The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (29 page)

I went to my room, read a little, but I was distracted. How lovely it would be to go out early in the morning, with the cool air, the scents. How much I loved the sea, and even Pinuccia, her tears, the evening’s quarrel, the conciliatory love that, week by week, was increasing between Lila and Stefano. And how much I desired Nino. And how pleasant it was to have there with me, every day, him and my friend, the three of us content despite misunderstandings, despite the bad feelings that did not always remain silent in the dark depths.

I heard Stefano and Lila return. Their voices and laughter were muffled. Doors opened, closed, opened again. I heard the tap, the flush. Then I turned off the light, I listened to the faint rustle of the reeds, the scurrying in the henhouse, I fell asleep.

But I woke immediately, there was someone in my room.

“It’s me,” Lila whispered.

I felt her sitting on the edge of the bed, I was about to turn on the light.

“No,” she said, “I’ll stay only a moment.”

I turned it on anyway, I sat up.

She was wearing a pale pink nightgown. Her skin was so darkened by the sun that her eyes seemed white.

“Did you see how far I went?”

“You were great, but I was worried.”

She shook her head proudly and gave a little smile as if to say that the sea now belonged to her. Then she became serious.

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“Nino kissed me,” she said, and she said it in one breath, like someone who, making a spontaneous confession, is trying to hide, even from herself, something more unconfessable. “He kissed me but I kept my lips closed.”

The account was detailed. She, exhausted by the long swim and yet satisfied that she had proved how proficient she was, had leaned against him so that it would be less effort to float. But Nino had taken advantage of her closeness and had pressed his lips hard against hers. She had immediately compressed her mouth and although he had tried to open it with the tip of his tongue he hadn’t been able to. “You’re crazy,” she had said, pushing him away, “I’m married.” But Nino had answered, “I’ve loved you long before your husband, ever since we had that competition in class.” Lila had ordered him never to try it again and they had started swimming again toward the shore. “He pressed so hard he hurt my lips,” she concluded, “and they still hurt.”

She waited for me to react, but I managed not to ask questions or comment. When she told me not to go to the mountain with him unless Bruno came, too, I said coldly that if Nino had kissed me, I wouldn’t have found anything bad about it, I wasn’t married and didn’t even have a boyfriend. “Only it’s a pity,” I added, “that I don’t like him: kissing him would be like putting my mouth on a dead rat.” Then I pretended to be unable to repress a yawn and she, after a look that seemed to be of affection and also of admiration, went to bed. I wept from the moment she left until dawn.

Today I feel some uneasiness in recalling how much I suffered, I have no sympathy for myself of that time. But in the course of that night it seemed to me that I had no reason to live. Why did Nino behave in that way? He kissed Nadia, he kissed me, he kissed Lila. How could he be the same person I loved, who was so serious, so thoughtful. The hours passed, but it was impossible for me to accept that he was as profound in confronting the great problems of the world as he was superficial in feelings of love. I began to question myself, I had made a mistake, I was deluded. Was it possible that I—short, too full-figured, wearing glasses, I diligent but not intelligent, I who pretended to be cultured, informed, when I wasn’t—could have believed that he would like me even just for the length of a vacation? And, besides, had I ever really thought that? I examined my behavior scrupulously. No, I wasn’t able to tell myself what my desires were with any clarity. Not only was I careful to hide them from others but I admitted them to myself in a skeptical way, without conviction. Why had I never told Lila plainly what I felt for Nino? And now, why had I not cried to her the pain she had caused me with that confidence in the middle of the night, why hadn’t I revealed to her that, before kissing her, Nino had kissed me? What drove me to act like that? Did I keep my feelings muted because I was frightened by the violence with which, in fact, in my innermost self, I wanted things, people, praise, triumphs? Was I afraid that that violence, if I did not get what I wanted, would explode in my chest, taking the path of the worst feelings—for example, the one that had driven me to compare Nino’s beautiful mouth to the flesh of a dead rat? Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?

Questions and tears. It was daybreak when I felt that I understood what had happened. Nino had sincerely believed that he loved Nadia. Of course, aware of my reputation with Professor Galiani, he had looked at me for years with sincere respect and liking. But now, at Ischia, he had met Lila and had understood that she had been since childhood—and would be in the future—his only true love. Ah yes, surely it had happened that way. And how could one reproach him? Where was the fault? In their history there was something intense, sublime: elective affinities. I called on poems and novels as tranquilizers. Maybe, I thought, studying has been useful to me just for this: to calm myself. She had kindled the flame in his breast, he had preserved it for years without realizing it: now that that flame had flared up, what could he do but love her. Even if she was married and therefore inaccessible, forbidden: marriage lasts forever, beyond death. Unless one violates it, condemning oneself to the infernal whirlwind until Judgment Day. It seemed to me, when dawn broke, that I had gained some clarity. Nino’s love for Lila was an impossible love. Like mine for him. And only within that frame of unattainability did the kiss he had given her in the middle of the sea begin to seem utterable.

The kiss.

It hadn’t been a choice, it had happened: especially since Lila knew how to make things happen. Whereas I don’t, what will I do now. I’ll go to our meeting. We’ll climb Epomeo. Or no. I’ll leave tonight with Stefano and Rino. I’ll say that my mother wrote and needs me. How can I go climbing with him when I know that he loves Lila, that he kissed her. And how will I be able to see them together every day, swimming, going farther and farther out. I was exhausted, I fell asleep. I woke with a start, and found that the formulas running through my head really had tamed the suffering a little. I hurried to the meeting.

I was sure that he wouldn’t come, but when I got to the beach he was already there, and without Bruno. But I realized that he had no desire to look for the road to the mountain, to set out on unknown paths. He said that he was ready to go, if I really wanted to, but he predicted that in this heat we’d get unbearably exhausted and dismissed the idea that we’d ever find anything as worthwhile as a good swim. I began to worry, I thought he was on the verge of saying that he was going to go back and study. Instead, to my surprise, he proposed renting a boat. He counted and recounted the money he had, I took out my few cents. He smiled, he said gently, “You’ve taken care of the sandwiches, I’ll do this.” A few minutes later we were on the sea, he at the oars, I sitting in the stern.

I felt better. I thought maybe Lila had lied to me, that he hadn’t kissed her. But in some part of myself I knew very well that it wasn’t so: I sometimes lied, yes, even (or especially) to myself; she, on the other hand, as far as I could remember, had never done so. Besides, I had only to wait a while and it was Nino himself who explained things. When we were out on the water he let go of the oars and dived in, I did the same. He didn’t swim the way he usually did, mingling with the undulating surface of the sea. Instead he dropped toward the bottom, disappeared, reappeared farther on, sank again. I was alarmed by the depth, and swam around the boat, not daring to go too far, until I got tired and clumsily pulled myself in. After a while he joined me, grabbed the oars, began to row energetically, following a line parallel to the coast, toward Punta Imperatore. So far we had remarked on the sandwiches, the heat, the sea, how wise we had been not to take the mule paths up Epomeo. To my increasing wonder he hadn’t yet resorted to the subjects he was reading about in books, in journals, in newspapers, even though every so often, afraid of the silence, I threw out some remark that might set off his passion for the things of the world. But no, he had something else on his mind. And eventually he put down the oars, stared for a moment at a rock face, a flight of seagulls, then he said:

“Did Lina say anything to you?”

“About what?”

He pressed his lips together uneasily, and said, “All right, I’m going to tell you what happened. Yesterday I kissed her.”

That was the beginning. We spent the rest of the day talking about the two of them. We went swimming again, he explored cliffs and caves, we ate the sandwiches, drank all the water I had brought, he wanted to teach me to row, but as for talking we couldn’t talk about anything else. And what most struck me was that he didn’t try even once, as he normally tended to do, to transform his particular situation into a general situation. Only he and Lila, Lila and he. He said nothing about love. He said nothing about the reasons one ends up being in love with one person rather than another. He questioned me, instead, obsessively about her and her relationship with Stefano.

“Why did she marry him?”

“Because she was in love with him.”

“It can’t be.”

“I assure you it is.”

“She married him for money, to help her family, to settle herself.”

“If that was all she could have married Marcello Solara.”

“Who’s that?”

“A guy who has more money than Stefano and was crazy about her.”

“And she?”

“Didn’t want him.”

“So you think she married the grocer out of love.”

“Yes.”

“And what’s this business about going swimming to have children?”

“The doctor told her.”

“But does she want them?”

“At first no, now I don’t know.”

“And he?”

“He yes.”

“Is he in love with her?”

“Very much.”

“And you, from the outside, do you think that everything’s fine between them?”

“With Lina things are never fine.”

“Meaning?”

“They had problems from the first day of their marriage, but it was because of Lina, who couldn’t adjust.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s going better.”

“I don’t believe it.”

He went around and around that point with growing skepticism. But I insisted: Lila never had loved her husband as in that period. And the more incredulous he appeared the more I piled it on. I told him plainly that between them nothing could happen, I didn’t want him to delude himself. This, however, was of no use in exhausting the subject. It became increasingly clear that the more I talked to him in detail about Lila the more pleasant for him that day between sea and sky would be. It didn’t matter to him that every word of mine made him suffer. It mattered that I should tell him everything I knew, the good and the bad, that I should fill our minutes and our hours with her name. I did, and if at first this pained me, slowly it changed. I felt, that day, that to speak of Lila with Nino could in the weeks to come give a new character to the relationship between the three of us. Neither she nor I would ever have him. But both of us, for the entire time of the vacation, could gain his attention, she as the object of a passion with no future, I as the wise counselor who kept under control both his folly and hers. I consoled myself with that hypothesis of centrality. Lila had come to me to tell me about Nino’s kiss. He, starting out from the confession of that kiss, talked to me for an entire day. I would become necessary to both.

In fact Nino already couldn’t do without me.

“You think she’ll never be able to love me?” he asked at one point.

“She made a decision, Nino.”

“What?”

“To love her husband, to have a child with him. She’s here just for that.”

“And my love for her?”

“When one is loved one tends to love in return. It’s likely that she’ll feel gratified. But if you don’t want to suffer more, don’t expect anything else. The more Lina is surrounded by affection and admiration, the crueler she can become. She’s always been like that.”

We parted at sunset and for a while I had the impression of having had a good day. But as soon as I was on the road home the anguish returned. How could I even think of enduring that torture, talking about Lila with Nino, about Nino with Lila, and, from tomorrow, witnessing their flirtations, their games, the clasps, the touching? I reached the house determined to announce that my mother wanted me back home. But as soon as I came in Lila assailed me harshly.

“Where have you been? We came to look for you. We need you, you’ve got to help us.”

I discovered that they had not had a good day. It was Pinuccia’s fault, she had tormented everyone. In the end she had cried that if her husband didn’t want her at home it meant that he didn’t love her and so she preferred to die with the child. At that point Rino had given in and taken her back to Naples.

I understood only the next day what Pinuccia’s departure meant. That evening her absence struck me as positive: no more whining, the house quieted down, time slithered away silently. When I withdrew into my little room and Lila followed me, the conversation was apparently without tension. I held my tongue, careful to say nothing of what I truly felt.

“Do you understand why she wanted to leave?” Lila asked me, speaking of Pinuccia.

“Because she wants to be with her husband.”

She shook her head no, she said seriously, “She was becoming afraid of her own emotions.”

“Which means?”

“She fell in love with Bruno.”

I was amazed, I had never thought of that possibility.