On those occasions I was the only one who did not remain silent but explicitly disagreed with Pasquale’s criticisms. I refuted him, saying things like: It’s not easy to leave home; it’s not easy to go against the wishes of the people you love; nothing is easy, especially when you criticize her rather than being angry at your friend Rino��he’s the one who got her in that trouble with Marcello, and if Lila hadn’t found a way of getting out of it, she would have had to marry Marcello. I concluded by praising Stefano, who of all the boys who had known Lila since she was a child and loved her was the only one with the courage to support her and help her. A terrible silence fell and I was very proud of having countered every criticism of my friend in a tone and language that, among other things, had subdued him.
But one night we ended up quarreling unpleasantly. We were all, including Enzo, having a pizza on the Rettifilo, in a place where a margherita and a beer cost fifty lire. This time it was the girls who started: Ada, I think, said she thought Lila was ridiculous going around always fresh from the hairdresser and in clothes like Princess Soraya, even though she was sprinkling roach poison in front of the house door. We all, some more, some less, laughed. Then, one thing leading to another, Carmela ended up saying outright that Lila had gone with Stefano for the money, to settle her brother and the rest of the family. I was starting my usual official defense when Pasquale interrupted me and said, “That’s not the point. The point is that Lina knows where that money comes from.”
“Now you want to drag in Don Achille and the black market and the trafficking and loan sharking and all the nonsense of before and after the war?” I said.
“Yes, and if your friend were here now she would say I was right.”
“Stefano is just a shopkeeper who’s a good salesman.”
“And the money he put into the Cerullos’ shoe store he got from the grocery?”
“Why, what do you think?”
“It comes from the gold objects taken from mothers and hidden by Don Achille in the mattress. Lina acts the lady with the blood of all the poor people of this neighborhood. And she is kept, she and her whole family, even before she’s married.”
I was about to answer when Enzo interrupted with his usual detachment: “Excuse me, Pascà, what do you mean by ‘is kept’?”
As soon as I heard that question I knew that things would turn ugly. Pasquale turned red, embarrassed. “Keep means keep. Who pays, please, when Lina goes to the hairdresser, when she buys dresses and purses? Who put money into the shoe shop so that the shoe-repair man can play at making shoes?”
“Are you saying that Lina isn’t in love, isn’t engaged, won’t soon marry Stefano, but has sold herself?”
We were all quiet. Antonio murmured, “No, Enzo, Pasquale doesn’t mean that; you know that he loves Lina as we all of us love her.”
Enzo nodded at him to be quiet.
“Be quiet, Anto’, let Pasquale answer.”
Pasquale said grimly, “Yes, she sold herself. And she doesn’t give a damn about the stink of the money she spends every day.”
I tried again to have my say, at that point, but Enzo touched my arm.
“Excuse me, Lenù, I want to know what Pasquale calls a girl who sells herself.”
Here Pasquale had an outburst of violence that we all read in his eyes and he said what for months he had wanted to say, to shout out to the whole neighborhood: “Whore, I call her a whore. Lina has behaved and is behaving like a whore.”
Enzo got up and said, almost in a whisper: “Come outside.”
Antonio jumped up, restrained Pasquale, who was getting up, and said, “Now, let’s not overdo it, Enzo. Pasquale is only saying something that’s not an accusation, it’s a criticism that we’d all like to make.”
Enzo answered, this time aloud, “Not me.” And he headed toward the door, announcing, “I’ll wait outside for both of you.”
We kept Pasquale and Antonio from following him, and nothing happened. They didn’t speak for several days, then everything was as before.
46
I’ve recounted that quarrel to say how that year passed and what the atmosphere was around Lila’s choices, especially among the young men who had secretly or explicitly loved her, desired her, and in all probability loved and desired her still. As for me, it’s hard to say in what tangle of feelings I found myself. I always defended Lila, and I liked doing so, I liked to hear myself speak with the authority of one who is studying difficult subjects. But I also knew that I could have just as well recounted, and willingly, if with some exaggeration, how Lila had really been behind each of Stefano’s moves, and I with her, linking step to step as if it were a mathematics problem, to achieve that result: to settle herself, settle her brother, attempt to realize the plan of the shoe factory, and even get money to repair my glasses if they broke.
I passed Fernando’s old workshop and felt a vicarious sense of triumph. Lila, clearly, had made it. The shoemaker’s shop, which had never had a sign, now displayed over the door a kind of plaque that said “Cerullo.” Fernando, Rino, the three apprentices worked at joining, stitching, hammering, polishing, bent over their benches from morning till late at night. It was known that father and son often quarreled. It was known that Fernando maintained that the shoes, especially the women’s, couldn’t be made as Lila had invented them, that they were only a child’s fantasy. It was known that Rino maintained the opposite and that he went to Lila to ask her to intervene. It was known that Lila said she didn’t want to know about it, and so Rino went to Stefano and dragged him to the shop to give his father specific orders. It was known that Stefano went in and looked for a long time at Lila’s designs framed on the walls, smiled to himself and said tranquilly that he wanted the shoes to be exactly as they were in those pictures, he had hung them there for that purpose. It was known, in short, that things were proceeding slowly, that the workers first received instructions from Fernando and then Rino changed them and everything stopped and started over, and Fernando noticed the changes and changed them back, and Stefano arrived and so back to square one: they ended up yelling, breaking things.
I glanced in and immediately fled. But the pictures hanging on the walls made an impression. Those drawings, for Lila, were fantasies, I thought. Money has nothing to do with it, selling has nothing to do with it. All that activity is the result of a whim of hers, celebrated by Stefano merely out of love. She’s lucky to be so loved, to love. Lucky to be adored for what she is and for what she invents. Now that she’s given her brother what he wanted, now that she’s taken him out of danger, surely she’ll invent something else. So I don’t want to lose sight of her. Something will happen.