The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (35 page)

I was greeted by Nella and the Sarratore family with the usual enthusiasm. I assumed my humblest mask, the mask of my father when he collected tips, the elaborate mask of my forebears—always fearful, always subordinate, always pleasingly willing—by which to avoid danger, and I went from lie to lie in a pleasant manner. I said to Nella that if I had decided to come and disturb her it wasn’t by choice but necessity. I said that the Carraccis had guests, that there was no room for me that night. I said that I hoped I hadn’t presumed too much in showing up like this, unexpectedly, and that if there were difficulties I would return to Naples for a few days.

Nella embraced me, fed me, swearing that to have me in the house was an immense pleasure for her. I refused to go to the beach with the Sarratores, although the children protested. Lidia insisted that I join them soon and Donato declared that he would wait for me so we could swim together. I stayed with Nella, helped her straighten the house, cook lunch. For a moment everything weighed on me less: the lies, the images of the adultery that was taking place, my complicity, a jealousy that couldn’t be defined because I felt at the same time jealous of Lila who was giving herself to Nino, of Nino who was giving himself to Lila. In the meantime, Nella, talking about the Sarratores, seemed less hostile. She said that husband and wife had found an equilibrium and since they were getting along they gave her less trouble. She told me about Maestra Oliviero: she had telephoned her in order to tell her that I had come to see her, and she had been very tired but more optimistic. For a while, in other words, there was a tranquil flow of news. But a few remarks were enough, an unexpected detour, and the weight of the situation I was involved in returned forcefully.

“She praised you a lot,” Nella said, speaking of Maestra Oliviero, “but when she found out that you came to see me with your two married friends she asked a lot of questions, especially about Signora Lina.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that in her entire career as a teacher she never had such a good student.”

The evocation of Lila’s old primacy disturbed me.

“It’s true,” I admitted.

But Nella made a grimace of absolute disagreement, her eyes lit up.

“My cousin is an exceptional teacher,” she said, “and yet in my view this time she is wrong.”

“No, she’s not wrong.”

“Can I tell you what I think?”

“Of course.”

“It won’t upset you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t like Signora Lina. You are much better, you’re prettier and more intelligent. I talked about it with the Sarratores, too, and they agree with me.”

“You say that because you love me.”

“No. Pay attention, Lenù. I know that you are good friends, my cousin told me. And I don’t want to interfere in things that have nothing to do with me. But a glance is enough for me to judge people. Signora Lina knows that you’re better than her and so she doesn’t love you the way you love her.”

I smiled, pretending skepticism. “Does she hate me?”

“I don’t know. But she knows how to wound, it’s written in her face, it’s enough to look at her forehead and her eyes.”

I shook my head, I repressed my satisfaction. Ah, if it were all so straightforward. But I already knew—although not the way I do today—that between the two of us everything was more tangled. And I joked, laughed, made Nella laugh. I told her that Lila never made a good impression the first time. Since she was little she had seemed like a devil, and she really was, but in a good way. She had a quick mind and did well in whatever she happened to apply herself to: if she could have studied she would have become a scientist like Madame Curie or a great novelist like Grazia Deledda, or even like Nilde Iotti, the lover of Togliatti. And hearing those last two names, Nella exclaimed, oh Madonna, and ironically made the sign of the cross. Then she gave a little laugh, then another, and she couldn’t contain herself, she wanted to whisper a secret, a very funny thing that Sarratore had said to her. Lila, according to him, had an almost ugly beauty, a type that males are, yes, enchanted by but also fear.

“What fear?” I asked, also in a low voice.

And she, in an even lower voice, “The fear that their thingy won’t function or it will fall off or she’ll pull out a knife and cut it off.”

She laughed, her chest heaved, her eyes became teary. She couldn’t contain herself for quite some time and I felt an unease I had never felt with her before. It wasn’t my mother’s laughter, the obscene laughter of the woman who knows. In Nella’s there was something chaste and yet vulgar, it was the laugh of an aging virgin that assailed me and pushed me to laugh, too, but in a forced way. A smart woman like her, I said to myself, why does this amuse her? And meanwhile I saw myself growing old, with that laugh of malicious innocence in my breast. I thought: I’ll end up laughing like that, too.

The Sarratores arrived for lunch. They left a trail of sand on the floor, an odor of sea and sweat, a lighthearted reproach because the children had waited for me in vain. I set the table, cleared, washed the dishes, followed Pino, Clelia, and Ciro to the edge of a thicket to help them cut reeds to make a kite. With the children I was happy. While their parents rested, while Nella napped on a lounge chair on the terrace, the time slipped by, the kite absorbed me completely, I scarcely thought of Nino and Lila.

In the late afternoon we all went to the beach, even Nella, to fly the kite. I ran back and forth on the beach followed by the three children, who were silent, amazed, when the kite appeared to rise and they cried out when they saw it hit the sand after an unexpected pirouette. I kept trying but I couldn’t make it fly, in spite of the instructions that Donato shouted to me from under the umbrella. Finally, all sweaty, I gave up, and said to Pino, Clelia, and Ciro, “Ask Papa.” Dragged by his children, Sarratore came and checked the weave of the reeds, the blue tissue paper, the thread, then he studied the wind and began to run backward, leaping energetically despite his heavy body. The children ran beside him in their excitement, and I also revived, I began to run along with them, until their expanding happiness was transmitted to me, too. Our kite traveled higher and higher, it flew, there was no need to run, you had only to hold the string. Sarratore was a good father. He demonstrated that with his help Ciro could hold it, and Clelia, and Pino, and even me. He handed it to me, in fact, but he stood behind me, he breathed on my neck and said, “Like that, good, pull a little, let it go,” and it was evening.

We had dinner, the Sarratore family went for a walk in the town, husband, wife, and three children, sunburned and dressed up. Although they urged me to come, I stayed with Nella. We cleaned up, she helped me make the bed in the usual corner of the kitchen, we sat on the terrace in the cool air. The moon wasn’t visible, in the dark sky there were swells of white clouds. We talked about how pretty and intelligent the Sarratore children were, and Nella fell asleep. Then, suddenly, the day, the night that was beginning, fell on me. I left the house on tiptoe, I went toward the Maronti.

Who knows if Michele Solara had kept to himself what he had seen. Who knows if everything was going smoothly. Who knows if Nunzia was already asleep in the house on the road in Cuotto or was trying to calm her son-in-law who had arrived unexpectedly on the last boat, hadn’t found his wife and was furious. Who knows if Lila had telephoned her husband and, reassured that he was in Naples, far away, in the apartment in the new neighborhood, was now in bed with Nino, without fear, a secret couple, a couple intent on enjoying the night. Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. I understood suddenly why I hadn’t had Nino, why Lila had had him. I wasn’t capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn’t know how to be drawn beyond the limits. I didn’t possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting. She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. She deserved Nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.

I made the dark descent. Now the moon was visible amid scattered pale-edged clouds; the evening was very fragrant, and you could hear the hypnotic rhythm of the waves. On the beach I took off my shoes, the sand was cold, a gray-blue light extended as far as the sea and then spread over its tremulous expanse. I thought: yes, Lila is right, the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear; I’m alive, now, here, ten steps from the water, and it is not at all beautiful, it’s terrifying; along with this beach, the sea, the swarm of animal forms, I am part of the universal terror; at this moment I’m the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of every thing becomes conscious of itself; I; I who listen to the sound of the sea, who feel the dampness and the cold sand; I who imagine all Ischia, the entwined bodies of Nino and Lila, Stefano sleeping by himself in the new house that is increasingly not so new, the furies who indulge the happiness of today to feed the violence of tomorrow. Ah, it’s true, my fear is too great and so I hope that everything will end soon, that the figures of the nightmares will consume my soul. I hope that from this darkness packs of mad dogs will emerge, vipers, scorpions, enormous sea serpents. I hope that while I’m sitting here, on the edge of the sea, assassins will arrive out of the night and torture my body. Yes, yes, let me be punished for my insufficiency, let the worst happen, something so devastating that it will prevent me from facing tonight, tomorrow, the hours and days to come, reminding me with always more crushing evidence of my unsuitable constitution. Thoughts like that I had, the frenzied thoughts of girlish discouragement. I gave myself up to them, for I don’t know how long. Then someone said, “Lena,” and touched my shoulder with cold fingers. I started, an icy grip seized my heart and when I turned suddenly and recognized Donato Sarratore, the breath burst in my throat like the sip of a magic potion, the kind that in poems revives strength and the urge to live.

Donato told me that Nella had awakened, found that I wasn’t in the house, and was worried. Lidia, too, was a little alarmed, so she had asked him to go and look for me. The only one who had found it normal that I wasn’t in the house was him. He had reassured the two women, he had said, “Go to sleep, surely she’s gone to enjoy the moon on the beach.” Yet to please them, out of prudence, he had come on a reconnaissance. And in fact here I was, sitting and listening to the sea’s breath, contemplating the divine beauty of the sky.

He spoke like that, more or less. He sat beside me, he murmured that he knew me as he knew himself. We had the same sensitivity to beautiful things, the same need to enjoy them, the same need to search for the right words to say how sweet the night was, how magical the moon, how the sea sparkled, how two souls were able to meet and recognize each other in the darkness, in the fragrant air. As he spoke I heard clearly the ridiculousness of his trained voice, the crudeness of his poeticizing, the sleazy lyricizing behind which he concealed his eagerness to put his hands on me. But I thought: Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity. So I rested my head on his shoulder, I murmured, “I’m cold.” And he quickly put an arm around my waist, pulled me slowly closer to him, asked me if it was better like that. I answered, “Yes,” a whisper, and Sarratore lifted my chin with thumb and index finger, placed his lips lightly on mine, asked, “How’s that?” Then he pressed me with little kisses that grew in intensity as he continued to murmur: “And like that, and like that, are you still cold, is it better like that, is it better?” His mouth was warm and wet, I welcomed it on mine with increasing gratitude, so that the kiss lasted longer and longer, his tongue grazed mine, collided with it, sank into my mouth. I felt better. I realized that I was regaining ground, that the ice was ceding, melting, that the fear was forgetting itself, that his hands were taking away the cold but slowly, as if it were made of very thin layers and Sarratore had the ability to peel them away with cautious precision, one by one, without tearing them, and that his mouth, too, had that capacity, and his teeth, his tongue, and he therefore knew much more about me than Antonio had ever learned, that in fact he knew what I myself didn’t know. I had a hidden me—I realized—that fingers, mouth, teeth, tongue were able to discover. Layer after layer, that me lost every hiding place, was shamelessly exposed, and Sarratore showed that he knew how to keep it from fleeing, from being ashamed, he knew how to hold it as if it were the absolute reason for his affectionate motility, for his sometimes gentle, sometimes fevered pressures. The entire time, I didn’t once regret having accepted what was happening. I had no second thoughts and I was proud of myself, I wanted it to be like that, I imposed it on myself. I was helped, perhaps, by the fact that Sarratore progressively forgot his flowery language, that, unlike Antonio, he claimed no intervention from me, he never took my hand to touch him, but confined himself to convincing me that he liked everything about me, and he applied himself to my body with the care, the devotion, the pride of the man absorbed in demonstrating how thoroughly he knows women. I didn’t even hear him say
you’re a virgin
, probably he was so sure of my condition that he would have been surprised by the opposite. When I was overwhelmed by a need for pleasure so demanding and so egocentric that it canceled out not only the entire world of sensation but also his body, in my eyes old, and the labels by which he could be classified—
father of Nino, railway worker-poet-journalist, Donato Sarratore
—he was aware of it and penetrated me. I felt that he did it delicately at first, then with a clear and decisive thrust that caused a rip in my stomach, a stab of pain immediately erased by a rhythmic oscillation, a sliding, a thrusting, an emptying and filling me with jolts of eager desire. Until suddenly he withdrew, turned over on his back on the sand and emitted a sort of strangled roar.