He complained about all the space that even
l’Unità
was giving to the students. Enzo said he was right, and they held forth with arguments not so different from those I had heard in Milan, only the vocabulary was cruder. It was clear that Pasquale especially wanted to entertain me with arguments worthy of someone who, though she was their friend, appeared in
l’Unità
with a photograph. But maybe they did it to dispel the anxiety, theirs and mine.
I listened. I quickly realized that their relationship had solidified precisely because of their political passion. They often met after work, at party or some sort of committee meetings. I listened to them, I joined in out of politeness, they replied, but meanwhile I couldn’t get Lila out of my mind, Lila consumed by an unknown anguish, she who was always so resistant. When we reached San Giovanni they seemed proud of me, Pasquale in particular didn’t miss a single word of mine, and kept checking on me in the rear-view mirror. Although he had his usual knowing tone—he was the secretary of the local section of the Communist Party—he ascribed to my agreement on politics the power to sanction his position. So that, when he felt clearly supported, he explained to me, in some distress, that, with Enzo and some others, he was engaged in a serious fight
within
the party, which—he said, frowning, pounding his hands on the wheel—preferred to wait for a whistle from Aldo Moro, like an obedient dog, rather than stop procrastinating and join the battle.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s as you say,” I said.
“You’re clever,” he praised me then, solemnly, as we were going up the dirty stairs, “you always were. Right, Enzo?”
Enzo nodded yes, but I understood that his worry about Lila was increasing at every step, as it was in me, and he felt guilty for being distracted by that chatter. He opened the door, said aloud, We’re here, and pointed to a door whose top half was of frosted glass, and through which a faint light shone. I knocked softly and went in.
Lila was lying on a cot, fully dressed. Gennaro was sleeping next to her. Come in, she said, I knew you’d come, give me a kiss. I kissed her on the cheeks, I sat on the empty bed that must be her son’s. How much time had passed since I’d last seen her? I found her even thinner, even paler, her eyes were red, the sides of her nose were cracked, her long hands were scarred by cuts. She continued almost without a pause, in a low voice so as not to wake the baby: I saw you in the newspapers, how well you look, your hair is lovely, I know everything about you, I know you’re getting married, he’s a professor, good for you, you’re going to live in Florence, I’m sorry I made you come at this hour, my mind’s no help to me, it’s coming unglued like wallpaper, luckily you’re here.
“What’s happening?” I asked, and moved to caress her hand.
That question, that gesture were enough. She opened her eyes wide, clenched her hand, abruptly pulled it away.
“I’m not well,” she said, “but wait, don’t be scared, I’ll calm down now.”
She became calm. She said softly, enunciating the words:
“I’ve disturbed you, Lenù, because you have to make me a promise, you’re the only person I trust: if something happens to me, if I end up in the hospital, if they take me to the insane asylum, if they can’t find me anymore, you have to take Gennaro, you have to keep him with you, bring him up in your house. Enzo is good, he’s smart, I trust him, but he can’t give the child the things you can.”
“Why are you talking like that? What’s wrong? If you don’t explain I can’t understand.”
“First promise.”
“All right.”
She became agitated again, alarming me.
“No, you mustn’t say all right; you must say here, now, that you’ll take the child. And if you need money, find Nino, tell him he has to help you. But promise:
I will bring up the child
.”
I looked at her uncertainly. But I promised. I promised and I sat and listened to her all night long.
This may be the last time I’ll talk about Lila with a wealth of detail. Later on she became more evasive, and the material at my disposal was diminished. It’s the fault of our lives diverging, the fault of distance. And yet even when I lived in other cities and we almost never met, and she as usual didn’t give me any news and I made an effort not to ask for it, her shadow goaded me, depressed me, filled me with pride, deflated me, giving me no rest.
Today, as I’m writing, that goad is even more essential. I wish she were here, that’s why I’m writing. I want her to erase, add, collaborate in our story by spilling into it, according to her whim, the things she knows, what she said or thought: the time she confronted Gino, the fascist; the time she met Nadia, Professor Galiani’s daughter; the time she returned to the apartment on Corso Vittorio Emanuele where long ago she had felt out of place; the time she looked frankly at her experience of sex. As for my own embarrassments as I listened, my sufferings, the few things I said during her long story, I’ll think about them later.
As soon as
The Blue Fairy
turned to ash in the bonfire of the courtyard, Lila went back to work. I don’t know how strong an effect our meeting had on her—certainly she felt unhappy for days but managed not to ask herself why. She had learned that it hurt to look for reasons, and she waited for the unhappiness to become first a general discontent, then a kind of melancholy, and finally the normal labor of every day: taking care of Gennaro, making the beds, keeping the house clean, washing and ironing the baby’s clothes, Enzo’s, and her own, making lunch for the three of them, leaving little Rino at the neighbor’s with a thousand instructions, hurrying to the factory and enduring the work and the abuses, coming home to devote herself to her son, and also to the children Gennaro played with, making dinner, the three of them eating again, putting Gennaro to bed while Enzo cleared up and washed the dishes, returning to the kitchen to help him study, something that was very important to him, and that, despite her weariness, she didn’t want to deny him.
What did she see in Enzo? In essence, I think, the same thing she had wanted to see in Stefano and in Nino: a way of finally putting everything back on its feet in the proper way. But while Stefano, once the screen of money vanished, had turned out to be a person without substance and dangerous; while Nino, once the screen of intelligence vanished, had been transformed into a black smoke of pain, Enzo for now seemed incapable of nasty surprises. He was the boy whom, for obscure reasons, she had always respected in elementary school, and now he was a man so deeply compact in every gesture, so resolute toward the world, and so gentle with her that she could be sure he wouldn’t abruptly change shape.
Of course, they didn’t sleep together. Lila couldn’t do it. They shut themselves in their rooms, and she heard him moving on the other side of the wall until every noise stopped and there remained only the sounds of the apartment, the building, the street. She had trouble falling asleep, in spite of her exhaustion. In the dark all the reasons for unhappiness that she had prudently left nameless got mixed up and were concentrated on Gennaro, little Rino. She thought: What will this child become? She thought: I mustn’t call him Rinuccio, that would drive him to regress into dialect. She thought: I also have to help the children he plays with if I don’t want him to be ruined by being with them. She thought: I don’t have time, I myself am not what I once was, I never pick up a pen, I no longer read books.
Sometimes she felt a weight on her chest. She became alarmed and turned on the light in the middle of the night, looked at her sleeping child. She saw almost nothing of Nino; Gennaro reminded her, rather, of her brother. When he was younger, the child had followed her around, now instead he was bored, he yelled, he wanted to run off and play, he said bad words to her. I love him—Lila reflected—but do I love him just as he is? An ugly question. The more she observed her son, the more she felt that, even if the neighbor found him very intelligent, he wasn’t growing up as she would have liked. She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain, now it seemed to her wrong that the quality of a person depends on the quality of his early childhood. You had to be constant, and Gennaro had no constancy, nor did she. My mind is always scattering, she said to herself, I’m made badly and he’s made badly. Then she was ashamed of thinking like that, she whispered to the sleeping child: you’re clever, you already know how to read, you already know how to write, you can do addition and subtraction, your mother is stupid, she’s never satisfied. She kissed the little boy on the forehead and turned out the light.
But still she couldn’t sleep, especially when Enzo came home late and went to bed without asking her to study. On these occasions, Lila imagined that he had met some prostitute or had a lover, a colleague in the factory where he worked, an activist from the Communist cell he had immediately joined. Males are like that, she thought, at least the ones I’ve known: they have to have sex constantly, otherwise they’re unhappy. I don’t think Enzo is any different, why should he be. And besides I’ve rejected him, I’ve left him in the bed by himself, I can’t make any demands. She was afraid only that he would fall in love and send her away. She wasn’t worried about finding no roof over her head, she had a job at the sausage factory and felt strong, surprisingly, much stronger than when she had married Stefano and found herself with a lot of money but was subjugated by him. Rather, she was afraid of losing Enzo’s kindness, the attention he gave to all her anxieties, the tranquil strength he emanated and thanks to which he had saved her first from Nino’s absence, then from Stefano’s presence. All the more because, in her present situation, he was the only one who gave her any gratification, who continued to ascribe to her extraordinary capabilities.
“You know what that means?”
“No.”
“Look closely.”
“It’s German, Enzo, I don’t know German.”
“But if you concentrate, after a while you’ll know it,” he said to her, partly joking, partly serious.
Enzo had worked hard to get a diploma and had succeeded, but, even though she had stopped going to school in fifth grade, he believed that she had a much brighter intelligence than he did and attributed to her the miraculous quality of rapidly mastering any material. In fact, when, with very little to go on, he nevertheless became convinced that the languages of computer programming held the future of the human race, and that the élite who first mastered them would have a resounding part in the history of the world, he immediately turned to her.
“Help me.”
“I’m tired.”
“The life we lead is disgusting, Lina, we have to change.”
“For me it’s fine like this.”
“The child is with strangers all day.”
“He’s big, he can’t live in a bell jar.”
“Look what bad shape your hands are in.”
“They’re my hands and I’ll do as I like with them.”
“I want to earn more, for you and for Gennaro.”
“You take care of your things and I’ll take care of mine.”
Harsh reactions, as usual. Enzo enrolled in a correspondence course—it was expensive, requiring periodic tests to be sent to an international data processing center with headquarters in Zurich, which returned them corrected—and gradually he had involved Lila and she had tried to keep up. But she behaved in a completely different way than she had with Nino, whom she had assailed with her obsession to prove that she could help him in everything. When she studied with Enzo she was calm, she didn’t try to overpower him. The evening hours that they spent on the course were a struggle for him, for her a sedative. Maybe that was why, the rare times he returned late and seemed able to do without her, Lila remained wakeful, anxious, as she listened to the water running in the bathroom, with which she imagined Enzo washing off his body every trace of contact with his lovers.
In the factory—she had immediately understood—overwork drove people to want to have sex not with their wife or husband in their own house, where they returned exhausted and empty of desire, but there, at work, morning or afternoon. The men reached out their hands at every opportunity, they propositioned you if they merely passed by; and women, especially the ones who were not so young, laughed, rubbed against them with their big bosoms, fell in love, and love became a diversion that mitigated the labor and the boredom, giving an impression of real life.
From Lila’s first days the men had tried to get close, as if to sniff her. Lila repulsed them, and they laughed or went off humming songs full of obscene allusions. One morning, to make things perfectly clear, she almost pulled off the ear of a man who passing by had made a lewd remark and pressed a kiss on her neck. He was a fairly attractive man in his forties, named Edo, who spoke to everyone in an allusive way and was good at telling dirty jokes. Lila grabbed the ear with one hand and twisted it, pulling with all her strength, her nails digging into the membrane, without letting go her grip even though the man was yelling, as he tried to parry the kicks she was giving him. After which, furious, she went to see Bruno Soccavo to protest.
Lila had seen him only a few times since he hired her––fleetingly, without paying him much attention. In that situation, however, she was able to observe him closely. He was standing behind the desk; he had risen deliberately, the way men do when a woman enters the room. Lila was amazed: Soccavo’s face was bloated, his eyes shrouded by dissipation, his chest heavy, and his flushed complexion clashed like magma against his black hair and the white of his wolfish teeth. She wondered: what does this man have to do with the young man, the friend of Nino who was studying law? And she felt there was no continuity between the time on Ischia and the sausage factory: between them stretched a void, and in the leap from one space to the other Bruno—maybe because his father had been ill recently and the weight of the business (the debts, some said) had fallen suddenly on his shoulders—had changed for the worse.