It wasn’t just me; certainly all of us, faced with that generosity of hers, had some difficulties. Pasquale, for example, didn’t want to accept the money for the dentist, he felt humiliated, and finally took it only because his face was disfigured, his eye was inflamed, and the lettuce compresses were of no use. Antonio, too, was offended, to the point where to take money that our friend gave Ada in addition to her regular pay he had to be persuaded that it was making up for the disgraceful pay that Stefano had given her before. We had never had a lot of money, and we attached great importance even to ten lire; if we found a coin on the street it was a celebration. So it seemed to us a mortal sin that Lila handed out money as if it were a worthless metal, waste paper. She did it silently, with an imperious gesture resembling those with which as a child she had organized games, assigned parts. Afterward, she talked about other things, as if that moment hadn’t existed. On the other hand—Pasquale said to me one evening, in his obscure way—mortadella sells, so do shoes, and Lina has always been our friend, she’s on our side, our ally, our companion. She’s rich now, but by her own merit: yes, by her own merit, because the money didn’t come to her from the fact that she is Signora Carracci, the future mother of the grocer’s child, but because it’s she who invented Cerullo shoes, and even if no one seemed to remember that now, we, her friends, remembered.
All true. How many things Lila had made happen in the space of a few years. And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine. Lila herself confirmed this bitterly when, one Sunday when the sea was smooth and the sky white, she appeared, to my surprise, at the Sea Garden around three in the afternoon, by herself: a truly unusual event. She had taken the subway, a couple of buses, and now was here, in a bathing suit, with a greenish complexion and an outbreak of pimples on her forehead. “Seventeen years of shit,” she said in dialect, with apparent cheer, her eyes full of sarcasm.
She had quarreled with Stefano. In the daily exchanges with the Solaras the truth came out about the management of the store in Piazza dei Martiri. Michele had tried to insist on Gigliola, had harshly threatened Rino, who supported Pinuccia, had finally launched into a tense negotiation with Stefano, in which they had come close to blows. And in the end what happened? Neither winners nor losers, it seemed. Gigliola and Pinuccia would manage the store
“What?” I asked.
“See if you can guess.”
I couldn’t guess. Michele had asked Stefano, in his teasing tone of voice, to concede on the photograph of Lila in her wedding dress. And this time her husband had done so.
“Really?”
“Really. I told you you just had to wait. They’re going to display me in the shop. In the end I’ve won the bet, not you. Start studying—this year you’ll have to get top marks.”
Here she changed her tone, became serious. She said that she hadn’t come because of the photograph, since she had known for a long time that as far as that shit was concerned she was merchandise to barter. She had come because of the pregnancy. She talked about it for a long time, nervously, as if it were something to be crushed in a mortar, and she did it with cold firmness. It has no meaning, she said, not concealing her anguish. Men insert their thingy in you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside. I’ve got it, it’s here, and it’s repulsive to me. I throw up continuously, it’s my very stomach that can’t bear it. I know I’m supposed to think beautiful things, I know I have to resign myself, but I can’t do it, I see no reason for resignation and no beauty. Besides the fact, she added, that I feel incapable of dealing with children. You, yes, you are, just look how you take care of the stationer’s children. Not me, I wasn’t born with that gift.
These words hurt me, what could I say?
“You don’t know if you have a gift or not, you have to try,” I sought to reassure her, and pointed to the daughters of the stationer who were playing a little distance away. “Sit with them for a while, talk to them.”
She laughed. She said maliciously that I had learned to use the sentimental voice of our mothers. But then, uneasily, she ventured to say a few words to the girls, retreated, began talking to me again. I equivocated, pressed her, urged her to take care of Linda, the smallest of the stationer’s daughters. I said to her, “Go on, let her play her favorite game, drinking from the fountain next to the bar or spraying the water by putting your thumb over it.”
