The Story of the Lost Child (48 page)

“Lina doesn’t hate me at all.”

He laughed.

“All right, as you like.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

He looked at me uncertainly. I hadn’t made up the cot as I usually did.

“Together?”

It was a dozen years since we had even touched each other. All night I was afraid that the girls would wake up and find us in the same bed. I lay looking in the shadowy light at that large, disheveled man, snoring faintly. Rarely, when we were married, had he slept with me for long. Usually he tormented me for a long time with his sex and his arduous orgasm, he fell asleep, then he got up and went to study. This time lovemaking was pleasant, a farewell embrace, we both knew it wouldn’t happen again and so we felt good. From Doriana Pietro had learned what I had been unable or unwilling to teach him, and he did all he could so that I would notice.

Around six I woke him, I said: It’s time for you to go. I went out to the car with him, he urged me yet again to look after the girls, especially Dede. We shook hands, we kissed each other on the cheeks, he left.

I walked idly to the newsstand, the news dealer was unpacking the papers. I went home with, as usual, three dailies, whose headlines I would look at but no more. I was making breakfast, I was thinking about Pietro, and our conversation. I could have lingered on any subject—his bland resentment, Dede, his somewhat facile psychologizing about Lila—and yet sometimes a mysterious connection is established between our mental circuits and the events whose echo is about to reach us. His description of Pasquale and Nadia—the childhood friends he had polemically alluded to—as murderers had stayed with me. To Nadia—I realized—I by now applied the word “murderer” naturally, to Pasquale, no, I continued to reject it. Yet again, I was asking myself why when the telephone rang. It was Lila calling from downstairs. She had heard me when I went out with Pietro and when I returned. She wanted to know if I had bought the papers. She had just heard on the radio that Pasquale had been arrested.

That news absorbed us entirely for weeks, and I was more involved—I admit—in the story of our friend than in Dede’s exams. Lila and I hurried to Carmen’s house, but she already knew everything, or at least the essentials, and she appeared serene. Pasquale had been arrested in the mountains of Serino, in the Avellinese. The carabinieri had surrounded the farmhouse where he was hiding and he had behaved in a reasonable way, he hadn’t reacted violently, he hadn’t tried to escape. Now—Carmen said—I only have to hope that they don’t let him die in prison the way Papa did. She continued to consider her brother a good person, in fact on the wave of her emotion she went so far as to say that the three of us—she, Lila, and I—carried within us a quantity of wickedness much greater than his. We have been capable of attending only to our own affairs—she murmured, bursting into tears—not Pasquale, Pasquale grew up as our father taught him.

Owing to the genuine suffering in those words, Carmen managed, perhaps for the first time since we had known one another, to have the better of Lila and me. For example, Lila didn’t make objections, and, as for me, I felt uneasy at her speech. The Peluso siblings, by their mere existence in the background of my life, confused me. I absolutely ruled out that their father the carpenter had taught them, as Franco had done with Dede, to challenge the silly moral fable of Menenius Agrippa, but both—Carmen less, Pasquale more—had always known instinctively that the limbs of a man are not nourished when he fills the belly of another, and that those who would make you believe it should sooner or later get what they deserve. Although they were different in every way, with their history they formed a block that I couldn’t relate to me or to Lila, but that I couldn’t distance us from, either. So maybe one day I said to Carmen: You should be happy, now that Pasquale is in the hands of the law we can understand better how to help him; and the next day I said to Lila, in complete agreement with her: Laws and guarantees count for nothing, whereas they should protect those who have no power—in prison they’ll kill him. At times, I even admitted, with the two of them, that, although the violence we had experienced from birth now disgusted me, a modest amount was needed to confront the fierce world we lived in. Along those confusing lines I undertook to do everything possible for Pasquale. I didn’t want him to feel—unlike his companion Nadia, who was treated with great consideration—like a nobody whom nobody cared about.

I looked for reliable lawyers, I even decided, through telephone calls, to track down Nino, the only member of parliament I knew personally. I never managed to speak to him but a secretary, after lengthy negotiations, made an appointment for me. Tell him—I said coldly—that I’ll bring our daughter. At the other end of the line there was a long moment of hesitation. I’ll let him know, the woman said finally.

A few minutes later the telephone rang. It was the secretary again: the Honorable Sarratore would be very happy to meet us in his office in Piazza Risorgimento. But in the following days the place and hour of the appointment changed continuously: the Honorable had left, the Honorable had returned but was busy, the Honorable had an interminable sitting in parliament. I marveled at how difficult it was to have direct contact—in spite of my modest fame, in spite of my journalist’s credentials, in spite of the fact that I was the mother of his child—with a representative of the people. When everything was finally set—the location was nothing less than Montecitorio, the parliament itself—Imma and I got dressed up and left for Rome. She asked if she could take her precious electoral flyer, I said yes. In the train she kept looking at it, as if to prepare for a comparison between the photograph and the reality. In the capital, we took a taxi, we presented ourselves at Montecitorio. At every obstacle I showed our papers and said, mainly so that Imma could hear: We’re expected by the Honorable Sarratore, this is his daughter Imma, Imma Sarratore.

We waited a long time, the child at one point said, in the grip of anxiety: What if the people hold him up? I reassured her: They won’t hold him up. Nino finally arrived, preceded by the secretary, a very attractive young woman. Well dressed, radiant, he hugged and kissed his daughter rapturously, picked her up and held her the whole time, as if she were still little. But what surprised me was the immediate assurance with which Imma clung to his neck and said to him happily, unfolding the leaflet: You’re handsomer than in this photo, you know my teacher voted for you?

Nino was very attentive to her; he had her tell him about school, about her friends, about the subjects she liked best. He paid only the slightest attention to me, by now I belonged to another life—an inferior life—and it seemed pointless to waste his energies. I talked about Pasquale, he listened, but without neglecting his daughter, and nodded at the secretary to take notes. At the end of my account he asked seriously:

“What do you expect from me?”

“To find out if he’s in good health and is getting the full protection of the law.”

“Is he cooperating with the law?”

“No, and I doubt that he ever will.”

“He’d be better off.”

“Like Nadia?”

He gave a small, embarrassed laugh.

“Nadia is behaving in the only way possible, if she doesn’t intend to spend the rest of her life in jail.”

“Nadia is a spoiled girl, Pasquale isn’t.”

He didn’t answer right away, he pressed Imma’s nose as if it were a button and imitated the sound of a bell. They laughed together and then he said:

“I’ll see what your friend’s situation is, I’m here to be sure that the rights of everyone are protected. But I’ll tell him that the relatives of the people he killed also have rights. You don’t play at being a rebel, shed real blood, and then cry: we have rights. Do you understand, Imma?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“And if the teacher mistreats you, call me.”

I said:

“If the teacher mistreats her, she’ll manage by herself.”

“The way Pasquale Peluso managed?”

“Pasquale never asked anyone to protect him.”

“And that vindicates him?”

“No, but it’s significant that if Imma has to assert her right you tell her: call me.”

“For your friend Pasquale aren’t you calling me?”

I left very nervous and unhappy, but for Imma it was the most important day of her first seven years of life.

The days passed. I thought it had been a waste of time, but in fact Nino kept his word, he looked into Pasquale’s situation. It was from him I learned, later, things that the lawyers either didn’t know or didn’t tell us about. The involvement of our friend in some notorious political crimes that had afflicted Campania was at the center of Nadia’s detailed confession, but this had also been common knowledge for some time. The new information, instead, was that she now tended to ascribe everything to him, even acts of minor interest. Thus the long list of Pasquale’s crimes included mentions of the murder of Gino, of Bruno Soccavo, the death of Manuela Solara, and, finally, that of her sons, Marcello and Michele.

“What agreement did your old girlfriend make with the carabinieri?” I asked Nino the last time I saw him.

“I don’t know.”

“Nadia is telling a pile of lies.”

“I don’t rule it out. But one thing I know for sure: she is ruining a lot of people who thought they were safe. So tell Lina to be careful, Nadia has always hated her.”

So many years had passed, and yet Nino didn’t miss a chance to mention Lila, to show that he was solicitous of her even at a distance. I was there with him, I had loved him, I had beside me his daughter who was licking a chocolate ice-cream cone. But he considered me only a friend of his youth to whom he could show off the extraordinary path he had traveled, from his high school desk to a seat in parliament. In that last encounter of ours his greatest compliment was to put me on the same rung of the ladder. I don’t remember in relation to what subject he said: The two of us climbed very high. But even as he uttered that sentence I read in his gaze that the declaration of equality was a sham. He considered himself much better than me and the proof was that, in spite of my successful books, I stood before him as a petitioner. His eyes smiled at me cordially, suggesting: Look what you lost by losing me.

I left in a hurry with the child. I was sure that he would have had quite a different attitude if Lila had been present. He would have mumbled, he would have felt mysteriously crushed, maybe even a little ridiculous with that preening. When we reached the garage where I had left the car—that time I had come to Rome by car—something occurred to me for the first time: only with Lila had Nino put at risk his own ambitions. On Ischia, and for the following year, he had given in to a romance that could have caused him nothing but trouble. An anomaly, in the journey of his life. At the time he was already a well-known and very promising university student. He had taken up with Nadia—that was clear to me now—because she was the daughter of Professor Galiani, because he had considered her the key to gaining access to what then appeared to us a superior class. His choices had always been consistent with his ambitions. Hadn’t he married Eleonora out of self-interest? And I myself, when I had left Pietro for him, wasn’t I in fact a well-connected woman, a writer of some success, with ties to an important publishing house—useful, in short, to his career? And all the other women who had helped him: didn’t they come under the same logic? Nino loved women, certainly, but he was above all a cultivator of useful relations. What his intelligence produced would never, alone, have had sufficient energy to assert itself, without the web of power that he had been weaving since he was a boy. What about Lila? She had gone to school up to fifth grade, she was the very young wife of a shopkeeper, if Stefano had known of their relationship he could have killed them both. Why had Nino in that case gambled his entire future?

I put Imma in the car, I scolded her for letting the ice cream drip on the dress bought for the occasion. I started the car, I left Rome. Maybe what had attracted Nino was the impression of having found in Lila what he, too, presumed he had and that now, just by comparison, he discovered that he didn’t have. She possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila’s intelligence.
She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, or to any purpose
. All of us had submitted and that submission had—through trials, failures, successes—reduced us. Only Lila, nothing and no one seemed to reduce her. Rather, even if over the years she became as stupid and intractable as anyone, the qualities that we had attributed to her would remain intact, maybe they would be magnified. Even when we hated her we ended by respecting her and fearing her. It didn’t surprise me, when I thought about it, that Nadia, although she had met Lila only a few times, detested her and wanted to hurt her. Lila had taken Nino from her. Lila had humiliated her in her revolutionary beliefs. Lila was mean and could hit before being hit. Lila was from the proletariat but rejected any deliverance. In other words Lila was an honorable enemy and hurting her could be pure satisfaction, without the store of guilt that a designated victim like Pasquale would certainly arouse. Nadia could truly think of her in that way. How tawdry everything had become over the years: Professor Galiani, her house with a view of the bay, her thousands of books, her paintings, her cultured conversations, Armando, Nadia herself. She was so pretty, so well brought up, when I saw her beside Nino, outside the school, when she welcomed me to the party at her parents’ beautiful house. And there was still something incomparable about her when she stripped herself of every privilege with the idea that, in a radically new world, she would have a more dazzling garment. But now? The noble reasons for that denuding had all dissolved. There remained the horror of so much blood stupidly shed and the villainy of unloading the blame on the former bricklayer, who had once seemed to her the avant-garde of a new humanity, and who now, along with so many others, served to reduce her own responsibilities almost to nothing.