Once, she left the cash drawer open and, staring at the money, said, angrily, “I earn this with my labor and Carmen’s. But nothing in there is mine, Lenù, it’s made with Stefano’s money. And Stefano to make money started with his father’s money. Without what Don Achille put under the mattress, working the black market and loan-sharking, today there would not be this and there would not be the shoe factory. Not only that. Stefano, Rino, my father would not have sold a single shoe without the money and the connections of the Solara family, who are also loan sharks. Is it clear what I’ve got myself into?”
Clear, but I didn’t understand the point of those discussions.
“It’s water under the bridge,” I said, and reminded her of the conclusions she had come to when she was engaged to Stefano. “What you’re talking about is what’s behind us, we are something else.”
But although she had invented that theory, she did not seem convinced by it. She said to me, and I have a vivid memory of the phrase, which was in dialect:
“I don’t like what I’ve done and what I’m doing.”
I thought that she must be spending time with Pasquale, who had always had opinions like that. I thought that maybe their relationship had been strengthened by the fact that Pasquale was engaged to Ada, who worked in the old grocery, and was the brother of Carmen, who worked with her in the new one. I went home dissatisfied, struggling to hold off an old childhood feeling, from the period when I suffered because Lila and Carmela had become friends and tried to exclude me. I calmed myself down by studying until very late.
One night as I was reading Il Mattino, my eyes heavy with sleep, a short, unsigned article jolted me awake like an electric charge. I couldn’t believe it — the article was about the shop in Piazza dei Martiri and it praised the panel that Lila and I had created.
I read and reread it, I can still recall a few lines: “The young women who manage the friendly shop in Piazza dei Martiri did not want to reveal the name of the artist. A pity. Whoever invented that anomalous mixture of photography and color has an avant-garde imagination that, with sublime ingenuity but also with unusual energy, subdues the material to the urgent needs of an intimate, potent grief.” Otherwise, it had generous praise for the shoe store, “an important sign of the dynamism that, in recent years, has invested Neapolitan entrepreneurial endeavors.”
I didn’t sleep a wink.
After school I hurried to find Lila. The shop was empty, Carmen had gone home to her mother, Giuseppina, who wasn’t well, Lila was on the phone with a local supplier who had not delivered mozzarella or provolone or I don’t remember what. I heard her shout, curse, I was upset. I thought maybe the man at the other end was old, he would be insulted, he would send one of his sons to take revenge. I thought: Why does she always overdo it? When she got off the phone she gave a snort of contempt and turned to me to apologize: “If I don’t act like that, they won’t even listen to me.”
I showed her the newspaper. She gave it a distracted glance, said, “I know about it.” She explained that it had been an initiative of Michele Solara’s, carried out as usual without consulting anyone. Look, she said, and went to the cash register, took out of the drawer a couple of creased clippings, handed them to me. Those, too, were about the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. One was a small article in Roma, whose author lavished praise on the Solaras, but made not the slightest mention of the panel. The other was an article spread over three columns, in Napoli Notte, and in it the shop sounded like a royal palace. The space was described in an extravagant Italian that praised the furnishings, the splendid illumination, the marvelous shoes, and, above all, “the kindness, the sweetness, and the grace of the two seductive Nereids, Miss Gigliola Spagnuolo and Miss Giuseppina Carracci, marvelous young women upon whom rests the fate of an enterprise that stands high among the flourishing commercial activities of our city.” You had to get to the end to find a mention of the panel, which was dismissed in a few lines. The author of the article called it “a crude mess, an out-of-tune note in a place of majestic refinement.”
“Did you see the signature?” Lila asked, teasingly.
The article in Roma was signed “d.s.” and the article in Napoli Notte bore the signature of Donato Sarratore, Nino’s father.
“Yes.”
“And what do you say?”
“What should I say?”
“Like father like son, you should say.”
She laughed mirthlessly. She explained that, seeing the growing success of Cerullo shoes and the Solara shop, Michele had decided to publicize the business and had distributed a few gratuities here and there, thanks to which the city newspapers had promptly come out with admiring articles. Advertising, in other words. Paid for. Pointless even to read. In those articles, she said, there was not a single true word.
I was disappointed. I didn’t like the way she belittled the newspapers, which I was diligently trying to read, sacrificing sleep. And I didn’t like her emphasis on the relationship between Nino and the author of the two articles. What need was there to associate Nino with his father, a pompous fabricator of factitious phrases?
30
Yet it was thanks to those phrases that in a short time the Solaras’ shop and Cerullo shoes became more successful. Gigliola and Pinuccia boasted a lot about how they had been quoted in the papers, but the success did not diminish their rivalry and each went on to give herself the credit for the shop’s fortunes, and began to consider the other an obstacle to further successes. On a single point they continued to agree: Lila’s panel was an abomination. They were rude to anyone who, in a refined little voice, stopped in just to have a look at it. And they framed the articles from Roma and Napoli Notte, but not the one from Il Mattino.
Between Christmas and Easter, the Solaras and the Carraccis made a lot of money. Stefano, especially, drew a sigh of relief. The new grocery and the old one were prospering, the Cerullo shoe factory was working at full capacity. In addition, the shop in Piazza dei Martiri revealed what he had always known, and that is that the shoes Lila had designed years before sold well not only on the Rettifilo, Via Foria, and Corso Garibaldi but were coveted by the wealthy, those who casually reached for their wallets. An important market, therefore, which had to be consolidated and expanded.
As proof of that success, in the spring some good imitations of Cerullo shoes began to appear in the shopwindows of the outlying neighborhoods. These shoes were essentially identical to Lila’s, but slightly modified by a fringe, a stud. Protests, threats immediately blocked their circulation: Michele Solara straightened things out. But he didn’t stop there, he soon reached the conclusion that new models had to be designed. For that reason, one evening in the shop in Piazza dei Martiri, he summoned his brother Marcello, the Carraccis, Rino, and, naturally, Gigliola and Pinuccia. Surprisingly, Stefano showed up without Lila, he said that his wife was sorry, she was tired.