The Neapolitan Novels полностью

I lived through a week of pure anguish when my period didn’t come. Afraid that Sarratore had made me pregnant, I was in despair; I was polite on the outside, grim inside. I spent sleepless nights, but didn’t ask advice or comfort from anyone, I kept it all to myself. Finally, one afternoon in the bookstore I went to the dirty toilet and found the blood. It was one of the rare moments of well-being during that time. My period seemed a sort of symbolic cancellation of Sarratore’s incursion into my body.

In early September it occurred to me that Nino must have returned from Ischia and I began to fear and hope that he would come by at least to say hello. But he didn’t show up on Via Mezzocannone or in the neighborhood. As for Lila, I saw her only a couple of times, on Sunday, when, beside her husband in the car, she drove by on the stradone. Those few seconds were enough to enrage me. What had happened. How she had arranged things for herself. She continued to have everything, to keep everything: the car, Stefano, the house with the bathroom and the telephone and the television, the nice clothes, the prosperity. And who could say what plans she was devising in the secrecy of her mind. I knew how she was made and I said to myself that she wouldn’t give up Nino even if Nino gave up her. But I chased away those thoughts and forced myself to respect the pact I had made with myself: to plan my life without them and learn not to suffer for it. To that end I concentrated on training myself to react little or not at all. I learned to reduce my emotions to the minimum: if the owner reached out his hands I repulsed him without indignation; if the customers were rude I made the best of it; even with my mother I managed to stay submissive. I said to myself every day: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.

77.

Then school began again. Only when I entered the classroom on the first of October did I realize that I was in my last year of high school, that I was eighteen years old, that the years of school, in my case already miraculously long, were about to end. So much the better. Alfonso and I talked a lot about what we would do after we graduated. He knew as much as I did. We’ll take a civil-service exam, he said, but in fact we didn’t have clear ideas on what the exams entailed; we said sit the exam, pass the exam, but the concept was vague: did you have to do a written exercise, take an oral test? And what did you get once you’d taken it, a salary?

Alfonso confided that he was thinking of getting married, once he had taken the exam and gained a post.

“To Marisa?”

“Yes, of course.”

Sometimes I asked him warily about Nino, but he didn’t like Nino, they didn’t even say hello to each other. He had never understood what I found in him. He’s ugly, he said, all out of proportion, skin and bone. Marisa, on the other hand, seemed pretty to him. But he immediately added, careful not to wound me, “You’re pretty, too.” He liked beauty, and especially appreciated care for one’s body. He himself was attentive to his appearance, he smelled of the barber, he bought clothes, he lifted weights every day. He told me that he had a good time at the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. It wasn’t like the grocery. There you could be elegant, in fact you had to be. There you could speak Italian, the people were respectable, had gone to school. There, even when you were on your knees in front of the customers, men and women, trying on the shoes, you could do it with pleasant manners, like the knight in a courtly love story. But unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to stay in the shop.

“Why?”

“Well . . . ”

At first he was vague and I didn’t insist. Then he told me that Pinuccia was staying home now because she didn’t want to get tired, she had a belly like a torpedo; and anyway it was clear that once she had the baby she wouldn’t have time to work. This in theory should have cleared a path for him, the Solaras were pleased with him, maybe he would be able to establish himself there after he graduated. But it wasn’t possible, and here suddenly the name of Lila came up. Just hearing it my stomach flared up.

“What does she have to do with it?”

I knew she had returned from the vacation like a madwoman. She still wasn’t pregnant, the swimming had been of no use, she was behaving oddly. Once she had broken all the flowerpots on her balcony. She said she was going to the grocery, instead she left Carmen alone and went walking around. Stefano woke up at night and she wasn’t in bed: she was wandering through the house, she read and wrote. Then suddenly she calmed down. Or rather she focused her entire capacity to spoil Stefano’s life on a single objective: for Gigliola to work in the new grocery, and she in Piazza dei Martiri.

I was amazed.