There was a knock at the door and Signora Peluso went to open it. Exclamations, cries. We looked out into the hall and saw the carabinieri, figures we feared greatly. The carabinieri seized Alfredo and dragged him away. He struggled, shouted, called his children by name, Pasquale, Carmela, Ciro, Immacolata, he grabbed the furniture made with his own hands, the chairs, Giuseppina, he swore that he hadn’t murdered Don Achille, that he was innocent. Carmela wept desperately, they all wept, I, too, began to weep. But not Lila, Lila had that look she had had years earlier for Melina, but with some difference: now, although she remained still, she appeared to be moving with Alfredo Peluso, whose cries were hoarse, and frightening:
It was the most terrible thing we witnessed in the course of our childhood, and made a deep impression on me. Lila attended to Carmela, and consoled her. She said to her that, if it really was her father, he had done well to kill Don Achille, but that in her opinion it wasn’t him: surely he was innocent and would soon get out of prison. They whispered together continuously and if I approached they moved a little farther off so that I wouldn’t hear.
A
DOLESCENCE
1.
On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn’t mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she was abruptly struck by that sensation, she was frightened and kept it to herself, still unable to name it. It was only years later, one night in November 1980—we were thirty-six, were married, had children—that she recounted in detail what had happened to her then, what still sometimes happened to her, and she used that term for the first time.
We were outside, on the roof terrace of one of the apartment buildings in the neighborhood. Although it was very cold we were wearing light, low-cut dresses, so that we would appear attractive. We looked at the boys, who were cheerful, aggressive, dark figures carried away by the party, the food, the sparkling wine. They were setting off fireworks to celebrate the new year, a ritual in which, as I will explain later, Lila had had a large role, so that now she felt content, watching the streaks of fire in the sky. But suddenly—she told me—in spite of the cold she had begun to sweat. It seemed to her that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.
Her heart had started beating uncontrollably. She had begun to feel horror at the cries emerging from the throats of all those who were moving about on the terrace amid the smoke, amid the explosions, as if the sound obeyed new, unknown laws. Her nausea increased, the dialect had become unfamiliar, the way our wet throats bathed the words in the liquid of saliva was intolerable. A sense of repulsion had invested all the bodies in movement, their bone structure, the frenzy that shook them. How poorly made we are, she had thought, how insufficient. The broad shoulders, the arms, the legs, the ears, noses, eyes seemed to her attributes of monstrous beings who had fallen from some corner of the black sky. And the disgust, who knows why, was concentrated in particular on her brother Rino, the person who was closest to her, the person she loved most.
She seemed to see him for the first time as he really was: a squat animal form, thickset, the loudest, the fiercest, the greediest, the meanest. The tumult of her heart had overwhelmed her, she felt as if she were suffocating. Too smoky, too foul-smelling, too much flashing fire in the cold. Lila had tried to calm herself, she had said to herself: I have to seize the stream that’s passing through me, I have to throw it out from me. But at that point she had heard, among the shouts of joy, a kind of final detonation and something like the breath of a wing beat had passed by her. Someone was shooting not rockets and firecrackers but a gun. Her brother Rino was shouting unbearable obscenities in the direction of the yellow flashes.
