“You’re threatening me,” Fernando said, but halfheartedly, in a tone of resigned observation.
“No, I’m asking you to do what’s best for your daughter.”
“I know what’s best for her.”
“Yes, but she knows better than you.”
And here Stefano got up, opened the door, called me, I was waiting outside with Lila.
“Lenù.”
We went in. How we liked feeling that we were at the center of those events, the two of us together, directing them toward their outcome. I remember the extreme tension of that moment. Stefano said to Lila, “I’m saying to you in front of your father: I love you, more than my life. Will you marry me?”
Lila answered seriously, “Yes.”
Fernando gasped slightly, then murmured, with the same subservience that in times gone by he had manifested toward Don Achille: “We’re offending not only Marcello but all the Solaras. Who’s going to tell that poor boy?”
Lila said, “I will.”
40.
In fact two nights later, in front of the whole family except Rino, who was out, before they sat down at the table, before the television was turned on, Lila asked Marcello, “Will you take me to get some ice cream?”
Marcello couldn’t believe his ears.
“Ice cream? Without eating first? You and me?” And he suddenly asked Nunzia, “Signora, would you come, too?”
Nunzia turned on the television and said, “No, thank you, Marcè. But don’t be too long. Ten minutes, you’ll go and be back.”
“Yes,” he promised, happily, “thank you.”
He repeated thank you at least four times. It seemed to him that the longed-for moment had arrived, Lila was about to say yes.
But as soon as they were outside the building she confronted him and said, with the cold cruelty that had come easily to her since her first years of life, “I never told you that I loved you.”
“I know. But now you do?”
“No.”
Marcello, who was heavily built, a healthy, ruddy youth of twenty-three, leaned against a lamppost, brokenhearted.
“Really no?”
“No. I love someone else.”
“Who is it?”
“Stefano.”
“I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it.”
“You have to believe it, it’s true.”
“I’ll kill you both.”
“With me you can try right now.”
Marcello left the lamppost in a rush, but, with a kind of death rattle, he bit his clenched right fist until it bled.
“I love you too much, I can’t do it.”
“Then get your brother, your father to do it, some friend, maybe they’re capable. But make it clear to all of them that you had better kill me first. Because if you touch anyone else while I’m alive, I will kill you, and you know I will, starting with you.”
Marcello continued to bite his finger stubbornly. Then he repressed a sort of sob that shook his breast, turned, and went off.
She shouted after him: “Send someone to get the television, we don’t need it.”
41.
Everything happened in little more than a month and Lila in the end seemed to me happy. She had found an outlet for the shoe project, she had given an opportunity to her brother and the whole family, she had gotten rid of Marcello Solara and had become the fiancée of the most respectable wealthy young man in the neighborhood. What more could she want? Nothing. She had everything. When school began again I felt the dreariness of it more than usual. I was reabsorbed by the work and, so that the teachers would not find me unprepared, I went back to studying until eleven and setting my alarm for five-thirty. I saw Lila less and less.
On the other hand, my relationship with Stefano’s brother, Alfonso, solidified. Although he had worked in the grocery all summer, he had passed the makeup exams successfully, with seven in each of the subjects: Latin, Greek, and English. Gino, who had hoped that he would fail so that they could repeat the first year of high school together, was disappointed. When he realized that the two of us, now in our second year, went to school and came home together every day, he grew even more bitter and became mean. He no longer spoke to me, his former girlfriend, or to Alfonso, his former deskmate, even though he was in the classroom next to ours and we often met in the hallways, as well as in the streets of the neighborhood. But he did worse: soon I heard that he was telling nasty stories about us. He said that I was in love with Alfonso and touched him during class even though Alfonso didn’t respond, because, as he knew very well, he who had sat next to him for a year, he didn’t like girls, he preferred boys. I reported this to Alfonso, expecting him to beat up Gino, as was the rule in such cases, but he confined himself to saying, contemptuously, in dialect, “Everyone knows that he’s the fag.”
