She narrowed her eyes, I was afraid she was about to tell me: I also have a boyfriend. Instead, she began to tease me. “You go out with the son of the pharmacist,” she said. “Good for you, you’ve given in, you’re in love like Aeneas’ lover.” Then she jumped abruptly from Dido to Melina and talked about her for a long time, since I knew little or nothing of what was happening in the buildings — I went to school in the morning and studied until late at night. She talked about her relative as if she never let her out of her sight. Poverty was consuming her and her children and so she continued to wash the stairs of the buildings, together with Ada (the money Antonio brought home wasn’t enough). But one never heard her singing anymore, the euphoria had passed, now she slaved away mechanically. Lila described Melina in minute detaiclass="underline" bent double, she started from the top floor and, with the wet rag in her hands, wiped step after step, flight after flight, with an energy and an agitation that would have exhausted a more robust person. If someone went down or up, she began shouting insults, she hurled the rag at him. Ada had said that once she had seen her mother, in the midst of a crisis because someone had spoiled her work by walking on it, drink the dirty water from the bucket, and had had to tear it away from her. Did I understand? Step by step, starting with Gino she had ended in Dido, in Aeneas who abandoned her, in the mad widow. And only at that point did she bring in Nino Sarratore, proof that she had listened to me carefully. “Tell him about Melina,” she urged me, “tell him he should tell his father.” Then she added, maliciously, “Because it’s all too easy to write poems.” And finally she started laughing and promised with a certain solemnity, “I’m never going to fall in love with anyone and I will never ever ever write a poem.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.”
“But people will fall in love with you.”
“Worse for them.”
“They’ll suffer like that Dido.”
“No, they’ll go and find someone else, just like Aeneas, who eventually settled down with the daughter of a king.”
I wasn’t convinced. I went away and came back, I liked those conversations about boyfriends, now that I had one. Once I asked her, cautiously, “What’s Marcello Solara up to, is he still after you?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
She made a half smile of contempt that meant: Marcello Solara makes me sick.
“And Enzo?”
“We’re friends.”
“And Stefano?”
“According to you they’re all thinking about me?”
“Yes.”
“Stefano serves me first if there’s a crowd.”
“You see?”
“There’s nothing to see.”
“And Pasquale, has he said anything to you?”
“Are you mad?”
“I’ve seen him walking you to the shop in the morning.”
“Because he’s explaining the things that happened before us.”
Thus she returned to the theme of “before,” but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet Stefano’s grocery store before had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale’s father. And yet Don Achille’s money had been made before. And the Solaras’ money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille’s son’s and at the Solaras’, and sent us, too. And they voted for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too. That conversation about “before” made a stronger impression than the vague conversations she had drawn me into during the summer. The Christmas vacation passed in deep conversation — in the shoemaker’s shop, on the street, in the courtyard. We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.
19
During that period I felt strong. At school I acquitted myself perfectly, I told Maestra Oliviero about my successes and she praised me. I saw Gino, and every day we walked to the Bar Solara: he bought a pastry, we shared it, we went home. Sometimes I even had the impression that it was Lila who depended on me and not I on her. I had crossed the boundaries of the neighborhood, I went to the high school, I was with boys and girls who were studying Latin and Greek, and not, like her, with construction workers, mechanics, cobblers, fruit and vegetable sellers, grocers, shoemakers. When she talked to me about Dido or her method for learning English words or the third declension or what she pondered when she talked to Pasquale, I saw with increasing clarity that it made her somewhat uneasy, as if it were ultimately she who felt the need to continuously prove that she could talk to me as an equal. Even when, one afternoon, with some uncertainty, she decided to show me how far she and Rino were with the secret shoe they were making, I no longer felt that she inhabited a marvelous land without me. It seemed instead that both she and her brother hesitated to talk to me about things of such small value.
Or maybe it was only that I was beginning to feel superior. When they dug around in a storeroom and took out the box, I encouraged them artificially. But the pair of men’s shoes they showed me seemed truly unusual; they were size 43, the size of Rino and Fernando, brown, and just as I remembered them in one of Lila’s drawings: they seemed both light and strong. I had never seen anything like them on the feet of anyone. While Lila and Rino let me touch them and demonstrated their qualities, I praised them enthusiastically. “Touch here,” Rino said, excited by my praise, “and tell me if you feel the stitches.” “No,” I said, “you can’t feel them.” Then he took the shoes out of my hands, bent them, widened them, showed me their durability. I approved, I said bravo the way Maestra Oliviero did when she wanted to encourage us. But Lila didn’t seem satisfied. The more good qualities her brother listed, the more defects she showed me and said to Rino, “How long would it take Papa to see these mistakes?” At one point she said, seriously, “Let’s test with water again.” Her brother seemed opposed. She filled a basin anyway, put her hand in one of the shoes as if it were a foot, and walked it in the water a little. “She has to play,” Rino said, like a big brother who is annoyed by the childish acts of his little sister.