In those months their relationship, after a long period of mutual tolerance, began to deteriorate again. Stefano told her one night that he was tired of her, of the baby, of everything. Another time he said that he had married too young, without understanding what he was doing. But once she answered, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, either, I’ll take the baby and go,” and he, instead of telling her to get out, lost his temper, as he hadn’t for a long time, and hit her in front of the child, who stared at her from the blanket on the floor, dazed by the uproar. Her nose dripping blood and Stefano shouting insults at her, Lila turned to her son laughing, told him in Italian (she had been speaking to him only in Italian for a long time), “Papa’s playing, we’re having fun.”
I don’t know why, but at a certain point she began to take care of Dino, her nephew. It’s possible that it began because she needed to compare Gennaro to another child. Or maybe not, maybe she felt a qualm that she was devoting all her attention only to her own son and it seemed right to take care of her nephew as well. Pinuccia, although she still considered Dino the living proof of the disaster that her life was, and was always yelling at him, and sometimes hit him (“Will you stop it, will you stop it? What do you want from me, you want to make me crazy?”), was resolutely opposed to having Lila take him to her house to play mysterious games with little Gennaro. She said to her angrily: “You take care of raising your son and I’ll take care of mine, and instead of wasting time take care of your husband, otherwise you’ll lose him.” But here Rino intervened.
It was a terrible time for Lila’s brother. He fought constantly with his father, who wanted to close the shoe factory because he was sick of working only to enrich the Solaras and, not understanding that it was necessary to go on at all costs, regretted his old workshop. He fought constantly with Michele and Marcello, who treated him like a petulant boy and when the problem was money spoke directly to Stefano. And mainly he fought with Stefano, shouting and insulting, because his brother-in-law wouldn’t give him a cent and, according to him, was now negotiating secretly to deliver the whole shoe business into the hands of the Solaras. He fought with Pinuccia, who accused him of having led her to believe he was a big shot when really he was a puppet who could be manipulated by anyone, by his father, by Stefano, by Marcello and Michele. So, when he realized that Stefano was mad at Lila because she was being too much a mamma and not enough a wife, and that Pinuccia wouldn’t entrust the child to her sister-in-law for even an hour, he began, defiantly, to take the baby to his sister himself, and since there was less and less work at the shoe factory, he got in the habit of staying, sometimes for hours, in the apartment in the new neighborhood to see what Lila did with Gennaro and Dino. He was fascinated by her maternal patience, by the way the children played, by the way his son, who at home was always crying or sat listlessly in his playpen like a sad puppy, with Lila became eager, quick, seemed happy.
“What do you do to them?” he asked admiringly.
“I make them play.”
“My son played before.”
“Here he plays and learns.”
“Why do you spend so much time on it?”
“Because I read that everything we are is decided now, in the first years of life.”
“And is mine doing well?”
“You see him.”
“Yes, I see, he’s better than yours.”
“Mine is younger.”
“Do you think Dino is intelligent?”
“All children are, you just have to train them.”
“Then train them, Lina, don’t get tired of it immediately the way you usually do. Make him very intelligent for me.”
But one evening Stefano came home early and especially irritable. He found his brother-in-law sitting on the kitchen floor and, instead of confining himself to a harsh look because of the mess, his wife’s lack of interest, the attention given to the children instead of to him, said to Rino that this was his house, that he didn’t like seeing him around every day wasting time, that the shoe factory was failing precisely because he was so idle, that the Cerullos were unreliable—in other words, Get out immediately or I’ll kick your ass.
There was a commotion. Lila cried that he mustn’t speak like that to her brother, Rino threw in his brother-in-law’s face everything that until that moment he had only hinted at or had prudently kept to himself. Gross insults flew. The two children, abandoned in the confusion, began grabbing each other’s toys, crying, especially the smaller one, who was overpowered by the bigger one. Rino shouted at Stefano, his neck swollen, his veins like electric cables, that it was easy to be the boss with the goods that Don Achille had stolen from half the neighborhood, and added, “You’re nothing, you’re just a piece of shit, your father at least knew how to commit a crime, you don’t even know that.”
