Marisa hurried eagerly to get ready and I regretted that I always had the same shabby old dress. But it seemed to me that he didn’t much care if I was pretty or ugly. As soon as we left the house he started talking, which made Marisa uncomfortable, she said it would have been better for her to stay home. I, however, hung on Nino’s every word. It greatly astonished me that, in the tumult of the Port, among the young and not so young men who looked at Marisa and me purposefully, he showed not a trace of that disposition to violence that Pasquale, Rino, Antonio, Enzo showed when they went out with us and someone gave us one glance too many. As an intimidating guardian of our bodies he had little value. Maybe because he was engrossed in the things that were going on in his head, by an eagerness to talk to me about them, he would let anything happen to us.
That was how Marisa made friends with some boys from Forio, they came to see her at Barano, and she brought them with us to the beach at the Maronti. And so the three of us began to go out every evening. We all went to the Port, but once we arrived she went off with her new friends (when in the world would Pasquale have been so free with Carmela, Antonio with Ada?) and we walked along the sea. Then we met her around ten and returned home.
One evening, as soon as we were alone, Nino said suddenly that as a boy he had greatly envied the relationship between Lila and me. He saw us from a distance, always together, always talking, and he would have liked to be friends with us, but never had the courage. Then he smiled and said, “You remember the declaration I made to you?”
“Yes.”
“I liked you a lot.”
I blushed, I whispered stupidly, “Thank you.”
“I thought we would become engaged and we would all three be together forever, you, me, and your friend.”
“Together?”
He smiled at himself as a child.
“I didn’t understand anything about engagements.”
Then he asked me about Lila.
“Did she go on studying?”
“No.”
“What does she do?”
“She helps her parents.”
“She was so smart, you couldn’t keep up with her, she made my head a blur.”
He said it just that way—
“She’s not like that anymore,” I said. “She’s changed.”
And I felt an urge to add, “Have you heard how the teachers at school talk about me?” Luckily I managed to restrain myself. But, after that conversation, I stopped writing to Lila: I had trouble telling her what was happening to me, and anyway she wouldn’t answer. I devoted myself instead to taking care of Nino. I knew that he woke up late and I invented excuses of every sort not to have breakfast with the others. I waited for him, I went to the beach with him, I got his things ready, I carried them, we went swimming together. But when he went out to sea I didn’t feel able to follow, I returned to the shoreline to watch apprehensively the wake he left, the dark speck of his head. I became anxious if I lost him, I was happy when I saw him return. In other words I loved him and knew it and was content to love him.
But meanwhile the mid-August holiday approached. One evening I told him that I didn’t want to go to the Port, I would rather walk to the Maronti, there was a full moon. I hoped that he would come with me, rather than take his sister, who was eager to go to the Port, where by now she had a sort of boyfriend with whom, she told me, she exchanged kisses and embraces, betraying the boyfriend in Naples. Instead he went with Marisa. As a matter of principle, I set out on the rocky road that led to the beach. The sand was cold, gray-black in the moonlight, the sea scarcely breathed. There was not a living soul and I began to weep with loneliness. What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me. What signs did I carry, what fate? I thought of the neighborhood as of a whirlpool from which any attempt at escape was an illusion. Then I heard the rustle of sand, I turned, I saw the shadow of Nino. He sat down beside me. He had to go back and get his sister in an hour. I felt he was nervous, he was hitting the sand with the heel of his left foot. He didn’t talk about books, he began suddenly speaking of his father.
“I will devote my life,” he said, as if he were speaking of a mission, “to trying not to resemble him.”
“He’s a nice man.”
“Everyone says that.”
“And so?”
He had a sarcastic expression that for a few seconds made him ugly.
“How is Melina?”
I looked at him in astonishment. I had been very careful never to mention Melina in those days of intense conversation, and here he was talking about her.
“All right.”
