to Pasquale in private she explained to him what in a very short time she had started up, and he, in his peevish way, was astonished, then said beaming: I would have sworn that you would do it, and he set up an appointment with a man named Capone, who was secretary of the union local.
Capone was right, also Nadia and Armando. It was a weak initiative, a forced effort. Lila worked at cutting the meat furiously, she had a desire to hurt and be hurt. To jab her hand with the knife, let it slip, now, from the dead flesh to her own living flesh. To shout, hurl herself at the others, make them all pay for her inability to find an equilibrium. Ah, Lina Cerullo, you are beyond correction. Why did you make that list? You don’t want to be exploited? You want to improve your condition and the condition of these people? You’re convinced that you, and they, starting from here, from what you are now, will join the victorious march of the proletariat of the whole world? No way. March to become what? Now and forever workers? Workers who slave from morning to night but are empowered? Nonsense. Hot air to sweeten the pill of toil. You know that it’s a terrible condition, it shouldn’t be improved but eliminated, you’ve known it since you were a child. Improve, improve yourself? You, for example, are you improved, have you become like Nadia or Isabella? Is your brother improved, has he become like Armando? And your son, is he like Marco? No, we remain us and they are they. So why don’t you resign yourself? Blame the mind that can’t settle down, that is constantly seeking a way to function. Designing shoes. Getting busy setting up a shoe factory. Rewriting Nino’s articles, tormenting him until he did as you said. Using for your own purposes the installments from Zurich, with Enzo. And now demonstrating to Nadia that if she is making the revolution, you are even more. The mind, ah yes, the evil is there, it’s the mind’s discontent that causes the body to get sick. I’ve had it with myself, with everything. I’ve even had it with Gennaro: his fate, if all goes well, is to end up in a place like this, crawling to some boss for another five lire. So? So, Cerullo, take up your responsibilities and do what you have always had in mind: frighten Soccavo, eliminate his habit of fucking the workers in the drying room. Show the student with the wolf face what you’ve prepared. That summer on Ischia. The drinks, the house in Forio, the luxurious bed where I was with Nino. The money came from this place, from this evil smell, from these days spent in disgust, from this poorly paid labor. What did I cut, here? A revolting yellowish pulp spurted out. The world turns but, luckily, if it falls it breaks.
Lila clenched her fists tightly. She detested the weakness she felt in her body. The room was undulating, the bodies of the dead objects and the living people were expanding. She looked at Michele, who was extinguishing the cigarette in the ashtray. He was putting too much energy into it, as if he, too, in spite of his placid tone, were giving vent to an uneasiness. Lila stared at his fingers, which went on squashing the butt, the nails were white. Once, she thought, he asked me to become his lover. But that’s not what he really wants, there’s something else, something that doesn’t have to do with sex and that not even he can explain. He’s obsessed, it’s like a superstition. Maybe he thinks that I have a power and that that power is indispensable to him. He wants it but he can’t get it, and it makes him suffer, it’s a thing he can’t take from me by force. Yes, maybe that’s it. Otherwise he would have crushed me by now. But why me? What has he recognized in me that’s useful to him? I mustn’t stay here, under his eyes, I mustn’t listen to him, what he sees and what he wants scares me. Lila said to Soccavo:
"[...] You think I fired her? No, one day, as if it were nothing, she didn’t come to work. Just like that, vanished. And if you catch her again, she’ll slip away again, she’s an eel. This is her problem: even though she’s extremely intelligent, she can’t understand what she can do and what she can’t. That’s because she hasn’t yet found a real man. A real man puts the woman in her place. She’s not capable of cooking? She learns. The house is dirty? She cleans it. A real man can make a woman do everything. For example: I met a woman a while ago who didn’t know how to whistle. Well, we were together for two hours only—hours of fire—and afterward I said to her: Now whistle. She—you won’t believe it—whistled. If you know how to train a woman, good. If you don’t know how to train her, forget about her, you’ll get hurt.” He uttered these last words in a very serious tone, as if they summed up an irrefutable commandment. But even as he was speaking, he must have realized that he hadn’t been able, and was still unable, to respect his own law. So suddenly his expression changed, his voice changed, he felt an urgent need to humiliate her. He turned toward Lila with a jolt of impatience and said emphatically, in a crescendo of obscenities in dialect: “But with her it’s difficult, it’s not so easy to kiss her off. And yet you see what she looks like, she has small eyes, small tits, a small ass, she’s just a broomstick. With someone like that what can you do, you can’t even get it up. But an instant is enough, a single instant: you look at her and you want to fuck her.”
michele solara talking to soccavo