The Story of the Lost Child (33 page)

It was no different on the streets of the neighborhood. Going shopping with her never ceased to amaze me: she had become an authority. She was constantly stopped, people drew her aside with a respectful familiarity, they whispered something to her, and she listened, without reacting. Did they treat her like that because of the success she had had with her new business? Because she gave off the sense of someone who could do anything? Or because, now that she was nearly forty, the energy she had always had imbued her with the aura of a magician who cast spells and instilled fear? I don’t know. Of course it struck me that people paid more attention to her than to me. I was a well-known writer and the publishing house was making sure that, in view of my new book, I was often mentioned in the newspapers: the
Repubblica
had come out with a fairly large photograph of me to illustrate a short article on forthcoming books, which at a certain point said:
Highly anticipated is the new novel by Elena Greco, a story set in an unknown Naples, with bloodred colors
, et cetera. And yet next to her, in the place where we were born, I was only a decoration, that is, I bore witness to Lila’s merits. Those who had known us from birth attributed to her, to the force of her attraction, the fact that the neighborhood could have on its streets an esteemed person like me.

I think there were many who wondered why I, who in the newspapers seemed rich and famous, had come to live in a wretched apartment, situated in an increasingly run-down area. Maybe the first not to understand were my daughters. Dede came home from school one day disgusted:

“An old man peed in our doorway.”

Another day Elsa arrived terrified:

“Today someone was knifed in the gardens.”

At such times I was afraid. The part of me that had long ago left the neighborhood was indignant, was worried about the children, and said, Enough. At home, Dede and Elsa spoke a good Italian, but occasionally I heard them from the window or coming up the stairs, and I realized that Elsa especially used a very aggressive, sometimes obscene dialect. I reprimanded her, she pretended to be sorry. But I knew that it took a lot of self-discipline to resist the lure of bad behavior and so many other temptations. Was it possible that while I was devoting myself to making literature they were getting lost? I calmed myself by repeating the temporal limit of this stay: after the publication of my book I would definitively leave Naples. I said it to myself and said it again: I needed only to reach a final draft of the novel.

The book was undoubtedly benefiting from everything that came from the neighborhood. But the work proceeded so well mainly because I was attentive to Lila, who had remained completely within that environment. Her voice, her gaze, her gestures, her meanness and her generosity, her dialect were all intimately connected to our place of birth. Even Basic Sight, in spite of the exotic name (people called her office
basissìt
), didn’t seem some sort of meteorite that had fallen from outer space but rather the unexpected product of poverty, violence, and blight. Thus, drawing on her to give truth to my story seemed indispensable. Afterward I would leave for good, I intended to move to Milan.

I had only to sit in her office for a while to understand the background against which she moved. I looked at her brother, who was now openly consumed by drugs. I looked at Ada, who was crueler every day, the sworn enemy of Marisa, who had taken Stefano away from her. I looked at Alfonso—in whose face, in whose habits, the feminine and the masculine continually broke boundaries with effects that one day repelled me, the next moved me, and always alarmed me—who often had a black eye or a split lip because of the beatings he got, who knows where, who knows when. I looked at Carmen, who, in the blue jacket of a gas-pump attendant, drew Lila aside and interrogated her like an oracle. I looked at Antonio, who hovered around her with unfinished sentences or stood in a serene silence when he brought to the office, as if on a courtesy visit, his beautiful German wife, the children. Meanwhile I picked up endless rumors. Stefano Carracci is about to close the grocery, he doesn’t have a lira, he needs money. It was Pasquale Peluso who kidnapped so-and-so, and if it wasn’t him he certainly has something to do with it. That other so-and-so set fire to the shirt factory in Afragola by himself to fuck the insurance company. Watch out for Dede, they’re giving children drugged candy. There’s a faggot hanging around the elementary school who lures children away. The Solaras are opening a night club in the new neighborhood, women and drugs, the music will be so loud that no one will sleep again. Big trucks pass by on the
stradone
at night, transporting stuff that can destroy us faster than the atomic bomb. Gennaro has started hanging out with a bad crowd, and, if he continues like that, I won’t even let him go to work. The person they found murdered in the tunnel looked like a woman but was a man: there was so much blood in the body that it flowed all the way down to the gas pump.

I observed, I listened, from the vantage point of what Lila and I as children had imagined becoming and what I had actually become: the author of a big book that I was polishing—or at times rewriting—and that would soon be published. In the first draft—I said to myself—I put too much dialect. And I erased it, rewrote. Then it seemed that I had put in too little and I added some. I was in the neighborhood and yet safe in that role, within that setting. The ambitious work justified my presence there and, as long as I was occupied with it, gave meaning to the poor light in the rooms, the rough voices of the street, the risks that the children ran, the traffic on the
stradone
that raised dust when the weather was good and water and mud when it rained, Lila and Enzo’s swarm of clients, small provincial entrepreneurs, big luxury cars, clothes of a vulgar wealth, heavy bodies that moved sometimes aggressively, sometimes with servile manners.

Once when I was waiting for Lila at Basic Sight with Imma and Tina, everything seemed to become clearer: Lila was doing new work but totally immersed in our old world. I heard her shouting at a client in an extremely crude way about a question of money. I was shaken, where had the woman who graciously emanated authority suddenly gone? Enzo hurried in, and the man—a small man around sixty, with an enormous belly—went away cursing. Afterward I said to Lila:

“Who are you really?”

“In what sense?”

“If you don’t want to talk about it, forget it.”

“No, let’s talk, but explain what you mean.”

“I mean: in an environment like this, with the people you have to deal with, how do you behave?”

“I’m careful, like everyone.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, I’m careful and I move things around in order to make them go the way I say. Haven’t we always behaved that way?”

“Yes, but now we have responsibilities, toward ourselves and our children. Didn’t you say we have to change the neighborhood?”

“And to change it what do you think needs to be done?”

“Resort to the law.”

I was startled myself by what I was saying. I made a speech in which I was, to my surprise, even more legalistic than my ex-husband and, in many ways, more than Nino. Lila said teasingly:

“The law is fine when you’re dealing with people who pay attention if you merely say the word ‘law’. But you know how it is here.”

“And so?”

“So if people have no fear of the law, you have to instill the fear yourself. We did a lot of work for that shit you saw before, in fact a huge amount, but he won’t pay, he says he has no money. I threatened him, I told him: I’ll sue you. And he answered: Sue me, who gives a damn.”

“But you’ll sue him.”

She laughed: “I’ll never see my money that way. Some time ago, an accountant stole millions from us. We fired him and filed charges. But the law didn’t lift a finger.”

“So?”

“I was fed up with waiting and I asked Antonio. The money was returned immediately. And this money, too, will return, without a trial, without lawyers, and without judges.”

So Antonio did that sort of work for Lila. Not for money but out of friendship, or personal respect. Or, I don’t know, maybe she asked Michele if she could borrow him, since Antonio worked for Michele, and Michele, who agreed to everything Lila asked, let her.

But did Michele really satisfy her every request? If it had certainly been true before I moved to the neighborhood, now it wasn’t clear if things really were like that. First I noticed some odd signs: Lila no longer uttered Michele’s name with condescension but, rather, with irritation or obvious concern; mainly, though, he hardly ever appeared at Basic Sight.

It was at the wedding celebration of Marcello and Elisa, which was ostentatious and lavish, that I became aware something had changed. During the entire reception Marcello stayed close to his brother; he often whispered to him, they laughed together, he put an arm around his shoulders. As for Michele, he seemed revived. He had returned to making long, pompous speeches, as he used to, while the children and Gigliola, now extraordinarily fat, sat obediently beside him, as if they had decided to forget the way he had treated them. It struck me how the vulgarity, which was still very provincial at the time of Lila’s wedding, had been as if modernized. It had become a metropolitan vulgarity, and Lila herself was appropriate to it, in her habits, in her language, in her clothes. Nothing clashed, in other words, except for me and my daughters, who with our sobriety were completely out of place in that triumph of excessive colors, excessive laughter, excessive luxuries.

Perhaps that was why Michele’s burst of rage was especially alarming. He was making a speech in honor of the newlyweds, but meanwhile little Tina was claiming something that Imma had taken away from her, and was screaming in the middle of the room. He was talking, Tina was crying. Suddenly Michele broke off and, with the eyes of a madman, shouted: Fuck, Lina, will you shut that piece of shit kid up? Like that, exactly in those words. Lila stared at him for a long second. She didn’t speak, she didn’t move. Very slowly, she placed one hand on the hand of Enzo, who was sitting next to her. I quickly got up from my table and took the two little girls outside.

The episode roused the bride, that is to say, my sister Elisa. At the end of the speech, when the sound of applause reached me, she came out, in her extravagant white dress. She said cheerfully: My brother-in-law has returned to himself. Then she added: But he shouldn’t treat babies like that. She picked up Imma and Tina, and, laughing and joking returned to the hall with the two children. I followed her, confused.

For a while I thought that she, too, had returned to herself. Elisa in fact did change greatly, after her marriage, as if what had ruined her had been the absence, until that moment, of the marriage bond. She became a calm mother, a tranquil yet firm wife, her hostility toward me ended. Now when I went to her house with my daughters and, often, Tina, she welcomed me politely and was affectionate with the children. Even Marcello—when I ran into him—was courteous. He called me the sister-in-law who writes novels (
How is the sister-in-law who writes novels?
), said a cordial word or two, and disappeared. The house was always tidy, and Elisa and Silvio welcomed us dressed as if for a party. But my sister as a little girl—I soon realized—had vanished forever. The marriage had inaugurated a completely fake Signora Solara, never an intimate word, only a good-humored tone and a smile, all copied from her husband. I made an effort to be loving, with her and especially with my nephew. But I didn’t find Silvio appealing, he was too much like Marcello, and Elisa must have realized it. One afternoon she turned bitter again for a few minutes. She said: You love Lina’s child more than mine. I swore it wasn’t true, I hugged the child, kissed him. But she shook her head, whispered: Besides, you went to live near Lina and not near me or Papa. She continued, in other words, to be angry with me and now also with our brothers. I think she accused them of behaving like ingrates. They lived and worked in Baiano and they weren’t even in touch with Marcello, who had been so generous with them. Family ties, said Elisa, you think they’re strong, but no. She talked as if she were stating a universal principle, then she added: To keep from breaking those ties, you need, as my husband has shown, goodwill. Michele had turned into an idiot, but Marcello restored his mind to him: Did you notice what a great speech he made at my wedding?

Michele’s return to his senses was marked not only by a return to his flowery speech but also by the absence among the guests of a person who during that period of crisis had been very close to him: Alfonso. Not to be invited was for my former schoolmate a source of great suffering. For days he did nothing but complain, asking aloud how he had wronged the Solaras. I worked for them for so many years, he said, and they didn’t invite me. Then something happened that caused a sensation. One evening he came to dinner at my house with Lila and Enzo, very depressed. But Alfonso, who had never dressed as a woman in my presence except the day he tried on the maternity dress in the shop on Via Chiaia, arrived in women’s clothes, leaving Dede and Elsa speechless. He was troublesome all evening; he drank a lot. He asked Lila obsessively: Am I getting fat, am I getting ugly, do I not look like you anymore? And Enzo: Who’s prettier, her or me? At a certain point he complained that he had a blocked intestine, that he had a terrible pain in what—addressing the girls—he called his ass. And he began to insist that I look and see what was wrong. Look at my ass, he said, laughing in an obscene way, and Dede stared at him in bewilderment, Elsa tried to stifle a laugh. Enzo and Lila had to take him away in a hurry.

But Alfonso didn’t calm down. The next day, without makeup, in male clothes, eyes red with crying, he left Basic Sight saying that he was going to have a coffee at the Bar Solara. At the entrance he met Michele, and they said something to each other. Michele, after a few minutes, began to punch and kick him, then he grabbed the pole that was used to lower the shutter and beat him methodically, for a long time. Alfonso returned to the office badly battered, but he couldn’t stop repeating: It’s my fault, I don’t how to control myself. Control in what way we couldn’t understand. Certainly, he got even worse, and Lila seemed worried. For days she tried in vain to soothe Enzo, who couldn’t bear the violence of the strong against the weak, and wanted to go to Michele to see if he could beat him, Enzo, the way he had beaten Alfonso. From my apartment I heard Lila saying: Stop it, you’re frightening Tina.