From that evening on, Nino’s father seemed to me a solid remedy not only against the darkness into which his son had driven me, departing after an almost imperceptible kiss, but also—I realized with amazement—against the darkness into which Lila had driven me by never responding to my letters. She and Nino scarcely know each other, I thought, they have never been friends, and yet now they seem to me very similar: they have no need of anything or anyone, and they always know what’s right and what isn’t. But if they’re wrong? What is especially terrible about Marcello Solara, what is especially terrible about Donato Sarratore? I didn’t understand. I loved both Lila and Nino, and now in a different way I missed them, but I was grateful to that hated father, who made me, and all us children, important, who gave us joy and peace that night at the Maronti. Suddenly I was glad that neither of the two was present on the island.
I began reading again, I wrote a last letter to Lila, in which I said that, since she hadn’t ever answered me, I wouldn’t write anymore. I bound myself instead to the Sarratore family, I felt I was the sister of Marisa, Pinuccio, and little Ciro, who now loved me tremendously and with me, only with me, wasn’t naughty but played happily; we went looking for shells together. Lidia, whose hostility had conclusively turned into sympathy and fondness, often praised me for the precision that I put into everything: setting the table, cleaning the rooms, washing the dishes, entertaining the baby, reading and studying. One morning she made me try on a sundress that was too tight for her, and, since Nella and even Sarratore, called urgently to give an opinion, thought it very becoming, she gave it to me. At certain moments she even seemed to prefer me to Marisa. She said, “She’s lazy and vain, I brought her up badly, she doesn’t study; whereas you are so sensible about everything.” “Just like Nino,” she added once, “except that you’re sunny and he is always irritable.” But Donato, hearing those criticisms, responded sharply, and began to praise his oldest son. “He’s as good as gold,” he said, and with a look asked me for confirmation and I nodded yes with great conviction.
After his long swims Donato lay beside me to dry in the sun and read his newspaper,
It was an article on the speed of train travel as opposed to the speed of travel in the past, by horse carriage or on foot, along country lanes. It was written in high-flown sentences that he read with great feeling.
“Yes, very much,” I said.
“See who wrote it: what do you read here?”
He held it out toward me, put the paper under my eyes. With emotion, I read: “Donato Sarratore.”
Lidia burst out laughing and so did he. They left me on the beach to keep an eye on Ciro while they swam in their usual way, staying close to each other and whispering. I looked at them, I thought, Poor Melina, but without bitterness toward Sarratore. Assuming that Nino was right and that there really had been something between the two of them; assuming, in other words, that Sarratore really had betrayed Lidia, now, even more than before—now that I knew him somewhat—I couldn’t feel that he was guilty, especially since it seemed to me that not even his wife felt he was guilty, although at the time she had compelled him to leave the neighborhood. As for Melina, I understood her, too. She had felt the joy of love for that so far from ordinary man—a conductor on the railroad but also a poet, a journalist—and her fragile mind had been unable to readjust to the rough normality of life without him. I was satisfied with these thoughts. I was pleased with everything, in those days, with my love for Nino, with my sadness, with the affection that I felt surrounded by, with my own capacity to read, think, reflect in solitude.
34.
