That was it, she said nothing else. But in speaking she hadn’t used her normal aggressive tone of voice, she seriously seemed to want us to help her understand, since the life of the neighborhood was a tangled skein. She had spoken in dialect most of the time, as if to indicate, modestly: I don’t use tricks, I speak as I am. And she had summarized disparate things frankly, without seeking, as she usually did, a thread that would hold them together. And in fact neither she nor I had ever heard that word-formula loaded with cultural and political contempt: shopkeepers. And in fact neither she nor I knew anything about taxes: our parents, friends, boyfriends, husbands, relatives acted as if they didn’t exist, and school taught nothing that had to do even vaguely with politics. Yet Lila still managed to disrupt what had until that moment been a new and thrilling afternoon. Right after that exchange, Nino tried to return to his subject but he faltered, he went back to telling funny anecdotes about life with Bruno. He said they ate only fried eggs and salami, he said that they drank a lot of wine. Then he seemed embarrassed by his own stories and appeared relieved when Pinuccia and Bruno, their hair wet, came back, eating coconut.
“That was really fun,” Pina exclaimed, but with the air of one who wants to say: You two bitches, you sent me off by myself with someone I don’t even know.
When the two boys left I walked with them a little way, just to make it clear that they were my friends and had come because of me.
Nino said moodily, “Lina really got lost, what a shame.”
I nodded yes, said goodbye, stood for a while with my feet in the water to calm myself.
When we got home, Pinuccia and I were lively, Lila thoughtful. Pinuccia told Nunzia about the visit of the two boys and appeared unexpectedly pleased with Bruno, who had taken the trouble to make sure that her child wasn’t born with a craving for coconut. He’s well brought up, she said, a student but not too boring: he seems not to care about how he’s dressed but everything he has on, from his bathing suit to his shirt and his sandals, is expensive. She appeared curious about the fact that someone could be wealthy in a fashion different from that of her brother, Rino, the Solaras. She made a remark that struck me: At the bar on the beach he bought me this and that without showing off.
Her mother-in-law, who, for the entire length of that vacation, never went to the beach but took care of the shopping, the house, preparing dinner and also the lunch that we carried to the beach the next day, listened as if her daughter-in-law were recounting to her an enchanted world. Naturally she noticed immediately that her daughter was preoccupied, and kept glancing at her questioningly. But Lila was just distracted. She caused no trouble of any type, she allowed Pinuccia to sleep with her again, she wished everyone good night. Then she did something completely unexpected. I had just gone to bed when she appeared in the little room.
“Will you give me one of your books?” she asked.
I looked at her in bewilderment. She wanted to read? How long since she had opened a book, three, four years? And why now had she decided to start again? I took the volume of Beckett, the one I used to kill the mosquitoes, and gave it to her. It seemed the most accessible text I had.
47.
The week passed, between long waits and encounters that ended too quickly. The two boys kept to a rigorous schedule. They woke at six in the morning, they studied until lunchtime, at three they set out for their date with us, at seven they went home, had dinner, and resumed studying. Nino never came by himself. He and Bruno, although so different in every way, got along well, and especially when it came to us they seemed to gain confidence from each other’s presence.
Pinuccia from the start did not share the hypothesis of their companionship. She claimed that they were neither particularly friendly nor particularly close. In her view it was a relationship that was sustained completely by the patience of Bruno, who was good-natured and so accepted without complaint the fact that Nino talked his head off from morning till night with all that nonsense that was constantly coming out of his mouth. “Nonsense, yes,” she repeated, but then apologized, with a touch of sarcasm, for having described in that way the talk that I, too, liked so much. “You’re students,” she said, “and it’s logical that you’re the only ones who understand what you’re saying; but wouldn’t you agree, at least, that the rest of us get a little fed up?”
