Her absence did not please the Solara brothers. If Lila isn’t here, Michele said, making Gigliola nervous, what the fuck are we talking about. But Rino immediately interrupted. He asserted, lying, that he and his father had begun some time ago to think of new models and planned to introduce them at a trade show that was to be held in Arezzo in September. Michele didn’t believe him, and became still more irritable. He said that they had to come out with products that were really innovative and not with normal stuff. Finally he turned to Stefano:
“Your wife is necessary, you’ve got to make her come.”
Stefano answered with startling hostility: “My wife works hard all day in the grocery store and at night she has to stay home, she has to think of me.”
“All right,” Michele said, with a grimace, spoiling for a moment his handsome boy’s face. “But see if she can think of us, too, a little.”
The evening left everyone unhappy, but Pinuccia and Gigliola in particular. For different reasons, they found the importance that Michele gave Lila intolerable, and in the following days their disgruntlement became a dark mood that at the slightest opportunity gave rise to a quarrel.
At that point — I think it was March — an accident happened; I don’t really know how. One afternoon, during one of their daily disagreements, Gigliola slapped Pinuccia. Pinuccia complained to Rino, who, believing at the time that he was riding the crest of a wave as high as a house, came to the shop with a proprietary air and told Gigliola off. Gigliola reacted aggressively and he went so far as to threaten to fire her.
“Starting tomorrow,” he said to her, “you can go and stuff ricotta in the cannoli again.”
Then Michele showed up. Smiling, he led Rino outside, to the square, to indicate the sign over the door.
“My friend,” he said, “the shop is called Solara and you have no right to come here and tell my girlfriend: I’m firing you.”
Rino retaliated by reminding him that everything in the shop belonged to his brother-in-law, and that he made the shoes himself, so he certainly did have the right. Inside, meanwhile, Gigliola and Pinuccia, each feeling protected by her own fiancé, had already started fighting again. The two young men hurried back inside, tried to calm them down, and couldn’t. Michele lost patience and cried that he would fire them both. Not only that: he let slip that he would have Lila manage the shop.
Lila?
The shop?
The two girls were silent and the idea left even Rino speechless. Then the discussion started up again, this time focused on that outrageous statement. Gigliola, Pinuccia, and Rino were allied against Michele — what’s wrong, what use to you is Lina, we’re making money here, you can’t complain, I thought up all the shoe styles, she was a child, what could she invent — and the tension increased. Who knows how long the quarreling would have gone on if the accident I mentioned hadn’t happened. Suddenly, and it’s unclear how, the panel — the panel with the strips of black paper, the photograph, the thick patches of color — let out a rasping sound, a kind of sick breath, and burst into flame. Pinuccia had her back to the photograph when it happened. The fire blazed up behind her as if from a secret hearth and licked her hair, which crackled and would have burned completely if Rino hadn’t quickly extinguished it with his bare hands.
31
Both Rino and Michele blamed Gigliola for the fire, because she smoked secretly and so had a tiny lighter. According to Rino, Gigliola had done it on purpose: while they were all occupied by their wrangling, she had set fire to the panel, which, loaded with paper, glue, paint, had instantly burst into flames. Michele was more circumspect: Gigliola, he knew, continuously toyed with the lighter and so, unintentionally, caught up in the argument, hadn’t realized that the flame was too close to the photograph. But the girl couldn’t bear either the first hypothesis or the second, and with a fiercely combative look blamed Lila herself, that is, she blamed the disfigured image, which had caught fire spontaneously, like the Devil, who, attempting to corrupt the saints, assumed the features of a woman, but the saints called on Jesus, and the demon was transformed into flames. She added, in confirmation of her version, that Pinuccia herself had told her that her sister-in-law had the ability not to stay pregnant, and, in fact, if she was unsuccessful she would let the child drain out, rejecting the gifts of the Lord.
This gossip grew worse when Michele Solara began to go regularly to the new grocery store. He spent a lot of time joking with Lila, joking with Carmen, so that Carmen hypothesized that he came for her and on the one hand was afraid that someone would tell Enzo, doing his military service in Piedmont, while on the other she was flattered and began to flirt. Lila instead made fun of the young Solara. She heard the rumors spread by his fiancée and so she said to him: “You’d better go, we’re witches here, we’re very dangerous.”
But when I went to see her, during that period, I never found her truly cheerful. She assumed an artificial tone and was sarcastic about everything. Did she have a bruise on her arm? Stefano had caressed her too passionately. Were her eyes red from crying? Those were tears of happiness, not grief. Be careful of Michele, he liked to hurt people? No, she said, all he has to do is touch me and he’ll burn: it’s I who hurt people.
On that last point there had always been modest agreement. But Gigliola especially had no doubts by now: Lila was a witch-whore, she had cast a spell on her fiancé; that’s why he wanted her to manage the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. And for days, jealous, desperate, she wouldn’t go to work. Then she decided to talk to Pinuccia, they became allies, and moved to the offensive. Pinuccia worked on her brother, insisting that he was a happy cuckold, and then she attacked Rino, her fiancé, telling him that he wasn’t a boss but Michele’s servant. So one evening Stefano and Rino waited for Michele outside the bar, and when he appeared they made a very general speech that in substance, however, meant: leave Lila alone, you’re making her waste time, she has to work. Michele immediately got the message and replied coldly:
“What the fuck are you saying?”
“If you don’t understand it means you don’t want to understand.”
“No, my fine friends, it’s you who don’t want to understand our commercial needs. And if you won’t understand them, I necessarily have to see to them.”
“Meaning?” Stefano asked.
“Your wife is wasted in the grocery.”
“In what sense?”
“In Piazza dei Martiri she would make in a month what your sister and Gigliola couldn’t make in a hundred years.”
“Explain yourself.”
“Lina needs to command, Ste’. She needs to have a responsibility. She should invent things. She ought to start thinking right away about the new shoe styles.”
They argued and finally, amid a thousand fine distinctions, came to an agreement. Stefano absolutely refused to let his wife go and work in Piazza dei Martiri: the new grocery was going well and to take Lila out of there would be foolish; but he agreed to have her design new models right away, at least for winter. Michele said that not to let Lila run the shoe store was stupid, and with a vaguely threatening coolness he put off the discussion until after the summer; he considered it a done deal that she would start designing new shoes.