“I’ll take care of them,” I said thanking him.
After dinner we walked to an isolated meadow. After we had held and touched each other for a long time in the cold, obstructed by coats and woolen sweaters, he asked me to revise and polish with care the pages where the protagonist loses her virginity on the beach. I said, bewildered, “It’s an important moment.”
“You yourself said that that part is a bit risqué.”
“At the publisher no one objected.”
“They’ll talk to you about it later.”
I became irritated, I told him that I would think about it and the next day I left for Naples in a bad mood. If that episode upset Pietro, who was a young man of wide reading, and had written a book on Bacchic rites, what would my mother and father say, my siblings, the neighborhood, if they read it? On the train I worked on the manuscript, keeping in mind the observations of the editor, and Pietro’s, and what I could eliminate I did. I wanted the book to be good, I didn’t want anyone to dislike it. I doubted that I would ever write another.
122.
As soon as I got home I had some bad news. My mother, convinced that it was her right to look at my mail when I was absent, had opened a package that came from Potenza. In the package she had found a number of my notebooks from elementary school and a note from Maestra Oliviero’s sister. The teacher, the note said, had died peacefully, twenty days earlier. She had often remembered me, in recent times, and had asked that some notebooks from elementary school that she had saved be returned to me. I was distressed, even more than my sister Elisa, who wept inconsolably for hours. This bothered my mother, who first yelled at her younger daughter and then, so that I, her older daughter, could hear it clearly, commented aloud: “That imbecile always thought she was more of a mother than I am.”
All day I thought of Maestra Oliviero and of how she would have been proud to know about my degree, about the book I was going to publish. When everyone went to bed I shut myself in the silent kitchen and leafed through the notebooks one after the other. How well she had taught me, the teacher, what beautiful handwriting she had instilled. Too bad that my adult writing had gotten smaller, that speed had simplified the letters. I smiled at the spelling mistakes, marked with furious strokes, at the goods, the excellents, which she wrote punctiliously in the margin when she found a good expression or the right solution to a difficult problem, at the high marks she always gave me. Had she really been more mother than my mother? For a time I hadn’t been sure. But she had imagined for me a road that my mother wasn’t able to imagine and had compelled me to take it. For this I was grateful to her.
I was putting aside the package to go to bed when I noticed in the middle of one of the notebooks a small, thin sheaf of paper, ten pages of graph paper fastened with a pin and refolded. I felt a sudden emptiness in my chest: I recognized The Blue Fairy, the story that Lila had written so many years before, how many? Thirteen, fourteen. How I had loved the cover colored with pastels, the beautifully drawn letters of the title: at the time I had considered it a real book and had been envious of it. I opened it to the center page. The pin had rusted, leaving brown marks on the paper. I saw, with amazement, that the teacher had written beside a sentence: beautiful. So she had read it? So she had liked it? I turned the pages one after the other, they were full of her wonderfuls, goods, very goods. I got angry. Old witch, I thought, why didn’t you tell us that you liked it, why did you deny Lila that satisfaction? What drove you to fight for my education and not for hers? Is the refusal of the shoemaker to let his daughter take the admission examination enough to justify you? What unhappiness did you have in your head that you unloaded onto her? I began to read The Blue Fairy from the beginning, racing over the pale ink, the handwriting so similar to mine of that time. But already at the first page I began to feel sick to my stomach and soon I was covered with sweat. Only at the end, however, did I admit what I had understood after a few lines. Lila’s childish pages were the secret heart of my book. Anyone who wanted to know what gave it warmth and what the origin was of the strong but invisible thread that joined the sentences would have had to go back to that child’s packet, ten notebook pages, the rusty pin, the brightly colored cover, the title, and not even a signature.
123.
I didn’t sleep all night, I waited until it was day. The long hostility toward Lila dissolved, suddenly what I had taken from her seemed to me much more than what she had ever been able to take from me. I decided to go right away to San Giovanni a Teduccio. I wanted to give her back The Blue Fairy, show her my notebooks, page through them together, enjoy the teacher’s comments. But most of all I felt the need to have her sit beside me, to tell her, you see how connected we are, one in two, two in one, and prove to her with the rigor that it seemed to me I had learned in the Normale, with the philological persistence I had learned from Pietro, how her child’s book had put down deep roots in my mind and had, in the course of the years, produced another book, different, adult, mine, and yet inseparable from hers, from the fantasies that we had elaborated together in the courtyard of our games, she and I continuously formed, deformed, reformed. I wanted to embrace her, kiss her, and tell her, Lila, from now on, whatever happens to me or you, we mustn’t lose each other anymore.
But it was a hard morning, it seemed to me that the city did everything possible to get between me and her. I took a crowded bus that went toward the Marina, I was unbearably squashed by miserable bodies. I got on another, even more crowded bus, I went in the wrong direction. I got out, upset, disheveled, I waited for a long time, angrily, to make up for the mistake. That small journey through Naples exhausted me. What was the use of years of middle school, high school, university, in that city? To arrive at San Giovanni I had forcibly to regress, as if Lila had gone to live not in a street, or a square, but in a ripple of time past, before we went to school, a black time without rules and without respect. I resorted to the most violent dialect of the neighborhood, I insulted, I was insulted, I threatened, I was mocked, I responded by mocking, a spiteful art in which I was trained. Naples had been very useful in Pisa, but Pisa was no use in Naples, it was an obstacle. Good manners, cultured voice and appearance, the crush in my head and on my tongue of what I had learned in books were all immediate signs of weakness that made me a secure prey, one of those who don’t struggle. On the buses and the streets heading toward San Giovanni I fused the old capacity to stop being meek at the right moment with the pride of my new state: I had a degree, I had had lunch with Professor Airota, I was engaged to his son, I had deposited money in the Post Office, in Milan I had been treated with respect by important people; how could these shitty people dare? I felt a power that no longer knew how to adjust to the pretend not to notice with which, in general, it was possible to survive in the neighborhood and outside it. Whenever, in the throng of passengers, I felt male hands on my body, I gave myself the sacrosanct right to fury and reacted with cries of contempt, I said unrepeatable words like the ones my mother and, especially, Lila knew how to say. I was so excessive that when I got off the bus I was sure that someone would jump off behind me and murder me.
It didn’t happen, but I walked away angry and scared. I had been much too neat when I left the house, now I felt mangled, outside and in.
I tried to compose myself, I said to myself: calm down, you’re almost there. I asked the passersby for directions. I walked along Corso San Giovanni a Teduccio with the cold wind in my face, it seemed a yellowish channel with defaced walls, black doorways, dirt. I wandered, confused by friendly information so crowded with details that it turned out to be useless. Finally I found the street, the building. I went up the dirty stairs, following a strong odor of garlic, the voices of children. A very fat woman in a green sweater looking out of an open door saw me and cried, “Who do you want?” “Carracci,” I said. But seeing that she was perplexed I corrected myself immediately: “Scanno.” Enzo’s surname. And then, afterward, “Cerullo.”
At that point the woman repeated Cerullo and said, raising a large arm, “Farther up.” I thanked her, kept going, while she leaned over the banister and, looking up, shouted, “Titì, there’s someone looking for Lina, she’s coming up.”
Lina. Here, in the mouths of strangers, in this place. I realized only then that I had in mind Lila as I had seen her the last time, in the apartment in the new neighborhood, in the orderliness that, however charged with anguish it had been, now seemed the backdrop of her life, the furniture, the refrigerator, the television, the well-cared-for child, she herself with a look certainly worn out but still that of a well-off young woman. I knew nothing, at that moment, of how she lived, what she did. The gossip had stopped at the abandonment of her husband, at the incredible fact that she had left a beautiful house and money and gone away with Enzo Scanno. I didn’t know about the encounter with Soccavo. So I had left the neighborhood in the certainty that I would find her in a new house among open books and educational games for her son, or, at most, out momentarily, doing the shopping. And, out of laziness, in order not to feel uneasy, I had mechanically placed those images inside a toponymy, San Giovanni a Teduccio, beyond the Granili, at the end of the Marina. I went up with that expectation. I thought, I’ve made it, here I am at my destination. So I reached Titina. A young woman with a baby in her arms who was crying quietly, with slight sobs, rivulets of mucous dripping onto her upper lip from cold-reddened nostrils, and two more children attached to her skirts, one on each side.
Titina turned her gaze to the door opposite, closed.
“Lina’s not here,” she said, in a hostile tone.
“Nor Enzo?”
“No.”
“Did she take the child for a walk?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Elena Greco, I’m a friend.”
“And you don’t recognize Rinuccio? Rinù, have you ever seen this lady?”
She boxed the ear of one of the children beside her, and only then I recognized him. The child smiled at me, he said in Italian, “Hello, Aunt Lenù. Mamma will be back tonight at eight.”
I picked him up, hugged him, praised how cute he was and how well he spoke.
“He’s very clever,” Titina admitted, “he’s a born professor.”
At that point, her hostility ceased, she invited me to come in. In the dark corridor I stumbled on something that surely belonged to the children. The kitchen was untidy, everything was sunk in a grayish light. There was a sewing machine with some material still under the needle, and around and on the floor other fabric of various colors. Suddenly ashamed, Titina tried to straighten the room, then she gave up and made coffee, but continuing to hold her daughter in her arms. I sat Rinuccio on my lap, asked him stupid questions that he answered with lively resignation. The woman meanwhile told me about Lila and Enzo.
“She makes salami at Soccavo,” she said.
I was surprised, only then did I remember Bruno.
“Soccavo, the sausage people?”
“Soccavo, yes.”
“I know him.”
“They are not nice people.”
“I know the son.”
“Grandfather, father, and son, same shit. They made money and forgot they ever went around in rags.”
I asked about Enzo. She said he worked at the locomotives, she used that expression, and I soon realized that she thought he and Lila were married, she called Enzo, with liking and respect, “Signor Cerullo.”
“When will Lina be back?”
“Tonight.”
“And the child?”
“He stays with me, eats, plays, does everything here.”
So the journey wasn’t over: I approached, Lila moved away. I asked, “How long does it take to walk to the factory?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Titina gave me directions, which I wrote down on a piece of paper. Meanwhile Rinuccio asked politely, “May I go play, aunt?” He waited for me to say yes, he ran into the hall with the other child, and immediately I heard him yelling a nasty insult in dialect. The woman gave me an embarrassed look and shouted from the kitchen, in Italian, “Rino, bad words aren’t nice, watch out or I’ll come and give you a rap on the knuckles.”
I smiled at her, remembering my trip on the bus. I also deserve a rap on the knuckles, I thought, I’m in the same condition as Rinuccio. When the quarrel in the hall didn’t stop, we ran out. The two boys were hitting each other, throwing things and yelling fiercely.
124.
I arrived at the site of the Soccavo factory by a dirt path, amid trash of every type, a thread of black smoke in the frozen sky. Before I even saw the boundary wall I noticed a sickening odor of animal fat mixed with burned wood. The guard said, derisively, you don’t go visiting your girlfriend during working hours. I asked to speak to Bruno Soccavo. He changed his tone, stammered that Bruno almost never came to the factory. Call him at home, I replied. He was embarrassed, he said that he couldn’t bother him for no reason. “If you don’t call,” I said, “I’ll go and find a telephone and do it myself.” He gave me a nasty look, he didn’t know what to do. A man came by on a bicycle, braked, said something obscene to him in dialect. The guard appeared relieved to see him. He began to talk to him as if I no longer existed.
At the center of the courtyard a bonfire was burning. The flame cut the cold air for a few seconds as I passed. I reached a low building of a yellow color, I pushed open a heavy door, I entered. The smell of fat, already strong outside, was unendurable. I met a girl who, obviously angry, was fixing her hair with agitated gestures. I said Excuse me, she passed by with her head down, took three or four steps, stopped.
“What is it?” she asked rudely.
“I’m looking for someone called Cerullo.”
“Lina?”
“Yes.”
“Look in sausage-stuffing.”
I asked where it was, she didn’t answer, she walked away. I pushed open another door. I was assailed by a warmth that made the odor of fat even more nauseating. The place was big, there were tubs full of a milky, steaming water in which dark bodies floated, stirred by slow, bent silhouettes, workers immersed up to their hips. I didn’t see Lila. I asked a man who, lying on the swampy tile floor, was fixing a pipe: “Do you know where I could find Lina?”
“Cerullo?”
“Cerullo.”
“In the mixing department.”
“They told me stuffing.”
“Then why are you asking me, if you know?”
“Where is mixing?”
“Straight ahead.”
“And stuffing?”
“To the right. If you don’t find her there, look where they’re stripping the meat off the carcasses. Or in the storerooms. They’re always moving her.”
“Why?”
He had a malicious smile.
“Is she a friend of yours?”
“Yes.”
“Forget it.”
“Tell me.”
“You won’t be offended?”
“No.”
“She’s a pain in the ass.”
I followed the directions, no one stopped me. The workers, both men and women, seemed to be enveloped in a bitter indifference; even when they laughed or shouted insults they seemed remote from their very laughter, from their voices, from the swill they handled, from the bad smell. I emerged among women in blue smocks who worked with the meat, caps on their heads: the machines produced a clanking sound and a mush of soft, ground, mixed matter. But Lila wasn’t there. And I didn’t see her where they were stuffing skins with the rosy pink paste mixed with bits of fat, or where, with sharp knives, they skinned, gutted, cut, using the blades with a dangerous frenzy. I found her in the storerooms. She came out of a refrigerator along with a sort of white breath. With the help of a short man, she was carrying a reddish block of frozen m
eat on her back. She placed it on a cart, she started to go back into the cold. I immediately saw that one hand was bandaged.
“Lila.”
She turned cautiously, stared at me uncertainly. “What are you doing here?” she said. Her eyes were feverish, her cheeks more hollow than usual, and yet she seemed large, tall. She, too, wore a blue smock, but over it a kind of long coat, and on her feet she wore army boots. I wanted to embrace her but I didn’t dare: I was afraid, I don’t know why, that she would crumble in my arms. It was she, instead, who hugged me for long minutes. I felt the damp material that gave off a smell even more offensive than the smell in the air. “Come,” she said, “let’s get out of here,” and shouted at the man who was working with her: “Two minutes.” She drew me into a corner.
“How did you find me?”
“I came in.”
“And they let you pass?”
“I said I was looking for you and that I was a friend of Bruno’s.”
“Good, that way they’ll be convinced that I give the son of the owner blow jobs and they’ll leave me alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s how it works.”
“Here?”
“Everywhere. Did you get your degree?”
“Yes. But an even more wonderful thing happened, Lila. I wrote a novel and it’s being published in April.”
Her complexion was gray, she seemed bloodless, and yet she flared up. I saw the red move up along her throat, her cheeks, up to the edge of her eyes, so close that she squeezed them as if fearing that the flame would burn the pupils. Then she took my hand and kissed it, first on the back, then on the palm.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 76