Rino got angry. Not only that: right before my eyes, he went through a kind of transformation. He became red in the face, he swelled up around the eyes and cheekbones, he couldn’t contain himself and exploded in a series of curses and expletives against his sister. He complained that if they went on like that they would never finish. He reproached Lila because she first encouraged him and then discouraged him. He shouted that he wouldn’t stay forever in that wretched place to be his father’s servant and watch others get rich. He grabbed the iron foot, pretended to throw it at her, and if he really had he would have killed her.
I left, on the one hand confused by that rage in a youth who was usually kind and on the other proud of how authoritative, how definitive my opinion had been.
In the following days I found that my acne was drying up.
“You’re really doing well, it’s the satisfaction you get from school, it’s love,” Lila said to me, and I felt that she was a little sad.
20.
As the New Year’s Eve celebration approached, Rino was seized by the desire to set off more fireworks than anyone else, especially the Solaras. Lila made fun of him, but sometimes she became harsh with him. She told me that her brother, who at first had been skeptical about the possibility of making money with the shoes, had now begun to count on it too heavily, already he saw himself as the owner of the Cerullo shoe factory and didn’t want to go back to repairing shoes. This worried her, it was a side of Rino she didn’t know. He had always seemed to her only generously impetuous, sometimes aggressive, but not a braggart. Now, though, he posed as what he was not. He felt he was close to wealth. A boss. Someone who could give the neighborhood the first sign of the good fortune the new year would bring by setting off a lot of fireworks, more than the Solara brothers, who had become in his eyes the model of the young man to emulate and indeed to surpass, people whom he envied and considered enemies to be beaten, so that he could assume their role.
Lila never said, as she had with Carmela and the other girls in the courtyard: maybe I planted a fantasy in his head that he doesn’t know how to control. She herself believed in the fantasy, felt it could be realized, and her brother was an important element of that realization. And then she loved him, he was six years older, she didn’t want to reduce him to a child who can’t handle his dreams. But she often said that Rino lacked concreteness, he didn’t know how to confront difficulties with his feet on the ground, he tended to get carried away. Like that competition with the Solaras, for example.
“Maybe he’s jealous of Marcello,” I said once.
“What?”
She smiled, pretending not to understand, but she had told me herself. Marcello Solara passed by and hung around in front of the shoemaker’s shop every day, both on foot and in the 1100, and Rino must have been aware of it, since he had said many times to his sister, “Don’t you dare get too familiar with that shit.” Maybe, who knows, since he wasn’t able to beat up the Solaras for chasing after his sister, he wished to demonstrate his strength by means of fireworks.
“If that’s true, you’ll agree that I’m right?”
“Right about what?”
“That he’s acting like a big shot: where’s he going to get the money for the fireworks?”
It was true. The last night of the year was a night of battle, in the neighborhood and throughout Naples. Dazzling lights, explosions. The dense smoke from the gunpowder made everything hazy, it entered the houses, burned your eyes, made you cough. But the pop of the poppers, the hiss of the rockets, the cannonades of the missiles had a cost and as usual those who set off the most were those with the most money. We Grecos had no money, at my house the contribution to the end-of-the-year fireworks was small. My father bought a box of sparklers, one of wheels, and one of slender rockets. At midnight he put in my hand, since I was the oldest, the stem of a sparkler or of a Catherine wheel, and lighted it, and I stood motionless, excited and terrified, staring at the whirling sparks, the brief swirls of fire a short distance from my fingers. He then stuck the shafts of the rockets in glass bottles on the marble windowsill, burned the fuses with the tip of his cigarette, and, excitedly, launched the luminous whistles into the sky. Then he threw the bottles, too, into the street.
