And so it was. From the balcony the fire intensified abruptly, the sky and the street began to explode again. At every burst, especially if the firecracker made a sound of destruction, enthusiastic obscenities came from the balcony. But, unexpectedly, here were Stefano, Pasquale, Antonio, Rino ready to respond with more bursts and equivalent obscenities. At a rocket from the Solaras they launched a rocket, a string of firecrackers was answered by a string of firecrackers, and in the sky miraculous fountains erupted, and the street below flared, trembled. At one point Rino climbed up onto the parapet shouting insults and throwing powerful firecrackers while his mother shrieked with terror, yelling, “Get down or you’ll fall.”
At that point panic overwhelmed Melina, who began to wail. Ada was furious, it was up to her to get her home, but Alfonso indicated that he would take care of her, and he disappeared down the stairs with her. My mother immediately followed, limping, and the other women began to drag the children away. The Solaras’ explosions were becoming more and more violent, one of their rockets instead of heading into the sky burst against the parapet of our terrace with a loud red flash and suffocating smoke.
“They did it on purpose,” Rino yelled at Stefano, beside himself.
Stefano, a dark profile in the cold, motioned him to calm down. He hurried to a corner where he himself had placed a box that we girls had received orders not to touch, and he dipped into it, inviting the others to help themselves.
“Enzo,” he cried, with not even a trace now of the polite shopkeeper’s tones, “Pascà, Rino, Antò, here, come on, here, we’ll show them what we’ve got.”
They all ran laughing. They repeated: yeah, we’ll let them have it, fuck those shits, fuck, take this, and they made obscene gestures in the direction of the Solaras’ balcony. Shivering with cold, we looked at their frenetic black forms. We were alone, with no role. Even my father had gone downstairs, with the shoemaker. Lila, I don’t know, she was silent, absorbed by the spectacle as if by a puzzle.
The thing was happening to her that I mentioned and that she later called dissolving margins. It was—she told me—as if, on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light, eroding the circumference of the moon’s circle, and disfiguring the shining disk, reducing it to its true nature of rough insensate material. Lila imagined, she saw, she felt—as if it were true—her brother break. Rino, before her eyes, lost the features he had had as long as she could remember, the features of the generous, candid boy, the pleasing features of the reliable young man, the beloved outline of one who, as far back as she had memory, had amused, helped, protected her. There, amid the violent explosions, in the cold, in the smoke that burned the nostrils and the strong odor of sulfur, something violated the organic structure of her brother, exercising over him a pressure so strong that it broke down his outlines, and the matter expanded like a magma, showing her what he was truly made of. Every second of that night of celebration horrified her, she had the impression that, as Rino moved, as he expanded around himself, every margin collapsed and her own margins, too, became softer and more yielding. She struggled to maintain control, and succeeded: on the outside her anguish hardly showed. It’s true that in the tumult of explosions and colors I didn’t pay much attention to her. I was struck, I think, by her expression, which seemed increasingly fearful. I also realized that she was staring at the shadow of her brother—the most active, the most arrogant, shouting the loudest, bloodiest insults in the direction of the Solaras’ terrace—with repulsion. It seemed that she, she who in general feared nothing, was afraid. But they were impressions I recalled only later. At the moment I didn’t notice, I felt closer to Carmela, to Ada, than to her. She seemed as usual to have no need of male attention. We, instead, out in the cold, in the midst of that chaos, without that attention couldn’t give ourselves meaning. We would have preferred that Stefano or Enzo or Rino stop the war, put an arm around our shoulders, press us to them, side to side, and speak soft words. Instead, we were holding on to each other to get warm, while they rushed to grab cylinders with fat fuses, astonished by Stefano’s infinite reserves, admiring of his generosity, disturbed by how much money could be transformed into fiery trails, sparks, explosions, smoke for the pure satisfaction of winning.
