The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (12 page)

We brought her home, Antonio supporting her on one side, I on the other. People seemed relieved, called to her, she waved weakly. I saw Lila next to the gate; isolated in her house in the new neighborhood, she must have heard the news late, and hadn’t taken part in the search. I knew that she felt a strong bond with Melina, but it struck me that, while everyone was showing signs of sympathy, and here was Ada running toward her, crying mamma, followed by Stefano—who had left the car in the middle of the
stradone
with the doors open, and had the happy expression of someone who has had ugly thoughts but now discovers that all is well—she stood apart with an expression that was hard to describe. She seemed to be moved by the pitiful sight of the widow: dirty, smiling faintly, her light clothes soaked and muddy, the outline of her wasted body visible under the material, the feeble wave of greeting to friends and acquaintances. But Lila also seemed to be wounded by it, and frightened, as if she felt inside the same disruption. I nodded to her, but she didn’t respond. I gave up Melina to her daughter, then, and tried to join Lila, I also wanted to tell her about Maestra Oliviero, about the terrible thing Antonio had said to me. But I couldn’t find her; she was gone.

When I saw Lila again, I realized immediately that she felt bad and tended to make me feel bad, too. We spent a morning at her house in an atmosphere that seemed to be playful. In fact she insisted, with growing spitefulness, that I try on all her clothes, even though they didn’t fit me. The game became torture. She was taller and thinner; everything of hers that I put on made me look ridiculous. But she wouldn’t admit it, she said all you need is an adjustment here or there, and yet her mood darkened as she gazed at me, as if my appearance offended her.

At a certain point she exclaimed that’s enough: she looked as if she had seen a ghost. Then she pulled herself together, and, assuming a frivolous tone, told me that a couple of nights earlier she had gone to have ice cream with Pasquale and Ada.

I was in my slip, helping her put the clothes back on the hangers.

“With Pasquale and Ada?”

“Yes.”

“And Stefano, too?”

“Just me.”

“Did they invite you?”

“No, I asked them.”

And, as though she wanted to surprise me, she added that she hadn’t confined herself to that brief visit to the old world of her girlhood: the next day she had gone to have a pizza with Enzo and Carmela.

“Also by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And what does Stefano say?”

She made a grimace of indifference. “Being married doesn’t mean leading the life of an old lady. If he wants to come with me, fine; if he’s too tired in the evening, I go out by myself.”

“How was it?”

“I had fun.”

I hoped she couldn’t read the disappointment in my face. We saw each other frequently, she could have said: Tonight I’m going out with Ada, Pasquale, Enzo, Carmela, do you want to come? Instead she had said nothing, she had arranged and managed those outings by herself, in secret, as if they had been not
our
friends forever but only hers. And now she was telling me in detail, with an air of satisfaction, everything they had said: Ada was worried, Melina ate almost nothing and threw up whatever she did eat, Pasquale was anxious about his mother, Giuseppina, who couldn’t sleep, felt a heaviness in her legs, had palpitations, and when she returned from visiting her husband in prison wept inconsolably. I listened. I noticed that, more than usual, she had an involved way of talking. She chose emotionally charged words, she described Melina Cappuccio and Giuseppina Peluso as if their bodies had seized hers, imposing on it the same contracted or inflated forms, the same bad feelings. As she spoke, she touched her face, her breast, her stomach, her hips as if they were no longer hers, and showed that she knew everything about those women, down to the tiniest details, in order to prove that no one told me anything but told her everything, or, worse, in order to make me feel that I was wrapped in a fog, unable to see the suffering of the people around me. She spoke of Giuseppina as if she had kept up with her, despite the vortex of her engagement and marriage; she spoke of Melina as if the mother of Ada and Antonio had always been in her mind and she were thoroughly familiar with her madness. Then she went on to enumerate many other people in the neighborhood, people whom I hardly knew but whose histories she seemed to know, as if she had a sort of long-distance involvement in their lives. Finally she announced:

“I also had ice cream with Antonio.”

That name was a punch in the stomach.

“How is he?”

“Fine.”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“No, nothing.”

“When does he leave?”

“In September.”

“Marcello did nothing to help him.”

“It was predictable.”

Predictable? If it was predictable, I thought, that the Solaras would do nothing, why did you take me there? And why do you, who are married, now want to see your friends again, like that, by yourself? And why did you have ice cream with Antonio without telling me, knowing that he is my old boyfriend and that though he doesn’t want to see me anymore I would like to see him? Do you want revenge because I went driving with your husband and didn’t report to you a word of what we said to each other? I dressed nervously, mumbled that I had things to do, had to go.

“I have something else to tell you.”

In a serious voice she said that Rino, Marcello, and Michele had wanted Stefano to go to Piazza dei Martiri to see how well the shop was coming along, and that the three of them, amid sacks of cement and cans of paint and brushes, had pointed out the wall opposite the entrance and told him they were thinking of putting the enlargement of the photograph of her in her wedding dress there. Stefano had listened, then he had answered that certainly it would be a good advertisement for the shoes, but that it didn’t seem to him suitable. The three had insisted, he had said no to Marcello, no to Michele, and no to Rino as well. In other words I had won the bet: her husband had not given in to the Solaras.

I said, making an effort to appear enthusiastic, “See? Always saying mean things about poor Stefano. And instead I was right. Now you have to start studying.”

“Wait.”

“Wait for what? A bet is a bet and you lost.”

“Wait,” Lila repeated.

My bad mood got worse. She doesn’t know what she wants, I thought. She’s unhappy that she was wrong about her husband. Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe she appreciated Stefano’s refusal, but she expects a more ferocious clash of men around her image, and she’s disappointed because the Solaras weren’t insistent enough. I saw that she was lazily running a hand over her hip and along one leg, like a caress of farewell, and in her eyes appeared for a moment that mixture of suffering, fear, and disgust that I had noticed the night of Melina’s disappearance. I thought: and if, instead, she secretly wants her picture to be on display, enlarged, in the center of the city, and is sorry that Michele didn’t succeed in forcing it on Stefano? Why not, she wants to be first in everything, she’s made like that: the most beautiful, the most elegant, the wealthiest. Then I said to myself: above all, the most intelligent. And at the idea that Lila would really start studying again I felt a regret that discouraged me. Of course she would make up for all the years of school she had missed. Of course I would find her beside me, elbow to elbow, taking the high-school graduation exam. And I realized that the prospect was intolerable. But it was even more intolerable to discover that feeling in myself. I was ashamed and immediately started telling her how wonderful it would be if we studied together again, and insisting that she should find out how to proceed. She shrugged, so I said, “Now I really have to go.”

This time she didn’t stop me.

As usual, once I was on the stairs I began to sympathize with her reasons, or so it seemed to me: she was isolated in the new neighborhood, shut up in her modern house, beaten by Stefano, engaged in some mysterious struggle with her own body in order not to conceive children, envious of my success in school to the point of indicating to me with that crazy bet that she would like to study again. Besides, it was likely that she saw me as much freer than she was. The breakup with Antonio, my troubles with school seemed like nonsense compared to hers. Step by step, without realizing it, I felt driven to a grudging support, then renewed admiration. Yes, it would be wonderful if she started studying again. To return to the time of elementary school, when she was always first and I second. To give meaning back to studying because she knew how to give it meaning. To stay in her shadow and therefore feel strong and secure. Yes, yes, yes. Start again.

At some point, on the way home, the mixture of suffering, fear, and disgust I had seen in her face returned to my mind. Why. I thought back to the teacher’s body in disarray, to Melina’s uncontrolled body. For no obvious reason, I began to look closely at the women on the
stradone
. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself?

I was suddenly sure that, without being aware of it, I had intercepted Lila’s feelings and was adding them to mine. Why did she have that expression, that ill humor? Had she caressed her leg, her hip, as a sort of farewell? Had she touched herself, speaking, as if she felt the edges of her body besieged by Melina, by Giuseppina, and was frightened, disgusted by it? Had she turned to our friends out of a need to react?

I remembered how, as a child, she had looked at Maestra Oliviero when she fell off the platform like a broken puppet. I remembered how she had looked at Melina on the
stradone,
eating the soft soap she had just bought. I remembered when she told the rest of us about the murder, and the blood on the copper pot, and claimed that the killer of Don Achille was not a man but a woman, as if, in the story she was telling us, she had heard and seen the form of a female body break, from the need for hatred, the urgency for revenge or justice, and lose its substance.

Starting in the last week of July, I went with the stationer’s daughters to the Sea Garden every day, including Sunday. Along with the thousand things that the children might need, I brought in a canvas bag the books that Professor Galiani had lent me. They were small volumes that examined the past, the present, the world as it was and as it ought to become. The writing resembled that of textbooks, but was more difficult and more interesting. I wasn’t used to that sort of reading, and got tired quickly. Besides, the girls required a lot of attention. And then there was the lazy sea, the leaden sun that bore down on the gulf and the city, stray fantasies, desires, the ever-present wish to undo the order of the lines—and, with it, every order that required an effort, a wait for fulfillment yet to come—and yield, instead, to what was within reach, immediately gained, the crude life of the creatures of the sky, the earth, and the sea. I approached my seventeenth birthday with one eye on the daughters of the stationer and one on
Discourse on the
Origins of Inequality
.

One Sunday I felt someone putting fingers over my eyes and a female voice asked, “Guess who?”

I recognized Marisa’s voice and hoped that she was with Nino. How I would have liked him to see me made beautiful by the sun, the salt water, and intent on reading a difficult book. I exclaimed happily, “Marisa!” and immediately turned around. But Nino wasn’t there; it was Alfonso, with a blue towel over his shoulder, cigarette, wallet, and lighter in his hand, a black bathing suit with a white stripe, he himself pale as one who has never had a ray of sun in his entire life.

I marveled at seeing them together. Alfonso had to retake exams in two subjects in October, and, since he was busy in the grocery, I imagined that on Sundays he studied. As for Marisa, I was sure that she would be at Barano with her family. Instead she told me that her parents had quarreled with Nella the year before and, with some friends from
Roma
, had taken a small villa at Castelvolturno. She had returned to Naples just for a few days: she needed some school books—three subjects to do again—and, then, she had to see a person. She smiled flirtatiously at Alfonso. The person was him.