The Story of the Lost Child (22 page)

The neighborhood emptied, the
stradone
became quiet, the air turned cold. In the buildings, transformed into dark rocks, there was not a single lamp lighted, no colorful glow of a television. I, too, fell asleep. I awoke with a start, it was still dark. Lila had left the car, the window on her side was half open. I opened mine, I looked around. The stopped cars were all inhabited, people coughed, groaned in their sleep. I didn’t see Lila, I grew concerned, I went toward the tunnel. I found her not far from Carmen’s gas pump. She was moving amid fragments of cornices and other debris, she looked up toward the windows of her house. Seeing me she had an expression of embarrassment. I wasn’t well, she said, I’m sorry, I filled your head with nonsense, luckily we were together. There was the hint of an uneasy smile on her face, she said one of the many almost incomprehensible phrases of that night—
“Luckily” is a breath of perfume that comes out when you press the pump
—and she shivered. She still wasn’t well, I persuaded her to return to the car. In a few minutes she fell asleep again.

As soon as it was day I woke her. She was calm, she wanted to apologize. She said softly, making light of it: You know I’m like that, every so often there’s something that grabs me here in my chest. I said: It’s nothing, there are periods of exhaustion, you’re looking after too many things, and anyway it’s been terrible for everyone, it wouldn’t end. She shook her head: I know how I’m made.

We organized ourselves, we found a way of returning to her house. We made a great number of phone calls, but either they didn’t go through or the phone rang in vain. Lila’s parents didn’t answer, the relatives in Avellino, who could have given us news of Enzo and Gennaro, didn’t answer, no one answered at Nino’s number, his friends didn’t answer. I talked to Pietro, he had just found out about the earthquake. I asked him to keep the girls for a few days, long enough to be sure the danger had passed. But as the hours slid by, the dimensions of the disaster grew. We hadn’t been frightened for nothing. Lila murmured as if to justify herself: You see, the earth was about to split in two.

We were dazed by emotions and by weariness, but still we walked through the neighborhood and through a sorrowing city, now silent, now streaked by the nagging sounds of sirens. We kept talking to alleviate anxiety: where was Nino, where was Enzo, where was Gennaro, how was my mother, where had Marcello Solara taken her, where were Lila’s parents. I realized that she needed to return to the moments of the earthquake, and not so much to recount again its traumatic effects as to feel them as a new heart around which to restructure sensibility. I encouraged her every time, and it seemed to me that the more she regained control of herself the more evident became the destruction and death of entire towns of the South. Soon she began to speak of the terror without being ashamed and I was reassured. But something indefinable nevertheless remained: her more cautious steps, a hint of apprehension in her voice. The memory of the earthquake endured, Naples contained it. Only the heat was departing, like a foggy breath that rose from the body of the city and its slow, strident life.

We reached the house of Nino and Eleonora. I knocked for a long time, I called, no answer. Lila stood a hundred meters away, staring at me, her belly stretched, pointed, a sulky expression on her face. I talked to a man who came out of the entrance with two suitcases, he said that the whole building was deserted. I stayed another moment, unable to make up my mind to leave. I observed Lila’s figure. I remembered what she had said and implied shortly before the earthquake, I had the impression that a legion of demons was pursuing her. She used Enzo, she used Pasquale, she used Antonio. She remodeled Alfonso. She subdued Michele Solara, leading him into a mad love for her, for him. And Michele was thrashing about to free himself, he fired Alfonso, he closed the shop in Piazza dei Martiri, but in vain. Lila humiliated him, continued to humiliate him, subjugating him. How much did she know now of the two brothers’ business. She had set eyes on their affairs when she collected data for the computer, she even knew about the drug money. That’s why Marcello hated her, that’s why my sister Elisa hated her. Lila knew everything. She knew everything out of pure, simple fear of all that was living or dead. Who knows how many ugly facts she knew about Nino. She seemed to say to me from a distance: Forget him, we both know that he’s safely with his family and doesn’t give a damn about you.

It turned out to be essentially true. Enzo and Gennaro returned to the neighborhood in the evening, worn-out, overwhelmed, looking like survivors of an atrocious war, with a single preoccupation: How was Lila. Nino, on the other hand, reappeared many days later, as if he’d come back from a vacation. I couldn’t understand anything, he said, I took my children and fled.

His children
. What a responsible father. And the one I carried in my belly?

He said in his confident voice that he had taken refuge with the children, Eleonora, his in-laws in a family villa in Minturno. I sulked. I kept him away for days, I didn’t want to see him, I was worried about my parents. I heard from Marcello himself, who had returned alone to the neighborhood, that he had brought them to a safe place, with Elisa and Silvio, to a property he had in Gaeta. Another savior of
his
family.

Meanwhile I returned to Via Tasso, alone. It was very cold now, the apartment was freezing. I checked the walls one by one, there didn’t seem to be any cracks. But at night I was afraid to fall asleep, I feared that the earthquake would return, and I was glad that Pietro and Doriana had agreed to keep the children for a while.

Then Christmas came; I couldn’t help it, I made peace with Nino. I went to Florence to get Dede and Elsa. Life began again but like a convalescence whose end I couldn’t see. Now, every time I saw Lila, I felt on her part a mood of uncertainty, especially when she took an aggressive tone. She looked at me as if to say: You know what is behind my every word.

But did I really know? I crossed barricaded streets and passed by countless uninhabitable buildings, shored up by strong wooden beams. I often ended up in the havoc caused by the basest complicit inefficiency. And I thought of Lila, of how she immediately returned to work, to manipulate, motivate, deride, attack. I thought of the terror that in a few seconds had annihilated her, I saw the trace of that terror in her now habitual gesture of holding her hands around her stomach with the fingers spread. And I wondered apprehensively: who is she now, what can she become, how can she react? I said to her once, to underline that a bad moment had passed:

“The world has returned to its place.”

She replied teasingly:

“What place?”

In the last month of pregnancy everything became a struggle. Nino was hardly ever around: he had to work, and that exasperated me. When he did appear, he was rude. I thought: I’m ugly, he doesn’t want me anymore. And it was true, by now I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without disgust. I had puffy cheeks and an enormous nose. My bosom and stomach seemed to have consumed the rest of my body, I saw myself without a neck, with short legs and fat ankles. I had become like my mother, but not the one of now, who was a thin, frightened old woman; rather, I resembled the venomous figure I had always feared, who now existed only in my memory.

That persecuting mother was unleashed. She began to act through me, venting because of the difficulties, the anxieties, the pain the dying mother was causing me with her frailties, the gaze of a person who is about to drown. I became intractable, every complication seemed like a plot, I often started shouting. I had the impression, in my moments of greatest unhappiness, that the chaos of Naples had settled even in my body, that I was losing the capacity to be nice, to be likable. Pietro called to talk to the children and I was brusque. The publisher called me, or some daily paper, and I protested, I said: I’m in my ninth month, I’m stressed, leave me alone.

With my daughters, too, I got worse. Not so much with Dede, since she resembled her father, and I was by now accustomed to her mixture of intelligence, affection, and harassing logic. It was Elsa who began to upset me. The meek little girl was becoming a being with blurry features, whose teacher did nothing but complain about her, calling her sly and violent, while I myself, in the house or on the street, constantly scolded her for picking fights, taking others’ things and breaking them when she had to give them back. A fine trio of women we are, I said to myself, it’s obvious that Nino is avoiding us, that he prefers Eleonora, Albertino, and Lidia. When I couldn’t sleep at night because of the creature stirring in my womb, as if it were made of mobile air bubbles, I hoped against every prediction that the new baby would be a male, that he would resemble Nino, that he would please him, and that Nino would love him more than his other children.

But although I forced myself to return to the image I preferred of myself—I had always wanted to be an even-tempered person who wisely curbed petty or even violent feelings—in those final days I was unable to find an equilibrium. I blamed the earthquake, which at the time didn’t seem to have disturbed me a great deal but perhaps remained deep inside, right in my belly. If I drove through the tunnel of Capodimonte I was gripped by panic, I was afraid that a new shock would make it collapse. If I took the Corso Malta viaduct, which vibrated anyway, I accelerated to escape the shock that might shatter it at any moment. In that phase I even stopped battling the ants, which often and willingly appeared in the bathroom: I preferred to let them live and every so often observe them; Alfonso claimed that they could anticipate disaster.

But it wasn’t only the aftermath of the earthquake that upset me; Lila’s fantastical hints also entered into it. I now looked on the streets for syringes like the ones I had absent-mindedly noticed in the days of Milan. And if I saw some in the gardens in the neighborhood a querulous mist rose around me, I wanted to go and confront Marcello and my brothers, even if it wasn’t clear to me what arguments I would use. Thus I ended up doing and saying hateful things. To my mother, who harassed me, asking if I had talked to Lila about Peppe and Gianni, I responded rudely one day: Ma, Lina can’t take them, she already has a brother who’s a drug addict, and she’s afraid for Gennaro, you can’t all burden her with the problems you can’t fix. She looked at me in horror, she had never alluded to drugs, I had said a word that shouldn’t be said. But if in earlier times she would have started shouting in defense of my brothers and against my lack of sensitivity, now she shut herself in a dark corner of the kitchen and didn’t breathe a word, so that I had to say, repentant: Don’t worry, come on, we’ll find a solution.

What solution? I made things even more complicated. I tracked down Peppe in the gardens—who knows where Gianni was—and made an angry speech about how terrible it was to earn money from the vices of others. I said: Go find any job but not this, you’ll ruin yourself and make our mother die of worry. The whole time he was cleaning the nails of his right hand with the nail of his left thumb, and he listened to me uneasily, eyes lowered. He was three years younger than me and felt like the little brother in front of the big sister who was an important person. But that didn’t keep him from saying to me, at the end, with a sneer: Without my money Mamma would already be dead. He went away with a faint wave of farewell.

That answer got me even more upset. I let a day or two go by and went to see Elisa, hoping to find Marcello, too. It was very cold, the streets of the new neighborhood were as damaged and dirty as those of the old. Marcello wasn’t there; the house was untidy; and I found my sister’s slovenliness annoying: she hadn’t washed or dressed, all she did was take care of her son. I almost scolded her: Tell your husband—and I stressed that word
husband
even though they weren’t married—that he’s ruining our brothers; if he has to sell drugs, let him do it himself. I expressed myself like that, in Italian, and she turned pale, she said: Lenù, leave my house immediately, who do you think you’re talking to, all those fancy people you know? Get out, you’re presumptuous, you always were. As soon as I tried to reply she shouted: Don’t ever come here again acting like the professor about my Marcello: he’s a good person, we owe everything to him; if I want to I can buy you, that whore Lina, and all the shits you admire so much.

I got more and more involved in the neighborhood that, because of Lila, I had glimpsed, and realized only later that I was getting mixed up in activities that were difficult to sort out, and was violating among other things a rule I had made when I returned to Naples: not to be sucked back into the place where I was born. One afternoon when I had left the children with Mirella, I went to see my mother, and then, I don’t know whether to soothe my agitation or to give vent to it, I went to Lila’s office. Ada opened the door, cheerfully. Lila was closed in her room and arguing with a client, Enzo had gone with Rino to visit some business or other, and she felt it her duty to keep me company. She entertained me with talk about her daughter, Maria, on how big she was, how good she was in school. But then the telephone rang, she hurried to answer, calling to Alfonso: Lenuccia’s here, come. With a certain embarrassment, my former schoolmate, more feminine than ever in his ways, in his hair, in the colors of his clothes, led me into a small bare space. There to my surprise I found Michele Solara.

I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and an unease took possession of all three of us. Michele seemed very changed. He had gone gray, and his face was lined, although his body was still young and athletic. But the oddest thing was that he appeared to be embarrassed by my presence, and behaved in a completely uncharacteristic way. First of all he stood up when I entered. Then he was polite but said very little, his usual teasing patter had disappeared. He kept looking at Alfonso as if he were seeking help, then immediately looked away, as if merely looking at him could be compromising. And Alfonso was just as uncomfortable. He kept smoothing his long hair, he smacked his lips in search of something to say, and the conversation soon languished. The moments seemed fragile to me. I became nervous, but I didn’t know why. Maybe it annoyed me that they were hiding—
from me
, no less, as if I couldn’t understand;
from me,
who had frequented and did frequent circles more progressive than that little neighborhood room, who had written a book praised even abroad on how brittle sexual identities were. On the tip of my tongue was the wish to exclaim: If I’ve understood correctly, you are lovers. I didn’t do it only out of fear of having mistaken Lila’s hints. But certainly I couldn’t bear the silence and I talked a lot, pushing the conversation in that direction.