But there were two episodes in particular, in that period, that were significant for Lila. Once Pasquale insisted that she come to hear an important comrade, a woman. Lila accepted the invitation; she was curious. But she heard almost none of the speech—a speech more or less about the party and the working class—because the important comrade arrived late and when the meeting finally began Gennaro was fidgety, and she had to amuse him, taking him out to the street to play, bringing him back inside, taking him out again. Yet the little she heard was enough for her to understand how much dignity the woman had, and how distinct she was in every way from the working- and lower-middle-class audience. So when she noticed that Pasquale, Enzo, and some others weren’t satisfied with what the speaker was saying, she thought that they were unfair, that they should be grateful to that educated woman who had come to waste her time with them. And when Pasquale made a speech so argumentative that the comrade delegate lost her temper and, her voice cracking, exclaimed, in irritation, That’s enough, I’m going to get up and leave, that reaction pleased her, she took her side. But evidently her feelings were, as usual, muddled. When Enzo shouted, in support of Pasquale: Comrade,
Much more lively was a meeting of the committee that Pasquale, with his thirst for engagement, had joined. Lila went not only because it meant a lot to him but because it seemed to her that the restlessness that drove him to try and to understand was good. The committee met in Naples, in an old house on Via dei Tribunali. They arrived one night in Pasquale’s car, and climbed up crumbling, monumental stairs. The place was large, and there weren’t many people present. Lila noticed how easy it was to distinguish the faces of the students from those of the workers, the fluency of the leaders from the stuttering of the followers. And she quickly became irritated. The students made speeches that seemed to her hypocritical; they had a modest manner that clashed with their pedantic phrases. The refrain, besides, was always the same: We’re here to learn from you, meaning from the workers, but in reality they were showing off ideas that were almost too obvious about capital, about exploitation, about the betrayal of social democracy, about the modalities of the class struggle. Furthermore—she discovered—the few girls, who were mostly silent, flirted eagerly with Enzo and Pasquale. Especially Pasquale, who was the more sociable, and was treated with great friendliness. He was a worker who—although he carried a Communist Party card, and was the head of a section—had chosen to bring his experience of the proletariat into a revolutionary meeting. When he and Enzo spoke, the students, who among themselves did nothing but quarrel, always registered approval. Enzo as usual said only a few, loaded words. Pasquale, on the other hand, recounted, with an inexhaustible patter, half in Italian, half in dialect, the progress that the political work was making at the construction sites around Naples, hurling small polemical darts at the students, who hadn’t been very active. At the conclusion, without warning, he dragged her, Lila, into it. He introduced her by her name and last name, he called her a worker comrade who had a job in a small food factory, and he heaped praises on her.
Lila furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes: she didn’t like them all looking at her like a rare animal. And when, after Pasquale, a girl spoke—the first of the girls to speak—she became even more annoyed, first of all because the girl expressed herself like a book, second because she kept referring to her, calling her Comrade Cerullo, and, third, because Lila already knew her: it was Nadia, the daughter of Professor Galiani, Nino’s little girlfriend, who had written him love letters on Ischia.
For a moment she was afraid that Nadia had in turn recognized her, but although the girl addressed her as she spoke, she gave no sign of remembering her. Besides, why should she? Who could say how many rich people’s parties she had gone to and what crowd of shadows inhabited her memory? For Lila, on the other hand, there had been that one long-ago occasion, and she remained struck by it. She recalled the apartment on Corso Vittorio Emanuele precisely, along with Nino and all those young people from good families, the books, the paintings, and her own agonizing experience of it, the unease it had inspired. She couldn’t bear it, she got up while Nadia was still speaking and went out with Gennaro, carrying inside her an evil energy that, finding no precise outlet, writhed in her stomach.
