The day ended there. There was only one last question, which I asked Lila and Enzo, because I was feeling at ease and had in mind what Elisa had said to me a little earlier. I asked: And the Solaras? Enzo immediately stared at the floor. Lila shrugged, she said: The usual pieces of shit. Then she said sarcastically that Michele had gone mad: after his mother’s death he had left Gigliola, he had thrown his wife and children out of the house on Posillipo and if they showed up there he beat them. The Solaras — she said, with a hint of gratification — are finished: imagine, Marcello goes around saying it’s my fault that his brother is behaving like that. And here she narrowed her eyes, with an expression of satisfaction, as if what Marcello said were a compliment. Then she concluded: A lot of things have changed, Lenù, since you left; you should stay with us now; give me your phone number, we ought see each other as much as we can; and then I want to send you Gennaro, you have to see if you can help him.
She took a pen and got ready to write. I dictated the first two numbers right away, then I got confused, I had learned the number only a few days earlier and I couldn’t remember it. When, however, it did come to mind precisely, I hesitated again, I was afraid she would come back and settle in my life; I dictated two more numbers, and got the other numbers wrong on purpose.
It was a good thing. Just as I was about to leave with the girls Lila asked me in front of everyone, including Dede and Elsa:
“Will you have a child with Nino?”
35
Of course not, I responded, and laughed in embarrassment. But on the street I had to explain, to Elsa especially — Dede was grimly silent — that I would not have other children, they were my children and that was that. And for two days I had a headache, I couldn’t sleep. A few deliberately placed words and Lila had disrupted an encounter that had seemed to me pleasant. I said to myself: There’s nothing to be done, she’s incurable, she always knows how to complicate my existence. And I wasn’t alluding only to the anxieties she had unleashed in Dede and Elsa. Lila had struck with precision a point in myself that I kept carefully hidden and which had to do with the urge for motherhood I’d noticed for the first time a dozen years ago, when I had held little Mirko, in Mariarosa’s house. It had been a completely irrational impulse, a sort of command of love, which at the time had overwhelmed me. I had intuited even then that it was not a simple wish to have a child, I wanted a particular child, a child like Mirko, a child of Nino’s. And in fact that yearning had not been alleviated by Pietro and the conception of Dede and Elsa. Rather, it had reemerged recently, when I saw Silvia’s child and, especially, when Nino had told me that Eleonora was pregnant. Now, with increasing frequency, it rummaged around in me, and Lila, with her usual acute gaze, had seen it. It’s her favorite game — I said to myself — she does it with Enzo, with Carmen, with Antonio, with Alfonso. She must have behaved the same way with Michele Solara, with Gigliola. She pretends to be a kind and affectionate person, but then she gives you a slight nudge, she moves you a tiny bit, and she ruins you. She wants to go back to acting like that with me, and with Nino, too. She had managed to bring out into the open a secret tremor that in general I tried to ignore, as one ignores the twitching of an eyelid.
For days, in the house on Via Tasso, alone and in company, I was constantly agitated by the question: Will you have a child with Nino? But now it wasn’t Lila’s question, I asked it of myself.
36
After that, I returned often to the neighborhood, especially when Pietro came to stay with the girls. I walked to Piazza Amedeo, I took the metro. Sometimes I stopped on the railroad bridge and looked down on the stradone, sometimes I just went through the tunnel and walked to the church. But more often I went to fight with my mother, insisting that she go to a doctor, and I involved my father, Peppe, Gianni in that battle. She was a stubborn woman, she got angry at her husband and sons as soon as they alluded to her health problems. With me, it was always the same, she cried: Shut up, you’re the one who’s killing me, and she threw me out, or locked herself in the bathroom.
Lila instead had what it takes, and everyone knew it; Michele, for example, had realized it long ago. So Elisa’s aversion toward her was due not only to some disagreement with Marcello but to the fact that Lila had yet again broken off from the Solaras and, after using them, had done well. Basic Sight was earning her a growing reputation for innovation and for profit. It was no longer a matter of the brilliant person who since she was a child had had the capacity to take the disorder from your head and heart to give it back to you well organized or, if she couldn’t stand you, to confuse your ideas and leave you depressed. Now she also embodied the possibility of learning a new job, a job that no one knew anything about but was lucrative. The business was going so well — people said — that Enzo was looking for a space for a proper office and not the makeshift one that he had installed between the kitchen and the bedroom. But who was Enzo, clever though he might be? Only a subordinate of Lila. It was she who moved things, who made and unmade. So, to exaggerate just slightly, the situation in the neighborhood seemed in a short time to have become the following: you learned either to be like Marcello and Michele or to be like Lila.
Of course, it might be that it was my obsession, but in that phase, at least, I seemed increasingly to see her in all the people who had been or were close to her. Once, for example, I ran into Stefano Carracci, much heavier, his complexion yellowish, shabbily dressed. There was absolutely nothing left of the young shopkeeper Lila had married, least of all his money. And yet from the little conversation we had it seemed to me that he used many of his wife’s phrases. And Ada, too, who at that point had great respect for Lila and said nice things about her, because of the money she gave Stefano, seemed to imitate her gestures, maybe even her way of laughing.
Relatives and friends crowded around her in search of a job, making an effort to appear suitable. Ada herself was hired out of the blue at Basic Sight, she was to begin by answering the telephone, then maybe she would learn other things. Rino, too — who one bad day had quarreled with Marcello and left the supermarket — inserted himself into his sister’s activity without even asking permission, boasting that he could learn in no time all there was to learn. But the most unexpected news for me — Nino told me one night, he had heard it from Marisa — was that even Alfonso had ended up at Basic Sight. Michele Solara, who continued to act in a crazy way, had closed the shop in Piazza dei Martiri for no reason and Alfonso was left without a job. As a result now he, too — and successfully — was being retrained, thanks to Lila.
I could have found out more, and maybe I would have liked to, all I had to do was call her, stop by. But I never did. Once only I met her on the street and stopped reluctantly. She must have been offended that I had told her the wrong phone number, that I had offered to give lessons to her son and instead had disappeared, that she had done everything to reconcile with me and I had withdrawn. She said she was in a hurry, she asked in dialect: