“You see I’m right? She is an unusual person. Once I told her a secret. I was afraid and I needed to tell someone the reason for my fear. I told her and she listened attentively, and I calmed down. It was important for me to talk to her, it seemed to me that she listened not with her ears but with an organ that she alone had and that made the words acceptable. At the end I didn’t ask her, as one usually does: swear, please, not to betray me. But it’s clear that if she hasn’t told you she hasn’t told anyone, not even out of spite, not even in the period that was hardest for her, when my brother hated her and beat her.”
I didn’t interrupt him. I felt only that I was sorry because he had confided something to Lila and not to me, although I had been his friend forever. He must have realized that and he decided to make up for it. He hugged me tight, and whispered in my ear:
“Lenù, I’m a queer, I don’t like girls.”
When I was about to leave, he said softly, embarrassed: I’m sure you already knew. This increased my unhappiness; in fact it had never occurred to me.
57.
The long day passed in that way, without rain but dark. And then began a reversal that rapidly changed a phase of apparent growth in the relationship between Lila and me into a desire to cut it off and return to taking care of my own life. Or maybe it had begun before that, in tiny details that I scarcely noticed as they struck me, and now instead were starting to add up. The trip had been useful, and yet I came home unhappy. What sort of friendship was mine and Lila’s, if she had been silent about Alfonso for years, though she knew I had a close relationship with him? Was it possible that she hadn’t realized Michele’s absolute dependence on her, or for her own reasons had she decided not to say anything? On the other hand, I—how many things had I kept hidden from her?
For the rest of the day I inhabited a chaos of places, times, various people: the haunted Signora Manuela, the vacuous Rino, Gigliola in elementary school, Gigliola in middle school, Gigliola seduced by the potent good looks of the Solara boys, Gigliola dazzled by the Fiat 1100, and Michele who attracted women like Nino but, unlike him, was capable of an absolute passion, and Lila, Lila who had aroused that passion, a rapture that was fed not only by a craving for possession, by thuggish bragging, by revenge, by low-level desire, as she might say, but was an obsessive form of appreciation of a woman, not devotion, not subservience, but rather a sought-after form of male love, a complex feeling that was capable—with determination, with a kind of ferocity—of making a woman the chosen among women. I felt close to Gigliola, I understood her humiliation.
That night I went to see Lila and Enzo. I didn’t say anything about that exploration I had made for love of her and also to protect the man she lived with. I took advantage instead of a moment when Lila was in the kitchen feeding the child to tell Enzo that she wanted to go back to the neighborhood. I decided not to hide my opinion. I said it didn’t seem like a good idea to me, but that anything that could help stabilize her—she was healthy, she had only to regain some equilibrium—or that she considered such, should be encouraged. All the more since time had passed and, as far as I knew, in the neighborhood they wouldn’t be worse off than in San Giovanni a Teduccio. Enzo shrugged.
“I have nothing against it. I’ll have to get up earlier in the morning, return a little later in the evening.”
“I saw that Don Carlo’s old apartment is for rent. The children have gone to Caserta and the widow wants to join them.”
“What’s the rent?”
I told him: in the neighborhood the rents were lower than in San Giovanni a Teduccio.
“All right,” Enzo agreed.
“You realize you’ll have some problems anyway.”
“There are problems here, too.”
“The irritations will increase, and also the claims.”
“We’ll see.”
“You’ll stay with her?”
“As long as she wants, yes.”
We joined Lila in the kitchen. She had just had a fight with Gennaro. Now that the child spent more time with his mother and less with the neighbor he was disoriented. He had less freedom, he was forced to give up a set of habits, and he rebelled by insisting, at the age of five, on being fed with a spoon. Lila had started yelling, he had thrown the plate, which shattered on the floor. When we went into the kitchen she had just slapped him. She said to me aggressively:
“Was it you who pretended the spoon was an airplane?”
“Just once.”
“You shouldn’t.”
I said: “It won’t happen again.”
“No, never again, because you’re going to be a writer and I have to waste my time like this.”
