The Neapolitan Novels полностью

Meanwhile, however, with the money from Don Achille, she bought a book: Little Women. She decided to buy it because she already knew it and liked it hugely. Maestra Oliviero, in fourth grade, had given the smarter girls books to read. Lila had received Little Women, along with the following comment: “This is for older girls, but it will be good for you,” and I got the book Heart, by Edmondo De Amicis, with not a word of explanation. Lila read both Little Women and Heart, in a very short time, and said there was no comparison, in her opinion Little Women was wonderful. I hadn’t managed to read it, I had had a hard time finishing Heart before the time set by the teacher for returning it. I was a slow reader, I still am. Lila, when she had to give the book back to Maestra Oliviero, regretted both not being able to reread Little Women continuously and not being able to talk about it with me. So one morning she made up her mind. She called me from the street, we went to the ponds, to the place where we had buried the money from Don Achille, in a metal box, took it out, and went to ask Iolanda the stationer, who had had displayed in her window forever a copy of Little Women, yellowed by the sun, if it was enough. It was. As soon as we became owners of the book we began to meet in the courtyard to read it, either silently, one next to the other, or aloud. We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart. But it was our book, we loved it dearly. I was the guardian, I kept it at home among the schoolbooks, because Lila didn’t feel she could keep it in her house. Her father, lately, would get angry if she merely took it out to read.

But Rino protected her. When the subject of the admissions test came up, quarrels exploded continuously between him and his father. Rino was about sixteen at the time, he was a very excitable boy and had started a battle to be paid for the work he did. His reasoning was: I get up at six; I come to the shop and work till eight at night; I want a salary. But those words outraged his father and his mother. Rino had a bed to sleep in, food to eat, why did he want money? His job was to help the family, not impoverish it. But he insisted, he found it unjust to work as hard as his father and not receive a cent. At that point Fernando Cerullo answered him with apparent patience: “I pay you already, Rino, I pay you generously by teaching you the whole trade: soon you’ll be able to repair a heel or an edge or put on a new sole; your father is passing on to you everything he knows, and you’ll be able to make an entire shoe, with the skill of a professional.” But that payment by instruction was not enough for Rino, and so they argued, especially at dinner. They began by talking about money and ended up quarreling about Lila.

“If you pay me I’ll take care of sending her to school,” Rino said.

“School? Why, did I go to school?”

“No.”

“Did you go to school?”

“No.”

“Then why should your sister, who is a girl, go to school?”

The matter almost always ended with a slap in the face for Rino, who, one way or another, even if he didn’t intend to, had displayed a lack of respect toward his father. The boy, without crying, apologized in a spiteful tone of voice.

Lila was silent during those discussions. She never said so, but I had the impression that while I hated my mother, really hated her, profoundly, she, in spite of everything, wasn’t upset with her father. She said that he was full of kindnesses, she said that when there were accounts to do he let her do them, she said that she had heard him say to his friends that his daughter was the most intelligent person in the neighborhood, she said that on her name day he brought her warm chocolate in bed and four biscuits. But what could you do, it didn’t enter into his view of the world that she should continue to go to school. Nor did it fall within his economic possibilities: the family was large, they all had to live off the shoe repair shop, including two unmarried sisters of Fernando and Nunzia’s parents. So on the matter of school it was like talking to the wall, and her mother all in all had the same opinion. Only her brother had different ideas, and fought boldly against his father. And Lila, for reasons I didn’t understand, seemed certain that Rino would win. He would get his salary and would send her to school with the money.

“If there’s a fee to pay, he’ll pay it for me,” she explained.

She was sure that her brother would also give her money for the school books and even for pens, pen case, pastels, globe, the smock and the ribbon. She adored him. She said that, after she went to school, she wanted to earn a lot of money for the sole purpose of making her brother the wealthiest person in the neighborhood.