Lila greeted me with obvious pleasure. Her eye was no longer swollen, her lip was healing. She was nicely dressed, her hair was carefully combed, she wore lipstick, yet she moved through the apartment as if her house were alien to her and she herself felt like a visitor. The wedding presents were still piled up near the door, the rooms had a smell of plaster and fresh paint mixed with the vaguely alcoholic scent that emanated from the new furniture in the dining room, the table, the sideboard with a mirror framed by dark-wood foliage, the silver chest full of silver, the plates, glasses, and bottles of colored liquors.
Lila made coffee: it was pleasant to sit with her in the spacious kitchen and play at being ladies, as we had done as children in front of the cellar air vent. It’s relaxing, I thought, I was wrong not to come sooner. I had a friend of my age with her own house, full of opulent, orderly things. That friend, who had nothing to do all day, seemed happy for my company. Although we had changed and the changes were still occurring, the warmth between us endured intact. Why, then, not give in to it? For the first time since her wedding day I felt at ease.
“How’s it going with Stefano?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“You’ve cleared things up?”
She smiled in amusement.
“Yes, it’s all clear.”
“And so?”
“Disgusting.”
“The same as Amalfi?”
“Yes.”
“Did he beat you again?”
She touched her face.
“No, this is old stuff.”
“Then?”
“It’s the humiliation.”
“And you?”
“I do what he wants.”
I thought for a moment, I asked her, suggestively, “But at least when you sleep together, isn’t it nice?”
She made a grimace of discomfort, became serious. She began to speak of her husband with a sort of loathing acceptance. It wasn’t hostility, it wasn’t a need for retaliation, it wasn’t even disgust, but a placid disdain, a contempt that invested Stefano’s entire person like polluted water in the ground.
I listened, I understood and I didn’t understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker’s knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As a result, since Stefano was not the hateful Marcello but the young man to whom she had declared her love, whom she had married, and with whom she had decided to live forever, she assumed complete responsibility for her choice. And yet it didn’t add up. In my eyes Lila was Lila, not an ordinary girl of the neighborhood. Our mothers, after they were slapped by their husbands, did not have that expression of calm disdain. They despaired, they wept, they confronted their man sullenly, they criticized him behind his back, and yet, more and less, they continued to respect him (my mother, for example, plainly admired my father’s devious deals). Lila instead displayed an acquiescence without respect.
I said, “I feel comfortable with Antonio, even though I don’t love him.”
And I hoped that, in accord with our old habits, she would be able to grasp in that statement a series of hidden questions. Although I love Nino—I was saying without saying it—I feel pleasantly excited just thinking of Antonio, of our kisses, of holding and touching each other at the ponds. Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that
“Do you like it here?”
“Yes.”
“Then study.”
She left, closing the door behind her.
