Every so often I escaped from the apartment, from the flight of stairs between my rooms and hers, from the gardens, the stradone, and left for work. These were moments when I sighed with relief: I put on makeup, stylish clothes, even the slight limp that remained from the pregnancy was a sort of pleasingly distinctive trait. Although I frequently made sarcastic remarks about the ill-humored behavior of literary people and artists, at the time everything having to do with publishing, cinema, television—every type of aesthetic display—seemed to me a fantastic landscape in which it was marvelous to appear. I liked being present in the extravagant, festive chaos of big conventions, big conferences, big theater productions, big exhibitions, big films, big operas, and I was flattered on the few occasions when I had a place in the front rows, the reserved seats, from which, sitting among famous people, I could observe the spectacle of powers large and small. Lila, on the other hand, remained at the center of her horror, without any distraction. Once I had an invitation to an opera at the San Carlo—a magnificent place where not even I had been—and I insisted on taking her; she didn’t want to go, and persuaded Carmen to go instead. The only distraction, if that is the right word for it, she would allow was another reason for suffering. A new affliction acted on her as a sort of antidote. She became combative, determined, she was like someone who knows she has to drown but in spite of herself agitates her arms and legs to stay afloat.
One night she discovered that her son had started shooting up again. Without saying a word, without even telling Enzo, she went to get him from Stefano, in the house in the new neighborhood where decades earlier she had lived as a bride. But he wasn’t there: Gennaro had quarreled with his father, too, and a few days earlier had moved to his uncle Rino’s. She was greeted with open hostility by Stefano and Marisa, who now lived together. That once handsome man was now skin and bones, and very pale; his clothes seemed several sizes too big. The heart attack had crushed him, he was frightened, he scarcely ate, he didn’t drink, he no longer smoked, he wasn’t supposed to get upset, because of his bad heart. But on that occasion he became extremely upset and had reason to be. He had closed the grocery because of his illness. Ada demanded money for herself and their daughter. His sister Pinuccia and his mother, Maria, also demanded money. Marisa demanded it for herself and her children. Lila understood immediately that Stefano wanted that money from her and that the excuse for getting it was Gennaro. In fact, although he had thrown his son out of the house, he took his side; he said, and Marisa supported him, that it would take a lot of money to get treatment for Gennaro. And since Lila replied that she would never give a cent to anyone, she didn’t give a damn about relatives, friends, or the whole neighborhood, the quarrel became furious. With tears in his eyes, Stefano listed all he had lost over the years—from the grocery stores to the house itself—and for those losses he in some obscure way blamed Lila. But the worst came from Marisa, who yelled at her: Alfonso was ruined because of you, you’ve ruined us all, you’re worse than the Solaras, whoever stole your child did a good thing.
Only at that point did Lila become silent, she looked around for a chair to sit on. She couldn’t find one and leaned against the living room wall, which, decades earlier, had been her living room, a white room at the time, the furniture brand-new, nothing yet damaged by the havoc of the children who had grown up there, by the carelessness of the adults. Let’s go, Stefano said to her, perhaps realizing that Marisa had gone too far, let’s go get Gennaro. And they left together; he took her by the arm, and they went to Rino’s house.
Once they were outside, Lila recovered, and freed herself. They walked, she a few steps ahead. Her brother lived in the Carraccis’ old house, with his mother-in-law, Pinuccia, their children. Gennaro was there and as soon as he saw his parents he began shouting. So another fight broke out, first between father and son, then between mother and son. For a while Rino was silent, then, his eyes dull, he began whining about the harm his sister had done since they were children. When Stefano intervened Rino got angry at him, insulted him, insisted that all the trouble had started when he wanted to make people think he was someone and instead he had been cheated first by Lila and then by the Solaras. They were about to come to blows and Pinuccia had to restrain her husband, muttering, You’re right, but calm down, this isn’t the moment, while the old lady, Maria, had to restrain Stefano, wheezing: That’s enough, son, pretend you didn’t hear him, Rino is sicker than you. At that point Lila grabbed her son forcefully by the arm and took him away.
But Rino followed them to the street, they heard him limping after them. He wanted money, he wanted it at all costs, right away. He said: You’ll kill me if you leave me like this. Lila kept walking while he pushed her, laughed, moaned, held her back by the arm. Gennaro began to cry, he yelled at her: You have money, Ma, give it to him. But Lila drove her brother away and brought her son home, hissing: You want to become like that, you want to end up like your uncle?
6.
With the return of Gennaro the apartment below became an even worse inferno; at times I was compelled to go down because I was afraid they’d kill each other. Lila opened the door, said coldly: What do you want. I answered just as coldly: You’re overdoing it, Dede’s crying, she wants to call the police, and Elsa is scared. She answered: Stay in your own home and plug up your children’s ears if they don’t want to hear.
In that period she showed less and less interest in the two girls; with explicit sarcasm she called them the young ladies. But my daughters’ attitude toward her changed as well. Dede especially stopped feeling her fascination, as if in her eyes, too, Tina’s disappearance had taken away Lila’s authority. One evening she asked me:
“If Aunt Lina didn’t want another child why did she have one?”
“How do you know she didn’t want one?”
“She told Imma.”
“Imma?”
“Yes, I heard it with my own ears. She talks to her as if she weren’t a child, I think she’s insane.”
“It’s not insanity, Dede, it’s grief.”
“She’s never shed a tear.”
“Tears aren’t grief.”
“Yes, but without tears how can you be sure that the grief is there?”
“It’s there and often it’s an even greater suffering.”
“That’s not her case. You want to know what I think?”
“All right.”
“She lost Tina on purpose. And now she also wants to lose Gennaro. Not to mention Enzo, don’t you see how she treats him? Aunt Lina is just like Elsa, she doesn’t love anyone.”
Dede was like that, she wanted to be someone who is more perceptive than everyone else, and loved to formulate judgments without appeal. I forbade her to repeat those terrible words in Lila’s presence and tried to explain to her that not all human beings react in the same way, Lila and Elsa had emotional strategies different from hers.
“Your sister, for example,” I said, “doesn’t confront emotional issues the way you do; she finds feelings that are too intense ridiculous, and she always stands back a step.”
“By standing back a step she’s lost any sensitivity.”
“Why are you so annoyed with Elsa?”
“Because she’s just like Aunt Lina.”
A vicious circle: Lila was wrong because she was like Elsa, Elsa was wrong because she was like Lila. In reality at the center of this negative judgment was Gennaro. According to Dede, precisely in this crucial situation Elsa and Lila were making the same mistaken assessment and showed the same emotional disorder. Just as for Lila, for Elsa, too, Gennaro was worse than a beast. Her sister—Dede reported to me—often told her, to offend her, that Lila and Enzo were right to beat him as soon as he tried to stick his nose out of the house. Only someone as stupid as you—she taunted her—who doesn’t know anything about men, could be dazzled by a mass of unwashed flesh without a crumb of intelligence. And Dede replied: Only a
bitch like you could describe a human being that way.
Since they both read a lot, they quarreled in the language of books, so that, if they didn’t slip suddenly into the most brutal dialect to insult each other, I would have listened to their squabbling almost with admiration. The positive side of the conflict was that Dede’s rancor toward me diminished, but the negative side burdened me greatly: her sister and Lila became the object of all her malice. Dede was constantly reporting to me Elsa’s disgraceful actions: she was hated by her schoolmates because she considered herself the best at everything and was always humiliating them; she boasted of having had relations with adult men; she skipped school and forged my signature on the absence slips. Of Lila she said: She’s a fascist, how can you be her friend? And she took Gennaro’s side with no equivocation. In her view drugs were a rebellion of sensitive people against the forces of repression. She swore that sooner or later she would find a way of getting Rino out—she always called him that, and only that, habituating us to call him that, too—from the prison in which his mother kept him.
I tried whenever I could to throw water on the flames, I reprimanded Elsa, I defended Lila. But sometimes it was hard to take Lila’s part. The peaks of her bitter grief frightened me. On the other hand I was afraid that, as had happened in the past, her body wouldn’t hold up, and so, even though I liked Dede’s lucid and yet passionate aggression, even though I found Elsa’s quirky impudence amusing, I was careful not to let my daughters set off crises with reckless words. (I knew that Dede would have been more than capable of saying: Aunt Lina, tell things as they are, you wanted to lose Tina, it didn’t happen by chance.) But every day I feared the worst. The young ladies, as Lila called them, although they were immersed in the reality of the neighborhood, had a strong sense that they were different. Especially when they returned from Florence they felt they were of superior quality and did all they could to demonstrate it. Dede was doing very well in high school and when her professor—a very cultivated man no more than forty, awestruck by the surname Airota—interrogated her he seemed more worried that he would make a mistake in the questions than that she would make a mistake in the answers. Elsa was less brilliant scholastically, and her midyear report cards were generally poor, but what made her intolerable was the ease with which at the end she shuffled the cards and came in among the top. I knew their insecurities and terrors, I felt them to be fearful girls, and so I didn’t put much credence in their domineering attitudes. But others did, and seen from the outside they must surely have seemed odious. Elsa, for example, gleefully bestowed offensive nicknames in class and outside, she had no respect for anyone. She called Enzo the mute bumpkin; she called Lila the poisonous moth; she called Gennaro the laughing crocodile. But she was especially irked by Antonio, who went to Lila’s almost every day, either to the office or to her house, and as soon as he arrived drew her and Enzo into a room to conspire. Antonio, after the episode of Tina, had become cantankerous. If I was present he more or less explicitly took his leave; if it was my daughters, he cut them off by closing the door. Elsa, who knew Poe well, called him the mask of yellow death, because Antonio had a naturally jaundiced complexion. It was obvious, therefore, that I should fear some blunder on their part. Which duly happened.
I was in Milan. Lila rushed into the courtyard, where Dede was reading, Elsa was talking to some friends, Imma was playing. They weren’t children. Dede was sixteen, Elsa almost thirteen; only Imma was little, she was five. But Lila treated all three as if they had no autonomy. She dragged them into the house without explanation (they were used to hearing explanations), crying only that staying outside was dangerous. My oldest daughter found that behavior unbearable, she said:
“Mamma entrusted my sisters to me, it’s up to me to decide whether to go inside or not.”
“When your mother isn’t here I’m your mother.”
“A shit mother,” Dede answered, moving to dialect. “You lost Tina and you haven’t even cried.”
Lila slapped her, crushing her. Elsa defended her sister and was slapped in turn, Imma burst into tears. You don’t go out of the house, my friend repeated, gasping, outside it’s dangerous, outside you’ll die. She kept them inside for days, until I returned.
When I returned, Dede recounted the whole episode, and, honest as she was, on principle, she also reported her own ugly response. I wanted her to understand that what she had said was terrible, and I scolded her harshly: I warned you not to. Elsa sided with her sister, she explained to me that Aunt Lina was out of her mind, she was possessed by the idea that to escape danger you had to live barricaded in the house. It was hard to convince my daughters that it wasn’t Lila’s fault but the Soviet empire’s. In a place called Chernobyl a nuclear power plant had exploded and emitted dangerous radiation that, since the planet was small, could be absorbed by anyone. Aunt Lina was protecting you, I said. But Elsa shouted: It’s not true, she beat us, the only good thing is that she fed us only frozen food. Imma: I cried a lot, I don’t like frozen food. And Dede: She treated us worse than she treats Rino. I said: Aunt Lina would have behaved the same way with Tina, think of what torture it must have been for her to protect you, imagining that her daughter is somewhere and no one’s taking care of her. But it was a mistake to express myself like that in front of Imma. While Dede and Elsa looked skeptical, she was upset, and ran away to play.
A few days later Lila confronted me in her direct way:
“Is it you who tell your daughters that I lost Tina and never cried?”
“Stop it, do you think I would say a thing like that?”
“Dede called me a shit mother.”
“She’s a child.”
“She’s a very rude child.”
At that point I committed errors no less serious than those of my daughters. I said:
“Calm down. I know how much you loved Tina. Try not to keep it all inside, you should let it out, you should say whatever comes into your mind. I know the birth was difficult, but you shouldn’t elaborate on it.”
I got everything wrong: the past tense of “you loved,” the allusion to the birth, the fatuous tone. She answered curtly: Mind your own business. And then she cried, as if Imma were an adult: Teach your daughter that if someone tells her something, she shouldn’t go around repeating it.
7.
Things got even worse when, one morning—I think it was in June of 1986—there was another disappearance. Nunzia arrived, grimmer than usual, and said that Rino hadn’t returned home the previous night, that Pinuccia was looking for him all over the neighborhood. She gave me the news without looking at me, as she did when what she was telling me was really meant for Lila.
I went downstairs to report it. Lila immediately summoned Gennaro—she took it for granted that he would know where his uncle was. The boy resisted, he didn’t want to reveal anything that might lead his mother to become even harsher. But when the entire day passed and Rino still couldn’t be found, he decided to cooperate. The next morning he refused to let Enzo and Lila come with him on the search, but resigned himself to the company of his father. Stefano arrived out of breath, nervous because of yet another difficulty that his brother-in-law was causing, apprehensive because of his own ill health, and, continually touching his throat, said, ashen-faced: I can’t breathe. Finally father and son—the boy large, the man looking like a stick in his oversized clothes—set off for the railroad.
They crossed the switching yard and walked along the old tracks where disused cars had been abandoned. In one of them they found Rino. He was seated, his eyes were open. His nose seemed enormous, his unshaved beard, still black, covered his face, up to the cheekbones, like an overgrown plant. Stefano, seeing his brother-in-law, forgot his health and had a real fit of rage. He shouted insults at the corpse, he wanted to kick it. You were a shit as a boy—he screamed—and a shit you’ve remained. You deserve this death, you died like a shit. He was angry because he had ruined his
sister Pinuccia, because he had ruined his nephews, and because he had ruined his son. Look, he said to Gennaro, look what’s waiting for you. Gennaro grabbed him from behind and gripped him hard to restrain him while, kicking and thrashing, Stefano tried to get free.
It was early morning but already starting to get hot. The car stank of shit and pee, the seats were broken, the windows so dirty you couldn’t see out. Since Stefano continued to struggle and howl, the boy lost his temper and said ugly things to his father. He said that it disgusted him to be his son, that the only people in the whole neighborhood he respected were his mother and Enzo. At that point Stefano began to cry. They sat together for a while beside Rino’s body, not to watch over him, only to calm down. They went home to deliver the news.
8.
Nunzia and Fernando were the only ones who felt the loss of Rino. Pinuccia mourned her husband only as much as was indispensable and then seemed to be reborn. Two weeks afterward she showed up at my house to ask if she could replace her mother-in-law, who was crushed by grief and didn’t feel like working anymore: she would clean the house, cook, and take care of my daughters in my absence for exactly the same sum. She was less efficient than Nunzia but more talkative and above all more appealing to Dede, Elsa, and Imma. She was full of compliments for all three of them and for me as well. How well you look, she said, you’re a lady: I see you’ve got beautiful dresses and a lot of shoes in the closet, it’s obvious that you’re important and you go out with important people: is it true that they’re making a film out of your book?
At first she acted like a widow, but then she asked if there were dresses I didn’t wear anymore, even if she was large and they didn’t fit her. I’ll let them out, she said, and I chose some for her. She altered them carefully and skillfully, and then she appeared at work as if she were going to a party, parading back and forth along the hall so that the girls and I could give her our opinion. She was very grateful to me; at times she was so content that she wanted to talk rather than work, and she recalled the days of Ischia. She often alluded to Bruno Soccavo, becoming emotional, and saying in a low voice: What a terrible end he had. A few times she made a remark that must have pleased her greatly: I was widowed twice. One morning she confided to me that Rino had been a real husband only for a few years, otherwise he had behaved like a boy: even in bed, one minute and off he got, sometimes not even the minute. Ah, yes, he was immature, he was a braggart, a liar, but also arrogant, arrogant like Lina. It’s a characteristic of the race of the Cerullos—she grew angry—they’re bigmouths and they’ve got no feelings. Then she began to speak ill of Lila, she said she had appropriated everything that was a product of her brother’s intelligence and hard work. I replied: It’s not true, Lina loved Rino, it was he who exploited her in every way. Pinuccia looked at me bitterly, out of the blue she began to praise her husband. Cerullo shoes, she pronounced, he invented, but then Lina took advantage, she cheated Stefano, she made him marry her, she stole a lot of money—Papa had left us millionaires—and then she made a deal with Michele Solara, she ruined us all. She added: Don’t defend her, you know it perfectly well.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 150