“So what?” asked Ada, who was always skeptical when her fiancé came up with reckless hypotheses.
“So he wouldn’t pay what he owed the loan shark and they had him murdered.”
“Come on, you always talk such nonsense.”
It’s likely that Pasquale was exaggerating, but, first of all, no one knew who had killed Don Carlo Resta, and, second, it was, precisely, the Solaras who took over the shop, along with its stock, for very little money, even though they left Don Carlo’s wife and oldest son there to manage it.
“Out of generosity,” said Ada.
“Because they’re bastards,” said Pasquale.
I don’t remember if Antonio made comments on that episode. He was crushed by his illness, which Pasquale’s speeches in some way made more acute. It seemed to him that the dysfunction of his body was spreading to the whole neighborhood and was manifested in the bad things that happened.
The worst thing for us happened on a warm Sunday in the spring, when Pasquale and Ada and he and I were waiting in the courtyard for Carmela, who had gone up to get a pullover. Five minutes passed; Carmen looked out the window, shouted to her brother: “Pasquà, I can’t find mamma. The door of the bathroom is locked from the inside but she doesn’t answer.”
Pasquale took the stairs two at a time and we followed. We found Carmela standing anxiously in front of the bathroom door, and Pasquale knocked, politely, again and again, but no one answered. Antonio then said to his friend, indicating the door: don’t worry, I’ll put it back in place, and, grabbing the handle, he practically tore it off.
The door opened. Giuseppina Peluso had been a radiant woman, energetic, hardworking, kindly, capable of confronting all adversities. She had continued, without fail, to occupy herself with her imprisoned husband, whose arrest — I remembered — she had opposed with all her strength, when he was accused of killing Don Achille Carracci. She had thoughtfully accepted Stefano’s invitation to spend New Year’s Eve together four years earlier, pleased with that reconciliation between the families. And she had been happy when her daughter found work, thanks to Lila, in the grocery in the new neighborhood. But now, with her husband dead, evidently she was worn out, she had become in a short time a tiny woman, skin and bone, without her old vigor. She had unfastened the lamp in the bathroom, a metal plate hanging on a chain, and had attached a clothesline to the hook set in the ceiling. Then she had hanged herself by the neck.
Antonio saw her first and burst into tears. It was easier to calm Giuseppina’s children, Carmen and Pasquale, than him. He repeated to me, horrified: Did you see that her feet were bare and that the nails were long and that on one foot there was fresh red nail polish and not on the other? I hadn’t noticed but he had. He had returned from military service more convinced than before, in spite of his nervous breakdown, that his job was to be the man in every situation, the one who hurls himself into danger, fearlessly, and resolves every problem. But he was fragile. For weeks after that episode, he saw Giuseppina in every dark corner of the house, and he got worse, so I neglected some of my obligations to help him calm down. He was the only person in the neighborhood I saw more or less regularly until I took my graduation exams. I had just a glimpse of Lila, next to her husband, at Giuseppina’s funeral, while she hugged Carmen, who was sobbing. She and Stefano had sent a large wreath on whose violet ribbon the condolences of the Carracci spouses could be read.
80
It wasn’t because of the exams that I stopped seeing Antonio. The two things happened to coincide, because just then he came to see me, rather relieved, to tell me that he had accepted a job from the Solara brothers. I didn’t like it, it seemed to me another sign of his illness. He hated the Solaras. He had scuffled with them as a boy to defend his sister. He, Pasquale, and Enzo had beaten up Marcello and Michele and destroyed their car. But the main thing was that he had left me because I went to ask Marcello for his help in getting Antonio out of military service. Why, then, had he succumbed like that? He gave me confused explanations. He said that in the Army he had learned that if you are a simple soldier you owe obedience to anyone who wears stripes. He said that order is better than disorder. He said he had learned how you come up behind a man and kill him before he has even heard you arrive. I understood that the illness had something to do with it but that the real problem was poverty. He had presented himself at the bar to ask for work. And Marcello had treated him a little roughly but then had offered him a fixed amount each month — he put it like that — without, however, a precise duty, only to be available.
“Available?”
“Yes.”
“Available for what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Forget it, Antò.”
He didn’t. And because of that job he ended up quarreling with both Pasquale and Enzo, who had returned from military service more taciturn than before, more inflexible. Illness or not, neither of them could forgive Antonio for that decision. Pasquale, although he was engaged to Ada, went so far as to threaten him, he said that, brother-in-law or not, he didn’t want to see him anymore.
I quickly got away from these problems and concentrated on my graduation exam. While I studied day and night, sometimes, overwhelmed by the heat, I thought again about the previous summer, before Pinuccia left, when Lila, Nino, and I were a happy trio, or at least so it seemed to me. But I repressed every image, and even the faintest echo of a word: I allowed no distractions.
The exam was a crucial moment of my life. In a couple of hours I wrote an essay on the role of Nature in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi, putting in, along with lines I knew by heart, finely written reworkings from the textbook of Italian literary history; but, most important, I handed in my Latin and Greek tests when my schoolmates, including Alfonso, had barely started on it. This attracted the attention of the examiners, in particular of an old, extremely thin teacher, with a pink suit and freshly coiffed, pale-blue hair, who kept smiling at me. But the real turning point took place during the oral exams. I was praised by all the professors, but in particular I gained the approval of the examiner with the blue hair. She had been struck by my essay not only because of what I said but because of how I said it.
“You write very well,” she said, with an accent I didn’t recognize, but anyway far from Neapolitan.
“Thank you.”
“Do you really think that nothing is fated to last, not even poetry?”
“That’s what Leopardi thinks.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think that beauty is a sham.”
“Like the Leopardian garden?”
I didn’t know anything about Leopardian gardens, but I answered, “Yes. Like the sea on a calm day. Or like a sunset. Or like the sky at night. It’s like face powder patted on over the horror. If you take it away, we are left alone with our fear.”
The sentences came easily, I uttered them with an inspired cadence. And, besides, I wasn’t improvising, it was an adaptation of what I had written in the essay.
“What faculty do you intend to choose?”
I didn’t know much about faculties, that meaning of the term was barely familiar to me. I was evasive:
“I’ll sit the civil-service exam.”
“You won’t go to the university?”
My cheeks burned, as if I were unable to hide a sin.