The Neapolitan Novels

105.

Before I left I went to see Enzo. When I said to him, “Lina told me to tell you that she tried but she couldn’t make it,” not even the shadow of an emotion crossed his face, so I thought that the message left him completely indifferent. “Things are bad,” I added. “On the other hand I don’t really know what can be done.” He pressed his lips together, assumed a grave expression. We said goodbye.

On the train I opened the metal box, even though I had sworn not to. There were eight notebooks. From the first lines I began to feel bad. In Pisa, the bad feeling increased, over days, over months. Every word of Lila’s diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor. Those notebooks I memorized, and in the end they made me feel that the world of the Normale—the friends, male and female, who respected me, the affectionate looks of those professors who encouraged me to constantly do more—was part of a universe that was too protected and thus too predictable, compared with that tempestuous world that, in the conditions of life in the neighborhood, Lila had been able to explore in her hurried lines, on pages that were crumpled and stained. Every past effort of mine seemed without meaning. I was frightened, for months school went badly. I was alone, Franco Mari had lost his place at the Normale, I couldn’t pull myself out of the feeling of pettiness that had overwhelmed me. At a certain point it became clear that soon I, too, would get a bad mark and be sent home. So one evening in late autumn, without a precise plan, I went out carrying the metal box. I stopped on the Solferino bridge and threw it into the Arno.