I also escaped, I went home with my heart pounding, and a thousand tangled thoughts. Not a single feature of Nino’s connected him to Sarratore: not his height, not his face, not his manners, not even his voice or his gaze. He was an anomalous, sweet fruit. How fascinating he was with his long, untidy hair. How different from any other male form: in all Naples there was no one who resembled him. And he had respect for me, even if I still had my last year of high school to do and he was going to the university. He had come all the way to the neighborhood on a Sunday. He had been worried about me, he had come to put me on my guard. He had wanted to warn me that Professor Galiani was all well and good but even she had her flaws, and meanwhile he had brought me that journal in the conviction that I had the capacity to read it and discuss it, and he had even gone so far as to invite me to Ischia, to Forio, for the August holiday. Something impractical, not a real invitation, he himself knew perfectly well that my parents were not like Nadia’s, they would never let me go; and yet he had invited me just the same, because in the words he said I heard other words, unsaid, like
I hid the review among my books. But at night, as soon as I was in bed, I looked at the table of contents and was startled. There was an article by Nino. An article by him in that very serious-looking magazine: almost a book, not the faded gray student magazine in which, two years earlier, he had suggested publishing my account of the priest, but important pages written by adults for adults. And yet there he was, Antonio Sarratore, name and last name. And I knew him. And he was only two years older than me.
I read, I didn’t understand much, I reread. The article talked about Planning with a capital “P,” Plan with a capital “P,” and it was written in a complicated style. But it was a piece of his intelligence, a piece of his person, that, without boasting, quietly, he had given to me.
Tears came to my eyes, it was late when I put the magazine down. Talk about it to Lila? Lend it to her? No, it was mine. I didn’t want to have a real friendship with her anymore, just hello, trite phrases. She didn’t know how to appreciate me. Whereas others did: Armando, Nadia, Nino. They were my friends, to them I owed my confidences. They had immediately seen in me what she had hastened not to see. Because she had the gaze of the neighborhood. She was able to see only the way Melina did, who, locked in her madness, saw Donato in Nino, took him for her former lover.
38.
At first I didn’t want to go to Pinuccia and Rino’s wedding, but Pinuccia came herself to bring me the invitation and since she treated me with exaggerated affection, and in fact asked my advice about many things, I didn’t know how to say no, even though she didn’t extend the invitation to the rest of my family. It’s not me who’s discourteous, she apologized, but Stefano. Not only had her brother refused to give her any of the family’s money so that she could buy a house (he had told her that the investments he had made in the shoes and in the new grocery had left him broke) but, since it was he who had to pay for the wedding dress, the photographer, and the refreshments, he had personally removed half the neighborhood from the guest list. It was extremely rude behavior, and Rino was even more embarrassed than she was. His bride would have liked a wedding as lavish as his sister’s and a new house, like hers, with a view of the railroad. Although he was by now the proprietor of a shoe factory, he couldn’t manage with his own resources, but it was partly because he was a spendthrift; he had just bought a Fiat 1100, he didn’t have a lira left. And so, after a lot of resistance, they had agreed to go and live in Don Achille’s old house, evicting Maria from the bedroom. They intended to save as much as possible and, as soon as they could, buy an apartment nicer than Stefano and Lila’s. My brother is a shit, Pinuccia said in conclusion, bitterly: when it comes to his wife he throws his money around, while for his sister he doesn’t have a cent.
I avoided any comment. I went to the wedding with Marisa and Alfonso; he seemed to be just waiting for these worldly occasions to become someone else, not my usual classmate but a young man graceful in manner and appearance, with black hair, a heavy bluish beard showing on his cheeks, languid eyes, a suit that wasn’t ill-fitting, as happened to other men, but showed off his slender yet sculpted body.
