The Neapolitan Novels полностью

Lila, as usual, paid no attention to the hostility that was growing around her; she devoted herself to the new job. And soon sales rose sharply. The shop became a place where people went to buy, but also to chat with that lively, very pretty young woman, whose conversation sparkled, who kept books among the shoes, who read those books, who offered you little chocolates along with the intelligent talk, and who, moreover, never seemed to want to sell Cerullo shoes or Solara shoes to the wife or daughters of the lawyer or the engineer, to the journalist for Mattino, to the young or old dandy who was wasting time and money at the Club; rather, she wanted them to make themselves comfortable on the couch and the ottomans and chat about this and that.

The only obstacle, Michele. He was often in the way during work hours and once he said in that ironic, insinuating tone he had, “You have the wrong husband, Lina. I was right: look how well you move among the people who can be useful to us. You and I together in a few years would take over Naples and do what we like with it.”

At that point he tried to kiss her.

She pushed him away, he wasn’t offended. He said, in amusement, “That’s all right, I know how to wait.”

“Wait where you like, but not here,” she said, “because if you wait here I’ll go back to the grocery tomorrow.”

Michele’s visits diminished while Nino’s secret visits increased. For months he and Lila had, finally, in the shop on Piazza dei Martiri, a life of their own, which lasted for three hours a day, except Sundays and holidays, and those were unbearable. He came in through the door of the bathroom at one o’clock, as soon as the assistant pulled the gate three-quarters of the way down and went off, and he left by that same door at four, exactly, before the assistant returned. On the rare occasions that there was some problem—a couple of times Michele arrived with Gigliola and there were particularly tense situations when Stefano showed up—Nino shut himself in the bathroom and sneaked out by the door that opened to the courtyard.

I think for Lila that was a tumultuous trial period for a happy existence. On the one hand she enthusiastically played the part of the young woman who gave the shoe store an eccentric touch, on the other she read for Nino, studied for Nino, reflected for Nino. And even the people of some prominence with whom she became acquainted in the shop seemed to her mainly connections to be used to help him.

During that period, Nino published an article in Il Mattino on Naples that gave him modest fame in university circles. I didn’t know about it, and luckily: if they had included me in their story as they had on Ischia I would have been so severely scarred that I would never have managed to recover. And it wouldn’t have taken me long to figure out that many of the lines in that article—not the most erudite, but those few intuitions that did not require great expertise, only an inspired moment of contact between things that were very distant from one another—were Lila’s, and that the tonality of the writing in particular belonged to her. Nino had never been able to write in such a fashion nor was he able to later. Only she and I could write like that.

88.

Then she discovered that she was pregnant and decided to put an end to the deception of Piazza dei Martiri. One Sunday in the late autumn of 1963 she refused to go to lunch at her mother-in-law’s, as they usually did, and devoted herself to cooking with great care. While Stefano went to get pastries at the Solaras’, bringing some to his mother and sister to be forgiven for his Sunday desertion, Lila put in the suitcase bought for her honeymoon some underwear, a few dresses, a pair of winter shoes, and hid it behind the door of the living room. Then she washed all the pots that she had gotten dirty, set the table in the kitchen, took a carving knife out of a drawer and put it on the sink, covered by a towel. Finally, waiting for her husband to return, she opened the window to get rid of the cooking smells, and stood there looking at the trains and the shining tracks. The cold dissipated the warmth of the apartment, but it didn’t bother her, it gave her energy.

Stefano returned, they sat down at the table. Irritated because he had been deprived of his mother’s good cooking, he didn’t say a single word in praise of the lunch but was harsher than usual toward his brother-in-law, Rino, and more affectionate than usual toward his nephew. He kept calling him my sister’s son, as if Rino’s contribution had been of little account. When they got to the pastries, he ate three, she none. Stefano carefully wiped the cream off his mouth and said, “Let’s go to bed for a while.”

Lila answered, “Starting tomorrow I’m not going to the shop anymore.”

Stefano immediately understood that the afternoon was taking a bad turn. “Why?”

“Because I don’t feel like it.”

“Did you fight with Michele and Marcello?”

“No.”