My hypothesis found support the night the grocery opened. She seemed to be wearing her shabbiest clothes. In front of everyone she treated her husband like a servant. She sent away the priest she had had me call on before he could bless the store, contemptuously sticking some money in his hand. She went on to slice prosciutto and stuff sandwiches, handing them out free to anyone, along with a glass of wine. And this last move was so successful that the store had scarcely opened when it was jammed with customers; she and Carmela were besieged, and Stefano, who was elegantly dressed, had to help them deal with the situation as he was, without an apron, so that his good clothes got all greasy.
When they came home, exhausted, her husband made a scene and Lila did her best to provoke his fury. She shouted that if he wanted someone who obeyed, and that’s all, he was out of luck; she was not his mother or his sister, she would always make life difficult for him. And she started with the Solaras, with the business of the photograph, insulting him grossly. First he let her have her say, then he responded with even worse insults. But he didn’t beat her. When, the next day, she told me what had happened, I said that although Stefano had his faults, certainly he loved her. She denied it. “He understands only this,” she replied, rubbing together thumb and index finger. And in fact the grocery was already popular throughout the new neighborhood, and was crowded from the moment it opened. “The cash drawer is already full. Thanks to me. I bring him wealth, a son, what more does he want?”
“What more do you want?” I asked, with a stab of rage that surprised me, and immediately I smiled, hoping she hadn’t noticed.
I remember that she looked bewildered; she touched her forehead with her fingers. Maybe she didn’t even know what she wanted, she felt only that she couldn’t find peace.
As the other opening, that of the shop on Piazza dei Martiri, approached, she became unbearable. But maybe that adjective is excessive. Let’s say that she poured out onto all of us, even me, the confusion that she felt inside. On the one hand, she made Stefano’s life hell, she squabbled with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, she went to Rino and quarreled with him in front of the workers and Fernando, who, more hunched than usual, labored over his bench, pretending not to hear; on the other, she herself perceived that she was spinning around in her unhappiness, unresigned, and at times I caught her in the new grocery store, in a rare moment when it was empty or she wasn’t dealing with suppliers, with a vacant look, one hand on her forehead, in her hair, as if to stanch a wound, and the expression of someone who is trying to catch her breath.
One afternoon I was at home; it was still very hot, although it was the end of September. School was about to begin, I felt at the mercy of the days. My mother reproached me for wasting time. Nino—who knows where he was, in England or in that mysterious space that was the university. I no longer had Antonio, or even the hope of getting back together with him; he had left, along with Enzo Scanno, for his military service, saying goodbye to everyone except me. I heard someone calling me from the street. It was Lila. Her eyes were shining, as if she had a fever, and she said she had found a solution.
“Solution to what?”
“The photograph. If they want to display it, they have to do it the way I say.”
“And what do you say?”
She didn’t tell me, maybe at that moment it wasn’t clear to her. But I knew what sort of person she was, and I recognized in her face the expression she got when, from the dark depths of herself, a signal arrived that fired her brain. She asked me to go with her that evening to Piazza dei Martiri. There we would find the Solaras, Gigliola, Pinuccia, her brother. She wanted me to help her, support her, and I realized that what she had in mind would ferry her beyond her permanent war: a violent but conclusive outlet for the accumulated tensions; or a way of freeing her head, her body, from pent-up energies.
“All right,” I said, “but promise not to be crazy.”
“Yes.”
After the stores closed she and Stefano came to get me in the car. From the few words they exchanged I understood that not even her husband knew what she had in mind and that this time my presence, rather than reassuring him, alarmed him. Lila had finally appeared to be accommodating. She had told him that, if there was no possibility of abandoning the photograph, she wanted at least to have her say on how it was displayed.
“A question of frame, wall, lighting?” he had asked.
“I have to see.”
“But then that’s it, Lina.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
