He pulled out of the box the new shoes that his children had made in secret. Lila was openmouthed with surprise. She didn’t know anything about it. Rino had decided on his own to show his father their work, as if it were a gift from the Befana.
When she saw on her brother’s face a small smile that was amused and at the same time tormented, when she caught his worried gaze on his father’s face, it seemed to her she had the confirmation of what had frightened her on the terrace, amid the smoke and fireworks: Rino had lost his usual outline, she now had a brother without boundaries, from whom something irreparable might emerge. In that smile, in that gaze she saw something unbearably wretched, the more unbearable the more she loved her brother, and felt the need to stay beside him to help him and be helped.
“How beautiful they are,” said Nunzia, who was ignorant of the whole business.
Fernando, without saying a word, and now looking like an angry Randolph Scott, sat down and put on first the right shoe, then the left.
“The Befana,” he said, “made them precisely for my feet.”
He got up, tried them, walked back and forth in the kitchen as his family watched.
“Very comfortable,” he commented.
“They’re gentleman’s shoes,” his wife said, giving her son admiring looks.
Fernando sat down again. He took them off, he examined them above, below, inside and outside.
“Whoever made these shoes is a master,” he said, but his face didn’t brighten at all. “Brava, Befana.”
In every word you heard how much he suffered and how that suffering was charging him with a desire to smash everything. But Rino didn’t seem to realize it. At every sarcastic word of his father’s he became prouder, he smiled, blushing, formulated half-phrases: I did like this, Papa, I added this, I thought that. Lila wanted to get out of the kitchen, out of the way of her father’s imminent rage, but she couldn’t make up her mind, she didn’t want to leave her brother alone.
“They’re light but also strong,” Fernando continued, “there’s no cutting corners. And I’ve never seen anything like them on anyone’s feet, with this wide tip they’re very original.”
He sat down, he put them on again, he laced them. He said to his son: “Turn around Rinù, I have to thank the Befana.”
Rino thought it was a joke that would conclusively end the whole long controversy and he appeared happy and embarrassed. But as soon as he started to turn his back his father kicked him violently in the rear, called him animal, idiot, and threw at him whatever came to hand, finally even the shoes.
Lila got involved only when she saw that her brother, at first intent only on protecting himself from punching and kicking, began shouting, too, overturning chairs, breaking plates, crying, swearing that he would kill himself rather than continue to work for his father for nothing, terrorizing his mother, the other children, and the neighbors. But in vain. Father and son first had to explode until they wore themselves out. Then they went back to working together, mute, shut up in the shop with their desperations.
There was no mention of the shoes for a while. Lila decided that her role was to help her mother, do the marketing, cook, wash the clothes and hang them in the sun, and she never went to the shoemaker’s shop. Rino, saddened, sulky, felt the thing as an incomprehensible injustice and began to insist that he find socks and underpants and shirts in order in his drawer, that his sister serve him and show him respect when he came home from work. If something wasn’t to his liking he protested, he said unpleasant things like you can’t even iron a shirt, you shit. She shrugged, she didn’t resist, she continued to carry out her duties with attention and care.
He himself, naturally, wasn’t happy with the way he was behaving, he was tormented, he tried to calm down, he made not a few efforts to return to being what he had been. On good days, Sunday mornings for example, he wandered around joking, taking on a gentle tone of voice. “Are you mad at me because I took all the credit for the shoes? I did it,” he said, lying, “to keep Papa from getting angry at you.” And then he asked her, “Help me, what should we do now? We can’t stop here, I have to get out of this situation.” Lila was silent: she cooked, she ironed, at times she kissed him on the cheek to let him know that she wasn’t mad anymore. But in the meantime he would get angry again, he always ended up smashing something. He shouted that she had betrayed him, and would betray him yet again, when, sooner or later, she would marry some imbecile and go away, leaving him to live in this wretchedness forever.
Sometimes, when no one was home, Lila went into the little room where she had hidden the shoes and touched them, looked at them, marveled to herself that for good or ill there they were and had come into being as the result of a design on a sheet of graph paper. How much wasted work.
