My Brilliant Friend (31 page)

At first we tried to keep her, to impose on her the old habits. We drew Stefano into our group, embraced him, coddled him, and he seemed pleased, and so one Saturday, perhaps impelled by his sympathy for Antonio and Ada, he said to Lila, “See if Lenuccia and Melina’s children will come and eat with us tomorrow evening.” By “us” he meant the two of them plus Pinuccia and Rino, who now liked to spend his free time with his future brother-in-law. We accepted, but it was a difficult evening. Ada, afraid of making a bad impression, borrowed a dress from Gigliola. Stefano and Rino chose not a pizzeria but a restaurant in Santa Lucia. Neither I nor Antonio nor Ada had ever been in a restaurant, it was something for rich people, and we were overcome by anxiety: how should we dress, what would it cost? While the four of them went in the Giardinetta, we took the bus to Piazza Plebiscito and walked the rest of the way. At the restaurant, they casually ordered many dishes, and we almost nothing, out of fear that the bill would be more than we could afford. We were almost silent the whole time, because Rino and Stefano talked, mainly about money, and never thought of involving even Antonio in their conversations. Ada, not resigned to marginality, tried all evening to attract Stefano’s attention by flirting outrageously, which upset her brother. Then, when it was time to pay, we discovered that Stefano had already taken care of the bill, and, while it didn’t bother Rino at all, Antonio went home in a rage, because although he was the same age as Stefano and Lila’s brother, although he worked as they did, he felt he had been treated like a pauper. But the most significant thing was that Ada and I, with different feelings, realized that in a public place, outside of our intimate, neighborhood relationship, we didn’t know what to say to Lila, how to treat her. She was so well dressed, so carefully made up, that she seemed right for the Giardinetta, the convertible, the restaurant in Santa Lucia, but physically unsuited now to go on the metro with us, to travel on the bus, to walk around the neighborhood, to get a pizza in Corso Garibaldi, to go to the parish cinema, to dance at Gigliola’s house.

That evening it became evident that Lila was changing her circumstances. In the days, the months, she became a young woman who imitated the models in the fashion magazines, the girls on television, the ladies she had seen walking on Via Chiaia. When you saw her, she gave off a glow that seemed a violent slap in the face of the poverty of the neighborhood. The girl’s body, of which there were still traces when we had woven the plot that led to her engagement to Stefano, was soon banished to dark lands. In the light of the sun she was instead a young woman who, when on Sundays she went out on the arm of her fiancé, seemed to apply the terms of their agreement as a couple, and Stefano, with his gifts, seemed to wish to demonstrate to the neighborhood that, if Lila was beautiful, she could always be more so; and she seemed to have discovered the joy of dipping into the inexhaustible well of her beauty, and to feel and show that no shape, however beautifully drawn, could contain her conclusively, since a new hairstyle, a new dress, a new way of making up her eyes or her mouth were only more expansive outlines that dissolved the preceding ones. Stefano seemed to seek in her the most palpable symbol of the future of wealth and power that he intended; and she seemed to use the seal that he was placing on her to make herself, her brother, her parents, her other relatives safe from all that she had confusedly confronted and challenged since she was a child.

I still didn’t know anything about what she secretly called, in herself, after the bad experience of New Year’s, dissolving margins. But I knew the story of the exploded pot, it was always lying in ambush in some corner of my mind; I thought about it over and over again. And I remember that, one night at home, I reread the letter she had sent me on Ischia. How seductive was her way of talking about herself and how distant it seemed now. I had to acknowledge that the Lila who had written those words had disappeared. In the letter there was still the girl who had written
The Blue Fairy
, who had learned Latin and Greek on her own, who had consumed half of Maestro Ferraro’s library, even the girl who had drawn the shoes framed and hanging in the shoe store. But in the life of every day I no longer saw her, no longer heard her. The tense, aggressive Cerullo was as if immolated. Although we both continued to live in the same neighborhood, although we had had the same childhood, although we were both living our fifteenth year, we had suddenly ended up in two different worlds. I was becoming, as the months ran by, a sloppy, disheveled, spectacled girl bent over tattered books that gave off a moldy odor, volumes bought at great sacrifice at the secondhand store or obtained from Maestra Oliviero. She went around on Stefano’s arm in the clothes of an actress or a princess, her hair styled like a diva’s.

I looked at her from the window, and felt that her earlier shape had broken, and I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter, of the cracked and crumpled copper. It was an image that I used all the time, whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.

After the terrible evening in the restaurant in Santa Lucia there were no more occasions like that, and not because the boyfriends didn’t ask us again but because we now got out of it with one excuse or another. Instead, when I wasn’t exhausted by my homework, I let myself be drawn out to a dance at someone’s house, to have a pizza with the old group. I preferred to go, however, only when I was sure that Antonio would come; for a while he had been courting me, discreetly, attentively. True, his face was shiny and full of blackheads, his teeth here and there were bluish; he had broad hands and strong fingers—he had once effortlessly unscrewed the screws on the punctured tire of an old car that Pasquale had acquired. But he had black wavy hair that made you want to caress it, and although he was very shy the rare times he opened his mouth he said something witty. Besides, he was the only one who noticed me. Enzo seldom appeared; he had a life of which we knew little or nothing, and when he was there he devoted himself, in his detached, slow way, and never excessively, to Carmela. As for Pasquale, he seemed to have lost interest in girls after Lila’s rejection. He took very little notice even of Ada, who flirted with him tirelessly, even if she kept saying that she couldn’t stand always seeing our mean faces.

Naturally on those evenings we sooner or later ended up talking about Lila, even if it seemed that no one wanted to name her: the boys were all a little disappointed, each one would have liked to be in Stefano’s place. But the most unhappy was Pasquale: if his hatred for the Solaras hadn’t been of such long standing, he would probably have sided publicly with Marcello against the Cerullo family. His sufferings in love had dug deep inside him and a mere glimpse of Lila and Stefano together dimmed his joy in life. Yet he was by nature honest and good-hearted, so he was careful to keep his reactions under control and to take sides according to what was just. When he found out that Marcello and Michele had confronted Rino one evening, and though they hadn’t laid a finger on him had grossly insulted him, Pasquale had entirely taken Rino’s part. When he found out that Silvio Solara, the father of Michele and Marcello, had gone in person to Fernando’s renovated shoe store and calmly reproached him for not having brought up his daughter properly, and then, looking around, had observed that the shoemaker could make all the shoes he wanted, but then where would he sell them, he would never find a store that would take them, not to mention that with all that glue around, with all that thread and pitch and wooden forms and soles and heels, it wouldn’t take much to start a fire, Pasquale had promised that, if there was a fire at the Cerullo shoe shop, he would go with a few trusted companions and burn down the Solara bar and pastry shop. But he was critical of Lila. He said that she should have run away from home rather than allow Marcello to go there and court her all those evenings. He said she should have smashed the television with a hammer and not watched it with anyone who knew that he had bought it only to have her. He said, finally, that she was a girl too intelligent to be truly in love with a hypocritical idiot like Stefano Carracci.

On those occasions I was the only one who did not remain silent but explicitly disagreed with Pasquale’s criticisms. I refuted him, saying things like: It’s not easy to leave home; it’s not easy to go against the wishes of the people you love; nothing is easy, especially when you criticize her rather than being angry at your friend Rino��he’s the one who got her in that trouble with Marcello, and if Lila hadn’t found a way of getting out of it, she would have had to marry Marcello. I concluded by praising Stefano, who of all the boys who had known Lila since she was a child and loved her was the only one with the courage to support her and help her. A terrible silence fell and I was very proud of having countered every criticism of my friend in a tone and language that, among other things, had subdued him.

But one night we ended up quarreling unpleasantly. We were all, including Enzo, having a pizza on the Rettifilo, in a place where a margherita and a beer cost fifty lire. This time it was the girls who started: Ada, I think, said she thought Lila was ridiculous going around always fresh from the hairdresser and in clothes like Princess Soraya, even though she was sprinkling roach poison in front of the house door. We all, some more, some less, laughed. Then, one thing leading to another, Carmela ended up saying outright that Lila had gone with Stefano for the money, to settle her brother and the rest of the family. I was starting my usual official defense when Pasquale interrupted me and said, “That’s not the point. The point is that Lina knows where that money comes from.”

“Now you want to drag in Don Achille and the black market and the trafficking and loan sharking and all the nonsense of before and after the war?” I said.

“Yes, and if your friend were here now she would say I was right.”

“Stefano is just a shopkeeper who’s a good salesman.”

“And the money he put into the Cerullos’ shoe store he got from the grocery?”

“Why, what do you think?”

“It comes from the gold objects taken from mothers and hidden by Don Achille in the mattress. Lina acts the lady with the blood of all the poor people of this neighborhood. And she is kept, she and her whole family, even before she’s married.”

I was about to answer when Enzo interrupted with his usual detachment: “Excuse me, Pascà, what do you mean by ‘is kept’?”

As soon as I heard that question I knew that things would turn ugly. Pasquale turned red, embarrassed. “Keep means keep. Who pays, please, when Lina goes to the hairdresser, when she buys dresses and purses? Who put money into the shoe shop so that the shoe-repair man can play at making shoes?”

“Are you saying that Lina isn’t in love, isn’t engaged, won’t soon marry Stefano, but has sold herself?”

We were all quiet. Antonio murmured, “No, Enzo, Pasquale doesn’t mean that; you know that he loves Lina as we all of us love her.”

Enzo nodded at him to be quiet.

“Be quiet, Anto’, let Pasquale answer.”

Pasquale said grimly, “Yes, she sold herself. And she doesn’t give a damn about the stink of the money she spends every day.”

I tried again to have my say, at that point, but Enzo touched my arm.

“Excuse me, Lenù, I want to know what Pasquale calls a girl who sells herself.”

Here Pasquale had an outburst of violence that we all read in his eyes and he said what for months he had wanted to say, to shout out to the whole neighborhood: “Whore, I call her a whore. Lina has behaved and is behaving like a whore.”

Enzo got up and said, almost in a whisper: “Come outside.”

Antonio jumped up, restrained Pasquale, who was getting up, and said, “Now, let’s not overdo it, Enzo. Pasquale is only saying something that’s not an accusation, it’s a criticism that we’d all like to make.”

Enzo answered, this time aloud, “Not me.” And he headed toward the door, announcing, “I’ll wait outside for both of you.”

We kept Pasquale and Antonio from following him, and nothing happened. They didn’t speak for several days, then everything was as before.

I’ve recounted that quarrel to say how that year passed and what the atmosphere was around Lila’s choices, especially among the young men who had secretly or explicitly loved her, desired her, and in all probability loved and desired her still. As for me, it’s hard to say in what tangle of feelings I found myself. I always defended Lila, and I liked doing so, I liked to hear myself speak with the authority of one who is studying difficult subjects. But I also knew that I could have just as well recounted, and willingly, if with some exaggeration, how Lila had really been behind each of Stefano’s moves, and I with her, linking step to step as if it were a mathematics problem, to achieve that result: to settle herself, settle her brother, attempt to realize the plan of the shoe factory, and even get money to repair my glasses if they broke.

I passed Fernando’s old workshop and felt a vicarious sense of triumph. Lila, clearly, had made it. The shoemaker’s shop, which had never had a sign, now displayed over the door a kind of plaque that said “Cerullo.” Fernando, Rino, the three apprentices worked at joining, stitching, hammering, polishing, bent over their benches from morning till late at night. It was known that father and son often quarreled. It was known that Fernando maintained that the shoes, especially the women’s, couldn’t be made as Lila had invented them, that they were only a child’s fantasy. It was known that Rino maintained the opposite and that he went to Lila to ask her to intervene. It was known that Lila said she didn’t want to know about it, and so Rino went to Stefano and dragged him to the shop to give his father specific orders. It was known that Stefano went in and looked for a long time at Lila’s designs framed on the walls, smiled to himself and said tranquilly that he wanted the shoes to be exactly as they were in those pictures, he had hung them there for that purpose. It was known, in short, that things were proceeding slowly, that the workers first received instructions from Fernando and then Rino changed them and everything stopped and started over, and Fernando noticed the changes and changed them back, and Stefano arrived and so back to square one: they ended up yelling, breaking things.