The days began to fly by. I gave back to Professor Galiani the books she had lent me for the summer, she gave me others, which were even more difficult. I read them diligently on Sundays, but I didn’t understand much. I ran my eyes along the lines, I turned the pages, and yet the style annoyed me, the meaning escaped me. That year, my fourth year of high school, between studying and difficult readings, I was exhausted, but it was the exhaustion of contentment.
One day Professor Galiani asked me, “What newspaper do you read, Greco?”
That question provoked the same uneasiness I had felt talking to Nino at Lila’s wedding. The professor took it for granted that I normally did something that at my house, in my environment, was not at all normal. How could I tell her that my father didn’t buy the newspaper, that I had never read one? I didn’t have the heart, and my mind raced to remember if Pasquale, who was a Communist, read one. A useless effort. Then I thought of Donato Sarratore and I remembered Ischia, the Maronti, I remembered that he wrote for
“I read
The professor gave an ironic half smile, and the next day began handing on her newspapers. She bought two, sometimes three, and after school she would give me one. I thanked her and went home upset by what seemed to me still more homework.
At first I left the paper around the house, and put off reading it until I had finished my homework, but at night it had disappeared, my father had grabbed it to read in bed or in the bathroom. So I got in the habit of hiding it among my books, and took it out only at night, when everyone was sleeping. Sometimes it was
In that period I saw little of Lila. Sometimes, right after school, before I rushed off to do my homework, I went to the new grocery. I was starving, she knew it, and would make me a generously stuffed sandwich. While I devoured it, I would articulate, in good Italian, statements I had memorized from Professor Galiani’s books and newspapers. I would mention, let’s say, “the atrocious reality of the Nazi extermination camps,” or “what men were able to do and what they can do today as well,” or “the atomic threat and the obligation to peace,” or the fact that “as a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature,” or “the need for a culture that combats and eliminates suffering,” or the idea that “religion will disappear from men’s consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound scientific conception of society and of life.” I talked to her about these and other things because I wanted to show her that I was sailing toward passing with high marks, and because I didn’t know who else to say them to, and because I hoped she would respond so that we could resume our old habit of discussion. But she said almost nothing, in fact she seemed embarrassed, as if she didn’t really understand what I was talking about. Or if she made a remark, she concluded by digging up an old obsession that now—I didn’t know why—had started working inside her again. She began to talk about the origin of Don Achille’s money, and of the Solaras’, even in the presence of Carmen, who immediately agreed. But as soon as a customer came in she stopped, she became very polite and efficient, she sliced, weighed, took money.
Once, she left the cash drawer open and, staring at the money, said, angrily, “I earn this with my labor and Carmen’s. But nothing in there is mine, Lenù, it’s made with Stefano’s money. And Stefano to make money started with his father’s money. Without what Don Achille put under the mattress, working the black market and loan-sharking, today there would not be this and there would not be the shoe factory. Not only that. Stefano, Rino, my father would not have sold a single shoe without the money and the connections of the Solara family, who are also loan sharks. Is it clear what I’ve got myself into?”
Clear, but I didn’t understand the point of those discussions.
“It’s water under the bridge,” I said, and reminded her of the conclusions she had come to when she was engaged to Stefano. “What you’re talking about is what’s behind us, we are something else.”
But although she had invented that theory, she did not seem convinced by it. She said to me, and I have a vivid memory of the phrase, which was in dialect:
“I don’t like what I’ve done and what I’m doing.”
