I said, “I feel comfortable with Antonio, even though I don’t love him.”
And I hoped that, in accord with our old habits, she would be able to grasp in that statement a series of hidden questions. Although I love Nino — I was saying without saying it — I feel pleasantly excited just thinking of Antonio, of our kisses, of holding and touching each other at the ponds. Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not? What happens when you’re in a bed, crushed by a man? She had experienced that and I would have liked her to talk about it. Instead she confined herself to saying, sarcastically, Better for you if you’re comfortable, and she led me to a small room that looked out onto the railroad tracks. It was a bare space, there was only a desk, a chair, a cot, nothing on the walls.
“Do you like it here?”
“Yes.”
“Then study.”
She left, closing the door behind her.
The room smelled of damp plaster more than the rest of the house. I looked out the window, I would have preferred to go on talking. But it was immediately clear to me that Alfonso had told her about my absence from school, maybe even about my bad grades, and that she wanted to restore to me the wisdom she had always attributed to me, even at the cost of imposing it on me. Better that way. I heard her moving through the house, making a phone call. It struck me that she didn’t say Hello, it’s Lina, or, I don’t know, It’s Lina Cerullo, but Hello, this is Signora Carracci. I sat down at the desk, opened my history book, and forced myself to study.
11
The close of the school year was inauspicious. The building that housed the high school was crumbling, rain leaked into the classrooms, after one violent storm a street nearby caved in. There followed a period when we went to school on alternate days, homework began to count more than the normal lessons, the teachers loaded it on to the point where it was unbearable. Despite my mother’s protests, I got in the habit of going to Lila’s right after school.
I arrived at two in the afternoon, I dropped my books somewhere. She made me a sandwich with prosciutto, cheese, salami — anything I wanted. Such abundance was never seen at my parents’ house: how good the smell of the fresh bread was, and the taste of the fillings, especially the prosciutto, bright red edged with white. I ate greedily and Lila made me coffee. After we’d had some intense conversation, she closed me in the little room and seldom looked in, except to bring me a snack and to eat or drink with me. Since I had no wish to run into Stefano, who generally returned from the grocery around eight at night, I always left right at seven.
I became familiar with the apartment, with its light, with the sounds that came from the railroad. Every space, every thing was new and clean, but especially the bathroom, which had a sink, a bidet, a bathtub. One afternoon when I felt particularly lazy I asked Lila if I could have a bath, I who still washed under the tap or in a copper tub. She said I could do what I wanted and went to bring me towels. The water came out hot from the tap and I let it run. I undressed, I sank in up to my neck.
That warmth was an unexpected pleasure. After a while I tried out the numerous little bottles that crowded the corners of the tub: a steamy foam arose, as if from my body, and almost overflowed. Ah, how many wonderful things Lila possessed. It was no longer just a matter of a clean body, it was play, it was abandon. I discovered the lipsticks, the makeup, the wide mirror that reflected an image without deformities, the hair dryer. Afterward, my skin was smoother than I had ever felt it, and my hair was full, luminous, blonder. Maybe the wealth we wanted as children is this, I thought: not strongboxes full of diamonds and gold coins but a bathtub, to immerse yourself like this every day, to eat bread, salami, prosciutto, to have a lot of space even in the bathroom, to have a telephone, a pantry and icebox full of food, a photograph in a silver frame on the sideboard that shows you in your wedding dress — to have this entire house, with the kitchen, the bedroom, the dining room, the two balconies, and the little room where I am studying, and where, even though Lila hasn’t said so, soon, when it comes, a baby will sleep.
That evening I hurried to the ponds, I couldn’t wait for Antonio to caress me, smell me, marvel, enjoy that luxurious cleanliness that highlighted beauty. It was a gift that I wanted to give him. But he had his anxieties: he said, I’ll never be able to offer you these things, and I answered, Who says that I want them, and he replied, You always want to do what Lila does. I was offended, we quarreled. I was independent. I did only what I liked, I did what he and Lila didn’t and couldn’t do, I went to school, I studied hard, was going blind over my books. I cried that he didn’t understand me, that all he did was disparage and insult me, and I ran away.
But Antonio understood me too well. Day by day my friend’s house charmed me more, it became a magical place where I could have everything, far from the wretched gray of the old buildings where we had grown up, the flaking walls, the scratched doors, the same objects always, dented and chipped. Lila was careful not to disturb me, I would call out: I’m thirsty, I’m kind of hungry, let’s turn on the television, can I see this, can I see that. I was bored by studying, I struggled. Sometimes I asked her to listen to me while I repeated the lessons aloud. She sat on the cot, I at the desk. I showed her the pages I had to repeat, I recited, Lila checked me line for line.
It was on those occasions that I realized how her relationship with books had changed. Now she was intimidated by them. She no longer wanted to impose on me an order, her own rhythm, as if just a few sentences were enough to get a picture of the whole and master it so that she could tell me: This is the important concept, start here. When, following me in the textbook, she had the impression that I was mistaken, she corrected me with a thousand apologies, such as: Maybe I didn’t understand it, maybe you should check. She seemed not to realize that her capacity to learn effortlessly remained intact. But I knew. I saw, for example, that chemistry, so boring for me, provoked in her that narrow look, and her few observations awakened me from my apathy, excited me. I saw that after half a page of the philosophy textbook she was able to find surprising connections between Anaxagoras, the order that the intellect imposes on the chaos of things, and Mendeleev’s tables. But more often I had the impression that she was aware of the inadequacy of her tools, of the naïveté of her observations, and she restrained herself on purpose. As soon as she realized that she had let herself get too involved, she retreated as if before a trap, and mumbled: Lucky you who understand, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Once, she closed the book abruptly and said with annoyance, “That’s enough.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve had it, it’s always the same story: inside something small there’s something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there’s always something larger that wants to keep it a prisoner. I’m going to cook.”