I sat on the bed, but trying to make it clear that I was tired of her and everything.
“What do you have to tell me?”
She whispered, “I want to go and sleep at Nino’s.”
I was astonished.
“And Nunzia?”
“Wait, don’t get mad. There’s not much time left, Lenù. Stefano will arrive on Saturday, he’ll stay for ten days, then we go back to Naples. And everything will be over.”
“Everything what?”
“This, these days, these evenings.”
We discussed it for a long time, she seemed very lucid. She murmured that nothing like this would ever happen to her again. She whispered that she loved him, that she wanted him. She used that verb, amare, that we had found only in books and in the movies, that no one used in the neighborhood, I would say it at most to myself, we all preferred voler bene. She no, she loved. She loved Nino. But she knew very well that that love had to be suffocated, every occasion for it to breathe had to be removed. And she would do it, she would do it starting Saturday night. She had no doubts, she would be capable of it, and I had to trust her. But the very little time that remained she wished to devote to Nino.
“I want to stay in a bed with him for a whole night and a whole day,” she said. “I want to sleep holding him and being held, and kiss him when I feel like it, caress him when I feel like it, even while he’s sleeping. Then that’s it.”
“It’s impossible.”
“You have to help me.”
“How?”
“You have to convince my mother that Nella has invited us to spend two days at Barano and that we’ll spend the night there.”
I was silent for a moment. So she already had a project, she had a plan. Clearly she had worked it out with Nino, maybe he had even sent Bruno away on purpose. For how long had they been deciding the how, the where? No more speeches on neocapitalism, on neocolonialism, on Africa, on Latin America, on Beckett, on Bertrand Russell. Mere doodles. Nino no longer talked about anything. Their brilliant minds now were exercised only on how to deceive Nunzia and Stefano, using me.
“You’re out of your mind,” I said, furiously, “even if your mother believes you your husband never will.”
“You persuade her to send us to Barano and I’ll persuade her not to tell Stefano.”
“No.”
“Aren’t we friends anymore?”
“No.”
“You’re not Nino’s friend anymore?”
“No.”
But Lila knew how to draw me in. And I was unable to resist: on the one hand I said that’s enough, on the other I was depressed at the idea of not being part of her life, of the means by which she invented it for herself. What was that deception but another of her fantastic moves, which were always full of risks? The two of us together, allied with each other, in the struggle against all. We would devote the next day to overcoming Nunzia’s opposition. The day after that we would leave early, together. At Forio we would separate. She would go to Bruno’s house with Nino, I would take the boat for the Maronti. She would spend the whole day and the whole night with Nino, I would be at Nella’s and sleep in Barano. The next day I would return to Forio for lunch, we would see each other at Bruno’s, and together would return home. Perfect. The more her mind was ignited as, in minute detail, she planned how to make every part of the ruse add up, the more skillfully she ignited mine, too, and she hugged me, begged me. Here was a new adventure, together. Here was how we would take what life didn’t want to give us. Here. Or would I rather that she be deprived of that joy, that Nino should suffer, that both should lose the light of reason and end up not capably managing their desire but being dangerously overwhelmed by it? There was a moment, that night, when, by following her along the thread of her arguments, I came to think that to support her in this undertaking, besides being an important milestone for our long sisterhood, was also the way of manifesting my love — she said friendship, but I desperately thought: love, love love — for Nino. And it was at that point that I said:
“All right, I’ll help you.”
66
The next day I told Nunzia many lies that were so disgraceful I was ashamed. At the center of the lies I placed Maestra Oliviero, who was in Potenza, in goodness knows what terrible conditions, and it was my idea, not Lila’s. “Yesterday,” I said to Nunzia, “I met Nella Incardo, and she told me that her cousin, who is convalescing, has come to stay with her for a vacation at the seaside that will finally restore her health. Tomorrow night Nella’s having a party for the teacher and she invited me and Lila, who were her best students. We would really like to go, but it will be late and so impossible. But Nella has said that we can sleep at her house.”
“In Barano?” Nunzia asked, frowning.
“Yes, the party is there.”
“You go, Lenù, Lila can’t, her husband will get mad.”
Lila threw in, “Let’s not tell him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mamma, he’s in Naples and I’m here, he’ll never find out.”
“One way or another things are always found out.”
“Well, no.”
“Yes, and that’s enough. Lina, I don’t want to discuss it further: if Lenuccia wants to go, fine, but you stay here.”
We went on for a good hour, I making the point that the teacher was very sick and this might be our last chance to show her our gratitude, and Lila pressing her like this: “How many lies have you told Papa, admit it, and not for bad reasons but for good ones, to have a moment to yourself, to do a just thing that he would never allow.” Wavering, Nunzia first said that she had never told the tiniest lie to Fernando; then she admitted that she had told one, two, many; finally she cried with rage and at the same time maternal pride, “What happened when I conceived you, an accident, a hiccup, a convulsion, the lights went out, a bulb blew, the basin of water fell off the night table? Certainly there must have been something, if you were born so intolerable, so different from the others.” And here she grew sad, she seemed to soften. But soon she was indignant again, she said you don’t tell lies to a husband just to see a schoolteacher. And Lila exclaimed, “To Maestra Oliviero I owe the little I know, the only school I had was with her.” And in the end Nunzia gave in. But she insisted on a precise timetable: Saturday at exactly two o’clock we were to be home again. Not a minute later. “If Stefano arrives early and doesn’t find you? Really, Lina, don’t put me in an ugly situation. Clear?”
“Clear.”
We went to the beach. Lila was radiant, she embraced me, she kissed me, she said that she would be grateful for her whole life. But I already felt guilty about that evocation of Maestra Oliviero, whom I had placed at the center of a party, in Barano, imagining her as she was when, full of energy, she taught us, and not as, instead, she must be now, worse than when she was taken away in the ambulance, worse than when I had seen her in the hospital. My satisfaction in having invented an effective lie vanished, I lost the frenzy of complicity, I became resentful again. I asked myself why I supported Lila, why I covered for her: in fact she wanted to betray her husband, she wanted to violate the sacred bond of marriage, she wanted to tear off her condition of wife, she wanted to do a thing that would provoke Stefano, if he should find out, to bash her head in. Suddenly I remembered what she had done to the wedding-dress photograph and I felt sick to my stomach. Now, I thought, she is behaving in the same way, and not with a photograph but with the very person of Signora Carracci. And in this case, too, she pulls me in to help her. Nino is a tool, yes, yes. Like the scissors, the paste, the paint, he is being used to disfigure her. Toward what terrible act is she driving me? And why do I let myself be driven?