We parted. I hurried off to give a Greek lesson to a girl in middle school who lived in Parco Margherita. But it was difficult. The large, permanently semi-dark room where I was greeted respectfully held heavy furniture, rugs with hunting scenes, old photographs of high-ranking soldiers, and various other signs of a long history of authority and ease that produced in my pale fourteen-year-old pupil a dullness of body and intelligence, and in me a feeling of impatience. That day I had to struggle to supervise declensions and conjugations. The picture of Nino as Professor Galiani had evoked him kept returning to my mind: worn jacket, tie flying, long legs staggering, the empty bottle that after the last swallow shattered on the stones of Via Arenaccia. What had happened between him and Lila, after Ischia? Contrary to my predictions, she had evidently seen her mistake, it was all over, she had returned to herself. Nino hadn’t: from a studious youth with a well-formulated response to everything he had become a vagrant, undone by the pain of love for the grocer’s wife. I thought of asking Alfonso again if he had news. I thought of going to Marisa myself and asking her about her brother. But soon I forced the idea out of my mind. It will pass, I said to myself. Has he come to see me? No. Has Lila come to see me? No. Why should I worry about him, or her, when they don’t care about me? I continued the lesson and went on my way.
78.
After Christmas I found out from Alfonso that Pinuccia had given birth, she had had a boy, named Fernando. I went to see her, thinking that I would find her in bed, happy, with the baby at her breast. Instead, she was up, but in nightgown and slippers, sulking. She rudely sent away her mother, who said to her, “Get in bed, don’t tire yourself,” and when she led me to the cradle she said grimly, “Nothing ever works out for me, look how ugly he is, it upsets me just to look at him, let alone touch him.” And although Maria, standing in the doorway, murmured, like a soothing formula, “What are you talking about, Pina, he’s beautiful,” she continued to repeat angrily, “He’s ugly, he’s uglier than Rino, that whole family is ugly.” Then she drew in her breath and exclaimed desperately, with tears in her eyes, “It’s my fault, I made a bad choice of a husband, but when you’re a girl you don’t think about it, and now look at what a child I’ve had, he has a pug nose just like Lina.” Then, with no interruption, she began to insult her sister-in-law grossly.
I learned from her that Lila, the whore, had already in two weeks done and redone as she liked the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. Gigliola had had to give in, she had returned to the Solaras’ pastry shop; she herself, Pinuccia, had had to give in, chained to the child until goodness knows when; they had all had to give in, Stefano above all, as usual. And now, every day, Lila was up to something new: she went to work dressed up as if she were Mike Bongiorno’s assistant, and if her husband wouldn’t take her in the car she had no scruples about getting Michele to drive her; she had spent who knows how much for two paintings that you couldn’t understand what they were of, and had hung them in the shop for who knows what purpose; she had bought a lot of books and, instead of shoes, she put those on the shelf; she had fitted out a sort of living room, with couches, chairs, ottomans, and a crystal bowl where she kept chocolates from Gay Odin, available to whoever wanted them, free, as if she were there not to notice the stink of the customers’ feet but to play the great lady in her castle.
“And it’s not only that,” she said, “there’s something even worse.”
“What?”
“You know what Marcello Solara did?”
“No.”
“You remember the shoes that Stefano and Rino gave him?”
“The ones made exactly the way Lina designed them?”
“Yes, a wretched shoe, Rino always said that the water got in.”
“Well, what happened?”
Pina overwhelmed me with a laborious, sometimes confused story, involving money, treacherous plots, deception, debts. Marcello, dissatisfied with the new models made by Rino and Fernando—and certainly in agreement with Michele—had had shoes like those manufactured, but not in the Cerullo factory, in another factory, in Afragola. Then, at Christmas, he had distributed them under the Solara name in the stores, including the one on Piazza dei Martiri.
“And he could do that?”
“Of course, they’re his: my brother and my husband, those two shits, gave them to him, he can do what he likes.”
“So?”
“So,” she said, “now there are Cerullo shoes and Solara shoes circulating in Naples. And the Solara shoes are selling really well, better than the Cerullos. And all the profit is the Solaras’. So Rino is extremely upset, because he expected some competition, of course, but not from the Solaras themselves, his partners, and with a shoe he made with his own hands and then stupidly threw away.”
