The laugh wasn’t of mockery, of contentment, or of satisfaction. The laugh served to prevent me from insisting. One afternoon we went shopping on Via dei Mille and since that area had for years been Alfonso’s domain, he offered to go with us, he had a friend with a shop that would suit us. People knew by now of his homosexuality. He continued formally to live with Marisa, but Carmen had confirmed to me that his children were Michele’s, and she had whispered: Marisa is now Stefano’s lover—yes, Stefano, Alfonso’s brother, Lila’s ex-husband, that was the new gossip. But—she added with explicit understanding—Alfonso doesn’t give a damn, he and his wife lead separate lives and they get on. So I wasn’t surprised that the shopkeeper friend—as Alfonso himself introduced him, smiling—was a homosexual. What surprised me instead was the game that Lila led him into.
We were trying on maternity clothes. We came out of the dressing rooms, looked at ourselves in the mirror, and Alfonso and his friend admired, recommended, recommended against, in a generally pleasant atmosphere. Then for no reason Lila began to get restless, scowling. She didn’t like anything, she touched her pointy stomach, she was tired, she made remarks to Alfonso like: What are you saying, don’t give me bad advice, would you wear a color like this?
I perceived in what was happening around me the usual oscillation between the visible and the hidden. At a certain point Lila grabbed a beautiful dark dress and, as if the mirror in the shop were broken, said to her former brother-in-law: show me how it looks on
I continued to try on clothes. Lila looked at me absent-mindedly, the owner of the shop complimented every item I put on, and I waited in bewilderment for Alfonso to reappear. When he did I was speechless. My old desk mate, with his hair down, in the elegant dress, was a copy of Lila. His tendency to resemble her, which I had long noted, came abruptly into focus, and maybe at that moment he was even handsomer, more beautiful than she, a male-female of the type I had talked about in my book, ready, male and female, to set off on the road leading to the black Madonna of Montevergine.
He asked Lila with some anxiety: Do you like it, this way? And the shop owner applauded enthusiastically, he said conspiratorially: I know exactly who’d like you, you’re beautiful. Allusions. Facts that I didn’t know and they did. Lila had a malicious smile, she muttered: I want to give it to you. Nothing more. Alfonso accepted it happily but nothing else was said, as if Lila had commanded him and his friend, silently, that it was enough, I had seen and heard enough.
47.
That deliberate oscillation of hers between the obvious and the opaque struck me in a particularly painful way once—the only time—when things went badly at one of our appointments with the gynecologist. It was November and yet the city gave off heat as if summer had never ended. Lila felt sick on the way, and we sat in a café for a few minutes, then went, slightly alarmed, to the doctor. Lila explained to her in self-mocking tones that the now large thing she had inside was kicking her, pushing her, stifling her, disturbing her, weakening her. The gynecologist listened, amused, calmed her, said: You’ll have a son like you, very lively, very imaginative. All good, then, very good. But before leaving I insisted with the doctor:
“You’re sure everything’s all right?”
“Very sure.”
“What’s the matter with me?” Lila protested.
“Nothing that has to do with your pregnancy.”
“What does it have to do with?”
“With your head.”
“What do you know about my head?”
“Your friend Nino was full of praise for it.”
Nino? Friend? Silence.
When we left I had to struggle to persuade Lila not to change doctors. Before going off she said, in her fiercest tones: your lover is certainly not my friend, but in my view he’s not your friend, either.
Here I was, then, driven forcefully into the heart of my problems: the unreliability of Nino. In the past Lila had showed me that she knew things about him I didn’t know. Was she now suggesting that there were still other facts known to her and not to me? It was pointless to ask her to explain; she left, cutting short any conversation.
48.
Afterward I quarreled with Nino for his lack of tact, for the confidences that, although he denied it indignantly, he must surely have made to the wife of his colleague, for everything I kept inside me and that this time, too, in the end I stifled.
