I observed her silently as she moved through the house; I was enraged by her capacity to travel through the most depressing labyrinths, holding on to the thread of her declaration of war without showing it. I thought of what her husband had told me, his words about the power that Lila held back like the spring of a dangerous device. I looked at her stomach and imagined that truly inside it, every day, every night, she was fighting a battle to destroy the life that Stefano wanted to insert there by force. How long will she resist, I wondered, but I didn’t dare to ask explicit questions, I knew she would consider them disagreeable.
A little later Pinuccia arrived, apparently to visit her sister-in-law. But in fact ten minutes afterward Rino showed up, and he and Pina began kissing, practically right in front of us, in a way so excessive that Lila and I exchanged looks. When Pina said she wanted to see the view, he followed her, and they shut themselves in a room for a good half hour.
This happened often. Lila talked about it with a mixture of irritation and sarcasm, and I was envious of the couple’s ease: no fear, no misery, when they reappeared they were more contented than before. Rino went to the kitchen to get something to eat; returning, he talked about shoes with his sister, he said that things were constantly improving, and tried to get suggestions from her that he could later take credit for with the Solaras.
“You know that Marcello and Michele want to put your picture in the store in Piazza dei Martiri?” he asked suddenly, in an appealing tone.
“It doesn’t seem appropriate,” Pinuccia immediately interrupted.
“Why not?” Rino asked.
“What sort of question is that? If she wants, Lina can put the picture in the new grocery: she’s going to run it, no? If I’m getting the shop in Piazza dei Martiri, will you let me decide what goes in it?”
She spoke as if she were defending Lila’s rights against her brother’s intrusiveness. In fact, we all knew that she was defending herself and her own future. She was tired of depending on Stefano, she wanted to quit the grocery store, and she liked the idea of being the proprietor of a store in the center of the city. So a small war had been going on for some time between Rino and Michele, whose object was the management of the shoe store, a war inflamed by pressure from their respective fiancées: Rino insisted that Pinuccia should do it, Michele that Gigliola should. But Pinuccia was the more aggressive and had no doubt that she would get the best of it; she knew that she could add the authority of her brother to that of her fiancé. And so at every opportunity she put on airs, like someone who has already made the leap, has left behind the old neighborhood and now decrees what is suitable and what is not for the sophisticated customers in the center.
I realized that Rino was afraid his sister would take the offensive, but Lila displayed complete indifference. Then he checked his watch to let us all know that he was very busy, and said in the tone of one who sees into the future, “In my opinion that photograph has great commercial possibilities.” Then he kissed Pina, who immediately drew back, to signal disapproval, and left.
We girls remained. Pinuccia, hoping to use my authority to settle the question, asked me, sulkily, “Lenù, what do you think? Do you think the photo of Lina should stay in Piazza dei Martiri?”
I said, in Italian, “It’s Stefano who should decide, and since he went to the dressmaker purposely to get it removed from her window, I consider it out of the question that he’ll give permission.”
Pinuccia glowed with satisfaction, and almost shouted, “My goodness, how smart you are, Lenù.”
I waited for Lila to have her say. There was a long silence, then she spoke just to me: “How much do you want to bet you’re wrong? Stefano will give his permission.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to bet?”
“If you lose, you must never again pass with anything less than the best grades.”
I looked at her in embarrassment. We hadn’t spoken about my difficulties, I didn’t even think she knew, but she was well informed and now was reproaching me. You weren’t up to it, she was saying, your grades fell. She expected from me what she would have done in my place. She really wanted me fixed in the role of someone who spends her life with books, while she had money, nice clothes, a house, television, a car, took everything, granted everything.
“And if you lose?” I asked, with a shade of bitterness.
That look of hers returned instantly, shot through dark slits.
“I’ll enroll in a private school, start studying again, and I swear I’ll get my diploma along with you and do better than you.”
Along with you and do better than you. Was that what she had in mind? I felt as if everything that was roiling inside me in that terrible time — Antonio, Nino, the unhappiness with the nothing that was my life — had been sucked up by a broad sigh.
“Are you serious?”
“When is a bet ever made as a joke?”
Pinuccia interrupted, aggressively.
“Lina, don’t start acting crazy the way you always do: you have the new grocery store, Stefano can’t manage it alone.” Immediately, however, she controlled herself, adding with false sweetness, “Besides, I’d like to know when you and Stefano are going to make me an aunt.”
She used that sweet-sounding formula but her tone seemed resentful to me, and I felt the reasons for that resentment irritatingly mixed with mine. Pinuccia meant: you’re married, my brother gives you everything, now do what you’re supposed to do. And in fact what’s the sense of being Signora Carracci if you’re going to shut all the doors, barricade yourself, obstruct, guard a poisoned fury in your stomach? Is it possible that you must always do harm, Lila? When will you stop? Will your energy diminish, will you be distracted, will you finally collapse, like a sleepy sentinel? When will you grow wide and sit at the cash register in the new neighborhood, with your stomach swelling, and make Pinuccia an aunt, and me, me, leave me to go my own way?
“Who knows,” Lila answered, and her eyes grew large and deep again.
“Am I going to become a mamma first?” said her sister-in-law, smiling.
“If you’re always pasted to Rino like that, it’s possible.”
They had a little skirmish; I didn’t stay to listen.
20
To placate my mother, I had to find a summer job. Naturally I went to the stationer. She welcomed me the way you’d welcome a schoolteacher or the doctor, she called her daughters, who were playing in the back of the shop, and they embraced me, kissed me, wanted me to play with them. When I mentioned that I was looking for a job, she said that she was ready to send her daughters to the Sea Garden right away, without waiting for August, just so that they could spend their days with a good, intelligent girl like me.
“Right away when?” I asked.
“Next week?”
“Wonderful.”
“I’ll give you a little more money than last year.”
That, finally, seemed to be good news. I went home satisfied, and my mood didn’t change even when my mother said that as usual I was lucky, going swimming and sitting in the sun wasn’t a job.
Encouraged, the next day I went to see Maestra Oliviero. I was upset about having to tell her that I hadn’t particularly distinguished myself in school that year, but I needed to see her; I had to tactfully remind her to get me the books for the next school year. And then I thought it would please her to know that Lila, now that she had made a good marriage and had so much free time, might start studying again. Reading in her eyes the reaction to that would help soothe the unease it had provoked in me.