“What do you do to them?” he asked admiringly.
“I make them play.”
“My son played before.”
“Here he plays and learns.”
“Why do you spend so much time on it?”
“Because I read that everything we are is decided now, in the first years of life.”
“And is mine doing well?”
“You see him.”
“Yes, I see, he’s better than yours.”
“Mine is younger.”
“Do you think Dino is intelligent?”
“All children are, you just have to train them.”
“Then train them, Lina, don’t get tired of it immediately the way you usually do. Make him very intelligent for me.”
But one evening Stefano came home early and especially irritable. He found his brother-in-law sitting on the kitchen floor and, instead of confining himself to a harsh look because of the mess, his wife’s lack of interest, the attention given to the children instead of to him, said to Rino that this was his house, that he didn’t like seeing him around every day wasting time, that the shoe factory was failing precisely because he was so idle, that the Cerullos were unreliable — in other words, Get out immediately or I’ll kick your ass.
There was a commotion. Lila cried that he mustn’t speak like that to her brother, Rino threw in his brother-in-law’s face everything that until that moment he had only hinted at or had prudently kept to himself. Gross insults flew. The two children, abandoned in the confusion, began grabbing each other’s toys, crying, especially the smaller one, who was overpowered by the bigger one. Rino shouted at Stefano, his neck swollen, his veins like electric cables, that it was easy to be the boss with the goods that Don Achille had stolen from half the neighborhood, and added, “You’re nothing, you’re just a piece of shit, your father at least knew how to commit a crime, you don’t even know that.”
It was a terrible moment, which Lila watched in terror. Stefano seized Rino by the hips with both hands, like a ballet dancer with his partner, and although they were of the same height, the same build, although Rino struggled and yelled and spit, Stefano picked him up with a prodigious force and hurled him against a wall. Right afterward he took him by the arm and dragged him across the floor to the door, opened it, pulled him to his feet and threw him down the stairs, even though Rino tried to resist, even though Lila had roused herself and was clinging to Stefano, begging him to calm down.
100
A complicated period began. Rino stopped going to his sister’s house, but Lila didn’t want to give up keeping Rinuccio and Dino together, so she got in the habit of going to her brother’s house, but in secret from Stefano. Pinuccia endured it, sullenly, and at first Lila tried to explain to her what she was doing: exercises in reactivity, games of skill, she went so far as to confide in her that she would have liked to involve all the neighborhood children. But Pinuccia said simply, “You’re a lunatic and I don’t give a damn what nonsense you get up to. You want to take the child? You want to kill him, you want to eat him like the witches? Go ahead, I don’t want him and I never did, your brother has been the ruin of my life and you are the ruin of my brother’s life.” Then she cried, “That poor devil is perfectly right to cheat on you.”
Lila didn’t react.
She didn’t ask what that remark meant, in fact she made a careless gesture, one of those gestures that you make to brush away a fly. She took Rinuccio and, although she was sorry to be deprived of her nephew, she did not return.
But in the solitude of her apartment she discovered that she was afraid. She absolutely didn’t care if Stefano was paying some whore, in fact she was glad — she didn’t have to submit at night when he approached her. But after that remark of Pinuccia’s she began to worry about the baby: if her husband had taken another woman, if he wanted her every day and every hour, he might go mad, he might throw her out. Until that moment the possibility of a definitive break in her marriage had seemed to her a liberation; now instead she was afraid of losing the house, the money, the time, everything that allowed her to bring up the child in the best way.
She hardly slept. Maybe Stefano’s rages were not only the sign of a constitutional lack of equilibrium, the bad blood that blew the lid off good-natured habits: maybe he really was in love with someone else, as had happened to her with Nino, and he couldn’t stand to stay in the cage of marriage, of paternity, even of groceries and other dealings. She felt she had to make up her mind to confront the situation, if only to control it, and yet she delayed, she gave it up, she counted on the fact that Stefano enjoyed his lover and left her in peace. Ultimately, she thought, I just have to hold out for a couple of years, long enough for the child to grow up and be educated.
She organized her day so that he would always find the house in order, dinner ready, the table set. But, after the scene with Rino, he did not return to his former mildness, he was always disgruntled, always preoccupied.
“What’s wrong?”
“Money.”
“Money and that’s all?”
Stefano got angry: “What does and that’s all mean?”
For him there was no other problem, in life, but money. After dinner he did the accounts and cursed the whole time: the new grocery wasn’t taking in cash as it used to; the Solaras, especially Michele, were acting as if the shoe business were all theirs and the profits weren’t to be shared anymore; without saying anything to him, Rino, and Fernando, they were having the old Cerullo models made by cheap shoemakers on the outskirts, and meanwhile they were having new Solara styles designed by artisans who in fact were simply making tiny variations in Lila’s; in this way the small enterprise of his father-in-law and brother-in-law really was being ruined, dragging him down with it, the one who had invested in it.
“Understand?”
“Yes.”
“So try not to be a pain in the ass.”
But Lila wasn’t convinced. She had the impression that her husband was deliberately amplifying problems that were real but old, in order to hide from her the true, new reasons for his outbursts and his increasingly explicit hostility toward her. He blamed her for all sorts of things, and especially for having complicated his relations with the Solaras. Once he yelled at her, “What did you do to that bastard Michele, I’d like to know?”
And she answered, “Nothing.”
And he: “It can’t be, in every discussion he brings you up but he screws me: try to talk to him and find out what he wants, otherwise I ought to smash your faces, both of you.”
And Lila, impulsively: “If he wants to fuck me what should I do, let him fuck me?”
A moment later she was sorry she had said that — sometimes contempt prevailed over prudence — but now she had done it and Stefano hit her. The slap counted little, it wasn’t even with his hand open, as usual, he hit her with the tips of his fingers. Rather, what he said right afterward, disgusted, carried more weight: