Stefano, who until that moment had been playing the part of the practical, businesslike man, was obviously disturbed. He waited for Lila to get up, and remained seated for some seconds as if to catch his breath. Then he stood, took a few steps.
“They’re tight,” he said.
Rino turned gray, disappointed.
“We can put them on the machine and widen them,” Fernando interrupted, but uncertainly.
Stefano turned to me and asked, “How do they look?”
“Nice,” I said.
“Then I’ll take them.”
Fernando remained impassive, Rino brightened.
“You know, Ste’, these are an exclusive Cerullo design, they’ll be expensive.”
Stefano smiled, took an affectionate tone: “And if they weren’t an exclusive Cerullo design, do you think I would buy them? When will they be ready?”
Rino looked at his father, radiant.
“We’ll keep them in the machine for at least three days,” Fernando said, but it was clear that he could have said ten days, twenty, a month, he was so eager to take his time in the face of this unexpected novelty.
“Good: you think of a friendly price and I’ll come in three days to pick them up.”
He folded the pieces of paper with the designs and put them in his pocket before our puzzled eyes. Then he shook hands with Fernando, with Rino, and headed toward the door.
“The drawings,” Lila said coldly.
“Can I bring them back in three days?” Stefano asked in a cordial tone, and without waiting for an answer opened the door. He made way for me to pass and went out after me.
I was already settled in the car next to him when Lila joined us. She was angry.
“You think my father is a fool, that my brother is a fool?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you think you’ll make fools of my family and me, you are mistaken.”
“You are insulting me: I’m not Marcello Solara.”
“And who are you?”
“A businessman: the shoes you’ve designed are unusual. And I don’t mean just the ones I bought, I mean all of them.”
“So?”
“So let me think and we’ll see each other in three days.”
Lila stared at him as if she wanted to read his mind, she didn’t move away from the car. Finally she said something that I would never have had the courage to utter:
“Look, Marcello tried in every possible way to buy me but no one is going to buy me.”
Stefano looked her straight in the eyes for a long moment.
“I don’t spend a lira if I don’t think it can produce a hundred.”
He started the engine and we left. Now I was sure: the drive had been a sort of agreement reached at the end of many encounters, much talk. I said weakly, in Italian, “Please, Stefano, leave me at the corner? If my mother sees me in a car with you she’ll bash my face in.”
38
Lila’s life changed decisively during that month of September. It wasn’t easy, but it changed. As for me, I had returned from Ischia in love with Nino, branded by the lips and hands of his father, sure that I would weep night and day because of the mixture of happiness and horror I felt inside. Instead I made no attempt to find a form for my emotions, in a few hours everything was reduced. I put aside Nino’s voice, the irritation of his father’s mustache. The island faded, lost itself in some secret corner of my head. I made room for what was happening to Lila.
In the three days that followed the astonishing ride in the convertible, she, with the excuse of doing the shopping, went often to Stefano’s grocery, but always asked me to go with her. I did it with my heart pounding, frightened by the possible appearance of Marcello, but also pleased with my role as confidante generous with advice, as accomplice in weaving plots, as apparent object of Stefano’s attentions. We were girls, even if we imagined ourselves wickedly daring. We embroidered on the facts — Marcello, Stefano, the shoes — with our usual eagerness and it seemed to us that we always knew how to make things come out right. “I’ll say this to him,” she hypothesized, and I would suggest a small variation: “No, say this.” Then she and Stefano would be deep in conversation in a corner behind the counter, while Alfonso exchanged a few words with me, Pinuccia, annoyed, waited on the customers, and Maria, at the cash register, observed her older son apprehensively, because he had been neglecting the job lately, and was feeding the gossip of the neighbors.
Naturally we were improvising. In the course of that back and forth I tried to understand what was really going through Lila’s head, so as to be in tune with her goals. At first I had the impression that she intended simply to enable her father and brother to earn some money by selling Stefano, for a good price, the only pair of shoes produced by the Cerullos, but soon it seemed to me that her principal aim was to get rid of Marcello by making use of the young grocer. In this sense, she was decisive when I asked her:
“Which of the two do you like more?”
She shrugged.
“I’ve never liked Marcello, he makes me sick.”
“You would become engaged to Stefano just to get Marcello out of your house?”
She thought for a moment and said yes.
From then on the ultimate goal of all our plotting seemed to us that — to fight by every means possible Marcello’s intrusion in her life. The rest came crowding around almost by chance and we merely gave it a rhythm and, at times, a true orchestration. Or so at least we believed. In fact, the person who was acting was only and was always Stefano.
Punctually, three days later, he went to the store and bought the shoes, even though they were tight. The two Cerullos with much hesitation asked for twenty-five thousand lire, but were ready to go down to ten thousand. He didn’t bat an eye and put down another twenty thousand in exchange for Lila’s drawings, which — he said — he liked, he wanted to frame them.
“Frame?” Rino asked.
“Yes.”
“Like a picture by a painter?”
“Yes.”
“And you told my sister that you’re buying her drawings?”
“Yes.”
Stefano didn’t stop there. In the following days he again poked his head in at the shop and announced to father and son that he had rented the space adjacent to theirs. “For now it’s there,” he said, “but if you one day decide to expand, remember that I am at your disposal.”
At the Cerullos’ they discussed for a long time what that statement meant. “Expand?” Finally Lila, since they couldn’t get there on their own, said:
“He’s proposing to transform the shoe shop into a workshop for making Cerullo shoes.”
“And the money?” Rino asked cautiously.
“He’ll invest it.”
“He told you?” Fernando, incredulous, was alarmed, immediately followed by Nunzia.
“He told the two of you,” Lila said, indicating her father and brother.
“But he knows that handmade shoes are expensive?”
“You showed him.”
“And if they don’t sell?”
“You’ve wasted the work and he’s wasted the money.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The entire family was upset for days. Marcello moved to the background. He arrived at night at eight-thirty and dinner wasn’t ready. Often he found himself alone in front of the television with Melina and Ada, while the Cerullos talked in another room.
Naturally the most enthusiastic was Rino, who regained energy, color, good humor, and, as he had been the close friend of the Solaras, so he began to be Stefano’s close friend, Alfonso’s, Pinuccia’s, even Signora Maria’s. When, finally, Fernando’s last reservation dissolved, Stefano went to the shop and, after a small discussion, came to a verbal agreement on the basis of which he would put up the expenses and the two Cerullos would start production of the model that Lila and Rino had already made and all the other models, it being understood that they would split the possible profits half and half. He took the documents out of a pocket and showed them to them one after another.