The Story of the Lost Child (42 page)

“I don’t, either.”

“Then when is she coming back?”

Lila said nothing for a long moment, then scolded her:

“It’s none of your business, shut up.”

Those words, uttered in dialect, were so brusque, so harsh, so unsuitable that I was alarmed. I said something, brought my child home.

I had always forgiven Lila her excesses and in those circumstances I was inclined to do so even more than in the past. She often went too far, and as much as possible I tried to get her to be reasonable. When the police interrogated Stefano and she was immediately convinced that he had taken Tina—so that at first she refused even to visit him in the hospital after the heart attack—I mollified her, and we went together to visit him. And it was thanks to me that she hadn’t attacked her brother when the police questioned him. I had also done all I could on the awful day when Gennaro was summoned to the police station and, once at home, felt himself accused; there was a quarrel, and he went to live at his father’s house, shouting at Lila that she had lost forever not only Tina but also him. The situation, in other words, was terrible and I could understand why she fought with everyone, even me. But with Imma, no, I couldn’t allow it. From then on, when Lila took the child I became anxious, I pondered, I looked for ways out.

But there was little to do; the threads of her grief were tangled and Imma was for a time part of that tangle. In the general chaos where we had all ended up, Lila, despite her weariness, continued to tell me about my daughter’s every little difficulty, as she had done until I decided to insist that Nino visit. I felt angry, I was irritated, and yet I tried
also
to see a positive aspect: she’s slowly shifting onto Imma—I thought—her maternal love, she’s saying to me: Since you’ve been lucky, and you still have your daughter, you ought to take advantage of it, pay attention to her, give her all the care you haven’t given her.

But that was only the appearance of things. Soon I had a different theory: that, more deeply, Imma—her body—must be a symbol of guilt. I thought often of the situation in which the little girl had been lost. Nino had handed her over to Lila but
Lila hadn’t attended to her
. She had said to her daughter,
You wait here
, and to my daughter,
Come with your aunt
. She had done it, perhaps, to show off Imma to her father, to praise her to him, to stir his affection, who knows. But Tina was lively, or more simply she had felt neglected, offended, and had wandered off. As a result Lila’s suffering had made a nest in the weight of Imma’s body in her arms, in the contact, in the living warmth it still gave off. But my daughter was fragile, slow, different in every way from Tina, who was shining, vivacious. Imma could in no way become a substitute, she was only holding back time. I imagined, in other words, that Lila kept her nearby in order to stay within that terrible Sunday, and meanwhile thought: Tina is here, soon she’ll pull on my skirt, she’ll call me, and then I’ll pick her up in my arms, and everything will return to its place. That was why she didn’t want the child to upset everything. When the little girl kept asking for her friend, when she merely reminded Lila that in fact Tina wasn’t there, Lila treated her with the same harshness with which she treated us adults. But I couldn’t accept that. As soon as she came to get Imma, I found some excuse or other to send Dede or Elsa to watch her. If she had used that tone when I was present, what might happen when she took her away for hours?

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?

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: A
unt 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.