“Well, you abandoned him, and that fellow is carrying all of them on his shoulders: your father, your mother, a child, Pinuccia, who’s pregnant again. What could he do? He turned to Marcello for help and Marcello helped him. Doesn’t that please you?”
Lila responded coldly:
“No, it doesn’t please me, nothing you do pleases me.”
Michele appeared dissatisfied, and he remembered Bruno:
“You see, as I was telling you, her problem is that she has a bad character.”
Bruno gave an embarrassed smile that was meant to be conspiratorial.
“It’s true.”
“Did she hurt you, too?”
“A little.”
“You know that she was still a child when she held a shoemaker’s knife to my brother’s throat, and he was twice her size? And not as a joke, it was clear that she was ready to use it.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. That girl has courage, she’s determined.”
Lila clenched her fists tightly. She detested the weakness she felt in her body. The room was undulating, the bodies of the dead objects and the living people were expanding. She looked at Michele, who was extinguishing the cigarette in the ashtray. He was putting too much energy into it, as if he, too, in spite of his placid tone, were giving vent to an uneasiness. Lila stared at his fingers, which went on squashing the butt, the nails were white. Once, she thought, he asked me to become his lover. But that’s not what he really wants, there’s something else, something that doesn’t have to do with sex and that not even he can explain. He’s obsessed, it’s like a superstition. Maybe he thinks that I have a power and that that power is indispensable to him. He wants it but he can’t get it, and it makes him suffer, it’s a thing he can’t take from me by force. Yes, maybe that’s it. Otherwise he would have crushed me by now. But why me? What has he recognized in me that’s useful to him? I mustn’t stay here, under his eyes, I mustn’t listen to him, what he sees and what he wants scares me. Lila said to Soccavo:
“I’ve got something to leave for you and then I’ll go.”
She got up, ready to give him the list of demands, a gesture that seemed to her increasingly pointless and yet necessary. She wished to place the piece of paper on the table, next to the ashtray, and leave that room. But Michele’s voice stopped her. Now it was definitely affectionate, almost caressing, as if he had intuited that she was trying to get away from him and wanted to do everything possible to charm her and keep her. He continued speaking to Soccavo:
