“It’s there and often it’s an even greater suffering.”
“That’s not her case. You want to know what I think?”
“All right.”
“She lost Tina on purpose. And now she also wants to lose Gennaro. Not to mention Enzo, don’t you see how she treats him? Aunt Lina is just like Elsa, she doesn’t love anyone.”
Dede was like that, she wanted to be someone who is more perceptive than everyone else, and loved to formulate judgments without appeal. I forbade her to repeat those terrible words in Lila’s presence and tried to explain to her that not all human beings react in the same way, Lila and Elsa had emotional strategies different from hers.
“Your sister, for example,” I said, “doesn’t confront emotional issues the way you do; she finds feelings that are too intense ridiculous, and she always stands back a step.”
“By standing back a step she’s lost any sensitivity.”
“Why are you so annoyed with Elsa?”
“Because she’s just like Aunt Lina.”
A vicious circle: Lila was wrong because she was like Elsa, Elsa was wrong because she was like Lila. In reality at the center of this negative judgment was Gennaro. According to Dede, precisely in this crucial situation Elsa and Lila were making the same mistaken assessment and showed the same emotional disorder. Just as for Lila, for Elsa, too, Gennaro was worse than a beast. Her sister—Dede reported to me—often told her, to offend her, that Lila and Enzo were right to beat him as soon as he tried to stick his nose out of the house. Only someone as stupid as you—she taunted her—who doesn’t know anything about men, could be dazzled by a mass of unwashed flesh without a crumb of intelligence. And Dede replied: Only a bitch like you could describe a human being that way.
Since they both read a lot, they quarreled in the language of books, so that, if they didn’t slip suddenly into the most brutal dialect to insult each other, I would have listened to their squabbling almost with admiration. The positive side of the conflict was that Dede’s rancor toward me diminished, but the negative side burdened me greatly: her sister and Lila became the object of all her malice. Dede was constantly reporting to me Elsa’s disgraceful actions: she was hated by her schoolmates because she considered herself the best at everything and was always humiliating them; she boasted of having had relations with adult men; she skipped school and forged my signature on the absence slips. Of Lila she said: She’s a fascist, how can you be her friend? And she took Gennaro’s side with no equivocation. In her view drugs were a rebellion of sensitive people against the forces of repression. She swore that sooner or later she would find a way of getting Rino out—she always called him that, and only that, habituating us to call him that, too—from the prison in which his mother kept him.
