He swallowed the insults in his usual way, with a faint smile, not saying a word, and finally she was silent. But the silence didn’t last. Lila started again calmly, but panting slightly. She told him that she wouldn’t stay in that car a minute longer, that it disgusted her to breathe the air that he breathed, that she wanted to get out, immediately. Stefano saw the disgust in her face, yet he continued to drive, without saying anything, so she raised her voice again to make him stop. Then he pulled over, but when Lila tried to open the door he grabbed her firmly by the wrist.
“Now listen to me,” he said softly. “There are serious reasons for what happened.”
He explained to her in placid tones how it went. To keep the shoe factory from closing down before it even opened its doors, he had found it necessary to enter into a partnership with Silvio Solara and his sons, who alone could insure not only that the shoes were placed in the best shops in the city but that in the fall a shop selling Cerullo shoes exclusively would open in Piazza dei Martiri.
“What do I care about your necessities,” Lila interrupted him, struggling to get free.
“My necessities are yours, you’re my wife.”
“I? I’m nothing to you, nor are you to me. Let go of my arm.”
Stefano let go of her arm.
“Your father and brother are nothing, either?”
“Wash your mouth out when you talk about them, you’re not fit to even mention their names.”
But Stefano did mention their names. He said that it was Francesco himself who had wanted to make the agreement with Silvio Solara. He said that the biggest obstacle had been Marcello, who was extremely angry at Lila, at the whole Cerullo family, and, especially, at Pasquale, Antonio, and Enzo, who had smashed his car and beaten him up. He said that Rino had calmed him down, that it had taken a lot of patience, and so when Marcello had said, then I want the shoes that Lina made, Rino had said O.K., take the shoes.
It was a bad moment, Lila felt as if she’d been stabbed in the chest. But just the same she cried, “And you, what did you do?”
Stefano had a moment of embarrassment.
“What was I supposed to do? Fight with your brother, ruin your family, start a war against your friends, lose all the money I invested?”
To Lila, every word, in both tone and content, seemed a hypocritical admission of guilt. She didn’t even let him finish, but began hitting him on the shoulder with her fists, yelling, “So even you, you said O.K., you went and got the shoes, you gave them to him?”
Stefano let her go on, but when she tried again to open the door and escape he said to her coldly, Calm down. Lila turned suddenly: calm down after he had thrown the blame on her father and brother, calm down when all three had treated her like an old rag, a rag for wiping up the floor. I don’t want to calm down, she shouted, you piece of shit, take me home right now, repeat what you just said in front of those two other shit men. And only when she uttered that expression in dialect, shit men,
“We’ve been wrong about everything,” she murmured.
But Stefano denied it decisively, as if he refused even to consider that possibility, and he made a long speech, part threatening, part didactic, part pathetic.
