Naturally the article caused a lot of bother. I was summoned by the carabinieri. I was bugged by the financial police. I was vilified by local papers on the right with labels like divorcée, feminist, Communist, supporter of terrorists. I received anonymous phone calls that threatened me and my daughters in a dialect full of obscenities. But, although I lived in anxiety—a state of anxiety now seemed to me inherent to writing—I was in the end not as agitated as at the time of the article in Panorama and Carmen’s lawsuit. It was my job, I was learning to do it better and better. And then I felt protected by the legal support of the publisher, by the success I had in newspapers on the left, by the increasingly well attended public appearances, and by the idea that I was right.
But, if I have to be honest, it wasn’t only that. I calmed down mainly when it became evident that the Solaras would do absolutely nothing to me. My visibility drove them to be as invisible as possible. Marcello and Michele not only didn’t bring a second lawsuit but were completely silent, the whole time, and even when I encountered them before law-enforcement officers, both confined themselves to cold but respectful greetings. Thus the waters subsided. The only concrete thing that happened was that various investigations were opened, along with an equal number of files. But, as the lawyers of the publishing house had predicted, the first soon came to a halt, the second ended—I imagine—under thousands of other files, and the Solaras remained free. The only harm the article caused was of an emotional nature: my sister, my nephew Silvio, even my father—not in words but in deeds—cut me out of their lives. Only Marcello continued to be polite. One afternoon I met him along the stradone, and I looked away. But he stopped in front of me, he said: Lenù, I know that if you could you wouldn’t have done it, I’m not angry with you, it’s not your fault. So remember that my house is always open. I replied: Elisa hung up on me just yesterday. He smiled: Your sister is the boss, what can I do?
104.
But the outcome, which was in essence conciliatory, depressed Lila. She didn’t hide her disappointment and yet she didn’t put it into words. She carried on, pretending that nothing was wrong: she dropped off Tina at my house and shut herself in the office. But sometimes she stayed in bed all day; she said her head was bursting, and she dozed.
I was careful not to remind her that the decision to publish our pages had been hers. I didn’t say: I warned you that the Solaras would come out of it unharmed, the publisher told me, now it’s pointless for you to suffer over it. But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then—I think today—did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood.
She stopped helping me. More and more often she gave me charge of her daughter and sometimes, though rarely, even of Gennaro, who was forced to hang around my house. Yet my life had become increasingly busy and I didn’t know how to manage. One morning when I asked her about the children she answered in annoyance: Call my mother, get her to help you. It was a novelty, I withdrew in embarrassment, I obeyed. So it was that Nunzia arrived at my house, much aged, submissive, uneasy, but efficient as in the days when she took care of the house in Ischia.
My older daughters immediately treated her with disdain, especially Dede, who was going through puberty and had lost any sense of tact. Her face was inflamed, her body was swelling, becoming shapeless, driving out, day by day, the image she was used to, and she felt ugly, she became mean. We began to bicker:
“Why do we have to stay with that old lady? It’s disgusting what she cooks, you should cook.”
“Stop it.”
“She spits when she talks, did you see she doesn’t have any teeth?”
“I don’t want to hear another word, that’s enough.”
“We already have to live in this toilet, now we have to have that person in the house? I don’t want her to sleep here when you’re not here.”
“Dede, I said that’s enough.”
Elsa was no better, but in her own way: she remained serious, assuming a tone that seemed to support me and yet was duplicitous.
“I like her, Mamma, you were right to have her come. She smells nice, just like a corpse.”
“Now I’ll slap you. You know she can hear you?”
The only one who was immediately fond of Lila’s mother was Imma: she was Tina’s slave and so she imitated her in everything, even in her attachments. The two of them followed Nunzia around as she worked in the apartment; they called her grandma. But Grandma was brusque, especially with Imma. She caressed her real grandchild, occasionally softening at her chatter and her affection, while she worked in silence when her pretend grandchild looked for attention. Meanwhile—I discovered—something was bothering her. At the end of the first week she said, looking down: Lenù, we haven’t talked about how much you’ll give me. I felt hurt: I had stupidly thought that she came because her daughter had asked her to; if I had known I had to pay I would have chosen a young person, whom my daughters would like and from whom I could have demanded what I needed. But I contained myself, we talked about money and fixed on an amount. Only then Nunzia cheered up a little. At the end of the negotiation she felt the need to justify herself: My husband is sick, she said, he no longer works, and Lina is crazy, she fired Rino, we don’t have a cent. I muttered that I understood, I told her to be nicer to Imma. She obeyed. From then on, although she always favored Tina, she made an effort to be kind to my daughter.
Toward Lila, however, her attitude didn’t change. Neither when she arrived nor when she left did Nunzia ever feel the need to stop by at her daughter’s, although Lila had gotten the job for her. If they met on the stairs they didn’t even greet each other. She was an old woman who had lost her former wary friendliness. But Lila, too, it must be said, was intractable, and visibly worsening.
105.
With me she was always spiteful, for no reason. It especially irritated me that she acted as if everything that happened to my daughters escaped me.
“Dede got the curse.”
“Did she tell you?”
“Yes, you weren’t here.”
“Did you use that expression with her?”
“What word should I have used?”
“Something less vulgar.”
“You know how your daughters speak to each other? And have you ever heard the things they say about my mother?”
I didn’t like that tone. She, who in the past had appeared so fond of Dede, Elsa, and Imma, seemed determined to disparage them to me, and she took every opportunity to show me that, because I was always traveling around Italy, I neglected them, with serious consequences for their upbringing. I was especially upset when she began accusing me of not seeing Imma’s problems.
“What’s wrong,” I asked her.
“She has a tic in her eye.”
“Not very often.”
“I’ve seen it a lot.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. I only know that she feels fatherless and isn’t even sure she has a mother.”
I tried to ignore her but it was difficult. Imma, as I’ve said, had always worried me a little, and even when she stood up well to Tina’s vivacity she still seemed to lack something. Also, some time earlier I had recognized in her features of mine that I didn’t like. She was submissive, she gave in immediately out of fear of not being liked, it depressed her that she had given in. I would have preferred her to inherit Nino’s bold capacity for seduction, his thoughtless vitality, but she wasn’t like that. Imma was unhappily compliant, she wanted everything and pretended to want nothing. Children, I said, are the product of chance, she’s got nothing of her father. Lila didn’t agree; she was always finding ways of alluding to the child’s resemblance to Nino, but she didn�
��t see it as positive, she spoke as if it were a congenital defect. And then she kept repeating: I’m telling you these things because I love them and I’m worried.
I tried to explain to myself her sudden persecution of my daughters. I thought that, since I had disappointed her, she was withdrawing from me by separating first of all from them. I thought that since my book was increasingly successful, which sanctioned my autonomy from her and from her judgment, she was trying to belittle me by belittling my children and my capacity to be a good mother. But neither of those hypotheses soothed me and a third advanced: Lila saw what I, as a mother, didn’t know how or didn’t want to see, and since she appeared critical of Imma in particular, I had better find out if her comments had any foundation.
So I began to observe the child and was soon convinced that she really suffered. She was the slave of Tina’s joyful expansiveness, of her elevated capacity for verbalization, of the way she aroused tenderness, admiration, affection in everyone, especially me. Although my daughter was pretty, and intelligent, beside Tina she turned dull, her virtues vanished, and she felt this deeply. One day I witnessed an exchange between them, in a good Italian, Tina’s pronunciation very precise, Imma’s still missing some syllables. They were coloring in the outlines of animals and Tina had decided to use green for a rhinoceros, while Imma added colors randomly for a cat. Tina said:
“Make it gray or black.”
“You mustn’t give me orders about the color.”
“It’s not an order, it’s a suggestion.”
Imma looked at her in alarm. She didn’t know the difference between an order and a suggestion. She said:
“I don’t want to follow the suggestion, either.”
“Then don’t.”
Imma’s lower lip trembled.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll do it but I don’t like it.”
I tried to be more attentive to her. To begin with, I stopped getting excited about everything Tina did, I reinforced Imma’s skills, I praised her for every little thing. But I soon realized it wasn’t enough. The two little girls loved each other. Dealing with each other helped them grow, some extra artificial praise was of no help in keeping Imma, looking at her reflection in Tina, from seeing something that wounded her and that her friend was certainly not the cause of.
At that point I began to turn over Lila’s words: she’s fatherless and isn’t even sure she has a mother. I remembered the mistake in the Panorama caption. That caption, buttressed by Dede and Elsa’s mean jokes (You don’t belong to this family: your name is Sarratore, not Airota), must have done its damage. But was that really the core of the problem? I ruled it out. Her father’s absence seemed to me something more serious and I was sure that her suffering came from that.
Once I had started down this road I began to notice how Imma sought Pietro’s attention. When he called his daughters, she sat in a corner and listened to the conversation. If the sisters had a good time she pretended to be having fun, too, and when the conversation ended and they said goodbye to their father in turn, Imma shouted: Bye. Often Pietro heard her and said to Dede: Give me Imma so I can say hello. But in those cases either she became shy and ran away or took the receiver and remained mute. She behaved the same way when he came to Naples. Pietro never forgot to bring her a little present, and Imma hovered near him, played at being his daughter, was happy if he said something nice or picked her up. Once when my ex-husband came to get Dede and Elsa, the child’s sadness must have seemed especially obvious, and as he left he said: Cuddle her, she’s sorry that her sisters are leaving and she has to stay behind.
That observation increased my anxieties, I said to myself that I had to do something, I thought of talking to Enzo and asking him to be more present in Imma’s life. But he was already very attentive. If he carried his daughter on his shoulders, after a while he put her down, picked up my daughter, and put her up there; if he got Tina a toy, he got an identical one for her; if he was pleased almost to the point of being moved at the intelligent questions his child asked, he managed to remember to show enthusiasm for the somewhat more prosaic questions of my child. But I spoke to him anyway, and sometimes Enzo admonished Tina, if she occupied the stage and didn’t leave room for Imma. I didn’t like that, it wasn’t the child’s fault. In those cases Tina was as if stunned, the lid that was suddenly lowered on her vivacity seemed an undeserved punishment. She didn’t understand why the spell was broken, she struggled to regain her father’s favor. At that point I would pull her to me, play with her.
In other words things were not going well. One morning I was in the office with Lila, I wanted her to teach me to write on the computer. Imma was playing with Tina under the desk and Tina was sketching in words imaginary places and characters with her usual brilliance. Monstrous creatures were pursuing their dolls, courageous princes were about to rescue them. But I heard my daughter exclaim with sudden rage:
“Not me.”
“Not you?”
“I won’t rescue myself.”
“You don’t have to rescue yourself, the prince rescues you.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Then mine will rescue you.”
“I said no.”
The sudden leap with which Imma had gone from her doll to herself wounded me, even though Tina tried to keep her in the game. Because I was distracted, Lila became irritated, she said:
“Girls, either talk quietly or go outside and play.”
106.
That day I wrote a long letter to Nino. I enumerated the problems that I thought were complicating our daughter’s life: her sisters had a father who was attentive to them, she didn’t; her playmate, Lila’s daughter, had a very devoted father and she didn’t; because of my work I was always traveling and often had to leave her. In other words, Imma was in danger of growing up feeling that she was continually at a disadvantage. I sent the letter and waited for him to respond. He didn’t and so I decided to call his house. Eleonora answered.
“He’s not here,” she said listlessly. “He’s in Rome.”
“Would you please tell him that my daughter needs him?”
Her voice caught in her throat. Then she composed herself:
“Mine haven’t seen their father, either, for at least six months.”
“Has he left you?”
“No, he never leaves anyone. Either you have the strength to leave him yourself—and in this you were smart, I admire you—or he goes, comes, disappears, reappears, as it suits him.”
“Will you tell him I called, and if he won’t see the child I’ll track him down, and take her to him wherever he is?”
I hung up.
It was a while before Nino made up his mind to call, but in the end he did. As usual he acted as if we had seen each other a few hours earlier. He was energetic, cheerful, full of compliments. I cut him off, I asked:
“Did you get my letter?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you answer?”
“I’ve got no time.”
“Find the time, as soon as possible, Imma’s not well.”
He said reluctantly that he would return to Naples for the weekend, I insisted that he come to lunch on Sunday. I insisted that he was not to talk to me, not joke with Dede or Elsa, but focus the whole day on Imma. That visit, I said, has to become a habit: it would be wonderful if you would come once a week, but I won’t ask that, I don’t expect that from you; once a month, however, is essential. He said in a serious tone that he would come every week, he promised, and at that moment he was surely sincere.
I don’t remember the day of the phone call, but the day when, at ten in the morning, Nino appeared in the neighborhood, elegantly dressed and driving a brand-new luxury car, I will never forget. It was September 16, 1984. Lila and I had just turned forty, Tina and Imma were almost four.
107.
I told Lila that Nino was coming to lunch at my house. I said to her: I forced him, I want him to spend the whole day with Imma. I hoped she would understand that for at least that one day she shouldn’t send Tina to my house, but she didn’t understand or didn’t want to. Instead she acted helpful, she said: I’ll tell my mother to cook for everyone and maybe we’ll eat here at my house where there’s more room. I was surprised, and annoyed. She hated Nino; what was that intrusion all about? I refused, I said: I’ll cook, and I repeated that the day was dedicated to Imma, there would be no way and no time for anything else. But exactly at nine the next day Tina climbed the stairs with her toys and knocked at my door. She was tidy and neat, her black braids shiny, her eyes sparkling with affection.
I told her to come in, but I immediately had to fight with Imma, who was still in her pajamas, sleepy, she hadn’t had breakfast, and yet she wanted to start playing immediately. Since she refused to obey me and kept making faces and laughing with her friend, I got mad and closed Tina—frightened by my tone—in a room to play by herself, then I made Imma wash. I don’t want to, she screamed. I told her: You have to get dressed, Papa is coming. I had been announcing it for days, but she, hearing that word, became even more rebellious. I myself, in using it to signal to her the imminence of his arrival, became more anxious. The child writhed, screamed: I don’t want Papa, as if Papa were a repellent medicine. I ruled out that she remembered Nino, she wasn’t expressing a rejection of a definite person. I thought: Maybe I was wrong to make him come; when Imma says she doesn’t want Papa, she means that she doesn’t want just anyone, she wants Enzo, she wants Pietro, she wants what Tina and her sisters have.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 147