Already on the way home I began to worry both about her and about me. If Stefano killed her? If Antonio killed me? I was racked by anxiety, I walked quickly, in the dusty heat, along Sunday streets that were beginning to empty as lunchtime approached. How difficult it was to find one’s way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations. Lila, perhaps based on secret calculations of her own, perhaps only out of spite, had humiliated her husband by going to flirt in front of everyone—she, Signora Carracci—with her former wooer Marcello Solara. I, without intending to, in fact convinced that I was doing good, had gone to argue the case of Antonio with those who years before had insulted his sister, who had beaten him up, whom he in turn had beaten up. When I entered the courtyard, I heard someone calling me, I started. It was him, he was at the window waiting for me to return.
He came down and I was afraid. I thought: he must have a knife. Instead, the whole time he spoke with his hands sunk in his pockets as if to keep them prisoner, calmly, his gaze distant. He said that I had humiliated him in front of the people he despised most in the world. He said I had made him look like someone who sends his woman to ask a favor. He said that he would not go down on his knees to anyone and that he would be a soldier not once but a hundred times, that in fact he would die in the Army rather than go and kiss the hand of Marcello Solara. He said that if Pasquale and Enzo should find out, they would spit in his face. He said that he was leaving me, because he had had the proof, finally, that I cared nothing about him and his feelings. He said that I could say and do with the son of Sarratore what I liked, he never wanted to see me again.
I couldn’t reply. Suddenly he took his hands out of his pockets, pulled me inside the doorway and kissed me, pressing his lips hard against mine, searching my mouth desperately with his tongue. Then he pulled away, turned his back, and left.
I went up the stairs in confusion. I thought that I was more fortunate than Lila, Antonio wasn’t like Stefano. He would never hurt me, the only person he could hurt was himself.
18.
I didn’t see Lila the next day, but, surprisingly, I was compelled to see her husband.
That morning I had gone to school depressed: it was hot, I hadn’t studied, I had scarcely slept. The school day had been a disaster. I had looked for Nino outside, I would have liked to talk just a little, but I didn’t see him, maybe he was wandering through the city with his girlfriend, maybe he was in one of the movie theaters that were open in the morning, kissing her in the dark, maybe he was in the woods at Capodimonte having her do to him the things I had done to Antonio for months. In the first class I had been interrogated in chemistry and had given muddled or inadequate answers; who knows what grade I had received, and there wasn’t time to make it up, I was in danger of having to retake the exam in September. I had met Professor Galiani in the hall and she had given me a gentle speech whose meaning was: What is happening to you, Greco, why aren’t you studying anymore? And I had been unable to say anything but: Professor, I am studying, I’m studying all the time, I swear; she listened to me for a bit and then walked away and went into the teachers’ lounge. I had had a long cry in the bathroom, a cry of self-pity for how wretched my life was. I had lost everything: success in school; Antonio, whom I had always wanted to leave, and who in the end had left me, and already I missed him; Lila, who since she had become Signora Carracci was more removed every day. Worn out by a headache, I had walked home thinking of her, of how she had used me—yes, used—to provoke the Solaras, to get revenge on her husband, to show him to me in his misery as a wounded male, and the whole way I wondered: Is it possible that a person can change like that, that now there’s nothing to distinguish her from someone like Gigliola?
But at home there was a surprise. My mother didn’t attack me the way she usually did because I was late and she suspected I had been seeing Antonio, or because I had neglected one of the thousands of household tasks. She said to me instead, with a sort of gentle annoyance, “Stefano asked me if you could go with him this afternoon to the dressmaker’s on the Rettifilo.”
Befuddled by tiredness and discouragement, I thought I hadn’t understood. Stefano? Stefano Carracci? He wanted me to go with him to the Rettifilo?
“Why doesn’t he go with his wife?” my father joked from the other room. Formally he was taking a sick day but in reality he had to keep an eye on some of his indecipherable deals. “How do those two pass the time? Do they play cards?”
