The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (48 page)

“For me, too.”

Lila was sad. While Alfonso continued to wait on customers, she remembered the people she had met in that place, and Nino, the lowered shutter, the shadowy light, the pleasant conversations, the way he arrived secretly, exactly at one, and disappeared at four, after they made love. It seemed to her an imaginary time, a bizarre fantasy, and she looked around uneasily. She didn’t feel nostalgia for it, she didn’t feel nostalgia for Nino. She felt only that time had passed, that what had been important was important no longer, that the tangle in her head endured and wouldn’t come untangled. She took the child and was about to leave when Michele Solara came in.

He greeted her enthusiastically, he played with Gennaro, he said that the baby was just like her. He invited her to a bar, bought her a coffee, decided to take her home in his car. Once they were in the car he said to her, “Leave your husband, right away, today. I’ll take you and your son. I’ve bought a house on the Vomero, in Piazza degli Artisti. If you want I’ll drive you there now, I’ll show it to you, I took it with you in mind. There you can do what you like: read, write, invent things, sleep, laugh, talk, and be with Rinuccio. I’m interested only in being able to look at you and listen to you.”

For the first time in his life Michele expressed himself without his teasing tone of voice. As he drove and talked he glanced at her obliquely, slightly anxious, to see her reactions. Lila stared at the street in front of her the whole way, trying, meanwhile, to take the pacifier out of Gennaro’s mouth, she thought he used it too much. But the child pushed her hand away energetically. When Michele stopped—she didn’t interrupt him—she asked:

“Are you finished?”

“Yes.”

“And Gigliola?”

“What does Gigliola have to do with it? You say yes or no, and then we’ll see.”

“No, Michè, the answer is no. I didn’t want your brother and I don’t want you, either. First, because I don’t like either of you; and second because you think you can do anything and take anything without regard.”

Michele didn’t react right away, he muttered something about the pacifier, like: Give it to him, don’t let him cry. Then he said, threateningly, “Think hard about it, Lina. Tomorrow you may be sorry and you’ll come begging to me.”

“I rule it out.”

“Yes? Then listen to me.”

He revealed to her what everyone knew (“Even your mother, your father, and that shit your brother, but they tell you nothing in order to keep the peace”): Stefano had taken Ada as a lover, and not recently. The thing had begun before the vacation on Ischia. “When you were on vacation,” he said, “she went to your house every night.” With Lila’s return the two had stopped for a while. But they hadn’t been able to resist: they had started again, had left each other again, had gone back together when Lila disappeared from the neighborhood. Recently Stefano had rented an apartment on the Rettifilo, they saw each other there.

“Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“And so?”

So what. Lila was disturbed not so much by the fact that her husband had a lover and that the lover was Ada but by the absurdity of every word and gesture of his when he came to get her on Ischia. The shouts, the blows, the departure returned to her mind.

She said to Michele: “You make me sick, you, Stefano, all of you.”

Lila suddenly felt that she was in the right and this calmed her. That evening she put Gennaro to bed and waited for Stefano to come home. He returned a little after midnight, and found her sitting at the kitchen table. Lila looked up from the book she was reading, said she knew about Ada, she knew how long it had been going on, and that it didn’t matter to her at all. “What you have done to me I did to you,” she said clearly, smiling, and repeated to him—how many times had she said it in the past, two, three?—that Gennaro wasn’t his son. She concluded that he could do what he liked, sleep where and with whom he wanted. “The essential thing,” she cried suddenly, “is that you don’t touch me again.”

I don’t know what she had in mind, maybe she just wanted to get things out in the open. Or maybe she was prepared for anything and everything. She expected that he would confess, that then he would beat her, chase her out of the house, make her, his wife, be a servant to his lover. She was prepared for every possible aggression and the arrogance of a man who feels that he is the master and has money to buy whatever he wants. Instead, getting to words that would clarify and sanction the failure of their marriage was impossible. Stefano denied it. He said, menacing, but calm, that Ada was merely the clerk in his grocery, that whatever gossip circulated about them had no basis. Then he got mad and told her that if she said that ugly thing about his son again, as God was his witness he would kill her: Gennaro was the image of him, identical, and everyone confirmed it, to keep provoking him on this point was useless. Finally—and this was the most surprising thing—he declared to her, as he had done at other times in the past, without varying the formulas, his love. He said that he would love her forever, because she was his wife, because they had been married before the priest and nothing could separate them. When he came over to kiss her and she pushed him away, he grabbed her, lifted her up, carried her to the bedroom, where the baby’s cradle was, tore off everything she had on and entered her forcibly, while she begged him in a low voice, repressing sobs: “Rinuccio will wake up, see us, hear us, please let’s go in there.”

After that night Lila lost many of the small freedoms that remained to her. Stefano’s behavior was completely contradictory. Since his wife now knew of his relationship with Ada, he abandoned all caution. Often he didn’t come home to sleep; every other Sunday he went out in the car with his lover. In August, he went on a vacation with her: they went to Stockholm in the sports car, even though officially Ada had gone to Turin, to visit a cousin who worked at Fiat. At the same time, a sick form of jealousy exploded in him: he didn’t want his wife to leave the house, he obliged her to do the shopping by phone and if she went out for an hour so that the baby could get some air he interrogated her on whom she had met, whom she had talked to. He felt more a husband than ever and he watched her. It was as if he feared that his betrayal of her authorized her to betray him. What he did in his encounters with Ada on the Rettifilo stirred his imagination and led him to detailed fantasies in which Lila did even more with her lovers. He was afraid of being made ridiculous by a possible unfaithfulness on her part, while he did nothing to hide his own.

He wasn’t jealous of all men, he had a hierarchy. Lila quickly understood that in particular he was preoccupied by Michele, by whom he felt cheated in everything and as if kept in a position of permanent subjugation. Although she had never said anything about the time Solara had tried to kiss her, or of his proposal that she become his lover, Stefano had perceived that to insult him by taking his wife was an important move in the process of ruining him in business. But on the other hand the logic of business meant that Lila should behave at least a little cordially. As a result whatever she did he didn’t like. At times he pressed her obsessively: “Did you see Michele, did you talk to him, did he ask you to design new shoes?” Sometimes he shouted at her: “You are not even to say hello to that shit, is that clear?” And he opened all her drawers, rummaged through them in search of evidence of her nature as a whore.

To further complicate the situation first Pasquale interfered, then Rino.

Pasquale naturally was the last to know, even after Lila, that his fiancée was Stefano’s lover. No one told him, he saw them with his own eyes, late on a Sunday afternoon in September, coming out of a doorway on the Rettifilo embracing. Ada had told him that she had things to do with Melina and couldn’t see him. Besides, he was always out at work or at his political meetings, and took little notice of his fiancée’s distortions and evasions. Seeing them caused him terrible pain, complicated by the fact that, while his immediate impulse would have been to kill them both, his education as a militant Communist prohibited him. Pasquale had recently become secretary of the neighborhood section of the Party and although in the past, like all the boys we had grown up with, he had classified us when necessary as whores, he now felt—since he kept himself up to date, read
l’Unità
, studied booklets, presided over debates in the section—that he could no longer do that, in fact he made an effort to consider us women not inferior, generally speaking, to men, with our feelings, our ideas, our freedoms. Caught, therefore, between rage and broad-mindedness, the next night, still dirty from work, he went to Ada and told her that he knew everything. She appeared relieved and admitted it, cried, begged forgiveness. When he asked if she had done it for money, she answered that she loved Stefano and that she alone knew what a good and generous and kind person he was. The result was that Pasquale punched the kitchen wall in the Cappuccio house, and returned home weeping, his knuckles sore. Afterward he talked to Carmen all night, the sister and brother suffered together, one because of Ada, the other because of Enzo, whom she couldn’t forget. Things really took a bad turn when Pasquale, although he had been betrayed, decided that he had to defend the dignity of both Ada and Lila. First he wanted to clarify things, and went to talk to Stefano; he made a complicated speech whose essence was that he should leave his wife and set up a household with his lover. Then he went to Lila and reproached her because she let Stefano trample on her rights as a wife and her feelings as a woman. One morning—it was six-thirty—Stefano confronted him just as he was leaving to go to work and good-naturedly offered him money so that he would stop bothering him, his wife, and Ada. Pasquale took the money, counted it, and threw it away, saying, “I’ve worked since I was a child, I don’t need you,” then, as if to apologize, he added that he had to go, otherwise he would be late and would be fired. But when he had gone some distance he had a second thought, he turned and shouted at the grocer, who was picking up the money scattered on the street: “You are worse than that fascist pig your father.” They fought, savagely, they had to be separated or they would have murdered each other.

Then came the trouble from Rino. He couldn’t bear the fact that his sister had stopped trying to make Dino a very intelligent child. He couldn’t bear the fact that his brother-in-law not only wouldn’t give him a cent but had even laid hands on him. He couldn’t bear the fact that the relation between Stefano and Ada had become public knowledge, with all the humiliating consequences for Lila. And he reacted in an unexpected way. Since Stefano beat Lila, he began to beat Pinuccia. Since Stefano had a lover, he found a lover. He started, that is, on a persecution of Stefano’s sister that mirrored what his sister was subjected to by Stefano.

This threw Pinuccia into despair: with tears, with entreaties, she begged him to end it. But no. If she merely opened her mouth Rino, blinded by rage, and frightening even Nunzia, shouted at her: “I should end it? I should calm down? Then go to your brother and tell him that he should leave Ada, that he should respect Lina, that we have to be a united family and that he should give me the money that he and the Solaras have cheated me of and are cheating me of.” The result was that Pinuccia very often ran out of the house, looking battered, and went to the grocery, to her brother, and sobbed in front of Ada and the customers. Stefano dragged her into the rear of the shop and she listed all her husband’s demands, but concluded, “Don’t give that bastard anything, come home now and kill him.”

This was more or less the situation when I returned to the neighborhood for the Easter vacation. I had been living in Pisa for two and a half years, I was a very brilliant student, and returning to Naples for the holidays had become an ordeal that I submitted to in order to avoid arguments with my parents, especially with my mother. As soon as the train entered the station I became nervous. I feared that some accident would prevent me from returning to the Normale at the end of the vacation: a serious illness that obliged me to enter the chaos of a hospital, some dreadful event that forced me to stop studying because the family needed me.

I had been home for a few hours. My mother had just given me a malicious report on the ugly affairs of Lila, Stefano, Ada, Pasquale, Rino, on the shoe factory that was about to close, on how these were times when one year you had money, you thought you were somebody, you bought a sports car, and the next year you had to sell everything, you ended up in Signora Solara’s red book and stopped acting like a big shot. And here she cut off her litany and said to me, “Your friend thought she really had arrived, the wedding of a princess, the big car, the new house, and yet today you are much smarter and much prettier than she is.” Then she frowned, to repress her satisfaction, and handed me a note that, naturally, she had read, even though it was for me. Lila wanted to see me, she invited me to lunch the next day, Holy Friday.

That was not the only invitation I had, the days were full. Soon afterward Pasquale called me from the courtyard and, as if I were descending from an Olympus instead of from my parents’ dark house, wanted to expound to me his ideas about women, to tell me how much he was suffering, find out what I thought of his behavior. Pinuccia did the same in the evening, furious with both Rino and Lila. Ada, unexpectedly, did the same the next morning, burning with hatred and a sense of injury.

With all three I assumed a distant tone. I urged Pasquale to be calm, Pinuccia to concern herself with her son, and Ada to try to understand if it was true love. In spite of the superficiality of the words, I have to say that she interested me most. While she spoke, I stared at her as if she were a book. She was the daughter of Melina the madwoman, the sister of Antonio. In her face I recognized her mother, and many features of her brother. She had grown up without a father, exposed to every danger, used to working. She had washed the stairs of our buildings for years, with Melina, whose brain had suddenly stopped functioning. The Solaras had picked her up in their car when she was a girl and I could imagine what they had done to her. It seemed therefore normal that she should fall in love with Stefano, the courteous boss. She loved him, she told me, they loved each other. “Tell Lina,” she said, her eyes shining with passion, “that one cannot command one’s heart, and that if she is the wife I am the one who has given and gives Stefano everything, every attention and feeling that a man could want, and soon children, too, and so he is mine, he no longer belongs to her.”