I drew him toward the skeleton of the canning factory. It was darker there, more sheltered, but I could hear the wary rustling of scampering mice. My heart began to beat hard, I was afraid of the place, of myself, of the craving that possessed me to obliterate from my manners and from my voice the sense of alienation that I had discovered a few hours earlier. I wanted to return, and sink into that neighborhood, to be as I had been. I wanted to throw away studying, the notebooks full of exercises. Exercising for what, after all. What I could become outside of Lila’s shadow counted for nothing. What was I compared with her in her wedding dress, with her in the convertible, the blue hat and the pastel suit? What was I, here with Antonio, secretly, in this rusting ruin, with the scurrying rats, my skirt raised over my hips, my underpants lowered, yearning and anguished and guilty, while she lay naked, with languid detachment, on linen sheets, in a hotel that looked out on the sea, and let Stefano violate her, enter her completely, give her his seed, impregnate her legitimately and without fear? What was I as Antonio fumbled with his pants and placed his gross male flesh between my legs, against my naked sex, and clutching my buttocks rubbed against me, moving back and forth, panting? I didn’t know. I knew only that I was not what I wanted at that moment. It wasn’t enough for him to rub against me. I wanted to be penetrated, I wanted to tell Lila when she returned: I’m not a virgin, either, what you do I do, you can’t leave me behind. So I held Antonio tight around his neck and kissed him, I stood on tiptoe, I sought his sex with mine, I sought it wordlessly, by trial and error. He realized it and helped me with his hand, I felt him entering just a little, I trembled with curiosity and fear. But I also felt the effort he was making to stop, to keep from pushing with all the violence that had been smoldering for an entire afternoon and surely was still. He was about to stop, I realized, and I pressed against him to persuade him to continue.
But with a deep breath Antonio pushed me away and said in dialect, “No, Lenù, I want to do it the way it’s done with a wife, not like this.”
He grabbed my right hand, brought it to his sex with a kind of repressed sob, and I resigned myself to masturbating him.
Afterward, as we were leaving the ponds, he said uneasily that he respected me and didn’t want to make me do something that I would later regret, not in that place, not in that dirty and careless way. He spoke as if it were he who had gone too far, and maybe he believed that. I didn’t utter a single word the whole way, and said goodbye with relief. When I knocked on the door, my mother opened it and, in vain restrained by my brothers and sister, without yelling, without a word of reproach, began hitting me. My glasses flew to the floor and immediately I shouted with bitter joy, and not a hint of dialect, “See what you’ve done? You’ve broken my glasses and now because of you I can’t study, I’m not going to school anymore.”
My mother froze, even the hand she had struck me with remained still in the air, like the blade of an axe.
Elisa, my little sister, picked up the glasses and said softly, “Here, Lenù, they’re not broken.”
5.
I was overcome by an exhaustion that, no matter how much I rested, wouldn’t go away. For the first time, I skipped school. I was absent, I think, for some two weeks, and not even to Antonio did I say that I couldn’t stand it anymore, I wanted to stop. I left home at the usual time, and wandered all morning through the city. I learned a lot about Naples in that period. I rummaged among the used books in the stalls of Port’Alba, unwillingly absorbing titles and authors’ names, and continued toward Toledo and the sea. Or I climbed the Vomero on Via Salvator Rosa, went up to San Martino, came back down by the Petraio. Or I explored the Doganella, went to the cemetery, wandered on the silent paths, read the names of the dead. Sometimes idle young men, stupid old men, even respectable middle-aged men pursued me with obscene offers. I quickened my pace, eyes lowered, I escaped, sensing danger, but didn’t stop. In fact the more I skipped school the bigger the hole that those long mornings of wandering made in the net of scholastic obligations that had imprisoned me since I was six years old. At the proper time I went home and no one suspected that I,
