“Lina, don’t talk nonsense, you know very well that your brother and I are just one step from a violent clash with them, don’t complicate things.”
“I’m not complicating anything. But I’m not going there anymore.”
Stefano was silent and Lila saw that he was worried, that he wanted to escape without examining the matter. Her husband was afraid she was about to reveal to him some insult on the part of the Solaras, an unforgivable offense to which, once he knew about it, he would have to react, leading to an irrevocable rupture. Which he couldn’t afford.
“All right,” he said, when he made up his mind to speak, “don’t go, go back to the grocery.”
She answered, “I don’t feel like the grocery, either.”
Stefano looked at her in bewilderment. “You want to stay home? Good. You wanted to work, I never asked you. Is that true or not?”
“It’s true.”
“Then stay home, I’d be glad to have you at home.”
“I don’t want to stay home, either.”
He was close to losing his calm, the only way he knew to expel anxiety.
“If you don’t want to stay home, either, am I allowed to know what the fuck you want?”
Lila answered, “I want to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t want to stay with you anymore, I want to leave you.”
The only thing Stefano could do was start laughing. Those words seemed to him so enormous that for a few minutes he seemed relieved. He pinched her cheek, he said with his usual half smile that they were husband and wife and that husband and wife don’t leave each other, he promised that the following Sunday he would take her to the Amalfi Coast, so they could relax a little. But she answered calmly that there was no reason to stay together, that she had been wrong from the start, that even when they were engaged she had liked him only a little, that she now knew clearly that she had never loved him and that to be supported by him, to help him make money, to sleep with him were things that she could no longer tolerate. It was at the end of that speech that she received a blow that knocked her off her chair. She got up while Stefano moved to grab her, she ran to the sink, seized the knife that she had put under the dishtowel. She turned to him just when he was about to hit her again.
“Do it and I’ll kill you the way they killed your father,” she said.
Stefano stopped, stunned by that reference to the fate of his father. He muttered things like “All right, kill me, do what you want.” And he made a gesture of boredom and yawned, an uncontrollable yawn, his mouth wide open, that left his eyes bright and shining. He turned his back on her and, still muttering resentfully—“Go on, go, I’ve given you everything, I’ve yielded in every way, and you repay me like this, me, who raised you out of poverty, who made your brother rich, your father, and your whole shitty family”—went to the table and ate another pastry.
Then he left the kitchen, retreated to the bedroom, and from there he cried suddenly, “You can’t even imagine how much I love you.”
Lila placed the knife on the sink, she thought: he doesn’t believe that I’m leaving him; he wouldn’t even believe that I have someone else, he can’t. Yet she got up her courage and went to the bedroom to confess to him about Nino, to tell him she was pregnant. But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape. So she put on her coat, took the suitcase, and left the apartment.
89.
Stefano slept all day. When he woke up and realized that his wife wasn’t there he pretended not to notice. He had behaved like that since he was a boy, when his father terrorized him by his mere presence and he, in reaction, had trained himself to that half smile, to slow, tranquil gestures, to a controlled distance from the world around him, to keep at bay both fear and the desire to tear open his chest with his bare hands and, pulling it apart, rip out the heart.
In the evening he went out and did something rash: he went to Ada’s windows, and though he knew she was supposed to be at the movies or somewhere with Pasquale, he called her, kept calling her. Ada looked out, both happy and alarmed. She had stayed home because Melina was raving more than usual and Antonio, ever since he had gone to work for the Solaras, was always out, he didn’t have a schedule. Her fiancé was there keeping her company. Stefano went up just the same, and, without ever mentioning Lila, spent the evening at the Cappuccio house talking politics with Pasquale and about matters connected to the grocery with Ada. When he got home he pretended that Lila had gone to her parents’ and before he went to bed he shaved carefully. He slept heavily all night.
