My Brilliant Friend (26 page)

Then Donato Sarratore arrived for his two-week holiday. He was sorry that his son had left, but pleased that he had joined his schoolmates in the Avellinese to study. “He’s a truly serious boy,” he said to me, “like you. I’m proud of him, as I imagine your father must be proud of you.”

The presence of that reassuring man calmed me. He wanted to meet Marisa’s new friends, he invited them one evening to have a big bonfire on the beach. He himself gathered all the wood he could find and piled it up, and he stayed with us until late. The boy with whom Marisa was carrying on a half-steady relationship strummed a guitar and Donato sang, he had a beautiful voice. Then, late at night, he himself began to play and he played well, he improvised dance tunes. Some began to dance, Marisa first.

I looked at that man and thought: he and his son have not even a feature in common. Nino is tall, he has a delicate face, the forehead buried under black hair, the mouth always half-closed, with inviting lips; Donato instead is of average height, his features are pronounced, he has a receding hairline, his mouth is compact, almost without lips. Nino has brooding eyes that see beyond things and persons and seem to be frightened; Donato has a gaze that is always receptive, that adores the appearance of every thing or person and is always smiling on them. Nino has something that’s eating him inside, like Lila, and it’s a gift and a suffering; they aren’t content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them; this man, no, he appears to love every manifestation of life, as if every lived second had an absolute clarity.

From that evening on, Nino’s father seemed to me a solid remedy not only against the darkness into which his son had driven me, departing after an almost imperceptible kiss, but also—I realized with amazement—against the darkness into which Lila had driven me by never responding to my letters. She and Nino scarcely know each other, I thought, they have never been friends, and yet now they seem to me very similar: they have no need of anything or anyone, and they always know what’s right and what isn’t. But if they’re wrong? What is especially terrible about Marcello Solara, what is especially terrible about Donato Sarratore? I didn’t understand. I loved both Lila and Nino, and now in a different way I missed them, but I was grateful to that hated father, who made me, and all us children, important, who gave us joy and peace that night at the Maronti. Suddenly I was glad that neither of the two was present on the island.

I began reading again, I wrote a last letter to Lila, in which I said that, since she hadn’t ever answered me, I wouldn’t write anymore. I bound myself instead to the Sarratore family, I felt I was the sister of Marisa, Pinuccio, and little Ciro, who now loved me tremendously and with me, only with me, wasn’t naughty but played happily; we went looking for shells together. Lidia, whose hostility had conclusively turned into sympathy and fondness, often praised me for the precision that I put into everything: setting the table, cleaning the rooms, washing the dishes, entertaining the baby, reading and studying. One morning she made me try on a sundress that was too tight for her, and, since Nella and even Sarratore, called urgently to give an opinion, thought it very becoming, she gave it to me. At certain moments she even seemed to prefer me to Marisa. She said, “She’s lazy and vain, I brought her up badly, she doesn’t study; whereas you are so sensible about everything.” “Just like Nino,” she added once, “except that you’re sunny and he is always irritable.” But Donato, hearing those criticisms, responded sharply, and began to praise his oldest son. “He’s as good as gold,” he said, and with a look asked me for confirmation and I nodded yes with great conviction.

After his long swims Donato lay beside me to dry in the sun and read his newspaper,
Roma
, the only thing he read. I was struck by the fact that someone who wrote poems, who had even collected them in a volume, never opened a book. He hadn’t brought any with him and was never curious about mine. At times he read aloud to me some passage from an article, words and sentiments that would have made Pasquale extremely angry and certainly Professor Galiani, too. But I was silent, I didn’t feel like arguing with such a kind and courteous person, and spoiling the great esteem he had for me. Once he read me an entire article, from beginning to end, and every two lines he turned to Lidia smiling, and Lidia responded with a complicit smile. At the end he asked me, “Did you like it?”

It was an article on the speed of train travel as opposed to the speed of travel in the past, by horse carriage or on foot, along country lanes. It was written in high-flown sentences that he read with great feeling.

“Yes, very much,” I said.

“See who wrote it: what do you read here?”

He held it out toward me, put the paper under my eyes. With emotion, I read: “Donato Sarratore.”

Lidia burst out laughing and so did he. They left me on the beach to keep an eye on Ciro while they swam in their usual way, staying close to each other and whispering. I looked at them, I thought, Poor Melina, but without bitterness toward Sarratore. Assuming that Nino was right and that there really had been something between the two of them; assuming, in other words, that Sarratore really had betrayed Lidia, now, even more than before—now that I knew him somewhat—I couldn’t feel that he was guilty, especially since it seemed to me that not even his wife felt he was guilty, although at the time she had compelled him to leave the neighborhood. As for Melina, I understood her, too. She had felt the joy of love for that so far from ordinary man—a conductor on the railroad but also a poet, a journalist—and her fragile mind had been unable to readjust to the rough normality of life without him. I was satisfied with these thoughts. I was pleased with everything, in those days, with my love for Nino, with my sadness, with the affection that I felt surrounded by, with my own capacity to read, think, reflect in solitude.

Then, at the end of August, when that extraordinary period was about to come to an end, two important things happened, suddenly, on the same day. It was the twenty-fifth, I remember with precision because my birthday fell on that day. I got up, I prepared breakfast for everyone, at the table I said, “Today I’m fifteen,” and as I said it I remembered that Lila had turned fifteen on the eleventh, but, in the grip of so many emotions, I hadn’t remembered. Although customarily it was the saint’s day that was celebrated—birthdays were considered irrelevant at the time—the Sarratores and Nella insisted on having a party, in the evening. I was pleased. They went to get ready for the beach, I began to clear the table, when the postman arrived.

I stuck my head out the window, the postman said there was a letter for Greco. I ran down with my heart pounding. I ruled out the possibility that my parents had written to me. Was it a letter from Lila, from Nino? It was from Lila. I tore open the envelope. There were five closely written pages, and I devoured them, but I understood almost nothing of what I read. It may seem strange today, and yet it really was so: even before I was overwhelmed by the contents, what struck me was that the writing contained Lila’s voice. Not only that. From the first lines I thought of
The Blue Fairy
, the only text of hers that I had read, apart from our elementary-school homework, and I understood what, at the time, I had liked so much. There was, in
The Blue Fairy
, the same quality that struck me now: Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos. I was ashamed of the childish pages I had written to her, the overwrought tone, the frivolity, the false cheer, the false grief. Who knows what Lila had thought of me. I felt contempt and bitterness toward Professor Gerace, who had deluded me by giving me a nine in Italian. The first effect of that letter was to make me feel, at the age of fifteen, on the day of my birthday, a fraud. School, with me, had made a mistake and proof was there, in Lila’s letter.

Then, slowly, the contents reached me as well. Lila sent me good wishes for my birthday. She hadn’t written because she was pleased that I was having fun in the sun, that I was comfortable with the Sarratores, that I loved Nino, that I liked Ischia so much, the beach of the Maronti, and she didn’t want to spoil my vacation with her terrible stories. But now she had felt an urge to break the silence. Immediately after my departure Marcello Solara, with the consent of Fernando, had begun to appear at dinner every night. He came at eight-thirty and left exactly at ten-thirty. He always brought something: pastries, chocolates, sugar, coffee. She didn’t touch anything, she kept him at a distance, he looked at her in silence. After the first week of that torture, since Lila acted as if he weren’t there, he had decided to surprise her. He showed up in the morning with a big fellow, all sweaty, who deposited in the dining room an enormous cardboard box. Out of the box emerged an object that we all knew about but that very few in the neighborhood had in their house: a television, an apparatus, that is, with a screen on which one saw images, just as at the cinema, but the images came not from a projector but rather from the air, and inside the apparatus was a mysterious tube that was called a cathode. Because of that tube, mentioned continuously by the large sweaty man, the machine hadn’t worked for days. Then, after various attempts, it had started, and now half the neighborhood, including my mother, my father, and my sister and brothers, came to the Cerullo house to see the miracle. Not Rino. He was better, the fever had definitely gone, but he no longer spoke to Marcello. When Marcello showed up, he began to disparage the television and after a while he either went to bed without eating or went out and wandered around with Pasquale and Antonio until late at night. Lila said that she herself loved the television. She especially liked to watch it with Melina, who came every night and sat silently for a long time, completely absorbed. It was the only moment of peace. Otherwise, everyone’s anger was unloaded on her: her brother’s anger because she had abandoned him to his fate as the slave of their father while she set off on a marriage that would make her a lady; the anger of Fernando and Nunzia because she was not nice to Solara but, rather, treated him like dirt; finally the anger of Marcello, who, although she hadn’t accepted him, felt increasingly that he was her fiancé, in fact her master, and tended to pass from silent devotion to attempts to kiss her, to suspicious questions about where she went during the day, whom she saw, if she had had other boyfriends, if she had even just touched anyone. Since she wouldn’t answer, or, worse still, teased him by telling him of kisses and embraces with nonexistent boyfriends, he one evening had whispered to her seriously, “You tease me, but remember when you threatened me with the knife? Well, if I find out that you like someone else, remember, I won’t merely threaten you, I’ll kill you.” So she didn’t know how to get out of this situation and she still carried her weapon, just in case. But she was terrified. She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and had blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn’t break and doesn’t become misshapen like that. “It’s this sort of thing,” Lila concluded, “that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.” She sent me many more good wishes, and, even if she wished the opposite, even if she couldn’t wait to see me, even if she urgently needed my help, she hoped I would stay in Ischia with kind Signora Nella and never return to the neighborhood again.

This letter disturbed me greatly. Lila’s world, as usual, rapidly superimposed itself on mine. Everything that I had written in July and August seemed to me trivial, I was seized by a frenzy to redeem myself. I didn’t go to the beach, I tried immediately to answer her with a serious letter, one that had the essential, pure yet colloquial tone of hers. But if the other letters had come easily to me—I dashed off pages and pages in a few minutes, without ever correcting—this I wrote, rewrote, rewrote again, and yet Nino’s hatred of his father, the role that the affair of Melina had had in the origin of that ugly sentiment, my entire relationship with the Sarratore family, even my anxiety about what was happening to her, came out badly. Donato, who in reality was a remarkable man, on the page became a banal family man; and, as far as Marcello was concerned, I was capable only of superficial advice. In the end all that seemed true was my disappointment that she had a television at home and I didn’t.