I told Lila about the streets, their names, the noise, the extraordinary light. But immediately I felt uncomfortable. If she had been telling the story of that day, I would have joined in with an indispensable counter-melody and, even if I hadn’t been present, I would have felt alive and active, I would have asked questions, raised issues, I would have tried to show her that we had to take that same journey together, necessarily, because I would be enriched by it, I would have been a much better companion than her father. She instead listened to me without curiosity, and at first I thought it was malicious, to diminish the force of my enthusiasm. But I had to persuade myself it wasn’t so, she simply had her own train of thought that was fed on concrete things, a book, a fountain. With her ears certainly she listened to me, but with her eyes, with her mind, she was solidly anchored to the street, to the few plants in the gardens, to Gigliola, who was walking with Alfonso and Carmela, to Pasquale, who waved at her from the scaffolding of the building site, to Melina, who spoke out loud of Donato Sarratore while Ada tried to drag her into the house, to Stefano, the son of Don Achille, who had just bought a Giardinetta, and had his mother beside him and in the backseat his sister Pinuccia, to Marcello and Michele Solara, who passed in their 1100, with Michele pretending not to see us while Marcello gave us a friendly glance, and, above all, to the secret work, kept hidden from her father, that she applied herself to, advancing the project of the shoes. My story, for her, was at that moment only a collection of useless signals from useless spaces. She would be concerned with those spaces only if she had the opportunity to go there. And in fact, after all my talk, she said only:
“I have to tell Rino that Sunday we should accept Pasquale Peluso’s invitation.”
There I was, telling her about the center of Naples, and she placed at the center Gigliola’s house, in one of the apartment buildings of the neighborhood, where Pasquale wanted to take her dancing. I was sorry. To Peluso’s invitations we had always said yes and yet we had never gone, I to avoid arguments with my parents, she because Rino was against it. We often saw him, on holidays, all cleaned up, waiting for his friends, old and young. He was a generous soul, he didn’t make distinctions of age, he brought along anyone. He would wait in front of the gas station and, one or two at a time, Enzo and Gigliola, and Carmela who now called herself Carmen, and sometimes Rino himself if he had nothing else to do, and Antonio, who had the weight of his mother, Melina, and, if Melina was calm, also his sister Ada, whom the Solaras had dragged into their car and driven who knows where for an hour. When the day was fine they went to the sea, returning red-faced from the sun. Or, more often, they all met at Gigliola’s, whose parents were more tolerant than ours, and there those who knew how to dance danced and those who didn’t learned.
Lila began to go to these little parties, and to take me; she had developed, I don’t know how, an interest in dancing. Both Pasquale and Rino turned out to be surprisingly good dancers, and we learned from them the tango, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka. Rino, it should be said, as a teacher got annoyed immediately, especially with his sister, while Pasquale was very patient. At first he would have us dance standing on his feet, so that we learned the steps, then, when we became more skilled, we went whirling through the house.
I discovered that I liked to dance, I would have danced forever. Lila instead wore the expression of someone who wants to understand how it’s done, and whose pleasure seems to consist entirely in learning, since often she stayed seated, watching us, studying us, and applauding the couples who were most in synch. Once, at her house, she showed me a book that she had taken from the library: it was all about the dances, and every movement was explained with black-and-white drawings of a man and woman dancing. She was very cheerful in that period, with an exuberance surprising in her. Abruptly she grabbed me around the waist and, playing the man, made me dance the tango as she sang the music. Rino looked in and saw us, and burst into laughter. He wanted to dance, too, first with me, then with his sister, though without music. While we danced he told me that Lila had such a mania for perfection that she was obliged to practice continuously, even if they didn’t have a gramophone. But as soon as he said the word—gramophone, gramophone, gramophone—Lila shouted at me from a corner of the room, narrowing her eyes.
“You know what kind of word it is?”
“No.”
“Greek.”
