This threw Pinuccia into despair: with tears, with entreaties, she begged him to end it. But no. If she merely opened her mouth Rino, blinded by rage, and frightening even Nunzia, shouted at her: “I should end it? I should calm down? Then go to your brother and tell him that he should leave Ada, that he should respect Lina, that we have to be a united family and that he should give me the money that he and the Solaras have cheated me of and are cheating me of.” The result was that Pinuccia very often ran out of the house, looking battered, and went to the grocery, to her brother, and sobbed in front of Ada and the customers. Stefano dragged her into the rear of the shop and she listed all her husband’s demands, but concluded, “Don’t give that bastard anything, come home now and kill him.”
103.
This was more or less the situation when I returned to the neighborhood for the Easter vacation. I had been living in Pisa for two and a half years, I was a very brilliant student, and returning to Naples for the holidays had become an ordeal that I submitted to in order to avoid arguments with my parents, especially with my mother. As soon as the train entered the station I became nervous. I feared that some accident would prevent me from returning to the Normale at the end of the vacation: a serious illness that obliged me to enter the chaos of a hospital, some dreadful event that forced me to stop studying because the family needed me.
I had been home for a few hours. My mother had just given me a malicious report on the ugly affairs of Lila, Stefano, Ada, Pasquale, Rino, on the shoe factory that was about to close, on how these were times when one year you had money, you thought you were somebody, you bought a sports car, and the next year you had to sell everything, you ended up in Signora Solara’s red book and stopped acting like a big shot. And here she cut off her litany and said to me, “Your friend thought she really had arrived, the wedding of a princess, the big car, the new house, and yet today you are much smarter and much prettier than she is.” Then she frowned, to repress her satisfaction, and handed me a note that, naturally, she had read, even though it was for me. Lila wanted to see me, she invited me to lunch the next day, Holy Friday.
That was not the only invitation I had, the days were full. Soon afterward Pasquale called me from the courtyard and, as if I were descending from an Olympus instead of from my parents’ dark house, wanted to expound to me his ideas about women, to tell me how much he was suffering, find out what I thought of his behavior. Pinuccia did the same in the evening, furious with both Rino and Lila. Ada, unexpectedly, did the same the next morning, burning with hatred and a sense of injury.
With all three I assumed a distant tone. I urged Pasquale to be calm, Pinuccia to concern herself with her son, and Ada to try to understand if it was true love. In spite of the superficiality of the words, I have to say that she interested me most. While she spoke, I stared at her as if she were a book. She was the daughter of Melina the madwoman, the sister of Antonio. In her face I recognized her mother, and many features of her brother. She had grown up without a father, exposed to every danger, used to working. She had washed the stairs of our buildings for years, with Melina, whose brain had suddenly stopped functioning. The Solaras had picked her up in their car when she was a girl and I could imagine what they had done to her. It seemed therefore normal that she should fall in love with Stefano, the courteous boss. She loved him, she told me, they loved each other. “Tell Lina,” she said, her eyes shining with passion, “that one cannot command one’s heart, and that if she is the wife I am the one who has given and gives Stefano everything, every attention and feeling that a man could want, and soon children, too, and so he is mine, he no longer belongs to her.”
