An alarming episode occurred, which made the situation more complicated. Alfonso and I had got into the habit of walking home. We went to Piazza Nazionale and then reached Corso Meridionale. It was a long walk, but we talked about homework, teachers, classmates, and it was pleasant. Then one day, just beyond the ponds, at the start of the stradone, I turned and seemed to see on the railway embankment, in his conductor’s uniform, Donato Sarratore. I started with rage and horror, and immediately turned away. When I looked again, he was gone.
Whether that apparition was true or false, the sound my heart made in my chest, like a gunshot, stayed with me, and, I don’t know why, I thought of the passage in Lila’s letter about the sound that the copper pot had made when it burst. That same sound returned the next day, at the mere sight of Nino. Then, frightened, I took cover in affection for Alfonso, and at both the start and the end of school I kept near him. As soon as the lanky figure of the boy I loved appeared, I turned to the younger son of Don Achille as if I had the most urgent things to tell him, and we walked away chattering.
It was, in other words, a confusing time, I would have liked to be attached to Nino and yet I was careful to stay glued to Alfonso. In fact, out of fear that he would get bored and leave me for other company, I behaved more and more kindly toward him, sometimes I even spoke sweetly. But as soon as I realized that I risked encouraging his liking me I changed my tone. What if he misunderstands and says he loves me? I worried. It would have been embarrassing, I would have had to reject him: Lila, my contemporary, was engaged to a man, Stefano, and it would be humiliating to be with a boy, the little brother of her fiancé. Yet my mind swirled without restraint, I daydreamed. Once, as I walked home along Corso Meridionale, with Alfonso beside me like a squire escorting me through the thousand dangers of the city, it seemed to me right that the duty had fallen to two Carraccis, Stefano and him, to protect, if in different forms, Lila and me from the blackest evil in the world, from that very evil that we had experienced for the first time going up the stairs that led to their house, when we went to retrieve the dolls that their father had stolen.
42
I liked to discover connections like that, especially if they concerned Lila. I traced lines between moments and events distant from one another, I established convergences and divergences. In that period it became a daily exercise: the better off I had been in Ischia, the worse off Lila had been in the desolation of the neighborhood; the more I had suffered upon leaving the island, the happier she had become. It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing. In Ischia I had felt beautiful, and the impression had lingered on my return to Naples — during the constant plotting with Lila to help her get rid of Marcello, there had even been moments when I thought again that I was prettier, and in some of Stefano’s glances I had caught the possibility of his liking me. But Lila now had retaken the upper hand, satisfaction had magnified her beauty, while I, overwhelmed by schoolwork, exhausted by my frustrated love for Nino, was growing ugly again. My healthy color faded, the acne returned. And suddenly one morning the specter of glasses appeared.
Professor Gerace questioned me about something he had written on the blackboard, and realized that I could see almost nothing. He told me that I must go immediately to an oculist, he would write it down in my notebook, he expected the signature of one of my parents the next day. I went home and showed them the notebook, full of guilt for the expense that glasses would involve. My father darkened, my mother shouted, “You’re always with your books, and now you’ve ruined your eyesight.” I was extremely hurt. Had I been punished for pride in wishing to study? What about Lila? Hadn’t she read much more than I had? So then why did she have perfect vision while mine deteriorated? Why should I have to wear glasses my whole life and she not?
The need for glasses intensified my mania for finding a pattern that, in good as in evil, would bind my fate and hers: I was blind, she a falcon; I had an opaque pupil, she narrowed her eyes, with darting glances that saw more; I clung to her arm, among the shadows, she guided me with a stern gaze. In the end my father, thanks to his dealings at the city hall, found the money. The fantasies diminished. I went to the oculist, he diagnosed a severe myopia, the glasses materialized. When I looked at myself in the mirror, the clear image was a hard blow: blemished skin, broad face, wide mouth, big nose, eyes imprisoned in frames that seemed to have been drawn insistently by an angry designer under eyebrows already too thick. I felt disfigured, and decided to wear the glasses only at home or, at most, if I had to copy something from the blackboard. But one day, leaving school, I forgot them on the desk. I hurried back to the classroom, the worst had happened. In the haste that seized us all at the sound of the last bell, they had ended up on the floor: one sidepiece was broken, a lens cracked. I began to cry.
I didn’t have the courage to go home, I took refuge with Lila. I told her what had happened, and gave her the glasses. She examined them and said to leave them with her. She spoke with a different sort of determination, calmer, as if it were no longer necessary to fight to the death for every little thing. I imagined some miraculous intervention by Rino with his shoemaker’s tools and I went home hoping that my parents wouldn’t notice that I was without my glasses.
A few days afterward, in the late afternoon, I heard someone calling from the courtyard. Below was Lila, she had my glasses on her nose and at first I was struck not by the fact that they were as if new but by how well they suited her. I ran down thinking, why is it that they look nice on her when she doesn’t need them and they make me, who can’t do without them, look ugly? As soon as I appeared she took off the glasses with amusement and put them on my nose herself, exclaiming, “How nice you look, you should wear them all the time.” She had given the glasses to Stefano, who had had them fixed by an optician in the city. I murmured in embarrassment that I could never repay her, she replied ironically, perhaps with a trace of malice: