The first 30 chapters or so of the second book in the Naples quartet describe Lila's early stage of being the wife of Stefano Carracci, the neighborhood grocer and the son of Don Achille, the fabled neighborhood ogre of the girls' childhood.
After Lila's wedding, her clashes Stefano went to a mini-climax, when she "erased" herself in the enlarged wedding picture that was to be hung on the wall of the new shoe store that sold the Cerullo shoes but carried the Solara name. Although she failed to prevent the Solara brothers using her image or Stefano selling it to them, she covered her own face in the picture with strips of black paper, leaving only an eye and a hand and, of course, the shoes she wore. At the end of this self-erasure disguised as store decoration, the author spells out its meaning in the girls' discussion about her married name, Raffaella Cerullo Carracci:
"A custom. Everything according to the rules then. But Lila, as usual, hadn't stopped there ... 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 Cerullo goes toward Carracci, falls into it, is sucked up by it, is dissolved in it."
"She had been increasingly oppressed by an unbearable sensation, a force pushing down harder and harder, crushing her. That impression had been getting stronger, had prevailed. Raffaella Cerullo, overpowered, had lost her shape and dissolved inside the outlines of Stefano, becoming a subsidiary emanation of him: Signora Carracci."
This summation comes at the end of a series of incidents in Lila's marriage to illustrate her point. Before the wedding, she wanted to invite no one from the Solara family, but Stefano invited Silvio Solara, the patriarch, to speak at the wedding. She had to acquiesce and begged him not to invite the Solara brothers. Not only did Marcello and Michele brothers show up at the wedding, but Marcello had on his feet Lila's creation -- the pair of men's shoes that she designed, she and Rino made together, and then gave to Stefano. The betrayal of the men who loved her occurred on her wedding. When she refused to have sex with Stefano on their wedding night, he beat her and raped her. After they returned from the honeymoon, more compromises were made by Stefano, so that the Solara brothers opened a store in the fashionable district in Naples to sell the Cerullo shoes. The Solaras wanted Lila's wedding photo in the store as a model for the shoes. Lila refused, Stefano held out for a while, and then Stefano gave the photo to them anyway. She fought with her own body for months trying not to become pregnant and dreamed of going back to school, but she did become pregnant before the store opened.
This is what the author means by Lila's sense of erasure, including the meaning of a woman taking up a new name upon marriage. When the wife cannot make any decision for herself --- her body, her work (shoe design), even her image no longer belong to her, and her husband can sell her off despite her objections, she does not exist any more as a human being, a free person, a person with her own identity.
The "re-created" wedding photo in the shoe store was Lila's way of asserting her final bit of self presence, to announce her existence, to insist that she had not been fully devoured by the men in her life. Subsequently, she had a miscarriage, and the photo spontaneously burst into flames.
This was to be come a theme in Lila's life. She would tirelessly work and create something wonderful, and the men around her would try to buy it and own it and profit from it. Most of them wanted to own her body, except Michele Solara, who wanted to own her intelligence and creativity. Michele is the perfect capitalist that any worker today should appreciate; he's practically the Steve Jobs of Napoli. Isn't he a great boss? Lila did not think so through the end.
Being as yet unmarried, Lenu did not explicitly understand Lila in her role of Signora Carracci, but she was inspired to see the crumpled and twisted bodies of married women in the neighborhood for the first time --- worn down by not only the crushing poverty and uncompensated domestic labor but also the loss of their autonomy and agency, their choices, and their will to live.
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