Lila appeared bewildered, she said that she had thought about it and that life in the pure state frightened her. She expressed herself with some emphasis, she exclaimed, “Life without seeing and without speaking, without speaking and listening, life without a covering, without a container, is shapeless.” She didn’t use exactly those words, but certainly she said “shapeless” and she said it with a gesture of revulsion. Nino repeated reluctantly, “shapeless,” as if it were a curse word. Then he started talking again, even more overwrought, until, with no warning, he took off his shirt, revealing himself in all his dark thinness, grabbed us both by the hand, and dragged us into the water, as I cried happily, “No, no, no, I’m cold, no,” and he answered, “
So, I thought contentedly, Lila is wrong. So there certainly exists another Nino: not the gloomy boy, not the one who gets excited only when he’s thinking about the general state of the world, but
When Bruno arrived things got even better. We all took a walk together and Pinuccia’s good humor slowly returned. She wanted to swim again, she wanted to eat coconut. Starting then, and for the whole week that followed, we found it completely natural that the boys should join us on the beach at ten in the morning and remain until sunset, when we said, “We have to go or Nunzia will get mad,” and they resigned themselves to going off to do some studying.
How intimate we were now. If Bruno called Lila Signora Carracci to tease her, she punched him playfully on the shoulder, chased him, threatening. If he showed too much reverence toward Pinuccia because she was carrying a child, Pinuccia linked arms with him, said, “Come on, let’s run, I want a soda.” As for Nino, now he often took my hand, put an arm around my shoulders, and then put an arm around Lila’s, too, he took her index finger, her thumb. The wary distances receded. We became a group of five friends who were having a good time doing little or nothing. We played games, whoever lost paid a fine. The fines were almost always kisses, but joke kisses, obviously: Bruno had to kiss Lila’s sandy feet, Nino my hand, and then cheeks, forehead, ear, with a pop in the auricle. We also had long games of
A thread of happiness thus began to extend through the hours and days. I no longer minded that Lila took my books, in fact it seemed to me a good thing. I didn’t mind that, when the discussions got going, she more and more often said what she thought and Nino listened attentively and seemed to lack the words for a response. I found it thrilling, in fact, that in those circumstances he would suddenly stop talking to her and start up with me, as if that helped him rediscover his convictions.
That was what happened the time Lila showed off her reading on Hiroshima. A tense discussion arose, because Nino, I saw, was so critical of the United States and didn’t like the fact that the Americans had a military base in Naples, but he was also attracted by their way of life, he said he wanted to study it, and he was disappointed when Lila said, more or less, that dropping atomic bombs on Japan had been a war crime, in fact more than a war crime—the war had scarcely anything to do with it—it had been a crime of pride.
“Can I remind you of Pearl Harbor?” he said hesitantly.
