But among those who saw her dragged into the car were some who reported it to Antonio, her older brother, who worked as a mechanic in Gorresio’s shop. Antonio was a hard worker, disciplined, very shy, obviously wounded by both the untimely death of his father and the unbalanced behavior of his mother. Without saying a single word to friends and relatives he waited in front of the Bar Solara for Marcello and Michele, and when the brothers showed up he confronted them, punching and kicking without even a word of preamble. For a few minutes he managed pretty well, but then the father Solara and one of the barmen came out. They beat Antonio bloody and none of the passersby, none of the customers, intervened to help him.
We girls were divided on this episode. Gigliola Spagnuolo and Carmela Peluso took the part of the Solaras, but only because they were handsome and had an 1100. I wavered. In the presence of my two friends I favored the Solaras and we competed for who loved them most, since in fact they were very handsome and it was impossible not to imagine the impression we would make sitting next to one of them in the car. But I also felt that they had behaved badly with Ada, and that Antonio, even though he wasn’t very good-looking, even though he wasn’t muscular like the brothers, who went to the gym every day to lift weights, had been courageous in confronting them. So in the presence of Lila, who expressed without half measures that same position, I, too, expressed some reservations.
Once the discussion became so heated that Lila, maybe because she wasn’t developed as we were and didn’t know the pleasure-fear of having the Solaras’ gaze on her, became paler than usual and said that, if what happened to Ada had happened to her, to avoid trouble for her father and her brother Rino she would take care of the two of them herself.
“Because Marcello and Michele don’t even look at you,” said Gigliola Spagnuolo, and we thought that Lila would get angry.
Instead she said seriously, “It’s better that way.”
She was as slender as ever, but tense in every fiber. I looked at her hands and marveled: in a short time they had become like Rino’s, like her father’s, with the skin at the tips yellowish and thick. Even if no one forced her—that wasn’t her job, in the shop—she had started to do small tasks, she prepared the thread, took out stitches, glued, even stitched, and now she handled Fernando’s tools almost like her brother. That was why that year she never asked me anything about Latin. Eventually, she told me the plan she had in mind, a thing that had nothing to do with books: she was trying to persuade her father to make new shoes. But Fernando didn’t want to hear about it. “Making shoes by hand,” he told her, “is an art without a future: today there are cars and cars cost money and the money is either in the bank or with the loan sharks, not in the pockets of the Cerullo family.” Then she insisted, she filled him with sincere praise: “No one knows how to make shoes the way you do, Papa.” Even if that was true, he responded, everything was made in factories now, and since he had worked in the factories he knew very well what lousy stuff came out of them; but there was little to do about it, when people needed new shoes they no longer went to the neighborhood shoemaker, they went to the stores in the center of town, on the Rettifilo, so even if you wanted to make the handcrafted product properly, you wouldn’t sell it, you’d be throwing away money and labor, you’d ruin yourself.
Lila wouldn’t be convinced and as usual she had drawn Rino to her side. Her brother had first agreed with his father, irritated by the fact that she interfered in things to do with work, where it wasn’t a matter of books and he was the expert. Then gradually he had been captivated and now he quarreled with Fernando nearly every day, repeating what she had put into his head.
“Let’s at least try it.”
“No.”
“Have you seen the car the Solaras have, have you seen how well the Carraccis’ grocery is doing?”
“I’ve seen that the dry goods store that wanted to be a dressmaker’s gave it up and I’ve seen that Gorresio, because of his son’s stupidity, has bitten off more than he can chew with his motorcycles.”
“But the Solaras keep expanding.”
“Mind your own business and forget the Solaras.”
“Near the train tracks a new neighborhood is being developed.”
“Who gives a damn.”
“Papa, people are earning and they want to spend.”
“People spend on food because you have to eat every day. As for shoes, first of all you don’t eat them, and, second, when they break you fix them and they can last twenty years. Our work, right now, is to repair shoes and that’s it.”
