The workday passed in an anxiety that, as usual, Lila contained behind an attitude that at one moment was contemptuous, the next threatening. They all made it clear that they blamed her for the tensions that had emerged suddenly in a place that had always been peaceful. But soon two parties formed: one, a small group, wanted to meet somewhere during the lunch break and take advantage of the situation to urge Lila to go to the owner with some cautious wage demands; the other, the majority, wouldn’t even speak to Lila and was opposed to any undertaking that would complicate a work life that was already complicated. Between the two groups there was no way to reach agreement. In fact Edo, who belonged to the first party and was worried about the injury to his hand, went so far as to say to someone who belonged to the second: If my hand gets infected, if they cut it off, I’m coming to your house, I’ll pour a can of gasoline on it, and set you and your family on fire. Lila ignored both factions. She kept to herself and worked, head down, with her usual efficiency, driving away the conversation, the insults, and the cold. But she reflected on what awaited her, a whirl of different thoughts passed through her feverish head: what had happened to the injured students, where had they gone, what trouble had they got her into; Gino would talk about her in the neighborhood, he would tell Michele Solara everything; it was humiliating to ask Bruno for favors, and yet there was no other way, she was afraid of being fired, she was afraid of losing a salary that, even though it was miserable, allowed her to love Enzo without considering him fundamental to her survival and that of Gennaro.
Then she remembered the terrible night. What had happened to her, should she go to a doctor? And if the doctor found some illness, how would she manage with work and the child? Careful, don’t get agitated, she needed to put things in order. Therefore, during the lunch break, oppressed by her cares, she resigned herself to going to Bruno. She wanted to tell him about the nasty trick of the sausage, about Gino’s fascists, reiterate that it wasn’t her fault. First, however, despising herself, she went to the bathroom to comb her hair and put on a little lipstick. But the secretary said with hostility that Bruno wasn’t there and almost certainly wouldn’t be all week. Anxiety gripped her again. Increasingly nervous, she thought of asking Pasquale to keep the students from returning to the gate, she said to herself that, once the boys from the committee disappeared, the fascists, too, would disappear, the factory would settle back into its old ways. But how to find Peluso? She didn’t know where he worked, she didn’t want to look for him in the neighborhood—she was afraid of running into her mother, her father, and especially her brother, with whom she didn’t want to fight. So, exhausted, she added up all her troubles and decided to turn directly to Nadia. At the end of her shift she hurried home, left a note for Enzo to prepare dinner, bundled Gennaro up carefully in coat and hat, and set off, bus after bus, to Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
The sky was pastel-colored, with not even a puff of a cloud, but the late-afternoon light was fading and a strong wind was blowing in the violet air. She remembered the house in detail, the entrance, all of it, and the humiliation of the past intensified the bitterness of the present. How brittle the past was, continually crumbling, falling on her. From that house where she had gone with me to a party that had made her suffer, Nadia, Nino’s old girlfriend, had tumbled out to make her suffer even more. But she wasn’t one to stay quiet, she walked up the hill, dragging Gennaro. She wanted to say to that girl: You and the others are making trouble for my son; for you it’s only an amusement, nothing terrible will happen to you; for me, for him, no, it’s a serious thing, so either do something to fix it or I’ll bash your face in. That was what she intended to say, and she coughed and her rage mounted; she couldn’t wait to explode.
She found the street door open. She climbed the stairs, she remembered herself and me, and Stefano, who had taken us to the party, the clothes, the shoes, every word that we had said to each other on the way and on the way back. She rang, Professor Galiani herself opened the door, just as she remembered her, polite, orderly, just like her house. In comparison Lila felt dirty, because of the odor of raw meat that clung to her, the cold that clogged her chest, the fever that confused her feelings, the child whose whining in dialect irritated her. She asked abruptly:
“Is Nadia here?”
“No, she’s out.”
“When will she be back?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know, in ten minutes, in an hour, she does as she likes.”
“Could you tell her that Lina came to see her?”
“Is it urgent?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
Tell her what? Lila gave a start, she looked past the professor. She glimpsed the ancient nobility of furniture and lamps, the book-filled library that had captivated her, the precious paintings on the walls. She thought: This is the world that Nino aspired to before he got mixed up with me. She thought: What do I know of this other Naples, nothing; I’ll never live there and neither will Gennaro. Let it be destroyed, then, let fire and ashes come, let the lava reach the top of the hills. Then finally she answered: No, thank you, I have to talk to Nadia. And she was about to leave, it had been a fruitless journey. But she liked the hostile attitude with which the professor had spoken of her daughter and she exclaimed in a suddenly frivolous tone:
“Do you know that years ago I was in this house at a party? I don’t know what I expected, but I was bored, I couldn’t wait to leave.”
Professor Galiani, too, must have seen something she liked, maybe a frankness verging on rudeness. When Lila mentioned our friendship, the professor seemed pleased, she exclaimed: Ah yes, Greco, we never see her anymore, success has gone to her head. Then she led mother and son to the living room, where she had left her grandson playing, a blond child whom she almost ordered: Marco, say hello to our new friend. Lila in turn pushed her son forward, she said, go on, Gennaro, play with Marco, and she sat in an old, comfortable green armchair, still talking about the party years ago. The professor was sorry she had no recollection of it, but Lila remembered everything. She said that it had been one of the worst nights of her life. She spoke of how out of place she had felt, she described in sarcastic tones the conversations she had listened to without understanding anything. I was very ignorant, she exclaimed, with an excessive gaiety, and today even more than I was then.
Professor Galiani listened and was impressed by her sincerity, by her unsettling tone, by the intense Italian of her sentences, by her skillfully controlled irony. She must have felt in Lila, I imagine, that elusive quality that seduced and at the same time alarmed, a siren power: it could happen to anyone, it happened to her, and the conversation broke off only when Gennaro slapped Marco, insulting him in dialect and grabbing a small green car. Lila got up quickly, and, seizing her son by the arm, forcefully slapped the hand that had hit the other child, and although Professor Galiani said weakly, Let it go, they’re children, she rebuked him harshly, insisting that he return the toy. Marco was crying, but Gennaro didn’t shed a tear; instead, he threw the toy at him with contempt. Lila hit him again, hard, on the head.
“We’re going,” she said, nervously.
“No, stay a little longer.”
Lila sat down again.
“He’s not always like that.”
“He’s a very handsome child. Right, Gennaro, you’re a good boy?”
“He isn’t good, he isn’t at all good. But he’s clever. Even though he’s little, he can read and write all the letters, capitals and small. What do you say, Gennà, do you want to show the professor how you read?”
She picked up a magazine from a beautiful glass table, pointed to a word at random on the cover, and said: Go on, read. Gennaro refused. Lila gave him a pat on the shoulder, repeated in a threatening tone: Read, Gennà. The child reluctantly deciphered,
d-e-s-t
, then he broke off, staring angrily at Marco’s little car. Marco hugged it to his chest, gave a small smile, and read confidently:
destinazione
.
Lila was disappointed, she darkened, she looked at Galiani’s grandson with annoyance.
“He reads well.”
“Because I devote a lot of time to him. His parents are always out.”
“How old is he?”
“Three and a half.”
“He seems older.”
“Yes, he’s sturdy. How old is your son?”
“He’s five,” Lila admitted reluctantly.
The professor caressed Gennaro, and said to him:
“Mamma made you read a difficult word, but you’re a clever boy, I can see that you know how to read.”
Just then there was a commotion, the door to the stairs opened and closed, the sound of footsteps scurrying through the house, male voices, female voices. Here are my children, Professor Galiani said, and called out: Nadia. But it wasn’t Nadia who came into the room; instead a thin, very pale, very blond girl, with eyes of a blue so blue that it looked fake, burst in noisily. The girl opened wide her arms and cried to Marco: Who’s going to give his mamma a kiss? The child ran to her and she embraced him, kissed him, followed by Armando, Professor Galiani’s son. Lila remembered him, too, immediately, and looked at him as he practically tore Marco from his mother’s arms, crying: Immediately, at least thirty kisses for papa. Marco began to kiss his father on the cheek, counting: One, two, three, four.
“Nadia,” Professor Galiani called again in a suddenly irritated tone, “are you deaf? Come, there’s someone here to see you.”
Nadia finally looked into the room. Behind her was Pasquale.
Lila’s bitterness exploded again. So Pasquale, when work was over, rushed to the house of those people, amid mothers and fathers and grandmothers and aunts and happy babies, all affectionate, all well educated, all so broad-minded that they welcomed him as one of them, although he was a construction worker and still bore the dirty traces of his job?
Nadia embraced her in her emotional way. Lucky you’re here, she said, leave the child with my mother, we have to talk. Lila replied aggressively that yes, they had to talk, right away, that’s why she was there. And since she said emphatically that she had only a minute, Pasquale offered to take her home in the car. So they left the living room, the children, the grandmother, and met—also Armando, also the blond girl, whose name was Isabella—in Nadia’s room, a large room with a bed, a desk, shelves full of books, posters showing singers, films, and revolutionary struggles that Lila knew little about. There were three other young men, two whom she had never seen, and Dario, banged up from the beating he’d had, sprawled on Nadia’s bed with his shoes on the pink quilt. All three were smoking, the room was full of smoke. Lila didn’t wait, she didn’t even respond to Dario’s greeting. She said that they had got her in trouble, that their lack of consideration had put her at risk of being fired, that the pamphlet had caused an uproar, that they shouldn’t come to the gate anymore, that because of them the fascists had showed up and everyone was now angry with both the reds and the blacks. She hissed at Dario: As for you, if you don’t know how to fight stay home, you know they could kill you? Pasquale tried to interrupt her a few times, but she cut him off contemptuously, as if his mere presence in that house were a betrayal. The others instead listened in silence. Only when Lila had finished, did Armando speak. He had his mother’s delicate features, and thick black eyebrows; the violet trace of his carefully shaved beard rose to his cheekbones, and he spoke in a warm, thick voice. He introduced himself, he said that he was very happy to meet her, that he regretted he hadn’t been there when she spoke at the meeting, that, however, what she had told them they had discussed among themselves and since they had considered it an important contribution they had decided to put everything in writing. Don’t worry, he concluded calmly, we’ll support you and your comrades in every way.
Lila coughed, the smoke in the room irritated her throat.
“You should have informed me.”
“It’s true, but there wasn’t time.”
“If you really want the time you find it.”
“We are few and our initiatives are more every day.”
“What work do you do?”
“In what sense?”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Like your father?”
“Yes.”
“And at this moment are you risking your job? Could you end up in the street at any moment along with your son?”
Armando shook his head unhappily and said:
“Competing for who is risking the most is wrong, Lina.”
And Pasquale:
“He’s been arrested twice and I have eight charges against me. Nobody here risks more or less than anyone else.”
“Oh, no?”
“No,” said Nadia, “we’re all in the front lines and ready to assume our responsibilities.”
Then Lila, forgetting that she was in someone else’s house, cried:
“So if I should lose my job, I’ll come and live here, you’ll feed me, you’ll assume responsibility for my life?”
Nadia answered placidly:
“If you like, yes.”
Four words only. Lila understood that it wasn’t a joke, that Nadia was serious, that even if Bruno Soccavo fired his entire work force she, with that sickly-sweet voice of hers, would give the same senseless answer. She claimed that she was in the service of the workers, and yet, from her room in a house full of books and with a view of the sea, she wanted to command you, she wanted to tell you what you should do with your work, she decided for you, she had the solution ready even if you ended up in the street. I—it was on the tip of Lila’s tongue—if I want, can smash everything much better than you: I don’t need you to tell me, in that sanctimonious tone, how I should think, what I should do. But she restrained herself, and said abruptly to Pasquale:
“I’m in a hurry, are you going to take me or are you staying here?”
Silence. Pasquale glanced at Nadia, muttered, I’ll take you, and Lila started to leave the room, without saying goodbye. The girl rushed to lead the way, saying to her how unacceptable it was to work in the conditions that Lila herself had described so well, how urgent it was to kindle the spark of the struggle, and other phrases like that. Don’t pull back, she urged, finally, before they went into the living room. But she got no response.