The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) (39 page)

“As far as somebody like him is capable of being happy, yes.”

“And all he does is study?”

“You mean does he have a girlfriend?”

“No, of course not, I mean does he go out, does he have fun, does he go dancing.”

“How should I know, Lenù? He’s always out. Now he’s obsessed with movies, novels, art, and the rare times he comes by the house he starts arguing with Papa, just to insult him and quarrel with us.”

I felt relieved that Nino had come to his senses, but I was also bitter. Movies, novels, art? How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins. I felt stupid, I had neglected the things I liked to conform to what Nino liked. Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path. I only hoped that Marisa would not tell him that she had seen me and that I had asked about him. Not even to Alfonso, after that evening, did I mention Nino or Lila.

I withdrew even more into my duties, I multiplied them in order to cram my days and nights. That year I studied obsessively, punctiliously, and I even took on a new private lesson, for a lot of money. I imposed on myself an iron discipline, much harsher than what I had enforced since childhood. A marking of time, a straight line that went from dawn until late at night. In the past there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now everything I was I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen, I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone.

The last year of high school slipped by like a single day. I struggled with astronomical geography, with geometry, with trigonometry. It was a sort of race to know everything, when in fact I took it for granted that my inadequacy was constitutional and so couldn’t be eliminated. Yet I liked to do my best. I didn’t have time to go to the movies? I learned titles and plots. Hadn’t been to the archeological museum? I ran through it in half a day. Hadn’t been to the picture gallery of Capodimonte? I made a flying visit, two hours and done. I had too much to do, in short. What did I care about shoes and the shop on Piazza dei Martiri? I never went there.

Sometimes I met Pinuccia, disheveled-looking, as she pushed Fernando in his carriage. I stopped a moment, listened absent-mindedly to her complaints about Rino, Stefano, Lila, Gigliola, everyone. Sometimes I ran into Carmen, who was increasingly bitter about how badly things had been going in the new grocery since Lila left, abandoning her to the oppression of Maria and Pinuccia, and I let her vent for a few minutes about how she missed Enzo Scanno, how she counted the days as she waited for him to finish his military service, how her brother Pasquale slaved, between his construction work and his Communist activities. Sometimes I ran into Ada, who had begun to hate Lila, while she was very pleased with Stefano, and spoke of him tenderly, and not only because he had recently increased her salary but also because he was a hard worker, available to everyone, and didn’t deserve that wife who treated him like dirt.

It was she who told me that Antonio had been discharged early because of a severe nervous breakdown.

“What happened?”

“You know what he’s like, he already had a breakdown with you.”

It was a mean statement that wounded me, I tried not to think about it. One Sunday in winter I ran into Antonio and scarcely recognized him, he was so thin. I smiled at him, expecting him to stop, but he seemed not to notice me and kept going. I called him, he turned, with a disoriented smile.

“Hello, Lenù.”

“Hello, I’m so glad to see you.”

“Me, too.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not going back to the workshop?”

“There’s no job.”

“You’re good, you’ll find something somewhere else.”

“No, if I don’t get better I can’t work.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Fear.”

He said it just like that: fear. In Cordenons, one night, while he was on guard duty, he had remembered a game that his father played when he was still alive and he himself was very small: with a pen his father would draw eyes and mouths on the five fingers of his left hand, and then he would move them and make them talk as if they were people. It was such a sweet game that, as he remembered it, tears came to his eyes. But that night, during his shift, he had had the impression that his father’s hand had entered his and that now he had real people inside his fingers, tiny but fully formed, who were laughing and singing. That was the source of the fear. He banged his hand against the sentry box until it bled, but the fingers went on laughing and singing, without stopping, not for an instant. He recovered only when his shift was over and he went to sleep. A little rest and the next morning it was gone. But the terror that the illness in his hand would return remained. In fact it did return, and, with increasing frequency, his fingers began to laugh and sing even in the daytime. Until he had gone mad and they had sent him to the doctor.

“It’s gone now,” he said, “but it could always start again.”

“Tell me how I can help you.”

He thought for a while, as if he were really evaluating a series of possibilities. He muttered, “No one can help me.”

I immediately understood that he no longer felt anything for me, I had definitively gone out of his mind. So after that encounter I got in the habit of going every Sunday to his windows and calling. We would take a walk around the courtyard, talking about this and that, and when he said he was tired we said goodbye. Sometimes Melina came down with him, garishly made up, and he and his mother and I walked. Sometimes we met Ada and Pasquale and took a longer walk, but then it was generally the three of us who talked, Antonio was silent. In other words it became a peaceful routine. I went with him to the funeral of Nicola Scanno, the fruit-and-vegetable seller, who died suddenly of pneumonia; Enzo came home on leave but wasn’t in time to see him alive. We also went together to console Pasquale, Carmen, and their mother, Giuseppina, when they learned that their father, the former carpenter who had killed Don Achille, had died in prison from a heart attack. And we were together also when we learned that Don Carlo Resta, the seller of soap and various household items, had been beaten to death in his cellar. We talked about it for a long time, the whole neighborhood talked about it, the talk spread truths and cruel rumors, someone said that the beating wasn’t enough and they had stuck a file in his nose. Some vagrants were blamed for the crime, people who had stolen the day’s cash. But Pasquale, later, told us he had heard rumors that in his view were well founded: Don Carlo was in debt to the mother of the Solaras, because he had the vice of gambling and went to her so that he could pay his debts.

“So what?” asked Ada, who was always skeptical when her fiancé came up with reckless hypotheses.

“So he wouldn’t pay what he owed the loan shark and they had him murdered.”

“Come on, you always talk such nonsense.”

It’s likely that Pasquale was exaggerating, but, first of all, no one knew who had killed Don Carlo Resta, and, second, it was, precisely, the Solaras who took over the shop, along with its stock, for very little money, even though they left Don Carlo’s wife and oldest son there to manage it.

“Out of generosity,” said Ada.

“Because they’re bastards,” said Pasquale.

I don’t remember if Antonio made comments on that episode. He was crushed by his illness, which Pasquale’s speeches in some way made more acute. It seemed to him that the dysfunction of his body was spreading to the whole neighborhood and was manifested in the bad things that happened.

The worst thing for us happened on a warm Sunday in the spring, when Pasquale and Ada and he and I were waiting in the courtyard for Carmela, who had gone up to get a pullover. Five minutes passed; Carmen looked out the window, shouted to her brother: “Pasquà, I can’t find mamma. The door of the bathroom is locked from the inside but she doesn’t answer.”

Pasquale took the stairs two at a time and we followed. We found Carmela standing anxiously in front of the bathroom door, and Pasquale knocked, politely, again and again, but no one answered. Antonio then said to his friend, indicating the door: don’t worry, I’ll put it back in place, and, grabbing the handle, he practically tore it off.

The door opened. Giuseppina Peluso had been a radiant woman, energetic, hardworking, kindly, capable of confronting all adversities. She had continued, without fail, to occupy herself with her imprisoned husband, whose arrest—I remembered—she had opposed with all her strength, when he was accused of killing Don Achille Carracci. She had thoughtfully accepted Stefano’s invitation to spend New Year’s Eve together four years earlier, pleased with that reconciliation between the families. And she had been happy when her daughter found work, thanks to Lila, in the grocery in the new neighborhood. But now, with her husband dead, evidently she was worn out, she had become in a short time a tiny woman, skin and bone, without her old vigor. She had unfastened the lamp in the bathroom, a metal plate hanging on a chain, and had attached a clothesline to the hook set in the ceiling. Then she had hanged herself by the neck.

Antonio saw her first and burst into tears. It was easier to calm Giuseppina’s children, Carmen and Pasquale, than him. He repeated to me, horrified: Did you see that her feet were bare and that the nails were long and that on one foot there was fresh red nail polish and not on the other? I hadn’t noticed but he had. He had returned from military service more convinced than before, in spite of his nervous breakdown, that his job was to be the man in every situation, the one who hurls himself into danger, fearlessly, and resolves every problem. But he was fragile. For weeks after that episode, he saw Giuseppina in every dark corner of the house, and he got worse, so I neglected some of my obligations to help him calm down. He was the only person in the neighborhood I saw more or less regularly until I took my graduation exams. I had just a glimpse of Lila, next to her husband, at Giuseppina’s funeral, while she hugged Carmen, who was sobbing. She and Stefano had sent a large wreath on whose violet ribbon the condolences of the Carracci spouses could be read.

It wasn’t because of the exams that I stopped seeing Antonio. The two things happened to coincide, because just then he came to see me, rather relieved, to tell me that he had accepted a job from the Solara brothers. I didn’t like it, it seemed to me another sign of his illness. He hated the Solaras. He had scuffled with them as a boy to defend his sister. He, Pasquale, and Enzo had beaten up Marcello and Michele and destroyed their car. But the main thing was that he had left me because I went to ask Marcello for his help in getting Antonio out of military service. Why, then, had he succumbed like that? He gave me confused explanations. He said that in the Army he had learned that if you are a simple soldier you owe obedience to anyone who wears stripes. He said that order is better than disorder. He said he had learned how you come up behind a man and kill him before he has even heard you arrive. I understood that the illness had something to do with it but that the real problem was poverty. He had presented himself at the bar to ask for work. And Marcello had treated him a little roughly but then had offered him a fixed amount each month—he put it like that—without, however, a precise duty, only to be available.

“Available?”

“Yes.”

“Available for what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Forget it, Antò.”

He didn’t. And because of that job he ended up quarreling with both Pasquale and Enzo, who had returned from military service more taciturn than before, more inflexible. Illness or not, neither of them could forgive Antonio for that decision. Pasquale, although he was engaged to Ada, went so far as to threaten him, he said that, brother-in-law or not, he didn’t want to see him anymore.

I quickly got away from these problems and concentrated on my graduation exam. While I studied day and night, sometimes, overwhelmed by the heat, I thought again about the previous summer, before Pinuccia left, when Lila, Nino, and I were a happy trio, or at least so it seemed to me. But I repressed every image, and even the faintest echo of a word: I allowed no distractions.

The exam was a crucial moment of my life. In a couple of hours I wrote an essay on the role of Nature in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi, putting in, along with lines I knew by heart, finely written reworkings from the textbook of Italian literary history; but, most important, I handed in my Latin and Greek tests when my schoolmates, including Alfonso, had barely started on it. This attracted the attention of the examiners, in particular of an old, extremely thin teacher, with a pink suit and freshly coiffed, pale-blue hair, who kept smiling at me. But the real turning point took place during the oral exams. I was praised by all the professors, but in particular I gained the approval of the examiner with the blue hair. She had been struck by my essay not only because of what I said but because of how I said it.

“You write very well,” she said, with an accent I didn’t recognize, but anyway far from Neapolitan.

“Thank you.”

“Do you really think that nothing is fated to last, not even poetry?”

“That’s what Leopardi thinks.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think that beauty is a sham.”

“Like the Leopardian garden?”

I didn’t know anything about Leopardian gardens, but I answered, “Yes. Like the sea on a calm day. Or like a sunset. Or like the sky at night. It’s like face powder patted on over the horror. If you take it away, we are left alone with our fear.”

The sentences came easily, I uttered them with an inspired cadence. And, besides, I wasn’t improvising, it was an adaptation of what I had written in the essay.

“What faculty do you intend to choose?”

I didn’t know much about faculties, that meaning of the term was barely familiar to me. I was evasive: