More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She began to speak of her husband with a sort of loathing acceptance. It wasn’t hostility, it wasn’t a need for retaliation, it wasn’t even disgust, but a placid disdain, a contempt that invested Stefano’s entire person like polluted water in the ground.
Her own capacity to learn had irritated her, or perhaps frightened her, and she had retreated. Where? To make dinner, to clean the house, to
He said that the Fascists wanted to return to power with the help of the Christian Democrats.
He fell on the ground and in a frenzy began sticking handfuls of dirt in his mouth.
I discovered that suddenly the wish to leave school—to accept myself for what I was, to marry him, to live at his mother’s house with his siblings, pumping gas—had faded.
Well thank god
The women, especially the old ones, didn’t limit themselves to bewildered expressions: some stopped on the edge of the sidewalk and stood watching her, with a laugh that was both amused and uneasy, as when Melina did odd things on the street.
“To me, too,” Lila said, and her amused half-smile, her total absence of hostility, surprised not only me but the two brothers as well.
“What can beatings do to me? A little time goes by and I’m better than before.”
if I said that maybe he had been cruel because he would like her to help him,
What thing? Judging from Marisa, it seemed good. Maybe Lila had soothed Antonio and he wanted to be with me again.
Shds peegnant bo god wgygyyy
She flew for a few seconds, arms wide, then clumsily hit the surface of the water. She didn’t know how to swim.
And I still think that much of the pleasure of those days was derived from the resetting of the conditions of her, or our, life, from the capacity we had to lift ourselves above ourselves, to isolate ourselves in the pure and simple fulfillment of that sort of visual synthesis.
As we worked with brushes and paints, she told me that she had begun to see in that formula an indirect object of place to which, as if Cerullo Carracci somehow indicated that Cerullo goes toward Carracci, falls into it, is sucked up by it, is dissolved in
Exactly
Lila’s pregnancy lasted scarcely more than ten weeks; then the midwife came and scraped away everything.
YAAAAAAAAAY
“I don’t like what I’ve done and what I’m doing.”
“If I don’t act like that, they won’t even listen to me.”
Rino, who, believing at the time that he was riding the crest of a wave as high as a house, came to the shop with a proprietary air and told Gigliola off.
In womwns business
the panel with the strips of black paper, the photograph, the thick patches of color—let out a rasping sound, a kind of sick breath, and burst into flame.
“Lina needs to command, Ste’. She needs to have a responsibility. She should invent things.
In the grip of my unexpected centrality, I even forgot to introduce my friend to Armando, nor, on the other hand, did he seem to notice her.
SO this is her man
when she realized that the professor’s gaze had come to rest on the wedding ring, immediately covered it with her other hand.
I was overwhelmed by emotion as I listened, and, although I felt lost in the midst of a thousand things I didn’t know—what were Gaullism, the O.A.S., social democracy, the opening to the left; who were Danilo Dolci, Bertrand Russell, the pieds-noirs, the followers of Fanfani; and what had happened in Beirut, what in Algeria—I felt the need, as I had long ago, to take care of him, to tend to him, to protect him, to sustain him in everything that he would do in the course of his life.
“She’s very young,” he said. “She needs to get a little stronger.”
They laughed, whispered to each other, laughed again, and then nodded at their wives, who followed them unwillingly into the bedrooms.
There was a part of me that was sick of being a sensible person.
I felt that I had to pay attention to say what he wanted me to say, hiding from him both my ignorance and the few things that I knew and he didn’t.
Then she turned to her daughter, and said, without malice, only to point out how things stood, “You, on the other hand, were married too young.” That comment infuriated Lila and she went to her room.
“If you removed from Nino’s head the things he’s read, you wouldn’t find anything there.”
“For your whole life you love people and you never really know who they are.”
you remember how Lina came back from her honeymoon? Well, look at them now. Life is like that: one day you’re getting hit, the next kissed.”
“How is it that you suddenly feel like reading again?” “It’s none of your business,” she answered.
I sensed that Lila was going on without waiting for us. I sensed that she had decided to do so not out of annoyance or indifference but because there was something in that behavior, something scorching, and if she got too close it would burn her.
she murmured that Lila should have gone to school, it was her destiny.
“Nino kissed me,” she said, and she said it in one breath, like someone who, making a spontaneous confession, is trying to hide, even from herself, something more unconfessable.
The more Lina is surrounded by affection and admiration, the crueler she can become. She’s always been like that.”
“She fell in love with Bruno.”
I KNEW IT
Lila’s reaction stunned me in particular: she sent them away.
What right had she to get angry at an appointment not kept?
This is hkw u have to act
I looked at them at times like fallen divinities: once so clever, so intelligent, and now so stupid, involved in a stupid game.
“You’re embarrassed, eh?” she asked. “You’re the one to blame. How can you have a girlfriend who writes like that?”
One becomes affectionate toward men slowly, whether they coincide or not with whomever in the various phases of life we have taken as the model of a man.
“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.”
Rather, I hated myself, I despised myself.
Another characfer letting life happen o her
Signora Lina knows that you’re better than her and so she doesn’t love you the way you love her.”
I am part of the universal terror; at this moment I’m the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of every thing becomes conscious of itself;
I felt that if the excessive violence he repressed behind his polite manners and his meek face terrified me,
It was a sort of race to know everything, when in fact I took it for granted that my inadequacy was constitutional and so couldn’t be eliminated.
He said that in the Army he had learned that if you are a simple soldier you owe obedience to anyone who wears stripes.
Lila let him do it, because she considered him not the flesh-and-blood Enzo but a shadow, in color, as in the movies, who although he spoke was nevertheless an effect of the light.
The following day, when she woke up, she said reluctantly, “I’m pregnant,” and he was so happy that when she added, “The baby isn’t yours,” he burst out laughing, with genuine joy.
