I knocked and knocked, the teacher didn’t come to the door. I asked the neighbors, and around the neighborhood, and returned an hour later, but still she didn’t answer. And yet no one had seen her go out, nor had I met her on the streets or in the shops. Since she was a woman alone, old, and not well, I went back to the neighbors. The woman who lived next door decided to ask her son for help. The young man got into the apartment by climbing from the balcony of his mother’s apartment into one of the teacher’s windows. He found her on the kitchen floor, in her nightgown — she had fainted. The doctor was called and he thought that she should be admitted to the hospital immediately. They carried her downstairs. I saw her as she emerged from the entrance, in disarray, her face swollen, she who always came to school carefully groomed. Her eyes were frightened. I gave her a nod of greeting, and she lowered her gaze. They settled her in a car that took off blasting its horn.
The heat that year must have had a cruel effect on frailer bodies. In the afternoon Melina’s children could be heard in the courtyard calling their mother in increasingly worried voices. When the cries didn’t stop, I went to see what was happening and ran into Ada. She said anxiously, her eyes shiny with tears, that Melina couldn’t be found. Right afterward Antonio arrived, out of breath and pale; he didn’t even look at me but hurried off. Soon half the neighborhood was looking for Melina, even Stefano, who, still in his grocer’s smock, got in the convertible, with Ada beside him, and drove slowly along the streets. I followed Antonio, and we ran here and there, without saying a word. We ended up near the ponds, and made our way through the tall grass, calling his mother. His cheeks were hollow, he had dark circles under his eyes. I took his hand, wanting to be of comfort, but he repulsed me, with an odious phrase, he said: Leave me alone, you’re no woman. I felt a sharp pain in my chest, but just then we saw Melina. She was sitting in the water, cooling off. Her face and neck were sticking out from the greenish surface, her hair was soaked, her eyes red, her lips matted with leaves and mud. She was silent: she whose attacks of madness had for ten years taken the form of shouting or singing.
We brought her home, Antonio supporting her on one side, I on the other. People seemed relieved, called to her, she waved weakly. I saw Lila next to the gate; isolated in her house in the new neighborhood, she must have heard the news late, and hadn’t taken part in the search. I knew that she felt a strong bond with Melina, but it struck me that, while everyone was showing signs of sympathy, and here was Ada running toward her, crying mamma, followed by Stefano — who had left the car in the middle of the stradone with the doors open, and had the happy expression of someone who has had ugly thoughts but now discovers that all is well — she stood apart with an expression that was hard to describe. She seemed to be moved by the pitiful sight of the widow: dirty, smiling faintly, her light clothes soaked and muddy, the outline of her wasted body visible under the material, the feeble wave of greeting to friends and acquaintances. But Lila also seemed to be wounded by it, and frightened, as if she felt inside the same disruption. I nodded to her, but she didn’t respond. I gave up Melina to her daughter, then, and tried to join Lila, I also wanted to tell her about Maestra Oliviero, about the terrible thing Antonio had said to me. But I couldn’t find her; she was gone.
21
When I saw Lila again, I realized immediately that she felt bad and tended to make me feel bad, too. We spent a morning at her house in an atmosphere that seemed to be playful. In fact she insisted, with growing spitefulness, that I try on all her clothes, even though they didn’t fit me. The game became torture. She was taller and thinner; everything of hers that I put on made me look ridiculous. But she wouldn’t admit it, she said all you need is an adjustment here or there, and yet her mood darkened as she gazed at me, as if my appearance offended her.
At a certain point she exclaimed that’s enough: she looked as if she had seen a ghost. Then she pulled herself together, and, assuming a frivolous tone, told me that a couple of nights earlier she had gone to have ice cream with Pasquale and Ada.
I was in my slip, helping her put the clothes back on the hangers.
“With Pasquale and Ada?”
“Yes.”
“And Stefano, too?”
“Just me.”
“Did they invite you?”
“No, I asked them.”
And, as though she wanted to surprise me, she added that she hadn’t confined herself to that brief visit to the old world of her girlhood: the next day she had gone to have a pizza with Enzo and Carmela.
“Also by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“And what does Stefano say?”
She made a grimace of indifference. “Being married doesn’t mean leading the life of an old lady. If he wants to come with me, fine; if he’s too tired in the evening, I go out by myself.”
“How was it?”
“I had fun.”
I hoped she couldn’t read the disappointment in my face. We saw each other frequently, she could have said: Tonight I’m going out with Ada, Pasquale, Enzo, Carmela, do you want to come? Instead she had said nothing, she had arranged and managed those outings by herself, in secret, as if they had been not our friends forever but only hers. And now she was telling me in detail, with an air of satisfaction, everything they had said: Ada was worried, Melina ate almost nothing and threw up whatever she did eat, Pasquale was anxious about his mother, Giuseppina, who couldn’t sleep, felt a heaviness in her legs, had palpitations, and when she returned from visiting her husband in prison wept inconsolably. I listened. I noticed that, more than usual, she had an involved way of talking. She chose emotionally charged words, she described Melina Cappuccio and Giuseppina Peluso as if their bodies had seized hers, imposing on it the same contracted or inflated forms, the same bad feelings. As she spoke, she touched her face, her breast, her stomach, her hips as if they were no longer hers, and showed that she knew everything about those women, down to the tiniest details, in order to prove that no one told me anything but told her everything, or, worse, in order to make me feel that I was wrapped in a fog, unable to see the suffering of the people around me. She spoke of Giuseppina as if she had kept up with her, despite the vortex of her engagement and marriage; she spoke of Melina as if the mother of Ada and Antonio had always been in her mind and she were thoroughly familiar with her madness. Then she went on to enumerate many other people in the neighborhood, people whom I hardly knew but whose histories she seemed to know, as if she had a sort of long-distance involvement in their lives. Finally she announced:
“I also had ice cream with Antonio.”
That name was a punch in the stomach.
“How is he?”
“Fine.”
“Did he say anything about me?”
“No, nothing.”
“When does he leave?”
“In September.”
“Marcello did nothing to help him.”
“It was predictable.”
Predictable? If it was predictable, I thought, that the Solaras would do nothing, why did you take me there? And why do you, who are married, now want to see your friends again, like that, by yourself? And why did you have ice cream with Antonio without telling me, knowing that he is my old boyfriend and that though he doesn’t want to see me anymore I would like to see him? Do you want revenge because I went driving with your husband and didn’t report to you a word of what we said to each other? I dressed nervously, mumbled that I had things to do, had to go.
“I have something else to tell you.”
In a serious voice she said that Rino, Marcello, and Michele had wanted Stefano to go to Piazza dei Martiri to see how well the shop was coming along, and that the three of them, amid sacks of cement and cans of paint and brushes, had pointed out the wall opposite the entrance and told him they were thinking of putting the enlargement of the photograph of her in her wedding dress there. Stefano had listened, then he had answered that certainly it would be a good advertisement for the shoes, but that it didn’t seem to him suitable. The three had insisted, he had said no to Marcello, no to Michele, and no to Rino as well. In other words I had won the bet: her husband had not given in to the Solaras.