“They have to be chic,” he urged, “you have to insist on that point.”
“She’ll do what she wants, as usual.”
“I can advise her, she’ll listen to me,” said Michele.
“There’s no need.”
I went to see Lila shortly after that agreement, and she spoke to me about it herself. I had just come from school, the weather was already getting hot, and I was tired. She was alone in the grocery and for the moment she seemed as if relieved. She said that she wouldn’t design anything, not even a sandal, not even a slipper.
“They’ll get mad.”
“What can I do about it?”
“It’s money, Lila.”
“They already have enough.”
It was her usual sort of obstinacy, I thought. She was like that, as soon as someone told her to focus on something the wish to do so vanished. But I soon realized that it wasn’t a matter of her character or even of disgust with the business affairs of her husband, Rino, and the Solaras, reinforced by the Communist arguments of Pasquale and Carmen. There was something more and she spoke slowly, seriously, about it.
“Nothing comes to mind,” she said.
“Have you tried?”
“Yes. But it’s not the way it was when I was twelve.”
The shoes — I understood — had come out of her brain only that one time and they wouldn’t again, she didn’t have any others. That game was over, she didn’t know how to start it again. The smell of leather repelled her, of skins, what she had done she no longer knew how to do. And then everything had changed. Fernando’s small shop had been consumed by the new spaces, by the workers’ benches, by three machines. Her father had as it were grown smaller, he didn’t even quarrel with his oldest son, he worked and that was all. Even affections were as if deflated. If she still felt tender toward her mother when she came to the grocery to fill her shopping bags, free, as if they still lived in poverty, if she still gave little gifts to her younger siblings, she could no longer feel the bond with Rino. Ruined, broken. The need to help and protect him had diminished. Thus the motivations for the fantasy of the shoes had vanished, the soil in which they had germinated was arid. It was most of all, she said suddenly, a way of showing you that I could do something well even if I had stopped going to school. Then she laughed nervously, glancing obliquely at me to see my reaction.
I didn’t answer, prevented by a strong emotion. Lila was like that? She didn’t have my stubborn diligence? She drew out of herself thoughts, shoes, words written and spoken, complicated plans, rages and inventions, only to show me something of herself? Having lost that motivation, she was lost? Even the treatment to which she had subjected her wedding photograph — even that she would never be able to repeat? Everything, in her, was the result of the chaos of an occasion?
I felt that in some part of me a long painful tension was relaxing, and her wet eyes, her fragile smile moved me. But it didn’t last. She continued to speak, she touched her forehead with a gesture that was customary with her, she said, regretfully, “I always have to prove that I can be better,” and she added darkly, “When we opened this place, Stefano showed me how to cheat on the weight; and at first I shouted you’re a thief, that’s how you make money, and then I couldn’t resist, I showed him that I had learned and immediately found my own ways to cheat and I showed him, and I was constantly thinking up new ones: I’ll cheat you all, I cheat you on the weight and a thousand other things, I cheat the neighborhood, don’t trust me, Lenù, don’t trust what I say and do.”
I was uneasy. In the space of a few seconds she had changed, already I no longer knew what she wanted. Why was she speaking to me like this now? I didn’t know if she had decided to or if the words came out of her mouth unwittingly, an impetuous stream in which the intention of reinforcing the bond between us — a real intention — was immediately swept away by the equally real need to deny it specificity: you see, with Stefano I behave the way I do with you, I act like this with everyone, I’m beauty and the beast, good and evil. She interlaced her long thin fingers, clasped them tight, asked, “Did you hear that Gigliola says the photograph caught fire by itself?”
“It’s stupid, Gigliola is mad at you.”
She gave a little laugh that was like a shock, something in her twisted too abruptly.
“I have something that hurts here, behind the eyes, something is pressing. You see the knives there? They’re too sharp — I just gave them to the knife grinder. While I’m slicing salami I think how much blood there is in a person’s body. If you put too much stuff in things, they break. Or they catch fire and burn. I’m glad the wedding picture burned. The marriage should burn, too, the shop, the shoes, the Solaras, everything.”
I realized that, no matter how she struggled, worked, proclaimed, she couldn’t get out of it: since the day of her wedding she had been pursued by an ever greater, increasingly ungovernable unhappiness, and I felt pity. I told her to be calm, she nodded yes.
“You have to try to relax.”
“Help me.”
“How.”
“Stay near me.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“It’s not true. I tell you all my secrets, even the worst, you tell me hardly anything about yourself.”
“You’re wrong. The only person I don’t hide anything from is you.”
She shook her head no energetically, she said, “Even if you’re better than me, even if you know more things, don’t leave me.”
32
They pressured her, wearing her down, and so she pretended to give in. She told Stefano that she would design the new shoes, and at the first opportunity she also told Michele. Then she summoned Rino and spoke to him exactly as he had always wanted her to: “You design them, I can’t. Design them with papa, you’re in the business, you know how to do it. But until you put them on the market and sell them, don’t tell anyone that I didn’t do them, not even Stefano.”
“And if they don’t go well?”
“It will be my fault.”
“And if they do well?”
“I’ll say how things are and you’ll get the credit you deserve.”
Rino was very pleased with that lie. He set to work with Fernando, but every so often he went to Lila in complete secrecy to show her what he had in mind. She examined the styles and at first pretended to admire them, partly because she couldn’t tolerate his anxious expression, partly to get rid of him quickly. But soon she herself marveled at how genuinely good the new shoes were — they resembled the ones now selling and yet were different. “Maybe,” she said to me one day, in an unexpectedly lighthearted tone, “I really didn’t think up those shoes, they really are my brother’s work.” And at that point she truly did seem to be rid of a weight. She rediscovered her affection for Rino, or rather she realized that she had exaggerated: that bond couldn’t be dissolved, it would never be dissolved, whatever he did, even if a rat came out of his body, a skittish horse, any sort of animal. The lie — she hypothesized — has relieved Rino of the anxiety of being inadequate, and that has taken him back to the way he was as a boy, and now he is discovering that he knows his job, that he’s good at it. As for Rino himself, he was increasingly satisfied with his sister’s praise. At the end of every consultation, he asked in a whisper for the house key and, also in complete secrecy, went to spend an hour there with Pinuccia.
For my part, I tried to show her that I would always be her friend, and on Sundays I often invited her to go out with me. Once we ventured as far as the Mostra d’Oltremare neighborhood with two of my schoolmates, who were intimidated, however, when they found out that she had been married for more than a year, and behaved respectfully, sedately, as if I had compelled them to go out with my mother. One asked her hesitantly: