The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (27 page)

“I have to work: the shoes have to be ready for the fall. Did you see them, do you like them?”

“Yes, but the things Lina made you add are ugly, take them off.”

“No, they look good.”

“You see? What I say counts for nothing with you.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s very true, you don’t love me anymore.”

“I do love you, and you know how much I want you.”

“No way, look at the belly I have.”

“I’d give that belly ten thousand kisses. For the whole week all I do is think about you.”

“Then don’t go to work.”

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll leave tonight, too.”

“We’ve already paid our share, you have to have your vacation.”

“I don’t want it anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because as soon as I fall asleep I have terrible dreams and I’m awake all night.”

“Even when you sleep with my sister?”

“Even more, if your sister could kill me, she would.”

“Go sleep with my mamma.”

“Your mamma snores.”

Pinuccia’s tone of voice was unbearable. All day I tried to figure out the reasons for her complaints. That she didn’t sleep much or very well was true. But that she wanted Rino to stay, or that she really wanted to leave with him, seemed to me a lie. At one point I was convinced that she was trying to tell him something that she herself didn’t know and so could express only in the form of peevishness. But then I forgot about it, I had other things to think about. Lila’s exuberance, first of all.

When she appeared at the beach with her husband, she seemed happier than the night before. She wanted to show him how she had learned to swim, and together they headed away from the shore—out where it’s deep, Stefano said, even though it was really only a few meters from the shore. With her elegant and precise strokes, and the rhythmic turn of the head to breathe that she had by now learned, moving her mouth away from the water, she immediately left him behind. Then she stopped to wait for him, laughing, until he caught up, clumsily flailing his arms, his head straight up, as he snorted at the water that sprayed in his face.

She was even livelier in the afternoon, when they went for a ride on the Lambretta. Rino wanted to drive around, too, and since Pinuccia refused—she was afraid of falling and losing the baby—he said to me, “You come, Lenù.” It was my first such experience, with Stefano in the lead, Rino following, and the wind, and the fear of falling or crashing, and the increasing excitement, the strong odor that came from the sweaty back of Pinuccia’s husband, and the swaggering self-confidence that pushed him to violate every rule and to respond to any protests according to the habits of the neighborhood, braking suddenly, threatening, always ready to fight to assert his right to do as he pleased. It was fun, a return to those feelings of a bad girl, very different from the ones Nino inspired in me when he appeared on the beach, in the afternoon, with his friend.

In the course of that Sunday I named the two boys often: I especially liked saying the name of Nino. I quickly noticed that both Pinuccia and Lila acted as if it hadn’t been the three of us who spent time with Bruno and Nino, but only me. As a result, when their husbands said goodbye, hurrying off to catch the ferry, Stefano asked me to say hello to Soccavo’s son for him, as if I were the only one who would have the opportunity to see him, and Rino teased me, with remarks like: Who do you like more, the son of the poet or the son of the mortadella maker? Who do you think is handsomer? as if his wife and sister had no basis for forming their own opinions.

Finally, the reactions of both to the departure of their husbands annoyed me. Pinuccia became cheerful, she wanted to wash her hair, which—she said aloud—was full of sand. Lila lounged about the house listlessly, then she lay down on her unmade bed, paying no attention to the mess in the room. When I went to say good night I saw that she hadn’t even undressed: she was reading the book about Hiroshima, frowning, eyes narrowed. I didn’t reproach her, I said only, perhaps a little sharply:

“How is it that you suddenly feel like reading again?”

“It’s none of your business,” she answered.

On Monday Nino appeared, like a ghost evoked by my desire, not at four in the afternoon, as usual, but, surprisingly, at ten in the morning. We three girls had just arrived at the beach, resentful, each convinced that the others had spent too much time in the bathroom, Pinuccia particularly upset about how her hair had been ruined by her sleeping on it. It was she who spoke first, stern, almost aggressive. She asked Nino, even before he could explain to us, why in the world he had turned his schedule upside down:

“Why didn’t Bruno come, he had better things to do?”

“His parents are still here, they’re leaving at noon.”

“Then he’ll come?”

“I think so.”

“Because if he’s not coming I’m going back to sleep, with just the three of you I’ll be bored.”

And while Nino was telling us how terrible his Sunday in Barano had been, and so he had left early and, since he couldn’t go to Bruno’s, had come straight to the beach, she interrupted once or twice, asking in a whine: Who’s going to go swimming with me? Since both Lila and I ignored her, she went into the water angrily by herself.

Never mind. We preferred to listen attentively to the list of wrongs that Nino suffered at the hands of his father. A cheater, he called him, a malingerer. He had settled himself in Barano, extending his leave from work on the ground of some feigned illness, which had been properly certified, however, by a health-service doctor who was a friend of his. “My father,” he said in disgust, “is in everything and for everything the negation of the general interest.” And then, without a break, he did something unpredictable. With a sudden movement that made me jump he leaned over and gave me a big, noisy kiss on the cheek, followed by the remark: “I’m really glad to see you.” Then, slightly embarrassed, as if he had realized that with that effusiveness toward me he might be acting rudely toward Lila, he said: “May I also give you a kiss?”

“Of course,” Lila answered, affably, and he gave her a light kiss, with no sound, a barely perceptible contact. After that he began to talk excitedly about the plays of Beckett: Ah, how he liked those guys buried in the ground up to their necks; and how beautiful the statement was about the fire that the present kindles inside you; and, even though among the thousand evocative things that Maddy and Dan Rooney said he had had a hard time picking out the precise point cited by Lila, well, the concept that life is felt more when you are blind, deaf, mute, and maybe without taste or touch was objectively interesting in itself. In his view it meant: Let’s get rid of all the filters that prevent us from fully savoring our being here and now, real.

Lila appeared bewildered, she said that she had thought about it and that life in the pure state frightened her. She expressed herself with some emphasis, she exclaimed, “Life without seeing and without speaking, without speaking and listening, life without a covering, without a container, is shapeless.” She didn’t use exactly those words, but certainly she said “shapeless” and she said it with a gesture of revulsion. Nino repeated reluctantly, “shapeless,” as if it were a curse word. Then he started talking again, even more overwrought, until, with no warning, he took off his shirt, revealing himself in all his dark thinness, grabbed us both by the hand, and dragged us into the water, as I cried happily, “No, no, no, I’m cold, no,” and he answered, “
Here finally another happy day
,” and Lila laughed.

So, I thought contentedly, Lila is wrong. So there certainly exists another Nino: not the gloomy boy, not the one who gets excited only when he’s thinking about the general state of the world, but
this boy
, this boy who plays, who drags us furiously into the water, who mocks us, grips us, pulls us toward him, swims away, lets us reach him, lets us grab him, lets us push him under the water and pretends to be overpowered, pretends that we’re drowning him.

When Bruno arrived things got even better. We all took a walk together and Pinuccia’s good humor slowly returned. She wanted to swim again, she wanted to eat coconut. Starting then, and for the whole week that followed, we found it completely natural that the boys should join us on the beach at ten in the morning and remain until sunset, when we said, “We have to go or Nunzia will get mad,” and they resigned themselves to going off to do some studying.

How intimate we were now. If Bruno called Lila Signora Carracci to tease her, she punched him playfully on the shoulder, chased him, threatening. If he showed too much reverence toward Pinuccia because she was carrying a child, Pinuccia linked arms with him, said, “Come on, let’s run, I want a soda.” As for Nino, now he often took my hand, put an arm around my shoulders, and then put an arm around Lila’s, too, he took her index finger, her thumb. The wary distances receded. We became a group of five friends who were having a good time doing little or nothing. We played games, whoever lost paid a fine. The fines were almost always kisses, but joke kisses, obviously: Bruno had to kiss Lila’s sandy feet, Nino my hand, and then cheeks, forehead, ear, with a pop in the auricle. We also had long games of
tamburello
. The ball flew through the air and was sent back with a sharp crack against the taut hide of the tambourines; Lila was good, Nino, too. But most agile of all, most precise, was Bruno. He and Pinuccia always won, against Lila and me, against Lila and Nino, against Nino and me. They won partly because we had all developed a sort of automatic tenderness toward Pina. She ran, she jumped, she tumbled on the sand, forgetting her condition, and so we ended by letting her win, sometimes just to soothe her. Bruno reproached her gently, made her sit down, said, that’s enough and cried, “Point for Pinuccia, excellent.”

A thread of happiness thus began to extend through the hours and days. I no longer minded that Lila took my books, in fact it seemed to me a good thing. I didn’t mind that, when the discussions got going, she more and more often said what she thought and Nino listened attentively and seemed to lack the words for a response. I found it thrilling, in fact, that in those circumstances he would suddenly stop talking to her and start up with me, as if that helped him rediscover his convictions.

That was what happened the time Lila showed off her reading on Hiroshima. A tense discussion arose, because Nino, I saw, was so critical of the United States and didn’t like the fact that the Americans had a military base in Naples, but he was also attracted by their way of life, he said he wanted to study it, and he was disappointed when Lila said, more or less, that dropping atomic bombs on Japan had been a war crime, in fact more than a war crime—the war had scarcely anything to do with it—it had been a crime of pride.

“Can I remind you of Pearl Harbor?” he said hesitantly.

I didn’t know what Pearl Harbor was but I discovered that Lila did. She told him that Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima were two things that couldn’t be compared, that Pearl Harbor was a vile act of war and Hiroshima was an idiotic, fierce, vindictive horror, worse, much worse, than the Nazi massacres. And she concluded: the Americans should be tried like the worst criminals, those who do terrible things to terrorize the living and keep them on their knees. She was so passionate that Nino, instead of moving to the counterattack, was silent, very thoughtful. Then he turned to me, as if she weren’t there. He said that the problem wasn’t ferocity or revenge but the urgency to bring an end to the most atrocious of wars and, at the same time, by using that terrible new weapon, to all wars. He spoke in a low tone, looking me straight in the eyes, as if he were interested only in my agreement. It was a wonderful moment. He himself was wonderful, when he was like that. I was so filled with emotion that tears rose to my eyes and I had trouble repressing them.

Then Friday came again, a very hot day that we spent mostly in the water. And suddenly something went bad again.

We had just left the two boys and were going back to the house, the sun was low, the sky pinkish-blue, when Pinuccia, unexpectedly silent after many long hours of extravagant playfulness, threw her bag on the ground, sat down on the side of road, and began to cry with rage, small thin cries, almost a moaning.

Lila narrowed her eyes, stared at her as if she saw not her sister-in-law but something ugly for which she wasn’t prepared. I went back, frightened, asked, “Pina, what’s the matter, don’t you feel well?”

“I can’t bear this wet bathing suit.”

“We all have wet bathing suits.”

“It bothers me.”

“Calm down, come on, aren’t you hungry?”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. You irritate me when you tell me to calm down. I can’t stand you anymore, Lenù, you and your calm down.”

And she started moaning again, and hitting her thighs.

I sensed that Lila was going on without waiting for us. I sensed that she had decided to do so not out of annoyance or indifference but because there was something in that behavior, something scorching, and if she got too close it would burn her. I helped Pinuccia get up, I carried her bag.

Eventually she became quieter, but she spent the evening sulking, as if we had somehow offended her. When she was rude even to Nunzia, brusquely criticizing the way the pasta was cooked, Lila flared up and, breaking into a fierce dialect, dumped on her all the fantastic insults she was capable of. Pina decided to sleep with me that night.

She tossed and turned in her sleep. And with two people in the room the heat made it almost impossible to breathe. Soaked with sweat, I resigned myself to opening the window and was tormented by the mosquitoes. Then I couldn’t sleep at all, I waited for dawn, I got up.

Now I, too, was in a bad mood, I had three or four disfiguring bites on my face. I went to the kitchen, Nunzia was washing our dirty clothes. Lila, too, was already up, she had had her bread-and-milk, and was reading another of my books, who knows when she had stolen it from me. As soon as she saw me, she gave me a searching glance and asked, with a genuine concern that I didn’t expect: “How is Pinuccia?”