The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (20 page)

I don’t know if everyone appreciated me. Armando seemed unhappy and a blond girl whose name I didn’t know stared at me with a small, mocking smile. But as I was speaking Nino nodded at me in agreement. And when Professor Galiani, just afterward, gave her opinion, she referred to me twice, and it was thrilling to hear, “As Elena rightly said.” It was Nadia, though, who did the most wonderful thing. She left Nino and came over and whispered in my ear: “How clever you are, how brave.” Lila, who was next to me, didn’t say a word. But while the professor was still talking to me she gave me a tug and whispered, in dialect, “I’m falling asleep on my feet, find out where the telephone is and call Stefano?”

How much that evening had hurt her I learned later from her notebooks. She admitted that she had asked to go with me. She admitted she had thought she could at least for one evening get away from the grocery and be comfortable with me, share in that sudden widening of my world, meet Professor Galiani, talk to her. She admitted she thought she would find a way of making a good impression. She admitted she had been sure she would be attractive to the males, she always was. Instead she immediately felt voiceless, graceless, deprived of movement, of beauty. She listed details: even when we were next to each other, people chose to speak only to me; they had brought me pastries, a drink, no one had done anything for her; Armando had shown me a family portrait, something from the seventeenth century, he had talked to me about it for a quarter of an hour; she had been treated as if she weren’t capable of understanding. They didn’t want her. They didn’t want to know anything about what sort of person she was. That evening for the first time it had become clear to her that her life would forever be Stefano, the grocery stores, the marriage of her brother and Pinuccia, the conversations with Pasquale and Carmen, the petty war with the Solaras. This she had written, and more, maybe that very night, maybe in the morning, in the store. There, for the entire evening, she had felt irrefutably lost.

But in the car, as we returned to the neighborhood, she didn’t allude in the slightest to her feeling, she just became mean, treacherous. She began as soon as she got in the car, when her husband asked resentfully if we had had a good time. I let her answer, I was dazed by the effort, by excitement, by pleasure. And then she went on slowly to hurt me. She said in dialect that she had never been so bored in her life. It would have been better if we’d gone to a movie, she apologized to her husband, and—it was unusual, done evidently on purpose to wound me, to remind me: See, good or bad I have a man, while you’ve got nothing, you’re a virgin, you know everything but you don’t know anything about this—she caressed the hand that he kept on the gear shift. Even watching television, she said, would have been more entertaining than spending time with those disgusting people. There’s not a thing there, an object, a painting, that was acquired by them directly. The furniture is from a hundred years ago. The house is at least three hundred years old. The books yes, some are new, but others are very old, they’re so dusty they haven’t been opened since who knows when, old law books, history, science, politics. They’ve read and studied in that house, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers. For hundreds of years they’ve been, at the least, lawyers, doctors, professors. So they all talk just so, so they dress and eat and move just so. They do it because they were born there. But in their heads they don’t have a thought that’s their own, that they struggled to think. They know everything and they don’t know a thing. She kissed her husband on the neck, she smoothed his hair with her fingertips. If you were up there, Ste’, all you’d see is parrots going
cocorico, cocorico
. You couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying and they didn’t even understand each other. You know what the O.A.S. is, you know what the opening to the left is? Next time, Lenù, don’t take me, take Pasquale, I’ll show you, he’ll put them in their place in a flash. Chimpanzees that piss and shit in the toilet instead of on the ground, and that’s why they give themselves a lot of airs, and they say they know what should be done in China and in Albania and in France and in Katanga. You, too, Lenù, I have to tell you: Look out, or you’ll be the parrots’ parrot. She turned to her husband, laughing. You should have heard her, she said. She made a little voice,
cheechee, cheechee
. Show Stefano how you speak to those people? You and Sarratore’s son: the same.
The world brigade for peace; we have the technical capability; hunger, war
. But do you really work that hard in school so you can say things just like he does?
Whoever finds a solution to the problems is working for peace
. Bravo. Do you remember how the son of Sarratore was able to find a solution: Do you remember, do you—and you pay attention to him? You, too, you want to be a puppet from the neighborhood who performs so you can be welcomed into the home of those people? You want to leave us alone in our own shit, cracking our skulls, while all of you go
cocorico cocorico
, hunger, war, working class, peace?

She was so spiteful, all the way home along Corso Vittorio Emanuele, that I was silent, and felt the poison that was transforming what had seemed to me an important moment of my life into a false step that had made me ridiculous. I struggled not to believe her. I felt she was truly hostile and capable of anything. She knew how to set the nerves of good people alight, in their breasts she kindled the fire of destruction. I felt that Gigliola and Pinuccia were right: it was she herself who in the photograph had blazed up like the devil. I hated her, and even Stefano noticed, and when he stopped at the gate and let me out on his side he said, “Bye, Lenù, good night, Lina’s joking,” and I muttered “Bye,” and went in. Only when the car had left did I hear Lila shouting at me, re-creating the voice that in her view I had deliberately assumed at the Galiani house: “Bye, hey, bye.”

That night began the long, painful period that led to our first break and a long separation.

I had trouble recovering. There had been a thousand causes of tension up until that moment; her unhappiness and, at the same time, her yearning to dominate were constantly surfacing. But never, ever, ever had she so explicitly set out to humiliate me. I stopped dropping in at the grocery. Although she had paid for my schoolbooks, although we had made that bet, I didn’t tell her that I had passed with all A’s and two A-pluses. Just after school ended, I started working in a bookstore on Via Mezzocannone, and I disappeared from the neighborhood without telling her. The memory of the sarcastic tone of that night, instead of fading, became magnified, and my resentment, too, increased. It seemed to me that nothing could justify what she had done to me. It never occurred to me, as, in fact, it had on other occasions, that she had felt the need to humiliate me in order to better endure her own humiliation.

I soon had confirmation that I really had made a good impression at the party, and that made the separation easier. I was wandering along Via Mezzocannone during my lunch break when I heard someone call me. It was Armando, on his way to take an exam. I learned that he was studying medicine and that the exam was difficult but, just the same, before vanishing in the direction of San Domenico Maggiore, he stopped to talk, piling on compliments and starting in again on politics. In the evening he showed up in the bookstore, he’d gotten a high mark, and was happy. He asked for my telephone number, I said I didn’t have a telephone; he asked if we could go for a walk the following Sunday, I said that on Sunday I had to help my mother in the house. He started talking about Latin America, where he intended to go right after graduating, to treat the destitute, and persuade them to take up arms against their oppressors, and he went on for so long that I had to send him away before the owner got irritated. In other words, I was pleased because he obviously liked me, and I was polite, but not available. Lila’s words had indeed done damage. My clothes were wrong, my hair was wrong, my tone of voice was false, I was ignorant. Besides, with the end of school, and without Professor Galiani, I had lost the habit of reading the newspapers and, partly because money was tight, I didn’t want to buy them out of my own pocket. Thus Naples, Italy, the world quickly went back to being a foggy terrain in which I could no longer orient myself. Armando talked, I nodded yes, but I understood little of what he was saying.

The next day there was another surprise. While I was sweeping the floor of the bookstore, Nino and Nadia appeared. They had heard from Armando where I worked and had come just to say hello. They invited me to go to the movies with them the following Sunday. I had to answer as I had answered Armando: it wasn’t possible, I worked all week, and my mother and father wanted me home on my day off.

“But a little walk in the neighborhood—you could do that?”

“That, yes.”

“So we’ll come see you.”

Since the owner was calling for me more impatiently than usual—he was a man of around sixty, the skin on his face seemed dirty, he was irascible, and had a dissolute look—they left right away.

Late in the morning on the following Sunday, I heard someone calling from the courtyard and I recognized Nino’s voice. I looked out, he was alone. I quickly tried to make myself presentable and, without even telling my mother, happy and at the same time anxious, I ran down. When I found myself before him I could hardly breathe. “I only have ten minutes,” I said, and we didn’t go out to walk along the
stradone
, but wandered among the houses. Why had he come without Nadia? Why had he come all the way here if she couldn’t? He answered my questions without my asking. Some relatives of Nadia’s father were visiting and she had been obliged to stay home. He had wanted to see the neighborhood again but also to bring me something to read, the latest issue of a journal called
Cronache Meridionali
. He handed me the issue with a petulant gesture, I thanked him, and he started, incongruously, to criticize the review, and so I asked why he had decided to give it to me. “It’s rigid,” he said, and added, laughing, “Like Professor Galiani and Armando.” Then he turned serious, he assumed a tone that was like an old man’s. He said that he owed a great deal to our professor, that without her the period of high school would have been a waste of time, but that you had to be on guard, keep her at a distance. “Her greatest defect,” he said emphatically, “is that she can’t bear for someone to have an opinion different from hers. Take from her everything she can give you, but then go your own way.” Then he returned to the review, he said that Galiani also wrote for it and suddenly, with no connection, he mentioned Lila: “Then, if possible, have her read it, too.” I didn’t tell him that Lila no longer read anything, that now she was Signora Carracci, that she had kept only her meanness from when she was a child. I was evasive, and asked about Nadia, he told me that she was taking a long car trip with her family, to Norway, and then would spend the rest of the summer in Anacapri, where her father had a family house.

“Will you go and see her?”

“Once or twice—I have to study.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Very well. She’s going back to Barano this year, she’s made up with the woman who owns the house.”

“Will you go on vacation with your family?”

“I? With my father? Never ever. I’ll be on Ischia but on my own.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a friend who has a house in Forio: his parents leave it to him for the whole summer, and we’ll stay there and study. You?”

“I’m working at Mezzocannone until September.”

“Even during the mid-August holiday?”

“No, for the holiday, no.”

He smiled. “Then come to Forio, the house is big. Maybe Nadia will come for two or three days.”

I smiled, nervously. To Forio? To Ischia? To a house without adults? Did he remember the Maronti? Did he remember that we had kissed there? I said I had to go in. “I’ll stop by again,” he promised. “I want to know what you think of the review.” He added, in a low voice, his hands stuck in his pockets, “I like talking to you.”

He had talked a lot, in fact. I was proud, thrilled, that he had felt comfortable. I murmured, “Me, too,” although I had said little or nothing, and was about to go in when something happened that disturbed us both. A cry cut the Sunday quiet of the courtyard and I saw Melina at the window, waving her arms, trying to attract our attention. When Nino also turned to look, perplexed, Melina cried even louder, a mixture of joy and anguish. She cried, Donato.

“Who is it?” Nino asked.

“Melina,” I said, “do you remember?”

He made a grimace of uneasiness. “Is she angry with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s saying Donato.”

“Yes.”

He turned again to look toward the window where the widow was leaning out, repeatedly calling that name.

“Do you think I look like my father?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

He said nervously, “I’ll go.”

“You’d better.”

He left quickly, shoulders bent, while Melina cried louder and louder, increasingly agitated: Donato, Donato, Donato.

I also escaped, I went home with my heart pounding, and a thousand tangled thoughts. Not a single feature of Nino’s connected him to Sarratore: not his height, not his face, not his manners, not even his voice or his gaze. He was an anomalous, sweet fruit. How fascinating he was with his long, untidy hair. How different from any other male form: in all Naples there was no one who resembled him. And he had respect for me, even if I still had my last year of high school to do and he was going to the university. He had come all the way to the neighborhood on a Sunday. He had been worried about me, he had come to put me on my guard. He had wanted to warn me that Professor Galiani was all well and good but even she had her flaws, and meanwhile he had brought me that journal in the conviction that I had the capacity to read it and discuss it, and he had even gone so far as to invite me to Ischia, to Forio, for the August holiday. Something impractical, not a real invitation, he himself knew perfectly well that my parents were not like Nadia’s, they would never let me go; and yet he had invited me just the same, because in the words he said I heard other words, unsaid, like
I care a lot about seeing you, how I’d like to return to our talks at the Port, at the Maronti.
Yes, yes, I heard myself shouting in my head, I’d like it, too, I’ll join you, in August I’ll run away, no matter what.