She also bought some big albums with green covers decorated with floral motifs, in which she arranged the wedding photographs. She had printed just for me copies of I don’t know how many of them, all the ones in which I, my parents, my sister and brothers, even Antonio appeared. She telephoned and ordered the photographs. I found one in which Nino could be seen: there was Alfonso, there was Marisa, and he was at the right, cut off by the edge of the frame, only his hair, his nose, his mouth.
“Can I have this, too?” I asked without much enthusiasm.
“You’re not in it.”
“I’m here, from the back.”
“All right, if you want it I’ll have it printed for you.”
I abruptly changed my mind.
“No, forget it.”
“Really, go ahead.”
“No.”
But the acquisition that most impressed me was the projector. The movie of the wedding had finally been developed; the photographer came one night to show it to the newlyweds and their relatives. Lila found out how much the machine cost, she had one delivered to her house and invited me to watch the film. She put the projector on the dining-room table, took a painting of a stormy sea off the wall, expertly inserted the film, lowered the blinds, and the images began to flow over the white wall. It was a marvel: the movie was in color, just a few minutes long. I was astonished. Again I saw her enter the church on Fernando’s arm, come out into the church square with Stefano, their happy walk through the Parco delle Rimembranze, ending with a long kiss, the entrance into the restaurant, the dance that followed, the relatives eating or dancing, the cutting of the cake, the handing out of the favors, the goodbyes addressed to the lens, Stefano happy, she grim, both in their traveling clothes.
The first time I saw it I was struck most of all by myself. I appeared twice. First in the church square, beside Antonio: I looked awkward, nervous, my face taken up by my glasses. The second time, I was sitting at the table with Nino, and was barely recognizable: I was laughing, hands and arms moved with casual elegance, I adjusted my hair, toyed with my mother’s bracelet—I seemed to myself refined and beautiful.
Lila in fact exclaimed, “Look how well you came out.”
“Not really,” I lied.
“You look the way you do when you’re happy.”
The second time we watched (I said to her, Play it again, she didn’t have to be asked twice), what struck me instead was the Solaras’ entrance into the restaurant. The cameraman had caught the moment that had registered most profoundly in me: the moment Nino left the room and Marcello and Michele burst in. The two brothers entered side by side, in their dress clothes; they were tall and muscular, thanks to the time they spent in the gym lifting weights; meanwhile Nino, slipping out, head lowered, just bumped Marcello’s arm, and as Marcello abruptly turned, with a mean, bullying look, he vanished, indifferent, without looking back.
The contrast seemed violent. It wasn’t so much the poverty of Nino’s clothes, which clashed with the opulence of the Solaras’, with the gold they wore on their necks and their wrists and their fingers. It wasn’t even his extreme thinness, which was accentuated by his height—he was at least three inches taller than the brothers, who were tall, too—and which suggested a fragility opposed to the virile strength that Marcello and Michele displayed with smug satisfaction. Rather, it was the indifference. While the Solaras’ arrogance could be considered normal, the haughty carelessness with which Nino had bumped into Marcello and kept going was not at all normal. Even those who detested the Solaras, like Pasquale, Enzo, or Antonio, had, one way or another, to reckon with them. Nino, on the other hand, not only didn’t apologize but didn’t so much as glance at Marcello.
The scene provided documentary proof of what I had intuited as I was experiencing it in reality. In that sequence Sarratore’s son—who had grown up in the run-down buildings of the old neighborhood just like us, and who had seemed so frightened when it came to defeating Alfonso in the school competitions—now appeared completely outside the scale of values at whose peak stood the Solaras. It was a hierarchy that visibly did not interest him, that perhaps he no longer understood.
Looking at him, I was seduced. He seemed to me an ascetic prince who could intimidate Michele and Marcello merely by means of a gaze that didn’t see them. And for an instant I hoped that now, in the image, he would do what he had not done in reality: take me away.
Lila noticed Nino only then, and said, curious, “Is that the same person you sat with at the table with Alfonso?”
“Yes. Didn’t you recognize him? It’s Nino, the oldest son of Sarratore.”
“He’s the one who kissed you when you were on Ischia?”
“It was nothing.”
“Just as well.”
“Why just as well?”
“He’s a person who thinks he’s somebody.”
As if to excuse that impression I said, “This year he graduates and he’s the best in the whole school.”
“You like him because of that?”
“No.”
