The Neapolitan Novels полностью

I hoped for a word of support from Marcello. But Marcello remained silent, head down: I understood that his residual feelings for Lila were vanishing at that moment, his old depressed passion couldn’t carry them forward any longer. It was his brother who broke in, lashing Gigliola, his fiancée, in his most aggressive voice. “Shut up,” he told her. And as soon as she tried to protest he became threatening, without even looking at her, staring, rather, at the panel: “Shut up, Gigliò.” Then he turned to Lila.

“I like it, signò. You’ve erased yourself deliberately and I see why: to show the thigh, to show how well a woman’s thigh goes with those shoes. Excellent. You’re a pain in the ass, but when you do a thing you do it right.”

Silence.

With her fingertips Gigliola dried silent tears that she couldn’t hold back. Pinuccia stared at Rino, she stared at her brother, as if she wanted to say to them: Speak, defend me, don’t let that bitch walk all over me.

Stefano instead murmured softly, “Yes, it convinces me, too.”

And Lila said suddenly, “It’s not finished.”

“What do you still have to do?” Pinuccia shot back.

“I have to add a little color.”

“Color?” Marcello mumbled, even more disoriented. “We’re supposed to open in three days.”

Michele laughed: “If we have to wait another little bit, we’ll wait. Get to work, signò, do what you like.”

That masterful tone, of one who makes and unmakes as he wishes, Stefano didn’t like.

“There’s the new grocery,” he said, to let it be understood that he needed his wife there.

“Figure it out,” Michele answered. “We have more interesting things to do here.”

26.

We spent the last days of September shut up in the shop, the two of us and three workmen. They were magnificent hours of play, of invention, of freedom, such as we hadn’t experienced together perhaps since childhood. Lila drew me into her frenzy. We bought paste, paint, brushes. With extreme precision (she was demanding) we attached the black paper cutouts. We traced red or blue borders between the remains of the photograph and the dark clouds that were devouring it. Lila had always been good with lines and colors, but here she did something more, though I wouldn’t have been able to say what it was; hour after hour it engulfed me.

For a while it seemed to me that she had fashioned that occasion to bring to an effective end the years that had begun with the designs for the shoes, when she was still the girl Lina Cerullo. And I still think that much of the pleasure of those days was derived from the resetting of the conditions of her, or our, life, from the capacity we had to lift ourselves above ourselves, to isolate ourselves in the pure and simple fulfillment of that sort of visual synthesis. We forgot about Antonio, Nino, Stefano, the Solaras, my problems with school, her pregnancy, the tensions between us. We suspended time, we isolated space, there remained only the play of glue, scissors, paper, paint: the play of shared creation.

But there was something else. I was soon reminded of the word Michele had used: erase. Likely, yes, very likely the black stripes did set the shoes apart and make them more visible: young Solara wasn’t stupid, he knew how to look. But at times, and with growing intensity, I felt that that wasn’t the true goal of our pasting and painting. Lila was happy, and she was drawing me deeper and deeper into her fierce happiness, because she had suddenly found, perhaps without even realizing it, an opportunity that allowed her to portray the fury she directed against herself, the insurgence, perhaps for the first time in her life, of the need—and here the verb used by Michele was appropriate—to erase herself.

Today, in the light of many subsequent events, I’m quite sure that that is really what happened. With the black paper, with the green and purple circles that Lila drew around certain parts of her body, with the blood-red lines with which she sliced and said she was slicing it, she completed her own self-destruction in an image, presented to the eyes of all in the space bought by the Solaras to display and sell her shoes.