But soon she forgot about it. In general the days passed over her without provoking the least emotion. She mostly took care of her son, the reading of a book might last weeks, two or three pages a day. In the gardens, if the baby was sleeping, every so often she let herself be distracted by the branches of the trees that were putting out new buds, and she wrote in one of her battered notebooks.
Once she noticed that there was a funeral in the church, and when, with the baby, she went to see, she discovered that it was the funeral of Enzo’s mother. She saw him, stiff, pale, but she didn’t offer her condolences. Another time she was sitting on a bench with the carriage beside her, bent over a large volume with a green spine, when a skinny old woman appeared before her, leaning on a cane; her cheeks seemed to be sucked into her throat by her very breathing.
“Guess who I am.”
Lila had trouble recognizing her, but finally the woman’s eyes, in a flash, recalled the imposing Maestra Oliviero. She jumped up full of emotion, about to embrace her, but the teacher drew back in annoyance. Lila then showed her the baby, said proudly, “His name is Gennaro,” and since everyone praised her son she expected that the teacher would, too. But Maestra Oliviero completely ignored the child, she seemed interested only in the heavy book that her former pupil was holding, a finger in the pages to mark her place.
“What is it?”
Lila became nervous. The teacher’s looks had changed, her voice, everything about her, except her eyes and the sharp tones, the same tones as when she had asked her a question in the classroom. So she, too, showed that she hadn’t changed, she answered in a lazy yet aggressive way: “The title is Ulysses.”
“Is it about the Odyssey?”
“No, it’s about how prosaic life is today.”
“And so?”
“That’s all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck.”
The teacher reproached her for that last word, as in school, and Lila posed as an insolent girl, and laughed, so that the old woman became even sterner, asked her how the book was. She answered that it was difficult and she didn’t completely understand it.
“Then why are you reading it?”
“Because someone I knew read it. But he didn’t like it.”
“And you?”
“I do.”
“Even if it’s difficult?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t read books that you can’t understand, it’s bad for you.”
“A lot of things are bad for you.”
“You’re not happy?”
“So-so.”
“You were destined for great things.”
“I’ve done them: I’m married and I’ve had a baby.”
“Everyone can do that.”
“I’m like everyone.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No, you are wrong, and you always were wrong.”
“You were rude as a child and you’re rude now.”
“Clearly you weren’t much of a teacher as far as I’m concerned.”
Maestra Oliviero looked at her carefully and Lila read in her face the anxiety of being wrong. The teacher was trying to find in her eyes the intelligence she had seen when she was a child, she wanted confirmation that she hadn’t been wrong. She thought: I have to remove from my face every sign that makes her right, I don’t want her to preach to me how I’m wasted. But meanwhile she felt exposed to yet another examination, and, contradictorily, she feared the result. She is discovering that I am stupid, she said to herself, her heart pounding harder, she is discovering that my whole family is stupid, that my forebears were stupid and my descendants will be stupid, that Gennaro will be stupid. She became upset, she put the book in her bag, she grabbed the handle of the carriage, she said nervously that she had to go. Crazy old lady, she still believed she could rap me on the knuckles. She left the teacher in the gardens, small, clutching her cane, consumed by an illness that she would not give in to.
99
Lila began to be obsessed with stimulating her son’s intelligence. She didn’t know what books to buy and asked Alfonso to find out from the booksellers. Alfonso brought her a couple of volumes and she dedicated herself to them. In her notebooks I found notes on how she was reading the difficult texts: she struggled to advance, page by page, but after a while she lost the thread, she thought of something else; yet she forced her eye to keep gliding along the lines, her fingers turned the pages automatically, and by the end she had the impression that, even though she hadn’t understood, the words had nevertheless entered her brain and inspired thoughts. Starting there, she reread the book and, reading, corrected her thoughts or amplified them, until the text was no longer useful, she looked for others.
Her husband came home at night and found that she hadn’t cooked dinner, that she had the baby playing games she had invented herself. He got angry, but she, as had happened for a long time, didn’t react. It was as if she didn’t hear him, as if the house were inhabited only by her and her son, and when she got up and started cooking she did it not because Stefano was hungry but because she was.
In those months their relationship, after a long period of mutual tolerance, began to deteriorate again. Stefano told her one night that he was tired of her, of the baby, of everything. Another time he said that he had married too young, without understanding what he was doing. But once she answered, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, either, I’ll take the baby and go,” and he, instead of telling her to get out, lost his temper, as he hadn’t for a long time, and hit her in front of the child, who stared at her from the blanket on the floor, dazed by the uproar. Her nose dripping blood and Stefano shouting insults at her, Lila turned to her son laughing, told him in Italian (she had been speaking to him only in Italian for a long time), “Papa’s playing, we’re having fun.”
I don’t know why, but at a certain point she began to take care of Dino, her nephew. It’s possible that it began because she needed to compare Gennaro to another child. Or maybe not, maybe she felt a qualm that she was devoting all her attention only to her own son and it seemed right to take care of her nephew as well. Pinuccia, although she still considered Dino the living proof of the disaster that her life was, and was always yelling at him, and sometimes hit him (“Will you stop it, will you stop it? What do you want from me, you want to make me crazy?”), was resolutely opposed to having Lila take him to her house to play mysterious games with little Gennaro. She said to her angrily: “You take care of raising your son and I’ll take care of mine, and instead of wasting time take care of your husband, otherwise you’ll lose him.” But here Rino intervened.
It was a terrible time for Lila’s brother. He fought constantly with his father, who wanted to close the shoe factory because he was sick of working only to enrich the Solaras and, not understanding that it was necessary to go on at all costs, regretted his old workshop. He fought constantly with Michele and Marcello, who treated him like a petulant boy and when the problem was money spoke directly to Stefano. And mainly he fought with Stefano, shouting and insulting, because his brother-in-law wouldn’t give him a cent and, according to him, was now negotiating secretly to deliver the whole shoe business into the hands of the Solaras. He fought with Pinuccia, who accused him of having led her to believe he was a big shot when really he was a puppet who could be manipulated by anyone, by his father, by Stefano, by Marcello and Michele. So, when he realized that Stefano was mad at Lila because she was being too much a mamma and not enough a wife, and that Pinuccia wouldn’t entrust the child to her sister-in-law for even an hour, he began, defiantly, to take the baby to his sister himself, and since there was less and less work at the shoe factory, he got in the habit of staying, sometimes for hours, in the apartment in the new neighborhood to see what Lila did with Gennaro and Dino. He was fascinated by her maternal patience, by the way the children played, by the way his son, who at home was always crying or sat listlessly in his playpen like a sad puppy, with Lila became eager, quick, seemed happy.