LITMIR.BIZ

      Anastasia Finizio, the older daughter of Angelina Finizio and the late Ernesto, one of Chiaia’s leading hairdress ers, who only a few years earlier had retired to a sunny and tranquil enclosure in the cemetery of Poggioreale, had just returned from High Mass (it was Christmas Day) at Santa Maria degli Angeli, in Monte di Dio, and still hadn’t made up her mind to take off her hat. Tall and thin, like all the Finizios, with the same meticulous, glittering elegance, which contrasted sharply with the dullness and indefinable decrepitude of their horsey figures, Anastasia paced up and down the bedroom she shared with her sister, Anna, unable to contain a visible agitation. Only a few minutes earlier, everything had been indifference and peace, coldness and resignation in her heart of a woman on the verge of forty, who, almost without realizing it, had lost every hope of personal happiness and adapted fairly easily to a man’s life—all responsibility, accounts, work. In the same place where her father had styled the most demanding heads of Naples, she had a knitwear shop, and with that she supported the household: mother, aunt, sister, two brothers, one of whom was about to get married. Apart from the pleasure of dressing like a sophisticated woman of the big city, she didn’t know or wish for anything else. And now in an instant, she was no longer herself. Not that she was ill, not at all, but she felt a happiness that wasn’t really happiness so much as a revival of the imagination she had believed dead, a disorientation. The fact that she had reached an excellent position in life, that she dressed well, and the many moral satisfactions she gained from maintaining all those people— these had disappeared, or almost, like a whirlwind, confronted by the hope of being young and a woman again. In her brain, at that moment, there was true confusion, as if an entire crowd were shouting and lamenting, pleading for mercy, before someone who had come to announce, in an equivocal way, something extraordinary. She was still stunned by the bellowing of the organ, by the furor of the hymns, dazzled by the sparkle of gold and silver on the reds and whites of the sacred vestments, by the twinkling lights; her head was still heavy with the penetrating scent of lilies and roses, mixed with the funereal odor of incense, when, upon reaching the entrance, and stretching out her arms toward the plain, everyday air, she had run into Lina Stassano, the sister of her future sister-in-law, and thus learned that, after years of absence, a certain Antonio Laurano, a youth she had once considered, was back in Naples. “His health isn’t bad, but he says he’s tired of being at sea, and wants to find a job in Naples. He said to me: If you see Anastasia Finizio give her a special greeting.” That was all; it could be much, or nothing, but this time—as if something had broken in her rigid mental mechanism, the old control, all the defenses of a race forced to greater and greater sacrifices because there would be hell to pay if they weren’t made—Anastasia, who had always been so cold and cautious, let herself go, as if bewitched, into the digressions of a feeling as obscure as it was extraordinary.

      “Ah, Madonna!” she was saying in her mind, without being aware herself of this mysterious conversation she was having. “If it were true! If Lina Stassano isn’t wrong … if that really is Antonio’s feeling for me! But why couldn’t it be? What’s odd about it? I’m not bad-looking … and I can’t even say I’m old, although twenty years have gone by. I have no illusions; I look at reality, I do look. I’m independent … I have a position … money … He’s tired of sailing … maybe disappointed … he wants to settle in Naples … I could help him … Perhaps he needs security, affection … he’s not looking for a girl but a woman. And I, on the other hand, what sort of life do I lead? House and shop, shop and house. I’m not like my sister, Anna, who still wears her hair down and plays the piano. The young men, now, no longer notice me, and if I didn’t dress well and use an expensive perfume, they wouldn’t even bother to say hello. I’m not old yet, but I’m about to get old. I didn’t realize it, but it’s so. Either Antonio really does have feelings for me, loves me, and needs me, or I’m lost. I’ll always have my clothes, of course, but even the statues in church have clothes, and the people in photographs have clothes.”