“Ah.”
“But he’s a Communist. His father, also a Communist, in the court’s opinion murdered my father-in-law, who had made money on the black market and as a loan shark. And Pasquale is like his father, he has never agreed on the question of peace, not even with the Communists, his comrades. But, even though my husband’s money comes directly from my father-in-law’s money, Pasquale and I are close friends.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
Lila made a self-mocking face.
“I don’t, either, I was hoping to understand by listening to the two of you.”
That was it, she said nothing else. But in speaking she hadn’t used her normal aggressive tone of voice, she seriously seemed to want us to help her understand, since the life of the neighborhood was a tangled skein. She had spoken in dialect most of the time, as if to indicate, modestly: I don’t use tricks, I speak as I am. And she had summarized disparate things frankly, without seeking, as she usually did, a thread that would hold them together. And in fact neither she nor I had ever heard that word-formula loaded with cultural and political contempt: shopkeepers. And in fact neither she nor I knew anything about taxes: our parents, friends, boyfriends, husbands, relatives acted as if they didn’t exist, and school taught nothing that had to do even vaguely with politics. Yet Lila still managed to disrupt what had until that moment been a new and thrilling afternoon. Right after that exchange, Nino tried to return to his subject but he faltered, he went back to telling funny anecdotes about life with Bruno. He said they ate only fried eggs and salami, he said that they drank a lot of wine. Then he seemed embarrassed by his own stories and appeared relieved when Pinuccia and Bruno, their hair wet, came back, eating coconut.
“That was really fun,” Pina exclaimed, but with the air of one who wants to say: You two bitches, you sent me off by myself with someone I don’t even know.
When the two boys left I walked with them a little way, just to make it clear that they were my friends and had come because of me.
Nino said moodily, “Lina really got lost, what a shame.”
I nodded yes, said goodbye, stood for a while with my feet in the water to calm myself.
When we got home, Pinuccia and I were lively, Lila thoughtful. Pinuccia told Nunzia about the visit of the two boys and appeared unexpectedly pleased with Bruno, who had taken the trouble to make sure that her child wasn’t born with a craving for coconut. He’s well brought up, she said, a student but not too boring: he seems not to care about how he’s dressed but everything he has on, from his bathing suit to his shirt and his sandals, is expensive. She appeared curious about the fact that someone could be wealthy in a fashion different from that of her brother, Rino, the Solaras. She made a remark that struck me: At the bar on the beach he bought me this and that without showing off.
Her mother-in-law, who, for the entire length of that vacation, never went to the beach but took care of the shopping, the house, preparing dinner and also the lunch that we carried to the beach the next day, listened as if her daughter-in-law were recounting to her an enchanted world. Naturally she noticed immediately that her daughter was preoccupied, and kept glancing at her questioningly. But Lila was just distracted. She caused no trouble of any type, she allowed Pinuccia to sleep with her again, she wished everyone good night. Then she did something completely unexpected. I had just gone to bed when she appeared in the little room.
“Will you give me one of your books?” she asked.
I looked at her in bewilderment. She wanted to read? How long since she had opened a book, three, four years? And why now had she decided to start again? I took the volume of Beckett, the one I used to kill the mosquitoes, and gave it to her. It seemed the most accessible text I had.
47
The week passed, between long waits and encounters that ended too quickly. The two boys kept to a rigorous schedule. They woke at six in the morning, they studied until lunchtime, at three they set out for their date with us, at seven they went home, had dinner, and resumed studying. Nino never came by himself. He and Bruno, although so different in every way, got along well, and especially when it came to us they seemed to gain confidence from each other’s presence.
Pinuccia from the start did not share the hypothesis of their companionship. She claimed that they were neither particularly friendly nor particularly close. In her view it was a relationship that was sustained completely by the patience of Bruno, who was good-natured and so accepted without complaint the fact that Nino talked his head off from morning till night with all that nonsense that was constantly coming out of his mouth. “Nonsense, yes,” she repeated, but then apologized, with a touch of sarcasm, for having described in that way the talk that I, too, liked so much. “You’re students,” she said, “and it’s logical that you’re the only ones who understand what you’re saying; but wouldn’t you agree, at least, that the rest of us get a little fed up?”
Those words pleased me greatly. They ratified in the presence of Lila, a mute witness, that between Nino and me there was a sort of exclusive relationship, in which it was hard to interfere. But one day Pinuccia said to Bruno and to Lila, in a disparaging tone, “Let’s leave those two to act like intellectuals and go swimming, the water is lovely.” Act like intellectuals was clearly a way of saying that the things we talked about didn’t interest us seriously, it was an attitude, a performance. And while I didn’t particularly mind that formulation, it annoyed Nino a lot, and he broke off in the middle of a sentence. He jumped to his feet, ran off and dived into the water, paying no attention to the temperature, splashed us as we started in, shivering and begging him to stop, then went on to fight with Bruno as if he wanted to drown him.
There, I thought, he’s full of grand thoughts, but if he wants to he can also be lighthearted and fun. So why does he only show me his serious side? Has Professor Galiani convinced him that all I’m interested in is studying? Or is it me, do I create that impression, with my glasses, the way I speak?
From that moment I noticed with increasing bitterness that the afternoons slipped away, leaving words burdened with his anxiety to express himself and mine to anticipate a concept, to hear him say that he agreed with me. He never took me by the hand, never invited me to sit on the edge of his towel. When I saw Bruno and Pinuccia laughing at silly things I envied them, I thought: How much I would like to laugh with Nino like that — I don’t want anything, I don’t expect anything, I’d just like a little intimacy, even if it’s polite, the way it is between Pinuccia and Bruno.
Lila seemed to have other problems. For the whole week she seemed tranquil. She spent a great part of the morning in the water, swimming back and forth, following a line parallel to the shore and a few meters away from it. Pinuccia and I kept her company, insisting on instructing her even though by now she swam much better than we did. But soon we got cold and went to lie on the hot sand, while she continued to exercise with steady arm strokes, feet kicking lightly, rhythmic mouthfuls of air as Sarratore the father had taught her. She always has to overdo it, Pinuccia grumbled in the sun, caressing her belly. And often I got up and shouted, “Enough swimming, you’ve been in the water too long, you’ll catch cold.” But Lila paid no attention and came out only when she was livid, her eyes white, her lips blue, her fingertips wrinkled. I waited for her on the shore with her towel, warmed in the sun; I put it around her shoulders and rubbed her energetically.
When the two boys, who didn’t skip a single day, arrived, either we took another swim together — though Lila generally refused, she stayed on her towel, watching us from the shore — or we all went for a walk and she lagged behind, picking up shells, or, if Nino and I started talking about the world, she listened attentively but rarely said anything. In the meantime, small habits became established, and I was struck by her insistence that they be respected. For example, Bruno always arrived with cold drinks that he bought on the way, at a bar on the beach, and one day she pointed out to him that he had brought me a soda whereas usually I had orangeade; I said, “Thanks, Bruno, this is fine,” but she made him go and exchange it. For example, Pinuccia and Bruno at a certain point in the afternoon went to get fresh coconut, and although they invited us to go with them, it never occurred to Lila to do so, or to me or Nino: it thus became completely normal for them to go off dry, return wet from a swim, and bring coconut, with the whitest flesh, and so if it seemed that they might forget Lila would say, “And where’s the coconut today?”