“He’s come to marry you,” I said to provoke her, “he’s going to ask your father.”
“He is deceiving himself.”
“Why,” Nunzia asked anxiously, “if he likes you do you say no?”
“Ma, I already told him no.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s true,” I said in confirmation.
“Your father must never know, otherwise he’ll kill you.”
At dinner only Marcello spoke. It was clear that he had invited himself, and Rino, who didn’t know how to say no to him, sat at the table nearly silent, or laughed for no reason. Solara addressed himself mainly to Fernando, but never neglected to pour water or wine for Nunzia, for Lila, for me. He said to him how much he was respected in the neighborhood because he was such a good cobbler. He said that his father had always spoken well of his skill. He said that Rino had an unlimited admiration for his abilities as a shoemaker.
Fernando, partly because of the wine, was moved. He muttered something in praise of Silvio Solara, and even went so far as to say that Rino was a good worker and was becoming a good shoemaker. Then Marcello started to praise the need for progress. He said that his grandfather had started with a cellar, then his father had enlarged it, and today the bar-pastry shop Solara was what it was, everybody knew it, people came from all over Naples to have coffee, eat a pastry.
“What an exaggeration,” Lila exclaimed, and her father gave her a silencing look.
But Marcello smiled at her humbly and admitted, “Yes, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but just to say that money has to circulate. You begin with a cellar and from generation to generation you can go far.”
At this point, with Rino showing evident signs of uneasiness, he began to praise the idea of making new shoes. And from that moment he began to look at Lila as if in praising the energy of the generations he were praising her in particular. He said: if someone feels capable, if he’s clever, if he can invent good things, which are pleasing, why not try? He spoke in a nice, charming dialect and as he spoke he never stopped staring at my friend. I felt, I saw that he was in love as in the songs, that he would have liked to kiss her, that he wanted to breathe her breath, that she would be able to make of him all she wanted, that in his eyes she embodied all possible feminine qualities.
“I know,” Marcello concluded, “that your children made a very nice pair of shoes, size 43, just my size.”
A long silence fell. Rino stared at his plate and didn’t dare look up at his father. Only the sound of the goldfinch at the window could be heard. Fernando said slowly, “Yes, they’re size 43.”
“I would very much like to see them, if you don’t mind?”
Fernando stammered, “I don’t know where they are. Nunzia, do you know?”
“She has them,” Rino said, indicating his sister.
“I did have them, yes, I had put them in the storeroom. But then Mamma told me to clean it out the other day and I threw them away. Since no one liked them.”
Rino said angrily, “You’re a liar, go and get the shoes right now.”
Fernando said nervously, “Go get the shoes, go on.”
Lila burst out, addressing her father, “How is it that now you want them? I threw them away because you said you didn’t like them.”
Fernando pounded the table with his open hand, the wine trembled in the glasses.
“Get up and go get the shoes, right now.”
Lila pushed away her chair, stood up.
“I threw them away,” she repeated weakly and left the room.
She didn’t come back.
The time passed in silence. The first to become alarmed was Marcello. He said, with real concern, “Maybe I was wrong, I didn’t know that there were problems.”
“There’s no problem,” Fernando said, and whispered to his wife, “Go see what your daughter is doing.”
Nunzia left the room. When she came back she was embarrassed, she couldn’t find Lila. We looked for her all over the house, she wasn’t there. We called her from the window: nothing. Marcello, desolate, took his leave. As soon as he had gone Fernando shouted at his wife, “God’s truth, this time I’m going to kill your daughter.”
Rino joined his father in the threat, Nunzia began to cry. I left almost on tiptoe, frightened. But as soon as I closed the door and came out on the landing Lila called me. She was on the top floor, I went up on tiptoe. She was huddled next to the door to the terrace, in the shadows. She had the shoes in her lap, for the first time I saw them finished. They shone in the feeble light of a bulb hanging on an electrical cable. “What would it cost you to let him see them?” I asked, confused.
She shook her head energetically. “I don’t even want him to touch them.”
But she was as if overwhelmed by her own extreme reaction. Her lower lip trembled, something that never happened.
