“What are you doing, do you feel all right?”
She didn’t answer.
Her husband waited a little and knocked again. When nothing happened, he twisted the handle nervously and said in a tone of feigned amusement, “Do I have to break down the door?”
Lila didn’t doubt that he would have been capable of it—the stranger who waited for her outside was capable of anything. I, too, she thought, am capable of anything. She undressed, she washed, she put on the nightgown, despising herself for the care with which she had chosen it months earlier. Stefano—purely a name that no longer coincided with the habits and affections of a few hours earlier—was sitting on the edge of the bed in his pajamas and he jumped to his feet as soon as she appeared.
“You took your time.”
“The time needed.”
“You look beautiful.”
“I’m very tired, I want to sleep.”
“We’ll sleep later.”
“Now. You on your side, I on mine.”
“O.K., come here.”
“I’m serious.”
“I am, too.”
Stefano uttered a little laugh, tried to take her by the hand. She drew back, he darkened.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Lila hesitated. She sought the right expression, said softly, “I don’t want you.”
Stefano shook his head uncertainly, as if the three words were in a foreign language. He murmured that he had been waiting so long for that moment, day and night. Please, he said, in a pleading tone, and, with an expression almost of dejection, he pointed to his wine-colored pajama pants, and mumbled with a crooked smile: See what happens to me just when I look at you. She looked without wanting to and, with a spasm of disgust, averted her gaze.
At that point Stefano realized that she was about to lock herself in the bathroom again and with an animal leap he grabbed her by the waist, picked her up, and threw her on the bed. What was happening. It was clear that he didn’t want to understand. He thought they had made peace at the restaurant, now he was wondering: Why is Lina behaving like this, she’s too young. In fact he was laughing, on top of her, trying to soothe her.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” he said, “you mustn’t be afraid. I love you more than my mother and my sister.”
But no, she was already pulling herself up to get away from him. How difficult it is to keep up with this girl: she says yes and means no, she says no and means yes. Stefano muttered: No more of these whims, and he stopped her again, sat astride her, pinned her wrists against the bedspread.
“You said that we should wait and we waited,” he said, “even though being near you without touching you was terrible and I suffered. But we’re married now—behave yourself, don’t worry.”
He leaned over to kiss her on the mouth, but she avoided him, turning her face forcefully to right and left, struggling, twisting, as she repeated, “Leave me alone, I don’t want you, I don’t want you, I don’t want you.”
At that point, almost against his will, the tone of Stefano’s voice rose: “Now you’re really pissing me off, Lina.”
He repeated that remark two or three times, each time louder, as if to assimilate fully an order that was coming to him from very far away, perhaps even from before he was born. The order was: be a man, Ste’; either you subdue her now or you’ll never subdue her; your wife has to learn right away that she is the female and you’re the male and therefore she has to obey. And Lila hearing him—you’re pissing me off, you’re pissing me off, you’re pissing me off—and seeing him, broad, heavy above her narrow pelvis, his sex erect, holding up the material of his pajamas like a tent support, remembered when, years before, he had wanted to grab her tongue with his fingers and prick it with a pin because she had dared to humiliate Alfonso in a school competition. He was never Stefano, she seemed to discover suddenly, he was always the oldest son of Don Achille. And that thought, immediately, brought to the young face of her husband, like a revival, features that until that moment had remained prudently hidden in his blood but that had always been there, waiting for their moment. Oh yes, to please the neighborhood, to please her, Stefano had striven to be someone else, softening his features with courteousness, adapting his gaze to meekness, modeling his voice on the tones of conciliation; his fingers, his hands, his whole body had learned to restrain their force. But now the limits that he had imposed for so long were about to give way, and Lila was seized by a childish terror, greater than when we had gone down into the cellar to get our dolls. Don Achille was rising from the muck of the neighborhood, feeding on the living matter of his son. The father was cracking his skin, changing his gaze, exploding out of his body. And in fact look at him, he tore the nightgown off her chest, bared her breasts, clasped her fiercely, leaned over to bite her nipples. And when she, as she had always been able to do, repressed her horror and tried to tear him off her by pulling his hair, groping with her mouth as she sought to bite him until he bled, he drew back, seized her arms, pinned them under his huge bent legs, said to her contemptuously: What are you doing, be quiet, you’re just a twig, if I want to break you I’ll break you. But Lila wouldn’t calm down, she bit the air, she arched to get his weight off of her. In vain. He now had his hands free and leaning over her he slapped her lightly with the tips of his fingers and kept telling her, pressing her: see how big it is, eh, say yes, say yes, say yes, until he took out of his pajamas his stubby sex that, extended over her, seemed like a puppet without arms or legs, congested by mute stirrings, in a frenzy to uproot itself from that other, bigger puppet that was saying, hoarsely, Now I’ll make you feel it, Lina, look how nice it is, nobody’s got one like this. And since she was still writhing, he hit her twice, first with the palm of his hand, then with the back, and so hard that she understood that if she continued to resist he would certainly kill her—or at least Don Achille would: who frightened the neighborhood because you knew that with his strength he could hurl you against a wall or a tree—and she emptied herself of all rebellion, yielding to a soundless terror, while he drew back, pulled up her nightgown, whispered in her ear: you don’t realize how much I love you, but you will know, and tomorrow it will be you asking me to love you as I am now, and more, in fact you will go down on your knees and beg me, and I will say yes but only if you are obedient, and you will be obedient.
When, after some awkward attempts, he tore her flesh with passionate brutality, Lila was absent. The night, the room, the bed, his kisses, his hands on her body, every sensation was absorbed by a single feeling: she hated Stefano Carracci, she hated his strength, she hated his weight on her, she hated his name and his surname.
8.
They returned to the neighborhood four days later. That same evening Stefano invited his parents-in-law and his brother-in-law to the new house. With a humbler expression than usual, he asked Fernando to tell Lila what had happened with Silvio Solara. Fernando confirmed to his daughter, in unhappy, disjointed sentences, Stefano’s version. As for Rino, Carracci asked him, right afterward, to tell why, in the end, they had made the mutual but painful decision to give Marcello the shoes he insisted on. Rino, in the manner of a man who knows what’s what, declared pompously: There are situations in which certain choices are obligatory, then he started in with the serious trouble Pasquale, Antonio, and Enzo had got into when they beat up the Solara brothers and wrecked their car.
“You know who was more at risk?” he said, leaning toward his sister and raising his voice. “Them, your friends, those knights in shining armor. Marcello recognized them and was convinced that you had sent them. Stefano and I—what were we supposed to do? You wanted those three idiots to get a beating a lot worse than the one they gave? You wanted to ruin them? And for what, anyway? For a pair of size 43 shoes that your husband can’t wear because they’re too narrow for him and when it rains the water gets in? We made peace, and, since those shoes were so important to Marcello, we gave them to him.”
Words: with them you can do and
undo as you please. Lila had always been good with words, but on that occasion, contrary to expectations, she didn’t open her mouth. Relieved, Rino reminded her spitefully that it was she who, ever since she was a child, had been harassing him, telling him they had to get rich. Then, she said, laughing, make us rich without complicating our life, which is already too complicated.
At that point—a surprise for the mistress of the house, though certainly not for the others—the doorbell rang, and Pinuccia, Alfonso, and their mother, Maria, appeared, with a tray of pastries freshly made by Spagnuolo himself, the Solaras’ pastry maker.
At first it seemed that they had come to celebrate the newlyweds’ return from their honeymoon, since Stefano passed around the wedding pictures, which he had just picked up from the photographer (for the movie, he explained, it would take a little longer). But it soon became clear that the wedding of Stefano and Lila was already old news, the pastries were intended to mark a new happy event: the engagement of Rino and Pinuccia. All the tension was set aside. Rino replaced the violent tones of a few minutes earlier with tender modulations in dialect, exaggerated pronouncements of love, the wonderful idea of having the engagement party right away, in his sister’s lovely house. Then, with a theatrical gesture, he took a package out of his pocket; the package, when it was unwrapped, revealed a dark rounded case; and the case, when it was opened, revealed a diamond ring.
Lila noted that it wasn’t that different from the one she wore on her finger, next to the wedding ring, and wondered where her brother had got the money. There were hugs and kisses. There was a lot of talk of the future, speculation about who would manage the Cerullo shoe store in Piazza dei Martiri when the Solaras opened it, in the fall. Rino supposed that Pinuccia would manage it, maybe by herself, maybe with Gigliola Spagnuolo, who was officially engaged to Michele and so was making claims. The family reunion became livelier and full of hope.
Lila remained standing most of the time, it hurt to sit down. No one, not even her mother, who was silent during the entire visit, seemed to notice her swollen, black right eye, the cut on her lower lip, the bruises on her arms.
9.
She was still in that state when, there on the stairs that led to the house of her mother-in-law, I took off her glasses, unwound her scarf. The skin around her eye had a yellowish color, and her lower lip was a purple stain with fiery red stripes.
To her friends and relatives she said that she had fallen on the rocks in Amalfi on a beautiful sunny morning, when she and her husband had taken a boat to a beach just at the foot of a yellow wall. During the engagement lunch for her brother and Pinuccia she had used, in telling that lie, a sarcastic tone and they had all sarcastically believed her, especially the women, who knew what had to be said when the men who loved them and whom they loved beat them severely. Besides, there was no one in the neighborhood, especially of the female sex, who did not think that she had needed a good thrashing for a long time. So the beatings did not cause outrage, and in fact sympathy and respect for Stefano increased—there was someone who knew how to be a man.
But when I saw her so battered, my heart leaped to my throat, I embraced her. And when she said she hadn’t come to visit because she didn’t want me to see her in that state, tears came to my eyes. The story of her honeymoon, as the photonovels put it, although stripped down, almost cold, made me angry, pained me. And yet, I have to admit, I also felt a tenuous pleasure. I was content to discover that Lila now needed help, maybe protection, and that admission of fragility not toward the neighborhood but toward me moved me. I felt that the distances had unexpectedly gotten shorter again and I was tempted to tell her right away that I had decided to quit school, that school was useless, that I didn’t have the right qualities. It seemed to me that the news would comfort her.
But her mother-in-law looked out over the banister on the top floor and called her. Lila ended her story with a few hurried sentences, she said that Stefano had tricked her, that he was just like his father.
“You remember that Don Achille gave us money instead of the dolls?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“We shouldn’t have taken it.”
“We bought Little Women.”
“We were wrong: ever since that moment I’ve been wrong about everything.”
She wasn’t upset, she was sad. She put her dark glasses back on, she reknotted the scarf. I was pleased about that we (we shouldn’t have taken it, we were wrong), but the abrupt transition to the I annoyed me: I have been wrong about everything. We, I would have liked to correct her, always we, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that she was trying to comprehend her new condition, and that she urgently needed to know what she could hold on to in order to confront it. Before starting up the flight of stairs she asked, “Would you like to come and study at my house?”
“When?”
“This afternoon, tomorrow, every day.”
“Stefano will be annoyed.”
“If he is the master, I am the master’s wife.”
“I don’t know, Lila.”
“I’ll give you a room, I’ll shut you in.”
“What’s the point?”
She shrugged.
“To know that you’re there.”
I didn’t say yes or no. I went off, and wandered through the city as usual. Lila was sure that I would never quit school. She had assigned me the role of the friend with glasses and pimples, always bent over her books, smart in school, and she couldn’t even imagine that I might change. But I didn’t want that role anymore. It seemed to me that, thanks to the humiliation of the unpublished article, I had thoroughly understood my inadequacy. Even though Nino was born and had grown up like Lila and me in that wretched outlying neighborhood, he was able to use school with intelligence, I was not. So stop deluding myself, stop striving. Accept your lot, as Carmela, Ada, Gigliola, and, in her way, Lila herself have long since done. I didn’t go to her house that afternoon or the following ones, and I continued to skip school, tormenting myself.
One morning I went wandering not far from the school, along Via Veterinaria, behind the Botanic Garden. I thought of the conversations I had had recently with Antonio: he was hoping to avoid military service, as the son of a widowed mother and the sole support of the family; he wanted to ask for a raise in the shop, and also save so that he could take over the management of a gas pump along the stradone; we would get married, I would help out at the pump. The choice of a simple life, my mother would approve. I can’t always please Lila, I said to myself. But how hard it was to erase from my mind the ambitions inspired by school. At the time when classes were over, I went, almost without intending it, to the neighborhood of the school, and walked around there. I was afraid of being seen by the teachers, and yet, I realized, I wished them to see me. I wanted to be either branded irremediably as a no longer model student or recaptured by the rhythms of school and submit to the obligation to go back.
The first groups of students appeared. I heard someone calling me, it was Alfonso. He was waiting for Marisa, but she was late.
“Are you going together?” I asked, teasing.
“No, she’s the one who’s got a crush.”
“Liar.”
“You’re the liar, telling me you were sick, and look at you, you’re fine. Professor Galiani is always asking about you, I told her you had a bad fever.”
“I did, in fact.”
“Obviously.”
He was carrying his books, tied up with elastic, under his arm, his face was strained by the tension of the hours of school. Did Alfonso also conceal Don Achille, his father, in his breast, despite his delicate appearance? Is it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?
I asked him, “Did you see what your brother did to Lina?”
Alfonso was embarrassed. “Yes.”
“And you didn’t say anything to him?”
“Yo
u have to see what Lina did to him.”
“Would you be able to act the same way with Marisa?”
He laughed timidly. “No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I know you, because we talk, because we go to school together.”
At the moment, I didn’t understand: what did “I know you” mean, what did “we talk” and “we go to school together” mean? I saw Marisa at the end of the street, she was running because she was late.
“Your girlfriend’s coming,” I said.
He didn’t turn, he shrugged, he mumbled, “Come back to school, please.”
“I’m sick,” I repeated, and left.
I didn’t want to exchange even a hello with Nino’s sister, any sign that evoked him made me anxious. But Alfonso’s obscure words did me good, I turned them over in my mind as I walked. He had said that because he knew me, we talked to each other, we sat at the same desk, he would never impose his authority on a possible wife by beating her. He had expressed himself with a frank sincerity, he wasn’t afraid of attributing to me, even if in a confused way, the capacity to influence him, a male, to change his behavior. I was grateful to him for that tangled message, which consoled me and set in motion a reconciliation between me and myself. It doesn’t take much for a conviction that has become fragile to weaken to the point of giving way. The next day I forged my mother’s signature and returned to school. That evening, at the ponds, clinging to Antonio to escape the cold, I promised him: I’ll finish the school year and we’ll get married.
10.
But I had a hard time making up the ground I had lost, especially in science, and I tried to reduce my meetings with Antonio so that I could concentrate on my books. When I missed a date because I had to study, he became gloomy, he asked me, in alarm, “Is something wrong?”