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Lila felt wrong.
Wrong in the way her belly protruded from her waiflike body, the way her skin stretched and wrapped around what was inside, the way it made her steps heavy and her gait uneven.
She hated the sickly pallor of her gaunt cheeks, how it felt as if there was some alien being sucking all the blood out of her, only to regurgitate the disgusting matter back into her stomach until it inflated completely, making her want to vomit constantly.
Lila felt full on herself, looking in the mirror at her abdomen jutting round and out underneath her nightgown, concealing a force so big as if about to burst open and spill out all the contents inside.
She imagined the baby to be something like malevolent black tar, oozing out from her ruptured body and pooling at the feet of Stefano, who'd leave out the door early and return home far too many hours after dark; of her perpetually pale, weary mother and increasingly neurotic brother; of the whole neighborhood, so that they'd say: See? We've always known you were a witch who kills the babies in her belly.
Her brain painted a picture of the scene: Lila, caught smiling up at the angel of death as she let the child drain from her body, a suddenly red thing stringing from her womb and into a chalice, like something holy.
No one had cried when she'd miscarried; instead, they blamed it on her restlessness and sent her to the beach.
Not even the salty seawaters of the Maronti had been enough to cleanse her.
Lila swallowed the thing she had always feared: that rupturing and revealing of one's true nature—a splintering of the self that burrowed itself into her mind as a girl, frightening her. But it wouldn't happen again. Not a single book on motherhood mentioned such a thing, so she tried to soothe herself the way she always did.
Putting pen to paper felt as natural and necessary as breathing, opening the pail and pulling out the words the way she had as a child. She wished she could place the baby within those neat notebook lines, protect it from spilling past the margins and into the world outside.
If something had to break, she wished for it to be anything but the child.
In July, the baby came anyway, and it wasn't anything like Lila expected. She expelled it out of her body with force, screaming—within that white room, icy fluorescent lights blinding, warm red blood painting the bright canvas of pure white bedsheets—as it tore out of her reluctantly.
Later, she would come to reconcile the warmth of that small body against hers with the agony of its birth, a tightrope of opposites: where at one point there was devotion, and at the other end, disquiet.
“Look what a beautiful baby. A beautiful boy,” said one of the nurses, holding the infant out to Lila like a prize she had unexpectedly won.
“Hi, Rino,” Lila whispered against his skin, warm and delicate on her lips. He would be called Gennaro, Rinuccio, like her brother.
She looked to the infant, something like pleased curiosity in her eyes, tender awe coaxing her lips into a small, shaky smile.
The thoughts quieted, the baby attached to her breast sucked them out leisurely, and she quickly grew to enjoy the sensation. A sort of satisfied feeling of delight bloomed within her, and not even Stefano's anger about the baby's name was enough to shake her out of that loving bliss.
She considered her child to be something of a small wonder, the bond that nourished her very being, causing within her a deeply embedded ache at the thought that he would one day stop nursing.
Time stretched on, the months went by in a blur, and Lila became content, confining herself within the white walls of the apartment as if the whole world consisted of nothing but her and Gennaro.
She'd wrinkle her brows when her husband—who had hardly touched the boy—would reprimand her for not taking him outside enough. When she finally did, on sunny autumn mornings where the breeze wasn't cold enough to break the baby's skin, she'd dress him in babydoll blue and walk around the neighborhood pushing an expensive white pram, pointing out various places to him in careful Italian as if he could understand.
She feared the inadequacy of her youth and sought to give her child a different fate, a proper education, almost to the point of obsession.
Lila began reading the best books on how to stimulate her child's intelligence. She bought Gennaro the best and most challenging toys, as if to say: what the world denied me, I'll ensure it never denies you.
She'd held onto a book that Nino disliked, struggling to wrap her head around it with an effort that had previously been foreign to her; she'd never found it difficult to grasp any other book before.
Lila often read a few pages at a time, putting the book down to cook dinner, staring aimlessly at the aqua blue cloth cover, only to pick it back up again while Gennaro slept.
“You shouldn't read books you can't understand,” her former teacher warned in a thin, croaking voice. Lila had run into the now frail woman on one of those sunny autumn walks. “They're bad for you.”
She was happy to see Maestra Oliviero at first, and fondly remembered how her hair had been much browner then than it was now; how encouraging she had been when, in those earlier days, Lila had answered a question correctly; how imposing she stood at the chalkboard during lessons.
Instead, her wispy strands now had strokes of faded gray, and she stood clutching a cane in her shaky fist.
It seemed to Lila almost unsightly, not the woman's appearance so much as the effect time wrought on the formerly smooth flesh, the once elegant strands of hair, now having the appearance of webs—on the body itself, until you no longer recognized it on others nor yourself.
Lila wondered idly, at the back of her mind, if one day Rino might regard her with such revulsion. If one day, in her old age, her son might miss the delicate lines of her form—the softness of her uncreased skin, not yet whet callously with age—from when he was a boy and she'd held him close to her bosom like they were the only two atoms of note in a sea of other matter.
Suddenly, the day had been sullied. Lila looked to the infant, asleep under the hood of the pram, and pretended to pluck a stray thread from his cradle knit sweater.
“A lot of things are bad for you,” she said once she met the old woman's critical gaze, mouth taut with a stifled frown.
Those assumptions had bothered her. Who was to decide what was bad for you and what wasn't?
I have to go, Lila told the woman nervously, jittery hands stuffing the book into her bag and grabbing the handle of the pram to start on the way back home.
She felt that, if at sixteen, all her dreams had ended up under her feet in the form of wedding shoes, then at just barely nineteen, the big things her former teacher swore she'd been destined for had shrunken into the reality of the small things everyone could do: getting married and having children.
She felt stupid, that her whole family and ancestors were stupid, too, and that soon enough—like an unspoken curse, passed down by the unforgiving hands of time—her child would grow up to be as stupid as they were.
While passing by the shoe store on Piazza dei Martiri, Lila realized that, perhaps, Nino had been bad for her. But the realization came without spite, instead with a numb neutrality that seemed at odds with the fervent passion they'd shared within those walls.
She remembered the lowered shutters of the shopfront—the streaks of shadow and light streaming through the window as they embraced—with an almost fondness just out of reach. She thought about Nino and felt nothing.
Holding Gennaro in her arms, Lila lingered outside the shop's windows like a phantom left behind in a foreign time.
The new shoe styles distinctly recalled the old, the ones designed by a younger hand she'd barely recognized as her own anymore. Lila settled her gaze on them for a while, the shoes standing on their displays inside like the severed feet of wealthy men and women frozen in time.
Perhaps she felt something, but that thing was without a name. There were no more words to pull from her brain. She decided that the pail was empty, and that, maybe, it was better that way.
When Alfonso, amiable as ever, invited her inside, she shook her head, waving dismissively.
Vignettes of Nino's willowy body wrapped around hers projected in her mind: the sensation of skin on skin, blood-warm bodies flush with want and heady impulse, the odor of sex ripe in the air among the waxy new of the shoes.
They'd lie on the store's lush maroon sofa, kissing languidly, mixed laughs and intermingled whispers quieting whenever passersby rushed past the door outside.
I just came to say hi, Lila told Alfonso with a tight-lipped smile, suddenly shy.
She felt her eyes drift down to the floor, tracing old footsteps. Something sank in her stomach, making her nauseous.
The tightrope of opposites appeared again.
Lila had put Gennaro to bed early the night the floors and walls of the apartment began to quiver; movements that shook the new apartment structure, supposedly sturdier than its crumbling counterparts in the old neighborhood.
The forceful winds of the thunderstorm outside didn't frighten Lila, even though the lightning pulsed with fury, its impact making the kitchen table wobble on its legs like a baby bird.
She watched the clock tick, the pendulum oscillating from one end to another, and waited patiently for Stefano to return from wherever he seemed to vanish on Sundays, a day of the week when he seemed to go out much earlier than any other.
Then, with a flash of lightning through the window, Stefano appeared in the kitchen doorway suddenly—as if the light itself had conjured him up in some stroke of bad magic.
He stood there for a moment, confused by her decision to wait for him like a child caught in the act of doing something wrong, before she beckoned him to sit down.
Lila told him plainly: she'd known for a long time that he had a lover, that what he'd been doing with Ada was the same thing she'd done with Nino. What you've done to me, I did to you, she'd said, wearing a single unchanging expression of unconcern.
Lila didn't care and, in fact, considered them even.
Stefano feigned ignorance in response, asking her what she meant as if to make her sound crazy.
And out of her mouth came the words she'd first told him after running away with Nino.
“Gennarino isn't your son,” she said to Stefano for what had to have been the fourth time.
She had always been good at twisting the knife. Lila thought to repeat it a few more times to see how deep she could wedge it into his body, how much blood would pool around where the blade pierced his flesh, red seeping into the white collared shirt she'd ironed with such care, spreading like mold everywhere. Maybe she'd wait until his lips turned pale and blue.
Perhaps, she'd even smile like the witch-whore everyone once thought she was.
Her husband didn't react the way she'd expected, didn't have another outburst that shook the walls the same way the storm had now, didn't beat her and kick her out. Instead, he simply denied it all.
Stefano sighed, deep and drawn out. After a long silence, he promptly lit a cigarette and said, thinly surpressed frustation tugging on his smirking lips, “Ada's only a shop girl in the grocery store. People in the neighborhood talk a lot of crap, don't believe it.”
Then, suddenly, he got angry, contorted his features in that way of his. And it reminded Lila of their wedding when, against all odds, the figure of his dead father burst out from his own, alive with fury. Mean and brutish like a monster from a cautionary tale.
Stefano leaned across the table, close enough to make Lila grimace from the bitter, ashy odor of tobacco coming off of him, stark and stale as it entered her nose.
He lowered his voice. “But say that ugly thing about my son again and, as God is my witness, I'll kill you with my bare hands, and I'll do it for real.”
Lila sat as still as a stone statue. She narrowed her eyes, staring daggers at him. Then, she began to realize daggers and knives didn't matter; Stefano tore them out of his body with ease and gusto.
He swore that Gennaro was identical to him, that to keep provoking him on the matter was pointless.
“Do you know why he's my son? Why he came along even though you didn't want him?”
Because he's the fruit of my love.
Stefano repeated over and over, the same way he'd done so many times before: he loved her. He'd promised at the altar, he loved her; they were husband and wife, and therefore nothing could separate them, he loved her; even if she acted like a bitch, he loved her.
His litany never varied, never contained any likeness to the kind of romantic confessions she and Lenu dreamt of receiving when they were schoolgirls—still new to the world and naive, pulled along by infantile ideals and childish dreams.
He took a quick drag of his cigarette and, with the flash of another burst of lightning outside, got up suddenly and tried to kiss her.
Lila finally moved, pushing him away. “Don't you dare!”
She got up and, in a sort of ill-fated dance, continued to evade his touch—his stale, tired declarations of love—until she found herself backed up against the kitchen counter, her hands gripping his arms so that he couldn't lean forward, come nearer.
She'd grown so used to the hitting, the bloody noses she'd have to conceal from little Gennaro, who busied himself blithely with toys in the adjoining room. Papa's playing, we're just having a bit of fun, she'd say to the child as he looked up in awe, startled out of his babbling daze by the sharp crack of skin striking skin.
Now, Lila thought nervously, this was different. He wouldn't dare invade her space in that other unspoken way again.
No, not after all this time.
Her mother, much younger then, had once worn a dignified blue hat and veil to her wedding. It was the only time Lila ever saw the woman dress so elegantly, a lady just as Lila herself was, wearing a lavish white gown bought with new money.
Lila began to think clothes were what made a lady. Walk around the neighborhood wearing just the right silhouette, the perfect cut above the knee, the seductive wrap of a heel strap around the ankle, and no one would care if, in truth, you'd barely had a single lira in your wallet.
She'd perfected the art of playing the part, and filling her wardrobe with the latest styles worn by the glamorous women in magazines had quickly become her new pet project before the wedding. She'd always been quick to devote herself to things completely; that all-consuming passion kept her mind from spilling outside the margins.
It was like playing dress up, something she had done as a girl with her doll, Nu, exchanging one meager rag for another to make her anew.
Lila wore nothing but her shirt now, a small shock in the somewhat conscious edge of her brain reminding her of the small dignity Stefano afforded her by leaving it on when he'd torn off her skirt in a frenzy.
She lay like a rigid metal box on their bed, inert and stiff, her own blood like liquid lead as it moved through her body and drummed in her ears; one of two forces making her feel so heavy.
She couldn't move, finding that she no longer wanted to struggle against the weight.
Lila thought about the wedding dress, a sprawling thing flowing down her body in all its extravagance as she walked down the aisle, a dead thing sitting tucked in her closet somewhere.
Hung woman, she thought. And she felt like one now, her husband's breath in her ear like a noose around her own neck.
In the past, she had clawed at him, hit him, forcefully shuffled her feet against his own, thrashing and kicking him away. This time, when he'd grabbed her from her place against the kitchen counter to carry her into their bedroom, she'd tried to grip the doorway.
“Gennaro is sleeping, you'll wake him,” she'd tried, her choked-off protests defeated by swallowed starts of a sob.
In the bedroom, she tried doing what she had always done. Lila let her eyes bore into the pasty white wall, drill a hole there, a fantasy means of escape. She thought about other things: the wedding, her mother's blue hat with the veil of a fisherman's net, Nu and her bottle cap hat, and Lenu's doll, Tina, too.
But it was no use, and she couldn't ignore the baby as he lay in the cradle not far from the bed. He was still sound asleep despite the bright, loud, blue flares of light flashing at irregular intervals, and rain tapping against the thinly curtained window.
All of it formed a stormy cacophony that sounded in almost haphazard tune to the pace with which Stefano buried himself inside of her in sharp, neverending blows. Like the sting of a slap if one had been forced to endure it over and over.
She worried that the constant crackle of lightning would have a better chance of waking the sleeping infant instead.
Would he cry for long? How quickly would she be able to detangle her limbs from the force above her? To hurry towards the cradle and hold him until, finally, a hush washed over. Would the storm still sound in his dreams? Would he hear her, crying?
Dream, Lila told herself, she had always been good at that.
So, she closed her eyes and saw nothing beneath her lids, only the icy afterimage left behind by the light.
The color underneath imprinted itself like ink, the noises beating against her brain in a terrible symphony.