“Why? When my head says, it’s better to act in this way, I do it, and I don’t think about it anymore. If you go back to it you only make trouble.”
How wise he had become. That was when I learned that the story of Nino and Lila would have lasted a little longer if Antonio hadn’t cut it off with a beating. But I immediately discarded the hypothesis that they would have loved each other all their lives, and perhaps both he and she would have become utterly different people: to me it seemed not only unlikely but unbearable. Instead I sighed with impatience. Antonio had decided for his own reasons to save Lila and now Lila had sent him to save me. I looked at him, I said with explicit sarcasm something about his role as a protector of women. He should have showed up in Florence, I thought, when I was hanging in the balance, when I didn’t know what to do, and made the decision for me with his gnarled hands, as years before he had decided for Lila. I asked him teasingly:
“What orders do you have now?”
“Before sending me here, Lina forbade me to break the face of that shit. But I did it once and I’d like to do it again.”
“You’re unreliable.”
“Yes and no.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s a complicated situation, Lenù, stay out of it. You just tell me that the son of Sarratore should repent the day he was born and I’ll make him repent.”
I couldn’t contain myself, I burst out laughing at the mannered seriousness with which he expressed himself. It was the tone he had learned in the neighborhood as a boy, the formal tone of the upright male: he who in reality had been timid and fearful. What an effort it must have been, but now it was
He darkened because of my laughter, he looked at the black panes of the window, he said: Don’t laugh. I saw that his forehead was shiny in spite of the cold, he was sweating from the shame of having seemed ridiculous to me. He said: I know I don’t express myself well, I know German better than Italian. I became aware of his odor, the way it had smelled at the time of the ponds. I’m laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who’ve wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I’m laughing out of despair, because I’ve never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don’t know if you can imagine, because at this moment I’m so ill that I think I’m fainting.
In fact I felt weak, and dead inside. So I was suddenly grateful to Lila for having had the sensitivity to send me Antonio, he was the only person whose affection at that moment I didn’t doubt. Besides, his lean body, his big bones, his thick eyebrows, his coarse features had remained familiar to me, they didn’t repel me, I wasn’t afraid of them. At the ponds, I said, it was cold and we didn’t feel it: I’m trembling, can I sit next to you?
He looked at me uncertainly, but I didn’t wait for his assent. I got up, I sat on his knees. He didn’t move, he extended only his arms, for fear of touching me, and let them fall to the sides of the chair. I leaned against him, resting my face between his neck and his shoulder, it seemed to me that for a few seconds I fell asleep.
“Lenù.”
“Yes?”
“Do you not feel well?”
“Hold me, I have to warm up.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure you want me.”
“I want you now, this time only: it’s something you owe me and I you.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I love you and you, instead, have always loved only him.”
“Yes, but I never desired anyone the way I desired you, not even him.”
I talked for a long time, I told him the truth, the truth of that moment and the truth of the faraway time of the ponds. He was the discovery of excitement, he was the pit of the stomach that grew warm, that opened up, that turned liquid, releasing a burning indolence. Franco, Pietro, Nino had stumbled on that expectation but had never managed to satisfy it, because it was an expectation without a definite object, it was the hope of pleasure, the hardest to fulfill. The taste of Antonio’s mouth, the perfume of his desire, his hands, the large sex taut between his thighs constituted a
