For Lila everything, except the smell of the salamis, reminded her of Stefano’s violence and for several seconds she felt annihilated, she was afraid of being murdered. Then fury seized her, and she hit Bruno in the face and between the legs, she yelled him, you are a shit of a man, you’ve got nothing down there; come here, pull it out so I can cut it off, you shit.
Bruno let go, retreated. He touched his lip, which was bleeding, he snickered in embarrassment, he mumbled: I’m sorry, I thought there might be at least a little gratitude. Lila shouted at him: You mean I have to pay a penalty, or you’ll fire me, is that it? He laughed again, shook his head: No, if you don’t want to you don’t want to, that’s all, I apologized, what else should I do? But she was beside herself, only now did she begin to feel on her body the traces of his hands, and she knew it would last, it wasn’t something she could wash off with soap. She backed up toward the door, she said to him: You were lucky right now, but whether you fire me or not, I swear I’ll make you curse the moment you touched me. As she was leaving he muttered: What did I do to you, I didn’t do anything, come here, as if these were real problems, let’s make peace.
She went back to her job. At the time she was working in the steamy vat room, as a kind of attendant who among other things was supposed to keep the floor dry, a fruitless task. Edo, the one whose ear she had almost torn off, looked at her with curiosity. All of them, men and women, kept their eyes on her as she returned, enraged, from the drying room. Lila didn’t exchange a glance with anyone. She grabbed a rag, slammed it down on the bricks, and began to wipe the floor, which was a swamp, uttering aloud, in a threatening tone: Let’s see if some other son of a bitch wants to try. Her companions concentrated on their work.
For days she expected to be fired, but she wasn’t. If she happened to run into Bruno, he smiled kindly, she responded with a cold nod. No consequences, then, except disgust at those short hands, and flashes of hatred. But since Lila continued to show the same contemptuous indifference toward the supervisors, they suddenly began to torment her again, by constantly changing her job, forcing her to work until she was worn out, making obscene remarks. A sign that they had been given permission.
She didn’t tell Enzo anything about almost tearing off the ear, about Bruno’s attack, about the everyday harassments and struggles. If he asked her how things were going at the sausage factory, she answered sarcastically: Why don’t you tell me how it is where you work? And since he was silent, Lila teased him a little and then together they turned to the exercises for the correspondence course. They took refuge there for many reasons, the most important being to avoid questions about the future: what were they to each other, why was he taking care of her and Gennaro, why did she accept it, why had they been living together for so long while Enzo waited in vain every night for her to join him, tossing and turning in the bed, going to the kitchen with the excuse of getting a drink of water, glancing at the door with the frosted glass to see if she had turned off the light yet and to look at her shadow. Mute tensions—I knock, I let him enter—his doubts, hers. In the end they preferred to dull their senses by competing with block diagrams as if they were equipment for gymnastics.
“Let’s do the diagram of the door opening,” Lila said.
“Let’s do the diagram of knotting the tie,” Enzo said.
“Let’s do the diagram of tying Gennaro’s shoes,” Lila said.
“Let’s do the diagram of making coffee in the
From the simplest actions to the most complicated, they racked their brains to diagram daily life, even if the Zurich tests didn’t require it. And not because Enzo wanted to but because, as usual, Lila, who had begun diffidently, grew more and more excited each day, and now, in spite of the cold at night, she was frantic to reduce the entire wretched world they lived in to the truth of 0s and 1s. She seemed to aspire to an abstract linearity—the abstraction that bred all abstractions—hoping that it would assure her a restful tidiness.
“Let’s diagram the factory,” she proposed one evening.
“The whole process?” he asked, bewildered.
“Yes.”
He looked at her, he said: “All right, let’s start with your job.”
An irritated scowl crossed her face; she said good night and went to her room.
30.
