More shuffling. A thickset figure emerged from the shadows. He had a long torso, short legs, arms that hung to his knees, and a cigarette in his mouth; you could see the embers. He asked hoarsely:
“Who is it?”
“The daughter of the shoemaker with Greco’s oldest daughter.”
Don Achille came into the light, and, for the first time, we saw him clearly. No minerals, no sparkle of glass. His long face was of flesh, and the hair bristled only around his ears; the top of his head was shiny. His eyes were bright, the white veined with small red streams, his mouth wide and thin, his chin heavy, with a crease in the middle. He seemed to me ugly but not the way I imagined.
“Well?”
“The dolls,” said Lila.
“What dolls?”
“Ours.”
“Your dolls are of no use here.”
“You took them down in the cellar.”
Don Achille turned and shouted into the apartment:
“Pinù, did you take the doll belonging to the shoemaker’s daughter?”
“Me, no.”
“Alfò, did you take it?”
Laughter.
Lila said firmly, I don’t know where she got all that courage:
“You took them, we saw you.”
There was a moment of silence.
“ ‘You’ me?”
“Yes, and you put them in your black bag.”
The man, hearing those words, wrinkled his forehead in annoyance.
I couldn’t believe that we were there, in front of Don Achille, and Lila was speaking to him like that and he was staring at her in bewilderment, and in the background could be seen Alfonso and Stefano and Pinuccia and Donna Maria, who was setting the table for dinner. I couldn’t believe that he was an ordinary person, a little short, a little bald, a little out of proportion, but ordinary. So I waited for him to be abruptly transformed.
Don Achille repeated, as if to understand clearly the meaning of the words:
“I took your dolls and put them in a black bag?”
I felt that he was not angry but unexpectedly pained, as if he were receiving confirmation of something he already knew. He said something in dialect that I didn’t understand, Maria cried, “Achì, it’s ready.”
“I’m coming.”
Don Achille stuck a large, broad hand in the back pocket of his pants. We clutched each other’s hand tightly, waiting for him to bring out a knife. Instead he took out his wallet, opened it, looked inside, and handed Lila some money, I don’t remember how much.
“Go buy yourselves dolls,” he said.
Lila grabbed the money and dragged me down the stairs. He muttered, leaning over the banister:
“And remember that they were a gift from me.”
I said, in Italian, careful not to trip on the stairs:
“Good evening and enjoy your meal.”
15.
Right after Easter, Gigliola Spagnuolo and I started going to the teacher’s house to prepare for the admissions test. The teacher lived right next to the parish church of the Holy Family, and her windows looked out on the public gardens; from there you could see, beyond the dense countryside, the pylons of the railroad. Gigliola passed by my window and called me. I was ready, I ran out. I liked those private lessons, two a week, I think. The teacher, at the end of the lesson, offered us little heart-shaped cookies and a soft drink.
Lila didn’t come; her parents had not agreed to pay the teacher. But, since we were now good friends, she continued to tell me that she would take the test and would enter the first year of middle school in the same class as me.
“And the books?”
“You’ll lend them to me.”
Meanwhile, however, with the money from Don Achille, she bought a book: Little Women. She decided to buy it because she already knew it and liked it hugely. Maestra Oliviero, in fourth grade, had given the smarter girls books to read. Lila had received Little Women, along with the following comment: “This is for older girls, but it will be good for you,” and I got the book Heart, by Edmondo De Amicis, with not a word of explanation. Lila read both Little Women and Heart, in a very short time, and said there was no comparison, in her opinion Little Women was wonderful. I hadn’t managed to read it, I had had a hard time finishing Heart before the time set by the teacher for returning it. I was a slow reader, I still am. Lila, when she had to give the book back to Maestra Oliviero, regretted both not being able to reread Little Women continuously and not being able to talk about it with me. So one morning she made up her mind. She called me from the street, we went to the ponds, to the place where we had buried the money from Don Achille, in a metal box, took it out, and went to ask Iolanda the stationer, who had had displayed in her window forever a copy of Little Women, yellowed by the sun, if it was enough. It was. As soon as we became owners of the book we began to meet in the courtyard to read it, either silently, one next to the other, or aloud. We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart. But it was our book, we loved it dearly. I was the guardian, I kept it at home among the schoolbooks, because Lila didn’t feel she could keep it in her house. Her father, lately, would get angry if she merely took it out to read.
But Rino protected her. When the subject of the admissions test came up, quarrels exploded continuously between him and his father. Rino was about sixteen at the time, he was a very excitable boy and had started a battle to be paid for the work he did. His reasoning was: I get up at six; I come to the shop and work till eight at night; I want a salary. But those words outraged his father and his mother. Rino had a bed to sleep in, food to eat, why did he want money? His job was to help the family, not impoverish it. But he insisted, he found it unjust to work as hard as his father and not receive a cent. At that point Fernando Cerullo answered him with apparent patience: “I pay you already, Rino, I pay you generously by teaching you the whole trade: soon you’ll be able to repair a heel or an edge or put on a new sole; your father is passing on to you everything he knows, and you’ll be able to make an entire shoe, with the skill of a professional.” But that payment by instruction was not enough for Rino, and so they argued, especially at dinner. They began by talking about money and ended up quarreling about Lila.
“If you pay me I’ll take care of sending her to school,” Rino said.
“School? Why, did I go to school?”
“No.”
“Did you go to school?”
“No.”
“Then why should your sister, who is a girl, go to school?”
The matter almost always ended with a slap in the face for Rino, who, one way or another, even if he didn’t intend to, had displayed a lack of respect toward his father. The boy, without crying, apologized in a spiteful tone of voice.
Lila was silent during those discussions. She never said so, but I had the impression that while I hated my mother, really hated her, profoundly, she, in spite of everything, wasn’t upset with her father. She said that he was full of kindnesses, she said that when there were accounts to do he let her do them, she said that she had heard him say to his friends that his daughter was the most intelligent person in the neighborhood, she said that on her name day he brought her warm chocolate in bed and four biscuits. But what could you do, it didn’t enter into his view of the world that she should continue to go to school. Nor did it fall within his economic possibilities: the family was large, they all had to live off the shoe repair shop, including two unmarried sisters of Fernando and Nunzia’s parents. So on the matter of school it was like talking to the wall, and her mother all in all had the same opinion. Only her brother had different ideas, and fought boldly against his father. And Lila, for reasons I didn’t understand, seemed certain that Rino would win. He would get his salary and would send her to school with the money.