But Lila had one of her intense looks and I saw that she was focused on the book I had in my hand. “If it happens we’ll know about it,” she muttered. “For now those poems have done only damage.”
“Why?”
“Sarratore didn’t have the courage to go in person to Melina and in his place he sent her the book.”
“Isn’t it a fine thing?”
“Who knows. Now Melina expects him, and if Sarratore doesn’t come she’ll suffer more than she’s suffered till now.”
What wonderful conversations. I looked at her white, smooth skin, not a blemish. I looked at her lips, the delicate shape of her ears. Yes, I thought, maybe she’s changing, and not only physically but in the way she expresses herself. It seemed to me—articulated in words of today—that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily. This—I thought contentedly—distinguishes me from Carmela and all the others: I get excited with her, here, at the very moment when she’s speaking to me. What beautiful strong hands she had, what graceful gestures came to her, what looks.
But while Lila talked about love, while I talked about it, the pleasure was spoiled by an ugly thought. I suddenly realized that I had been mistaken: Pasquale the construction worker, the Communist, the son of the murderer, had wanted to go there with me not for me but for her, to have the chance to see her.
12.
The thought took my breath away for a moment. When the two young men returned, interrupting our conversation, Pasquale confessed, laughing, that he had left the work site without saying anything to the boss, so he had to go back right away. I noticed that he looked at Lila again, for a long time, intensely, almost against his will, perhaps to signal to her: I’m running the risk of losing my job just for you. Addressing Rino, he said:
“Sunday we’re all going dancing at Gigliola’s, even Lenuccia’s coming, will you two come?”
“Sunday is a long way off, we’ll think about it later,” Rino answered.
Pasquale gave a last look at Lila, who paid no attention to him, then he slipped away without asking if I wanted to go with him.
I felt an irritation that made me nervous. I began touching the most inflamed areas of my cheeks with my fingers, then I realized it and forced myself not to. While Rino took out from under the bench the things he had been working on before we arrived, and was studying them in bewilderment, I started talking again to Lila about books, about love affairs. We inflated excessively Sarratore, Melina’s love madness, the role of the book. What would happen? What reactions would be unleashed not by the reading of the poems but by the object itself, the fact that its cover, the title, the name and surname had again stirred that woman’s heart? We talked so fervently that Rino suddenly lost patience and shouted at us: “Will you stop it? Lila, let’s get to work, otherwise Papa will return and we won’t be able to do anything.”
We stopped. I glanced at what they were doing: a wooden form besieged by a tangle of soles, strips of skin, pieces of thick leather, amid knives and awls and various other tools. Lila told me that she and Rino were trying to make a man’s traveling shoe, and her brother, right afterward, made me swear on my sister Elisa that I would never say a word about it to anyone. They were working in secret from Fernando, Rino had got the skins and the leather from a friend who worked at a tannery at Ponte di Casanova. They would devote five minutes here, ten tomorrow, to making the shoe, because there was no way to persuade their father to help them; in fact when they had brought up the subject Fernando had sent Lila home, shouting that he didn’t want to see her in the shop anymore, and meanwhile he had threatened to kill Rino, who at the age of nineteen was lacking in respect and had got it in his head to be better than his father.
