My Brilliant Friend (29 page)

“My sister agrees about everything?” he asked.

Stefano smiled: “Who can do anything if your sister doesn’t agree?”

He got up, shook Fernando’s hand vigorously, and headed toward the door. Rino went with him and, with sudden concern, called to him from the doorway, as Stefano was going to the red convertible:

“The brand of the shoes is Cerullo.”

Stefano waved to him, without turning: “A Cerullo invented them and Cerullo they will be called.”

That same night Rino, before he went out with Pasquale and Antonio, said, “Marcè, have you seen that car Stefano’s got?”

Marcello, stupefied by the television and by sadness, didn’t even answer.

Then Rino drew his comb out of his pocket, pulled it through his hair, and said cheerfully: “You know that he bought our shoes for twenty-five thousand lire?”

“You see he’s got money to throw away,” Marcello answered, and Melina burst out laughing, it wasn’t clear if she was reacting to that remark or to what was showing on the television.

From that moment Rino found a way, night after night, to annoy Marcello, and the atmosphere became increasingly tense. Besides, as soon as Solara, who was always greeted kindly by Nunzia, arrived, Lila disappeared, saying she was tired, and went to bed. One night Marcello, very depressed, talked to Nunzia.

“If your daughter goes to bed as soon as I arrive, what am I coming here for?”

Evidently he hoped that she would comfort him, saying something that would encourage him to persevere. But Nunzia didn’t know what to say and so he stammered, “Does she like someone else?”

“But no.”

“I know she goes to do the shopping at Stefano’s.”

“And where should she go, my boy, to do the shopping?”

Marcello was silent, eyes lowered.

“She was seen in the car with the grocer.”

“Lenuccia was there, too: Stefano is interested in the porter’s daughter.”

“Lenuccia doesn’t seem to me a good companion for your daughter. Tell her not to see her anymore.”

I was not a good companion? Lila was not supposed to see me anymore? When my friend reported that request of Marcello’s I went over conclusively to Stefano’s side and began to praise his tactful ways, his calm determination. “He’s rich,” I said to her finally. But even as I said that I realized how the idea of the riches girls dreamed of was changing further. The treasure chests full of gold pieces that a procession of servants in livery would deposit in our castle when we published a book like
Little Women
—riches and fame—had truly faded. Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured. But the fundamental feature that now prevailed was concreteness, the daily gesture, the negotiation. This wealth of adolescence proceeded from a fantastic, still childish illumination—the designs for extraordinary shoes—but it was embodied in the petulant dissatisfaction of Rino, who wanted to spend like a big shot, in the television, in the meals, and in the ring with which Marcello wanted to buy a feeling, and, finally, from step to step, in that courteous youth Stefano, who sold groceries, had a red convertible, spent forty-five thousand lire like nothing, framed drawings, wished to do business in shoes as well as in cheese, invested in leather and a workforce, and seemed convinced that he could inaugurate a new era of peace and well-being for the neighborhood: it was, in short, wealth that existed in the facts of every day, and so was without splendor and without glory.

“He’s rich,” I heard Lila repeat, and we started laughing. But then she added, “Also nice, also good,” and I agreed, these last were qualities that Marcello didn’t have, a further reason for being on Stefano’s side. Yet those two adjectives confused me, I felt that they gave the final blow to the shine of childish fantasies. No castle, no treasure chest—I seemed to understand—would concern Lila and me alone, intent on writing our
Little Women
. Wealth, incarnated in Stefano, was taking the form of a young man in a greasy apron, was gaining features, smell, voice, was expressing kindness and goodness, was a male we had known forever, the oldest son of Don Achille.

I was disturbed.

“But he wanted to prick your tongue,” I said.

“He was a child,” she answered, with emotion, sweet as I had never heard her before, so that only at that moment did I realize that she was much farther along than what she had said to me in words.

In the following days everything became clearer. I saw how she talked to Stefano and how he seemed shaped by her voice. I adapted to the pact they were making, I didn’t want to be cut out. And we plotted for hours—the two of us, the three of us—to act in a way that would quickly silence people, feelings, the arrangement of things. A worker arrived in the space next to the shoe shop and took down the dividing wall. The shoemaker’s shop was reorganized. Three nearly silent apprentices appeared, country boys, from Melito. In one corner they continued to do resoling, in the rest of the space Fernando arranged benches, shelves, his tools, his wooden forms according to the various sizes, and began, with sudden energy, unsuspected in a man so thin, consumed by a bitter discontent, to talk about a course of action.

Just that day, when the new work was about to begin, Stefano showed up. He carried a package done up in brown paper. They all jumped to their feet, even Fernando, as if he had come for an inspection. He opened the package, and inside were a number of small pictures, all the same size, in narrow brown frames. They were Lila’s notebook pages, under glass, like precious relics. He asked permission from Fernando to hang them on the walls, Fernando grumbled something, and Stefano had Rino and the apprentices help him put in the nails. When the pictures were hung, Stefano asked the three helpers to go get a coffee and handed them some lire. As soon as he was alone with the shoemaker and his son, he announced quietly that he wanted to marry Lila.

An unbearable silence fell. Rino confined himself to a knowing little smile and Fernando said finally, weakly, “Stefano, Lina is engaged to Marcello Solara.”

“Your daughter doesn’t know it.”

“What do you mean?”

Rino interrupted, cheerfully: “He’s telling the truth: you and Mamma let that shit come to our house, but Lina never wanted him and doesn’t want him.”

Fernando gave his son a stern look. The grocer said gently, looking around: “We’ve started out on a job now, let’s not get worked up. I ask of you a single thing, Don Fernà: let your daughter decide. If she wants Marcello Solara, I will resign myself. I love her so much that if she’s happy with someone else I will withdraw and between us everything will remain as it is now. But if she wants me—if she wants me—there’s no help for it, you must give her to me.”

“You’re threatening me,” Fernando said, but halfheartedly, in a tone of resigned observation.

“No, I’m asking you to do what’s best for your daughter.”

“I know what’s best for her.”

“Yes, but she knows better than you.”

And here Stefano got up, opened the door, called me, I was waiting outside with Lila.

“Lenù.”

We went in. How we liked feeling that we were at the center of those events, the two of us together, directing them toward their outcome. I remember the extreme tension of that moment. Stefano said to Lila, “I’m saying to you in front of your father: I love you, more than my life. Will you marry me?”

Lila answered seriously, “Yes.”

Fernando gasped slightly, then murmured, with the same subservience that in times gone by he had manifested toward Don Achille: “We’re offending not only Marcello but all the Solaras. Who’s going to tell that poor boy?”

Lila said, “I will.”

In fact two nights later, in front of the whole family except Rino, who was out, before they sat down at the table, before the television was turned on, Lila asked Marcello, “Will you take me to get some ice cream?”

Marcello couldn’t believe his ears.

“Ice cream? Without eating first? You and me?” And he suddenly asked Nunzia, “Signora, would you come, too?”

Nunzia turned on the television and said, “No, thank you, Marcè. But don’t be too long. Ten minutes, you’ll go and be back.”

“Yes,” he promised, happily, “thank you.”

He repeated thank you at least four times. It seemed to him that the longed-for moment had arrived, Lila was about to say yes.

But as soon as they were outside the building she confronted him and said, with the cold cruelty that had come easily to her since her first years of life, “I never told you that I loved you.”

“I know. But now you do?”

“No.”

Marcello, who was heavily built, a healthy, ruddy youth of twenty-three, leaned against a lamppost, brokenhearted.

“Really no?”

“No. I love someone else.”

“Who is it?”

“Stefano.”

“I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it.”

“You have to believe it, it’s true.”

“I’ll kill you both.”

“With me you can try right now.”

Marcello left the lamppost in a rush, but, with a kind of death rattle, he bit his clenched right fist until it bled.

“I love you too much, I can’t do it.”

“Then get your brother, your father to do it, some friend, maybe they’re capable. But make it clear to all of them that you had better kill me first. Because if you touch anyone else while I’m alive, I will kill you, and you know I will, starting with you.”

Marcello continued to bite his finger stubbornly. Then he repressed a sort of sob that shook his breast, turned, and went off.

She shouted after him: “Send someone to get the television, we don’t need it.”

Everything happened in little more than a month and Lila in the end seemed to me happy. She had found an outlet for the shoe project, she had given an opportunity to her brother and the whole family, she had gotten rid of Marcello Solara and had become the fiancée of the most respectable wealthy young man in the neighborhood. What more could she want? Nothing. She had everything. When school began again I felt the dreariness of it more than usual. I was reabsorbed by the work and, so that the teachers would not find me unprepared, I went back to studying until eleven and setting my alarm for five-thirty. I saw Lila less and less.

On the other hand, my relationship with Stefano’s brother, Alfonso, solidified. Although he had worked in the grocery all summer, he had passed the makeup exams successfully, with seven in each of the subjects: Latin, Greek, and English. Gino, who had hoped that he would fail so that they could repeat the first year of high school together, was disappointed. When he realized that the two of us, now in our second year, went to school and came home together every day, he grew even more bitter and became mean. He no longer spoke to me, his former girlfriend, or to Alfonso, his former deskmate, even though he was in the classroom next to ours and we often met in the hallways, as well as in the streets of the neighborhood. But he did worse: soon I heard that he was telling nasty stories about us. He said that I was in love with Alfonso and touched him during class even though Alfonso didn’t respond, because, as he knew very well, he who had sat next to him for a year, he didn’t like girls, he preferred boys. I reported this to Alfonso, expecting him to beat up Gino, as was the rule in such cases, but he confined himself to saying, contemptuously, in dialect, “Everyone knows that he’s the fag.”

Alfonso was a pleasant, fortunate discovery. He gave an impression of cleanliness and good manners. Although his features were very similar to Stefano’s, the same eyes, same nose, same mouth; although his body, as he grew, was taking the same form, the large head, legs slightly short in relation to the torso; although in his gaze and in his gestures he manifested the same mildness, I felt in him a total absence of the determination that was concealed in every cell of Stefano’s body, and that in the end, I thought, reduced his courtesy to a sort of hiding place from which to jump out unexpectedly. Alfonso was soothing, that type of human being, rare in the neighborhood, from whom you know you needn’t expect any cruelty. We didn’t talk a lot, but we didn’t feel uncomfortable. He always had what I needed and if he didn’t he hurried to get it. He loved me without any tension and I felt quietly affectionate toward him. The first day of school we ended up sitting at the same desk, a thing that was audacious at the time, and even if the other boys made fun of him because he was always near me and the girls asked me continuously if he was my boyfriend, neither of us decided to change places. He was a trusted person. If he saw that I needed my own time, he either waited for me at a distance or said goodbye and went off. If he realized that I wanted him to stay with me, he stayed even if he had other things to do.

I used him to escape Nino Sarratore. When, for the first time after Ischia, we saw each other from a distance, Nino came toward me in a friendly way, but I dismissed him with a few cold remarks. And yet I liked him so much, if his tall slender figure merely appeared I blushed and my heart beat madly. And yet now that Lila was really engaged, officially engaged���and to such a fiancé, a man of twenty-two, not a boy: kind, decisive, courageous—it was more urgent than ever that I, too, should have an enviable fiancé and so rebalance our relationship. It would be lovely to go out as four, Lila with her betrothed, I with mine. Of course, Nino didn’t have a red convertible. Of course, he was a student in the fourth year of high school, and thus didn’t have a lira. But he was a lot taller than I, while Stefano was an inch or so shorter than Lila. And he spoke a literary Italian, when he wanted to. And he read and discussed everything and was aware of the great questions of the human condition, while Stefano lived shut off in his grocery, spoke almost exclusively in dialect, had not gone past the vocational school, at the cash register had his mamma, who did the accounts better than he, and, though he had a good character, was sensitive above all to the profitable turnover of money. Yet, although passion consumed me, although I saw clearly the prestige I would acquire in Lila’s eyes if I were bound to him, for the second time since seeing him and falling in love I felt incapable of establishing a relationship. The motive seemed to me much stronger than that of childhood. Seeing him brought immediately to mind Donato Sarratore, even if they didn’t resemble each other at all. And the disgust, the rage aroused by the memory of what his father had done without my being able to repulse him extended to Nino. Of course, I loved him. I longed to talk to him, walk with him, and at times I thought, racking my brains: Why do you behave like that, the father isn’t the son, the son isn’t the father, behave as Stefano did with the Pelusos. But I couldn’t. As soon as I imagined kissing him, I felt the mouth of Donato, and a wave of pleasure and revulsion mixed father and son into a single person.