“I have to tell Rino that Sunday we should accept Pasquale Peluso’s invitation.”
There I was, telling her about the center of Naples, and she placed at the center Gigliola’s house, in one of the apartment buildings of the neighborhood, where Pasquale wanted to take her dancing. I was sorry. To Peluso’s invitations we had always said yes and yet we had never gone, I to avoid arguments with my parents, she because Rino was against it. We often saw him, on holidays, all cleaned up, waiting for his friends, old and young. He was a generous soul, he didn’t make distinctions of age, he brought along anyone. He would wait in front of the gas station and, one or two at a time, Enzo and Gigliola, and Carmela who now called herself Carmen, and sometimes Rino himself if he had nothing else to do, and Antonio, who had the weight of his mother, Melina, and, if Melina was calm, also his sister Ada, whom the Solaras had dragged into their car and driven who knows where for an hour. When the day was fine they went to the sea, returning red-faced from the sun. Or, more often, they all met at Gigliola’s, whose parents were more tolerant than ours, and there those who knew how to dance danced and those who didn’t learned.
Lila began to go to these little parties, and to take me; she had developed, I don’t know how, an interest in dancing. Both Pasquale and Rino turned out to be surprisingly good dancers, and we learned from them the tango, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka. Rino, it should be said, as a teacher got annoyed immediately, especially with his sister, while Pasquale was very patient. At first he would have us dance standing on his feet, so that we learned the steps, then, when we became more skilled, we went whirling through the house.
I discovered that I liked to dance, I would have danced forever. Lila instead wore the expression of someone who wants to understand how it’s done, and whose pleasure seems to consist entirely in learning, since often she stayed seated, watching us, studying us, and applauding the couples who were most in synch. Once, at her house, she showed me a book that she had taken from the library: it was all about the dances, and every movement was explained with black-and-white drawings of a man and woman dancing. She was very cheerful in that period, with an exuberance surprising in her. Abruptly she grabbed me around the waist and, playing the man, made me dance the tango as she sang the music. Rino looked in and saw us, and burst into laughter. He wanted to dance, too, first with me, then with his sister, though without music. While we danced he told me that Lila had such a mania for perfection that she was obliged to practice continuously, even if they didn’t have a gramophone. But as soon as he said the word — gramophone, gramophone, gramophone — Lila shouted at me from a corner of the room, narrowing her eyes.
“You know what kind of word it is?”
“No.”
“Greek.”
I looked at her uncertainly. Rino meanwhile let me go and went to dance with his sister, who gave a soft cry, handed me the dance manual, and flew around the room with him. I placed the manual among her books. What had she said? Gramophone was Italian, not Greek. But meanwhile I saw that under War and Peace, and bearing the label of Maestro Ferraro’s library, a tattered volume was sticking out, entitled Greek Grammar. Grammar. Greek. I heard her promising me, out of breath:
“Afterward I’ll write gramophone for you in Greek letters.”
I said I had things to do and left.
15
She had begun to study Greek even before I went to high school? She had done it on her own, while I hadn’t even thought about it, and during the summer, the vacation? Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by?
I tried not to see her for a while, I was angry. I went to the library to get a Greek grammar, but there was only one, and the whole Cerullo family had borrowed it in turn. Maybe I should erase Lila from myself like a drawing from the blackboard, I thought, for, I think, the first time. I felt fragile, exposed, I couldn’t spend my time following her or discovering that she was following me, either way feeling diminished. I immediately went to find her. I let her teach me how to do the quadrille. I let her show me how many Italian words she could write in the Greek alphabet. She wanted me to learn the alphabet before I went to school, and she forced me to write and read it. I got even more pimples. I went to the dances at Gigliola’s with a permanent sense of inadequacy and shame.
I hoped that it would pass, but inadequacy and shame intensified. Once Lila danced a waltz with her brother. They danced so well together that we left them the whole space. I was spellbound. They were beautiful, they were perfect together. As I watched, I understood conclusively that soon she would lose completely her air of a child-old woman, the way a well-known musical theme is lost when it’s adapted too fancifully. She had become shapely. Her high forehead, her large eyes that could suddenly narrow, her small nose, her cheekbones, her lips, her ears were looking for a new orchestration and seemed close to finding it. When she combed her hair in a ponytail, her long neck was revealed with a touching clarity. Her chest had small graceful breasts that were more and more visible. Her back made a deep curve before landing at the increasingly taut arc of her behind. Her ankles were still too thin, the ankles of a child; but how long before they adapted to her now feminine figure? I realized that the males, watching as she danced with Rino, were seeing more than I was. Pasquale above all, but also Antonio, also Enzo. They kept their eyes on her as if we others had disappeared. And yet I had bigger breasts. And yet Gigliola was a dazzling blonde, with regular features and nice legs. And yet Carmela had beautiful eyes and, especially, provocative movements. But there was nothing to be done: something had begun to emanate from Lila’s mobile body that the males sensed, an energy that dazed them, like the swelling sound of beauty arriving. The music had to stop before they returned to themselves, with uncertain smiles and extravagant applause.
16
Lila was malicious: this, in some secret place in myself, I still thought. She had shown me not only that she knew how to wound with words but that she would kill without hesitation, and yet those capacities now seemed to me of little importance. I said to myself: she will release something more vicious, and I resorted to the word “evil”, an exaggerated word that came to me from childhood tales. But if it was a childish self that unleashed these thoughts in me, they had a foundation of truth. And in fact, it slowly became clear not only to me, who had been observing her since elementary school, but to everyone, that an essence not only seductive but dangerous emanated from Lila.