I turned to see what Enzo was doing, but he was still leaning against the wall, watching Lila dance. The music ended. Lila moved toward me, followed by Marcello, whose eyes were shining with happiness.
“We have to go,” I nearly shrieked.
I must have put such anguish into my voice that she finally looked around as if she had woken up. “All right, let’s go,” she said, puzzled.
I headed toward the door, without waiting any longer, the music started again. Marcello Solara grabbed Lila by the arm, said to her between a laugh and an entreaty: “Stay, I’ll take you home.”
Lila, as if only then recognizing him, looked at him incredulously: suddenly it seemed to her impossible that he was touching her with such assurance. She tried to free her arm but Marcello held it in a strong grip, saying, “Just one more dance.”
Enzo left the wall, grabbed Marcello’s wrist without saying a word. I see him before my eyes: he was calm; although younger in years and smaller in size, he seemed to be making no effort. The strength of his grip could be seen only on the face of Marcello Solara, who let go of Lila with a grimace of pain and seized his wrist with his other hand. As we left I heard Lila saying indignantly to Enzo, in the thickest dialect, “He touched me, did you see: me, that shit. Luckily Rino wasn’t there. If he does it again, he’s dead.”
Was it possible she didn’t realize that she had danced with Marcello twice? Yes, possible, she was like that.
Outside we found Pasquale, Antonio, Carmela, and Ada. Pasquale was beside himself, we had never seen him like that. He was shouting insults, shouting at the top of his lungs, his eyes like a madman’s, and there was no way to calm him. He was angry with Michele, of course, but above all with Marcello and Stefano. He said things that we weren’t capable of understanding. He said that the Bar Solara had always been a place for loan sharks from the Camorra, that it was the base for smuggling and for collecting votes for the monarchists. He said that Don Achille had been a spy for the Nazi Fascists, he said that the money Stefano was using to expand the grocery store his father had made on the black market. He yelled, “Papa was right to kill him.” He yelled, “The Solaras, father and sons — I’ll cut their throats, and then I’ll eliminate Stefano and his whole family from the face of the earth.” Finally, turning to Lila, he yelled, as if it were the most serious thing, “And you, you were even dancing with that piece of shit.”
At that point, as if Pasquale’s rage had pumped breath into his chest, Antonio, too, began shouting, and it was almost as if he were angry at Pasquale because he wished to deprive him of a joy: the joy of killing the Solaras for what they had done to Ada. And Ada immediately began to cry and Carmela couldn’t restrain herself and she, too, burst into tears. And Enzo tried to persuade all of us to get off the street. “Let’s go home,” he said. But Pasquale and Antonio silenced him, they wanted to stay and confront the Solaras. Fiercely, but with pretended calm, they kept repeating to Enzo, “Go, go, we’ll see you tomorrow.” Enzo said softly, “If you stay, I’m going to stay, too.” At that point I, too, burst into tears and a moment afterward — the thing that moved me most — Lila, whom I had never seen cry, ever, began weeping.
We were four girls in tears, desperate tears. But Pasquale yielded only when he saw Lila crying. He said in a tone of resignation, “All right, not tonight, I’ll settle things with the Solaras some other time, let’s go.” Immediately, between sobs, Lila and I took him under the arm, dragged him away. For a moment we consoled him by saying mean things about the Solaras, but also insisting that the best thing was to act as if they didn’t exist. Then Lila, drying her tears with the back of her hand, asked “Who are the Nazi Fascists, Pascà? Who are the monarchists? What’s the black market?”
17
It’s hard to say what Pasquale’s answers did to Lila. I’m in danger of getting it wrong, partly because on me, at the time, they had no concrete effect. But she, in her usual way, was moved and altered by them, so that for the entire summer she tormented me with a single concept that I found quite unbearable. I’ll try to summarize it, using the language of today, like this: there are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.
Naturally she said it in another way. But what matters is that she was gripped by a frenzy of absolute disclosure. She pointed to people, things, streets, and said, “That man fought in the war and killed, that one bludgeoned and administered castor oil, that one turned in a lot of people, that one starved his own mother, in that house they tortured and killed, on these stones they marched and gave the Fascist salute, on this corner they inflicted beatings, these people’s money comes from the hunger of others, this car was bought by selling bread adulterated with marble dust and rotten meat on the black market, that butcher shop had its origins in stolen copper and vandalized freight trains, behind that bar is the Camorra, smuggling, loan-sharking.”
Soon she became dissatisfied with Pasquale. It was as if he had set in motion a mechanism in her head and now her job was to put order into a chaotic mass of impressions. Increasingly intent, increasingly obsessed, probably overcome herself by an urgent need to find a solid vision, without cracks, she complicated his meager information with some book she got from the library. So she gave concrete motives, ordinary faces to the air of abstract apprehension that as children we had breathed in the neighborhood. Fascism, Nazism, the war, the Allies, the monarchy, the republic — she turned them into streets, houses, faces, Don Achille and the black market, Alfredo Peluso the Communist, the Camorrist grandfather of the Solaras, the father, Silvio, a worse Fascist than Marcello and Michele, and her father, Fernando the shoemaker, and my father, all — all — in her eyes stained to the marrow by shadowy crimes, all hardened criminals or acquiescent accomplices, all bought for practically nothing. She and Pasquale enclosed me in a terrible world that left no escape.
Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila’s capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides. I often looked at them walking together and, if at first it had been she who hung on his words, now it was he who hung on hers. He’s in love, I thought. I also thought: Lila will fall in love, too, they’ll be engaged, they’ll marry, they’ll always be talking about these political things, they’ll have children who will talk about the same things. When school started again, on the one hand I suffered because I knew I wouldn’t have time for Lila anymore, on the other I hoped to detach myself from that sum of the misdeeds and compliances and cowardly acts of the people we knew, whom we loved, whom we carried — she, Pasquale, Rino, I, all of us — in our blood.
18
The first two years of high school were much more difficult than middle school. I was in a class of forty-two students, one of the very rare mixed classes in that school. There were few girls, and I didn’t know any of them. Gigliola, after much boasting (“Yes, I’m going to high school, too, definitely, we’ll sit at the same desk”), ended up going to help her father in the Solaras’ pastry shop. Of the boys, instead, I knew Alfonso and Gino, who, however, sat together in one of the front desks, elbow to elbow, with frightened looks, and nearly pretended not to know me. The room stank, an acid odor of sweat, dirty feet, fear.
For the first months I lived my new scholastic life in silence, constantly picking at my acne-studded forehead and cheeks. Sitting in one of the rows at the back, from which I could barely see the teachers or what they wrote on the blackboard, I was unknown to my deskmate as she was unknown to me. Thanks to Maestra Oliviero I soon had the books I needed; they were grimy and well worn. I imposed on myself a discipline learned in middle schooclass="underline" I studied all afternoon until eleven and then from five in the morning until seven, when it was time to go. Leaving the house, weighed down with books, I often met Lila, who was hurrying to the shoe shop to open up, sweep, wash, get things in order before her father and brother arrived. She questioned me about the subjects I had for the day, what I had studied, and wanted precise answers. If I didn’t give them she besieged me with questions that made me fear I hadn’t studied enough, that I wouldn’t be able to answer the teachers as I wasn’t able to answer her. On some cold mornings, when I rose at dawn and in the kitchen went over the lessons, I had the impression that, as usual, I was sacrificing the warm deep sleep of the morning to make a good impression on the daughter of the shoemaker rather than on the teachers in the school for rich people. Breakfast was hurried, too, for her sake. I gulped down milk and coffee and ran out to the street so as not to miss even a step of the way we would go together.