49.

My job began, and life with a boyfriend. The stationer gave me a sort of bus pass, and every morning I crossed the city with the three little girls, on the crowded buses, and took them to that bright-colored place of beach umbrellas, blue sea, concrete platforms, students, well-off women with a lot of free time, showy women, with greedy faces. I was polite to the attendants who tried to start conversations. I looked after the children, taking them for long swims, and showing off the bathing suit that Nella had made for me the year before. I fed them, played with them, let them drink endlessly at the jet of a stone fountain, taking care that they didn’t slip and break their teeth on the basin.

We got back to the neighborhood in the late afternoon. I returned the children to the stationer, and hurried to my secret date with Antonio, burned by the sun, salty from the sea water. We went to the ponds by back streets, I was afraid of being seen by my mother and, perhaps still more, by Maestra Oliviero. With him I exchanged my first real kisses. I soon let him touch my breasts and between my legs. One evening I touched his penis, straining, large, inside his pants, and when he took it out I held it willingly in one hand while we kissed. I accepted those practices with two very clear questions in my mind. The first was: does Lila do these things with Stefano? The second was: is the pleasure I feel with Antonio the same that I felt the night Donato Sarratore touched me? In both cases Antonio was ultimately only a useful phantom to evoke on the one hand the love between Lila and Stefano, on the other the strong emotion, difficult to categorize, that Nino’s father had inspired in me. But I never felt guilty. Antonio was so grateful to me, he showed such an absolute dependence on me for those few moments of contact at the ponds, that I soon convinced myself that it was he who was indebted to me, that the pleasure I gave him was by far superior to that which he gave me.

Sometimes, on Sunday, he went with me and the children to the Sea Garden. He spent money with pretended casualness, though he earned very little, and he also hated getting sunburned. But he did it for me, just to be near me, without any immediate reward, since there was no way to kiss or touch each other. And he entertained the children, with clowning and athletic diving. While he played with them I lay in the sun reading, dissolving into the pages like a jellyfish.

One of those times I looked up for a second and saw a tall, slender, graceful girl in a stunning red bikini. It was Lila. By now she was used to having men’s gaze on her, she moved as if there were no one in that crowded place, not even the young attendant who went ahead of her, leading her to her umbrella. She didn’t see me and I didn’t know whether to call her. She was wearing sunglasses, she carried a purse of bright-colored fabric. I hadn’t yet told her about my job or even about Antonio: probably I was afraid of her judgment of both. Let’s wait for her to notice me, I thought, and turned back to my book, but I was unable to read. Soon I looked in her direction again. The attendant had opened the chaise, she was sitting in the sun. Meanwhile Stefano was arriving, very white, in a blue bathing suit, in his hand his wallet, lighter, cigarettes. He kissed Lila on the lips the way princes kiss sleeping beauties, and also sat down on a chaise.

Again I tried to read. I had long been used to self-discipline and this time for a few minutes I really did manage to grasp the meaning of the words, I remember that the novel was Oblomov. When I looked up again Stefano was still sitting, staring at the sea, Lila had disappeared. I searched for her and saw that she was talking to Antonio, and Antonio was pointing to me. I gave her a warm wave to which she responded as warmly, and she turned to call Stefano.

We went swimming, the three of us, while Antonio watched the stationer’s daughters. It was a day of seeming cheerfulness. At one point Stefano took us to the bar, ordered all kinds of things: sandwiches, drinks, ice cream, and the children immediately abandoned Antonio and turned their attention to him. When the two young men began to talk about some problems with the convertible, a conversation in which Antonio had a lot to say, I took the little girls away so that they wouldn’t bother them. Lila joined me.

“How much does the stationer pay you?” she asked.

I told her.

“Not much.”

“My mother thinks she pays me too much.”

“You should assert yourself, Lenù.”

“I’ll assert myself when I take your children to the beach.”

“I’ll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you.”

I looked at her to see if she was joking. She wasn’t joking, but she joked right afterward when she mentioned Antonio:

“Does he know your value?”

“We’ve been together for three weeks.”

“Do you love him?”

“No.”

“So?”

I challenged her with a look.

“Do you love Stefano?”

She said seriously, “Very much.”

“More than your parents, more than Rino?”

“More than everyone, but not more than you.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

But meanwhile I thought: even if she’s kidding, it’s nice to talk like this, in the sun, sitting on the warm concrete, with our feet in the water; never mind if she didn’t ask what book I’m reading; never mind if she didn’t find out how the exams went. Maybe it’s not all over: even after she’s married, something between us will endure. I said to her:

“I come here every day. Why don’t you come, too?”

She was enthusiastic about the idea, she spoke to Stefano about it and he agreed. It was a beautiful day on which all of us, miraculously, felt at our ease. Then the sun began to go down, it was time to take the children home. Stefano went to pay and discovered that Antonio had taken care of everything. He was really sorry, he thanked him wholeheartedly. On the street, as soon as Stefano and Lila went off in the convertible, I reproached him. Melina and Ada washed the stairs of the buildings, he earned practically nothing in the garage.

“Why did you pay?” I almost yelled at him, in dialect, angrily.

“Because you and I are better-looking and more refined,” he answered.