The Neapolitan Novels

116.

My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind. I arrived in the middle of summer. I would have liked to look for a job right away, but my condition as a graduate meant that it was unsuitable for me to go looking for little jobs like the ones I used to have. On the other hand I had no money, and it was humiliating to ask my father and mother, who had already sacrificed enough for me. I became nervous. Everything irritated me, the streets, the ugly façades of the houses, the stradone, the gardens, even though at first every stone, every smell had moved me. If Pietro finds someone else, I thought, if I don’t get in to the teachers’ college, what will I do? It’s not possible that I could remain forever a prisoner of this place and these people.

My parents, my siblings were very proud of me, but, I realized, they didn’t know why: what use was I, why had I returned, how could they demonstrate to the neighbors that I was the pride of the family? If you thought about it I only complicated their life, further crowding the small apartment, making more arduous the arrangement of beds at night, getting in the way of a daily routine that by now didn’t allow for me. Besides, I always had my nose in a book, standing up, sitting in one corner or another, a useless monument to study, a self-important, serious person whom they all made it their duty not to disturb, but about whom they also wondered: What are her intentions?

My mother resisted for a while before questioning me about my fiancé, whose existence she had deduced more from the ring that I wore on my finger than from my confidences. She wanted to know what he did, how much he earned, when he would introduce himself at our house with his parents, where I would live when I was married. At first I gave her some information: he was a professor at the university, for now he earned nothing, he was publishing a book that was considered very important by the other professors, we would get married in a couple of years, his parents were from Genoa, probably I would go to live in that city or anyway wherever he established himself. But from her intent look, from the way she kept asking the same questions, I had the impression that, too much in the grip of her preconceptions, she wasn’t listening. I was engaged to someone who hadn’t come and wasn’t coming to ask for my hand, who lived very far away, who taught but wasn’t paid, who was publishing a book but wasn’t famous? She became upset as usual, even though she no longer got angry at me. She tried to contain her disapproval, maybe she didn’t even feel capable of communicating it to me. Language itself, in fact, had become a mark of alienation. I expressed myself in a way that was too complex for her, although I made an effort to speak in dialect, and when I realized that and simplified the sentences, the simplification made them unnatural and therefore confusing. Besides, the effort I had made to get rid of my Neapolitan accent hadn’t convinced the Pisans but was convincing to her, my father, my siblings, the whole neighborhood. On the street, in the stores, on the landing of our building, people treated me with a mixture of respect and mockery. Behind my back they began to call me the Pisan.

In that period I wrote long letters to Pietro, who answered with even longer ones. At first I expected that he would make at least some reference to my notebook, then I forgot about it myself. We said nothing concrete, I still have those letters: there is not a single useful detail for reconstructing the daily life of the time, what was the price of bread or a ticket to the movies, how much a porter or a professor earned. We focused, let’s say, on a book he had read, on an article of interest for our studies, on some reflection of his or mine, on unrest among certain university students, on the neo-avant-garde, which I didn’t know anything about but which he was surprisingly well acquainted with, and which amused him to the point of inspiring him to write: “I would like to make a book out of crumpled-up pieces of paper: you start a sentence, it doesn’t work, and you throw the page away. I’m collecting a few, I would have the pages printed just as they are, crumpled, so the random pattern of the creases is interwoven with the tentative, broken-off sentences. Maybe this is, in fact, the only literature possible today.” That last note struck me. I suspected, I remember, that that was his way of communicating to me that he had read my notebook and that that literary gift of mine seemed to him a product that had arrived too late.

In those weeks of enervating heat I felt as if the weariness of years had poisoned my body, and I had no energy. Here and there I picked up news of Maestra Oliviero’s state of health, I hoped that she was well, that I might see her and gain some strength from her satisfaction in my scholastic success. I knew that her sister had come to get her and had taken her back to Potenza. I felt very alone. I even missed Lila, and our turbulent meeting. I felt a desire to find her and measure the distance between us now. But I didn’t. I confined myself to an idle, petty investigation into what people in the neighborhood thought of her, into the rumors that were circulating.

In particular I looked for Antonio. He wasn’t there, it was said that he had remained in Germany, some claimed that he had married a beautiful German, a fat, blue-eyed platinum blonde, and that he was the father of twins.

So I talked to Alfonso. I went often to the shop on Piazza dei Martiri. He had grown really handsome, he looked like a refined Spanish nobleman, he spoke in a cultivated Italian, with pleasing inserts of dialect. The Solaras’ shop, thanks to him, was thriving. His salary was satisfactory, he had rented a house in Ponte di Tappia, and he didn’t miss the neighborhood, his siblings, the odor and grease of the grocery stores. “Next year I’ll get married,” he announced, without too much enthusiasm. The relationship with Marisa had lasted, had become stable, there was only the final step. I went out sometimes with them, they got along well; she had lost her old liveliness, her effusiveness, and now seemed above all careful not to say anything that might annoy him. I never asked her about her father, her mother, her brothers and sister. I didn’t even ask about Nino nor did she mention him, as if he were gone forever out of her life, too.

I also saw Pasquale and Carmen: he still worked on construction jobs around Naples and the provinces, she continued to work in the new grocery. But the thing they were eager to tell me was that both had new loves: Pasquale was secretly seeing the oldest, though very young, daughter of the owner of the notions shop; Carmen was engaged to the gas-station man on the stradone, a nice man of forty who loved her dearly.

I also went to see Pinuccia, who was almost unrecognizable: slovenly, nervous, extremely thin, resigned to her fate, she bore the marks of the beatings that Rino continued to give her, taking revenge on Stefano, and, in her eyes and in the deep creases around her mouth, even more obvious traces of an unhappiness with no outlet.

Finally I got up my courage and tracked down Ada. I imagined I’d find her more distressed than Pina, humiliated by her situation. Instead she lived in the house that had been Lina’s and was beautiful, and apparently serene; she had just given birth to a girl she had named Maria. Even during my pregnancy I didn’t stop working, she said proudly. And I saw with my own eyes that she was the real mistress of the two groceries, she hurried from one to the other, she took care of everything.

Each of my childhood friends told me something about Lila, but Ada seemed to be the best informed. And it was she who spoke of her with greater understanding, almost sympathy. Ada was happy, happy with her baby, her comforts, her work, Stefano, and it seemed to me that for all that happiness she was sincerely grateful to Lila.

She exclaimed, admiringly, “I did things like a madwoman, I realize it. But Lina and Enzo behaved in an even crazier way. They were so careless of everything, even of themselves, that they frightened me, Stefano, and even that piece of shit Michele Solara. You know that she took nothing with her? You know that she left me all her jewelry? You know that they wrote on a piece of paper where they were going, the precise address, number, everything, as if to say: come find us, do what you like, who gives a damn?”

I wanted the address, I took it down. While I was writing she said, “If you see her, tell her that I’m not the one keeping Stefano from seeing the child: he has too much to do and although he’s sorry, he can’t. Also tell her that the Solaras don’t forget anything, especially Michele. Tell her not to trust anyone.”