“I don’t spend a lira if I don’t think it can produce a hundred.”
He started the engine and we left. Now I was sure: the drive had been a sort of agreement reached at the end of many encounters, much talk. I said weakly, in Italian, “Please, Stefano, leave me at the corner? If my mother sees me in a car with you she’ll bash my face in.”
38.
Lila’s life changed decisively during that month of September. It wasn’t easy, but it changed. As for me, I had returned from Ischia in love with Nino, branded by the lips and hands of his father, sure that I would weep night and day because of the mixture of happiness and horror I felt inside. Instead I made no attempt to find a form for my emotions, in a few hours everything was reduced. I put aside Nino’s voice, the irritation of his father’s mustache. The island faded, lost itself in some secret corner of my head. I made room for what was happening to Lila.
In the three days that followed the astonishing ride in the convertible, she, with the excuse of doing the shopping, went often to Stefano’s grocery, but always asked me to go with her. I did it with my heart pounding, frightened by the possible appearance of Marcello, but also pleased with my role as confidante generous with advice, as accomplice in weaving plots, as apparent object of Stefano’s attentions. We were girls, even if we imagined ourselves wickedly daring. We embroidered on the facts—Marcello, Stefano, the shoes—with our usual eagerness and it seemed to us that we always knew how to make things come out right. “I’ll say this to him,” she hypothesized, and I would suggest a small variation: “No, say this.” Then she and Stefano would be deep in conversation in a corner behind the counter, while Alfonso exchanged a few words with me, Pinuccia, annoyed, waited on the customers, and Maria, at the cash register, observed her older son apprehensively, because he had been neglecting the job lately, and was feeding the gossip of the neighbors.
Naturally we were improvising. In the course of that back and forth I tried to understand what was really going through Lila’s head, so as to be in tune with her goals. At first I had the impression that she intended simply to enable her father and brother to earn some money by selling Stefano, for a good price, the only pair of shoes produced by the Cerullos, but soon it seemed to me that her principal aim was to get rid of Marcello by making use of the young grocer. In this sense, she was decisive when I asked her:
“Which of the two do you like more?”
She shrugged.
“I’ve never liked Marcello, he makes me sick.”
“You would become engaged to Stefano just to get Marcello out of your house?”
She thought for a moment and said yes.
From then on the ultimate goal of all our plotting seemed to us that—to fight by every means possible Marcello’s intrusion in her life. The rest came crowding around almost by chance and we merely gave it a rhythm and, at times, a true orchestration. Or so at least we believed. In fact, the person who was acting was only and was always Stefano.
Punctually, three days later, he went to the store and bought the shoes, even though they were tight. The two Cerullos with much hesitation asked for twenty-five thousand lire, but were ready to go down to ten thousand. He didn’t bat an eye and put down another twenty thousand in exchange for Lila’s drawings, which—he said—he liked, he wanted to frame them.
“Frame?” Rino asked.
“Yes.”
“Like a picture by a painter?”
“Yes.”
“And you told my sister that you’re buying her drawings?”
“Yes.”
Stefano didn’t stop there. In the following days he again poked his head in at the shop and announced to father and son that he had rented the space adjacent to theirs. “For now it’s there,” he said, “but if you one day decide to expand, remember that I am at your disposal.”
At the Cerullos’ they discussed for a long time what that statement meant. “Expand?” Finally Lila, since they couldn’t get there on their own, said:
“He’s proposing to transform the shoe shop into a workshop for making Cerullo shoes.”
“And the money?” Rino asked cautiously.
“He’ll invest it.”
“He told you?” Fernando, incredulous, was alarmed, immediately followed by Nunzia.
“He told the two of you,” Lila said, indicating her father and brother.
“But he knows that handmade shoes are expensive?”
“You showed him.”
“And if they don’t sell?”
“You’ve wasted the work and he’s wasted the money.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The entire family was upset for days. Marcello moved to the background. He arrived at night at eight-thirty and dinner wasn’t ready. Often he found himself alone in front of the television with Melina and Ada, while the Cerullos talked in another room.
