When Nino did not return in ten minutes or an hour or even the next day, Lila turned spiteful. She felt not abandoned but humiliated, and although she had admitted to herself that she wasn't the right woman for him, she still found it unbearable that he, disappearing from her life after only twenty-three days, had brutally confirmed it. In a rage she threw away everything he had left: books, underwear, socks, a sweater, even a pencil stub. She did it, she regretted it, she burst into tears. When finally the tears stopped, she felt ugly, swollen, stupid, cheapened by the bitter feelings that Nino, Nino whom she loved and by whom she believed she was loved in return, was provoking. The apartment seemed suddenly what it was, a squalid place through whose walls all the noises of the city reached her. She became aware of the bad smell, of the cockroaches that came in under the stairwell door, the stains of dampness on the ceiling, and felt for the first time that childhood was clutching at her again, not the childhood of dreams but the childhood of cruel privations, of threats and beatings. In fact suddenly she discovered that one fantasy that had comforted us since we were children -- to become rich -- had evaporated from her mind. Although the poverty of Campi Flegrei seemed to her darker than in the neighborhood of our games, although her situation was worse because of the child she was expecting, although in a few days she had used up the money she had brought, she discovered that wealth no longer seemed a prize and a compensation, it no longer spoke to her. The creased and evil-smelling paper money -- piling up in the drawer of the cash register when she worked in the grocery, or in the colored metal box of the shop in Piazza dei Martiri -- that in adolescence replaced the strongboxes of our childhood, overflowing with gold pieces and precious stones, no longer functioned: any remaining glitter was gone. The relationship between money and the possession of things had disappointed her. She wanted nothing for herself or for the child she would have. To be rich for her meant having Nino, and since Nino was gone she felt poor, a poverty that no money could obliterate. Since there was no remedy for that new condition -- she had made too many mistakes since she was a child, and they had all converged in that last mistake: to believe that the son of Sarratore couldn't do without her as she couldn't without him, and that theirs was a unique, exceptional fate, and that the good fortune of loving each other would last forever and would extinguish the force of any other necessity -- she felt guilty and decided not to go out, not to look for him, not to eat, not to drink, but to wait for her life and that of the baby to lose their outlines, any possible definition, and she found that there was nothing left in her mind, not even a trace of the thing that made her spiteful, that is to say the awareness of abandonment.

…

…

…

 

>> 网页版功能未完善，完整内容，请扫码微信小程序。