The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (11 page)

The chemistry teacher was generous with me (or maybe it was Professor Galiani who went to the trouble to get her to be generous), and gave me a pass. I was promoted with average grades in literary subjects, low passing grades in scientific ones, a narrow pass in religion and, for the first time, a less than perfect grade in behavior, a sign that the priest and a great many of the teachers had never really forgiven me. I was sorry about it; I felt that my old dispute with the religion teacher on the role of the Holy Spirit had been presumptuous, and I regretted not having listened to Alfonso, who at the time had tried to restrain me. Naturally I did not get a scholarship, and my mother was enraged, saying that it was all because of the time I had wasted with Antonio. Her words infuriated me. I said I didn’t want to go to school anymore. She raised her hand to slap me, feared for my glasses, and hurried to get the carpet beater. Terrible days, in other words, and they got worse. The only thing that seemed positive was that, the morning I went to see the grades, the janitor came up and handed me a package left by Professor Galiani. It was books, but not novels: books full of arguments, a subtle sign of trust that still was not enough to bring me relief.

I had too many worries and, whatever I did, the feeling of always being in the wrong. I looked for my old boyfriend at home and at his job, but he always managed to avoid me. I stuck my head in the grocery to ask Ada for help. She treated me coldly, said that her brother didn’t want to see me anymore, and from then on, if we met, she looked the other way. Now that there was no school, waking up in the morning became traumatic, a kind of painful blow to the head. At first I tried to read Professor Galiani’s books, but I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn’t help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went all the way to school in the hope of seeing Nino, who was taking the graduation exams. The day of the written Greek test I waited for hours, patiently. But just as the first candidates began to emerge, with Rocci under their arms, the pretty, pure girl I had seen raising her lips to him appeared. She settled herself to wait not far from me, and in a second I was imagining the two of us—models displayed in a catalogue—as we would appear to the eyes of Sarratore’s son the moment he came out the door. I felt ugly, shabby, and I left.

I went to Lila’s house in search of comfort. But I knew I had made a mistake with her, too. I had done something stupid: I hadn’t told her about going with Stefano to get the photograph. Why had I been silent? Was I pleased with the role of peacemaker that her husband had proposed and did I think I could exercise it better by being silent about the visit to the Rettifilo? Had I been afraid of betraying Stefano’s confidence and as a result, without realizing it, betrayed her? I didn’t know. Certainly it hadn’t been a real decision: rather, an uncertainty that first became a feigned carelessness, then the conviction that not having said right away what had happened made remedying the situation complicated and perhaps vain. How easy it was to do wrong. I sought excuses that might seem convincing to her, but I wasn’t able to make them even to myself. I sensed that the foundations of my behavior were flawed, I was silent.

On the other hand, she had never indicated that she knew the encounter had taken place. She always welcomed me kindly, let me take a bath in her bathtub, use her makeup. But she made few comments on the plots of the novels that I recounted to her, preferring to give me frivolous information about the lives of actors and singers she read about in the magazines. And she no longer told me any of her thoughts or secret plans. If I saw a bruise, if I took that as a starting point to get her to examine the reasons for Stefano’s ugly reaction, if I said that maybe he had been cruel because he would like her to help him, support him in his difficulties, she looked at me ironically, she shrugged, she was evasive. In a short time I understood that although she didn’t want to break off her relationship with me, she had decided not to confide in me anymore. Did she in fact know, and no longer considered me a trustworthy friend? I even went so far as to make my visits less frequent, hoping that she would feel my absence, ask the reason for it, and we would explain things to each other. But she didn’t seem to notice. Then I couldn’t stand it and went back to visiting constantly, which seemed to make her neither happy nor unhappy.

That very hot day in July I was especially depressed when I arrived at her house and yet I said nothing about Nino, about Nino’s girlfriend, because without intending to—it’s the way these things go—I had ended up reducing the play of confidences almost to nothing myself. She was welcoming as usual. She made an orzata. I curled up on the couch in the dining room to drink the cold almond syrup, irritated by the clatter of the trains, by the sweat, by everything.

I observed her silently as she moved through the house; I was enraged by her capacity to travel through the most depressing labyrinths, holding on to the thread of her declaration of war without showing it. I thought of what her husband had told me, his words about the power that Lila held back like the spring of a dangerous device. I looked at her stomach and imagined that truly inside it, every day, every night, she was fighting a battle to destroy the life that Stefano wanted to insert there by force. How long will she resist, I wondered, but I didn’t dare to ask explicit questions, I knew she would consider them disagreeable.

A little later Pinuccia arrived, apparently to visit her sister-in-law. But in fact ten minutes afterward Rino showed up, and he and Pina began kissing, practically right in front of us, in a way so excessive that Lila and I exchanged looks. When Pina said she wanted to see the view, he followed her, and they shut themselves in a room for a good half hour.

This happened often. Lila talked about it with a mixture of irritation and sarcasm, and I was envious of the couple’s ease: no fear, no misery, when they reappeared they were more contented than before. Rino went to the kitchen to get something to eat; returning, he talked about shoes with his sister, he said that things were constantly improving, and tried to get suggestions from her that he could later take credit for with the Solaras.

“You know that Marcello and Michele want to put your picture in the store in Piazza dei Martiri?” he asked suddenly, in an appealing tone.

“It doesn’t seem appropriate,” Pinuccia immediately interrupted.

“Why not?” Rino asked.

“What sort of question is that? If she wants, Lina can put the picture in the new grocery: she’s going to run it, no? If I’m getting the shop in Piazza dei Martiri, will you let me decide what goes in it?”

She spoke as if she were defending Lila’s rights against her brother’s intrusiveness. In fact, we all knew that she was defending herself and her own future. She was tired of depending on Stefano, she wanted to quit the grocery store, and she liked the idea of being the proprietor of a store in the center of the city. So a small war had been going on for some time between Rino and Michele, whose object was the management of the shoe store, a war inflamed by pressure from their respective fiancées: Rino insisted that Pinuccia should do it, Michele that Gigliola should. But Pinuccia was the more aggressive and had no doubt that she would get the best of it; she knew that she could add the authority of her brother to that of her fiancé. And so at every opportunity she put on airs, like someone who has already made the leap, has left behind the old neighborhood and now decrees what is suitable and what is not for the sophisticated customers in the center.

I realized that Rino was afraid his sister would take the offensive, but Lila displayed complete indifference. Then he checked his watch to let us all know that he was very busy, and said in the tone of one who sees into the future, “In my opinion that photograph has great commercial possibilities.” Then he kissed Pina, who immediately drew back, to signal disapproval, and left.

We girls remained. Pinuccia, hoping to use my authority to settle the question, asked me, sulkily, “Lenù, what do you think? Do you think the photo of Lina should stay in Piazza dei Martiri?”

I said, in Italian, “It’s Stefano who should decide, and since he went to the dressmaker purposely to get it removed from her window, I consider it out of the question that he’ll give permission.”

Pinuccia glowed with satisfaction, and almost shouted, “My goodness, how smart you are, Lenù.”

I waited for Lila to have her say. There was a long silence, then she spoke just to me: “How much do you want to bet you’re wrong? Stefano will give his permission.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to bet?”

“If you lose, you must never again pass with anything less than the best grades.”

I looked at her in embarrassment. We hadn’t spoken about my difficulties, I didn’t even think she knew, but she was well informed and now was reproaching me. You weren’t up to it, she was saying, your grades fell. She expected from me what she would have done in my place. She really wanted me fixed in the role of someone who spends her life with books, while she had money, nice clothes, a house, television, a car, took everything, granted everything.

“And if you lose?” I asked, with a shade of bitterness.

That look of hers returned instantly, shot through dark slits.

“I’ll enroll in a private school, start studying again, and I swear I’ll get my diploma along with you and do better than you.”

Along with you and do better than you
. Was that what she had in mind? I felt as if everything that was roiling inside me in that terrible time—Antonio, Nino, the unhappiness with the nothing that was my life—had been sucked up by a broad sigh.

“Are you serious?”

“When is a bet ever made as a joke?”

Pinuccia interrupted, aggressively.

“Lina, don’t start acting crazy the way you always do: you have the new grocery store, Stefano can’t manage it alone.” Immediately, however, she controlled herself, adding with false sweetness, “Besides, I’d like to know when you and Stefano are going to make me an aunt.”

She used that sweet-sounding formula but her tone seemed resentful to me, and I felt the reasons for that resentment irritatingly mixed with mine. Pinuccia meant: you’re married, my brother gives you everything, now do what you’re supposed to do. And in fact what’s the sense of being Signora Carracci if you’re going to shut all the doors, barricade yourself, obstruct, guard a poisoned fury in your stomach? Is it possible that you must always do harm, Lila? When will you stop? Will your energy diminish, will you be distracted, will you finally collapse, like a sleepy sentinel? When will you grow wide and sit at the cash register in the new neighborhood, with your stomach swelling, and make Pinuccia an aunt, and me, me, leave me to go my own way?

“Who knows,” Lila answered, and her eyes grew large and deep again.

“Am I going to become a mamma first?” said her sister-in-law, smiling.

“If you’re always pasted to Rino like that, it’s possible.”

They had a little skirmish; I didn’t stay to listen.

To placate my mother, I had to find a summer job. Naturally I went to the stationer. She welcomed me the way you’d welcome a schoolteacher or the doctor, she called her daughters, who were playing in the back of the shop, and they embraced me, kissed me, wanted me to play with them. When I mentioned that I was looking for a job, she said that she was ready to send her daughters to the Sea Garden right away, without waiting for August, just so that they could spend their days with a good, intelligent girl like me.

“Right away when?” I asked.

“Next week?”

“Wonderful.”

“I’ll give you a little more money than last year.”

That, finally, seemed to be good news. I went home satisfied, and my mood didn’t change even when my mother said that as usual I was lucky, going swimming and sitting in the sun wasn’t a job.

Encouraged, the next day I went to see Maestra Oliviero. I was upset about having to tell her that I hadn’t particularly distinguished myself in school that year, but I needed to see her; I had to tactfully remind her to get me the books for the next school year. And then I thought it would please her to know that Lila, now that she had made a good marriage and had so much free time, might start studying again. Reading in her eyes the reaction to that would help soothe the unease it had provoked in me.

I knocked and knocked, the teacher didn’t come to the door. I asked the neighbors, and around the neighborhood, and returned an hour later, but still she didn’t answer. And yet no one had seen her go out, nor had I met her on the streets or in the shops. Since she was a woman alone, old, and not well, I went back to the neighbors. The woman who lived next door decided to ask her son for help. The young man got into the apartment by climbing from the balcony of his mother’s apartment into one of the teacher’s windows. He found her on the kitchen floor, in her nightgown—she had fainted. The doctor was called and he thought that she should be admitted to the hospital immediately. They carried her downstairs. I saw her as she emerged from the entrance, in disarray, her face swollen, she who always came to school carefully groomed. Her eyes were frightened. I gave her a nod of greeting, and she lowered her gaze. They settled her in a car that took off blasting its horn.

The heat that year must have had a cruel effect on frailer bodies. In the afternoon Melina’s children could be heard in the courtyard calling their mother in increasingly worried voices. When the cries didn’t stop, I went to see what was happening and ran into Ada. She said anxiously, her eyes shiny with tears, that Melina couldn’t be found. Right afterward Antonio arrived, out of breath and pale; he didn’t even look at me but hurried off. Soon half the neighborhood was looking for Melina, even Stefano, who, still in his grocer’s smock, got in the convertible, with Ada beside him, and drove slowly along the streets. I followed Antonio, and we ran here and there, without saying a word. We ended up near the ponds, and made our way through the tall grass, calling his mother. His cheeks were hollow, he had dark circles under his eyes. I took his hand, wanting to be of comfort, but he repulsed me, with an odious phrase, he said: Leave me alone, you’re no woman. I felt a sharp pain in my chest, but just then we saw Melina. She was sitting in the water, cooling off. Her face and neck were sticking out from the greenish surface, her hair was soaked, her eyes red, her lips matted with leaves and mud. She was silent: she whose attacks of madness had for ten years taken the form of shouting or singing.