The Story of the Lost Child (44 page)

I would have liked to lead her into a conversation like that, jumbled, intoxicated. I felt that if she made up her mind she would extract from the tangled mass of her brain words of that sort. But it didn’t happen. In fact, as I think back, in that phase she was less aggressive than in other periods of our story. Maybe the outburst I hoped for was made up of my own feelings, which therefore hindered me from seeing the situation clearly and made Lila even more elusive. Sometimes I wondered if she had in her mind something unutterable that I wasn’t even capable of imagining.

Sundays were the worst. Lila stayed home, she didn’t work, and from outside came the holiday voices. I went down, I said: Let’s go out, let’s take a walk to the center, let’s go to the sea. She refused, and got angry if I was too insistent. So, to make up for her rudeness, Enzo said: I’ll go, come on. She shouted immediately: Yes, go, leave me in peace, I’ll take a bath and wash my hair, let me breathe.

We would go out, my daughters came with us and sometimes also Gennaro—who, after the death of his uncle, we all called Rino. During those hours of our walks Enzo confided in me, in his laconic, sometimes obscure way. He said that without Tina he didn’t know what the point of making money was. He said that stealing children to make their parents suffer was a sign of the wretched times that were coming. He said that after the birth of his daughter it was as if a light had switched on in his head, and now the light had gone out. He said: You remember when right here, on this street, I carried her on my shoulders? He said: Thank you, Lenù, for the help you give us, don’t be angry with Lina, this is a time of tribulation, but you know her better than I do, sooner or later she’ll recover.

I listened, I asked him: She’s very pale, physically how is she? I meant: I know she is tortured by grief, but tell me, is she healthy, have you noticed worrying symptoms? But in the face of “physically” Enzo was embarrassed. He knew almost nothing about Lila’s body, he adored it as one adores an idol, warily and with respect. And he answered without conviction: fine. Then he grew nervous, he was in a hurry to get home, he said: Let’s try to persuade her at least to take a short walk in the neighborhood.

Useless. Only very rarely could I get Lila outside on a Sunday. But it wasn’t a good idea. She walked quickly, carelessly dressed, her hair loose and disheveled, flashing angry glances. My daughters and I followed haltingly behind her, supportive, like handmaidens more beautiful, more richly adorned than our mistress. Everyone knew her, even the peddlers, who remembered the troubles they had had because of Tina’s disappearance and, afraid there could be others, avoided her. To everyone she was the terrifying woman who, stricken by a great misfortune, carried its potency with her, spreading it wherever she went. Lila walked along the
stradone
with her fierce gaze, toward the gardens, and people lowered their eyes, looked in another direction. But even if someone greeted her she paid no attention, and didn’t respond. From the way she walked she seemed to have an urgent goal. The truth is, she was running from the memory of that Sunday two years earlier.

When we went out together we inevitably met the Solaras. Lately, they hadn’t been straying from the neighborhood much; there had been a lengthy list of people murdered in Naples, and, at least on Sundays, they preferred to remain peacefully on the streets of their childhood that for them were as safe as a fortress. The two families always did the same things. They went to Mass, they walked amid the stalls, they brought their children to the neighborhood library, which by long tradition, since the days when Lila and I were young, was open on Sundays. I thought it must be Elisa or Gigliola who imposed that educated ritual, but once when I stopped to exchange a few words I discovered that it was Michele. He said, pointing to his children, who although they were grown obeyed him, evidently out of fear, while they had no respect for their mother:

“They know that if they don’t read at least one book a month from the first page to the last I won’t give them a lira. I’m doing the right thing, no, Lenù?”

I don’t know if they really took out books, they had enough money to buy the entire Biblioteca Nazionale. But whether they did it out of real need or as a performance, they now had this habit: they went up the stairs, pushed open the glass door, a relic of the forties, went in, stayed for no more than ten minutes, and came out.

When I was alone with my daughters, Marcello, Michele, Gigliola, and the boys, too, were cordial; only my sister was cool. With Lila, on the other hand, things were complicated, and I was afraid that the tension would rise dangerously. But on those very rare Sunday walks she always pretended that they didn’t exist. And the Solaras behaved the same way, and since I was with Lila they preferred to ignore me as well. Elsa, however, one Sunday morning, decided not to follow that unwritten rule and with her queen-of-hearts manners greeted the children of Michele and Gigliola, who responded uneasily. As a result, although it was very cold, we were forced to stop for a few minutes. The two Solaras pretended to have urgent things to talk about with each other, I spoke to Gigliola, the girls to the boys, Imma studied her cousin Silvio attentively, since we saw him so infrequently. No one addressed a word to Lila, and Lila, for her part, was silent. Only Michele, when he broke off his conversation with his brother and spoke to me in his teasing way, referred to her without looking at her:

“Now, Lenù, we’re going to look in at the library and then we’re going to eat. Would you like to come with us?”

“No, thank you,” I said, “we have to go. Another time, though, certainly.”

“Good, then tell the boys what they should read and what they shouldn’t. You are an example for us, you and your daughters. When we see you pass by on the street we always say: once Lenuccia was like us, and look how she is now. She doesn’t know what pride is, she is democratic, she lives here with us, just like us, even though she’s an important person. Ah, yes, those who study become good. Today everyone goes to school, everyone keeps his eyes on the books, and so in the future we’ll have so much of that goodness it’ll be coming out of our ears. But if you don’t read and you don’t study, which is what happened to Lina, it happened to all of us, you stay malicious, and malice is ugly. Isn’t it true, Lenù?”

He grabbed me by the wrist, his eyes were shining. He repeated sarcastically: Isn’t it true? and I nodded yes, but I freed my wrist too forcefully, my mother’s bracelet remained in his hand.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, and this time he sought Lila’s gaze, but didn’t find it. He said with feigned regret: “I’m sorry, I’ll have it fixed for you.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Absolutely not, it’s my duty: you’ll have it back like new. Marcè, you’ll go by the jeweler’s?”

Marcello nodded yes.

People were passing, eyes lowered; it was almost time for lunch. When we managed to get rid of the brothers Lila said to me:

“You’re even more defenseless than you used to be: you’ll never see that bracelet again.”

I was convinced that she was about to have one of her crises. I saw that she was debilitated and anguished, as if she expected something uncontrollable to break the building in two, the apartment, herself. For several days, knocked out by the flu, I didn’t hear anything about her. Dede, too, had a cough and a fever, and I assumed that the virus would soon be transmitted to Elsa and to Imma. Also, I had an article to hand in urgently (I was supposed to do something for a magazine that was devoting an entire issue to the female body) and I didn’t have the desire or the strength to write.

Outside a cold wind had arisen; it shook the windowpanes, blades of cold penetrated the loose frames. On Friday Enzo came to tell me that he had to go to Avellino because an old aunt of his was ill. As for Rino, he would be spending Saturday and Sunday with Stefano, who had asked him to help dismantle the fixtures in the grocery and take them to a man who was willing to buy them. Lila therefore would be alone, and Enzo said that she was a little depressed, he wanted me to keep her company. But I was tired, I barely had time to focus on a thought when Dede called me, Imma wanted me, Elsa protested, and the thought vanished. When Pinuccia came to clean the house I asked her to cook enough for Saturday and Sunday, then I shut myself in my bedroom, where I had a table to work at.

The next day, since I hadn’t heard from Lila, I went down to invite her to lunch. She came to the door in sandals, an old green bathrobe over her pajamas, her hair disheveled. But to my amazement her eyes and mouth were heavily made up. The house was a mess, and there was an unpleasant smell. She said: If the wind blows any harder the neighborhood will fly away. Nothing but an overused hyperbole and yet I was alarmed: she had said it as if she were convinced that the neighborhood really could be torn from its foundations and carried off to shatter near Ponti Rossi. Once she realized that I had perceived how odd her tone was, she smiled in a forced way, whispered: I was joking. I nodded, I listed the good things there were for lunch. She became excited in an exaggerated way, but a moment later her mood abruptly changed, she said: Bring me lunch here, I don’t want to come to your house, your daughters get on my nerves.

I brought her lunch and also dinner. The stairs were cold, I didn’t feel well, and I didn’t want to go up and down just to have unpleasant things said to me. But this time I found her surprisingly cordial, she said Wait, sit with me for a moment. She drew me into the bathroom, she brushed her hair carefully, and meanwhile spoke about my daughters with tenderness, with admiration, as if to convince me that she didn’t seriously believe what she had said to me earlier.

“At first,” she said, dividing the hair into two, and beginning to braid it without losing sight of her image in the mirror, “Dede resembled you, now instead she’s becoming like her father. The opposite is happening with Elsa: she seemed identical to her father and now instead she’s starting to look like you. Everything moves. A wish, a fantasy travels more swiftly than blood.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remember when I thought Gennaro was Nino’s?”

“Yes.”

“To me he really seemed so, he was identical to Nino, his exact image.”

“You mean that a desire can be so strong as to seem fulfilled?”

“No, I mean that for a few years Gennaro was
truly
Nino’s child.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

She stared at me spitefully for a moment, she took a few steps in the bathroom, limping, she burst out laughing in a slightly artificial way.

“So it seems to you that I’m exaggerating?”

I realized with some annoyance that she was imitating my walk.

“Don’t make fun of me, my hip hurts.”

“Nothing hurts, Lenù. You invented that limp in order not to let your mother die completely, and now you really do limp, and I’ve studied you, it’s good for you. The Solaras took your bracelet and you said nothing, you weren’t sorry, you weren’t worried. At the time I thought it was because you don’t know how to rebel, but now I understand it’s not that. You’re getting old properly. You feel strong, you stopped being a daughter, you truly became a mother.”

I felt uneasy, I repeated:

“It’s just a little pain.”

“Even pain does you good. You just needed a slight limp and now your mother stays quietly inside you. Her leg is glad that you limp and so you, too, are glad. Isn’t that true?”

“No.”

She gave me an ironic look to reassert that she didn’t believe me, and with her made-up eyes narrowed to cracks said:

“Do you think that when Tina is forty-two, she’ll be like this?”

I stared at her. She had a provocative expression, her hands tight around the braids. I said:

“It’s likely, yes, maybe so.”

My daughters had to fend for themselves, I stayed to eat with Lila, even though I felt cold in my bones. We talked the whole time about physical resemblances; I tried to understand what was happening in her mind. But I also mentioned to her the work I was doing. Talking to you helps, I said to give her confidence, you make me think.

The idea seemed to cheer her, she said: Knowing I’m useful to you I feel better. Right afterward, thanks to the effort involved in being useful to me, she moved on to contorted or illogical arguments. She had put on a lot of powder to hide her pallor, and she didn’t seem herself but a Carnival mask with very red cheeks. At times I followed her with interest, at times I recognized only the signs of the illness that I was well acquainted with by now, and was alarmed. For example, she said, laughing: For a while I brought up Nino’s child, just as you’ve done with Imma, a flesh and blood child; but when that child became Stefano’s where did Nino’s child go, does Gennaro still have him inside, do I have him? Remarks like that: she got lost. Then she started abruptly to praise my cooking, she said she had eaten with pleasure, something she hadn’t done for a long time. When I said it wasn’t mine but Pinuccia’s, she darkened, she grumbled that she didn’t want anything from Pinuccia. At that point Elsa called me from the landing, she shouted that I had to come home right away, Dede with a fever was even worse than Dede healthy. I urged Lila to call me whenever she needed me, I told her to rest, I hurried up to my apartment.

For the rest of the day I tried to forget about her; I worked late into the night. The children had grown up with the idea that when I really had my back to the wall they had to look after themselves and not disturb me. In fact they left me in peace, and I worked well. As usual a half sentence of Lila’s was enough and my brain recognized her aura, became active, liberated my intelligence. By now I knew that I could do well especially when she, even just with a few disjointed words, assured the more insecure part of me that I was right. I gave to her digressive complaints a concise, elegant organization. I wrote about my hip, about my mother. Now that I was surrounded by admiration, I could admit without uneasiness that talking to her incited ideas, pushed me to make connections between distant things. In those years of being neighbors, I on the floor above, she below, it often happened. A slight push was enough and the seemingly empty mind discovered that it was full and lively. I attributed to her a sort of farsightedness, as I had all our lives, and I found nothing wrong with it. I said to myself that to be adult was to recognize that I needed her impulses. If once I had hidden, even from myself, that spark she induced in me, now I was proud of it, I had even written about it somewhere.
I was I
and for that very reason I could make space for her in me and give her an enduring form.
She instead didn’t want to be her
, so she couldn’t do the same. The tragedy of Tina, her weakened physical state, her drifting brain surely contributed to her crises. But
that
was the underlying cause of the illness that she called “dissolving boundaries.” I went to bed around three, I woke at nine.