The Neapolitan Novels

123.

I didn’t sleep all night, I waited until it was day. The long hostility toward Lila dissolved, suddenly what I had taken from her seemed to me much more than what she had ever been able to take from me. I decided to go right away to San Giovanni a Teduccio. I wanted to give her back The Blue Fairy, show her my notebooks, page through them together, enjoy the teacher’s comments. But most of all I felt the need to have her sit beside me, to tell her, you see how connected we are, one in two, two in one, and prove to her with the rigor that it seemed to me I had learned in the Normale, with the philological persistence I had learned from Pietro, how her child’s book had put down deep roots in my mind and had, in the course of the years, produced another book, different, adult, mine, and yet inseparable from hers, from the fantasies that we had elaborated together in the courtyard of our games, she and I continuously formed, deformed, reformed. I wanted to embrace her, kiss her, and tell her, Lila, from now on, whatever happens to me or you, we mustn’t lose each other anymore.

But it was a hard morning, it seemed to me that the city did everything possible to get between me and her. I took a crowded bus that went toward the Marina, I was unbearably squashed by miserable bodies. I got on another, even more crowded bus, I went in the wrong direction. I got out, upset, disheveled, I waited for a long time, angrily, to make up for the mistake. That small journey through Naples exhausted me. What was the use of years of middle school, high school, university, in that city? To arrive at San Giovanni I had forcibly to regress, as if Lila had gone to live not in a street, or a square, but in a ripple of time past, before we went to school, a black time without rules and without respect. I resorted to the most violent dialect of the neighborhood, I insulted, I was insulted, I threatened, I was mocked, I responded by mocking, a spiteful art in which I was trained. Naples had been very useful in Pisa, but Pisa was no use in Naples, it was an obstacle. Good manners, cultured voice and appearance, the crush in my head and on my tongue of what I had learned in books were all immediate signs of weakness that made me a secure prey, one of those who don’t struggle. On the buses and the streets heading toward San Giovanni I fused the old capacity to stop being meek at the right moment with the pride of my new state: I had a degree, I had had lunch with Professor Airota, I was engaged to his son, I had deposited money in the Post Office, in Milan I had been treated with respect by important people; how could these shitty people dare? I felt a power that no longer knew how to adjust to the pretend not to notice with which, in general, it was possible to survive in the neighborhood and outside it. Whenever, in the throng of passengers, I felt male hands on my body, I gave myself the sacrosanct right to fury and reacted with cries of contempt, I said unrepeatable words like the ones my mother and, especially, Lila knew how to say. I was so excessive that when I got off the bus I was sure that someone would jump off behind me and murder me.

It didn’t happen, but I walked away angry and scared. I had been much too neat when I left the house, now I felt mangled, outside and in.

I tried to compose myself, I said to myself: calm down, you’re almost there. I asked the passersby for directions. I walked along Corso San Giovanni a Teduccio with the cold wind in my face, it seemed a yellowish channel with defaced walls, black doorways, dirt. I wandered, confused by friendly information so crowded with details that it turned out to be useless. Finally I found the street, the building. I went up the dirty stairs, following a strong odor of garlic, the voices of children. A very fat woman in a green sweater looking out of an open door saw me and cried, “Who do you want?” “Carracci,” I said. But seeing that she was perplexed I corrected myself immediately: “Scanno.” Enzo’s surname. And then, afterward, “Cerullo.” At that point the woman repeated Cerullo and said, raising a large arm, “Farther up.” I thanked her, kept going, while she leaned over the banister and, looking up, shouted, “Titì, there’s someone looking for Lina, she’s coming up.”

Lina. Here, in the mouths of strangers, in this place. I realized only then that I had in mind Lila as I had seen her the last time, in the apartment in the new neighborhood, in the orderliness that, however charged with anguish it had been, now seemed the backdrop of her life, the furniture, the refrigerator, the television, the well-cared-for child, she herself with a look certainly worn out but still that of a well-off young woman. I knew nothing, at that moment, of how she lived, what she did. The gossip had stopped at the abandonment of her husband, at the incredible fact that she had left a beautiful house and money and gone away with Enzo Scanno. I didn’t know about the encounter with Soccavo. So I had left the neighborhood in the certainty that I would find her in a new house among open books and educational games for her son, or, at most, out momentarily, doing the shopping. And, out of laziness, in order not to feel uneasy, I had mechanically placed those images inside a toponymy, San Giovanni a Teduccio, beyond the Granili, at the end of the Marina. I went up with that expectation. I thought, I’ve made it, here I am at my destination. So I reached Titina. A young woman with a baby in her arms who was crying quietly, with slight sobs, rivulets of mucous dripping onto her upper lip from cold-reddened nostrils, and two more children attached to her skirts, one on each side.

Titina turned her gaze to the door opposite, closed.

“Lina’s not here,” she said, in a hostile tone.

“Nor Enzo?”

“No.”

“Did she take the child for a walk?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Elena Greco, I’m a friend.”

“And you don’t recognize Rinuccio? Rinù, have you ever seen this lady?”

She boxed the ear of one of the children beside her, and only then I recognized him. The child smiled at me, he said in Italian, “Hello, Aunt Lenù. Mamma will be back tonight at eight.”

I picked him up, hugged him, praised how cute he was and how well he spoke.

“He’s very clever,” Titina admitted, “he’s a born professor.”

At that point, her hostility ceased, she invited me to come in. In the dark corridor I stumbled on something that surely belonged to the children. The kitchen was untidy, everything was sunk in a grayish light. There was a sewing machine with some material still under the needle, and around and on the floor other fabric of various colors. Suddenly ashamed, Titina tried to straighten the room, then she gave up and made coffee, but continuing to hold her daughter in her arms. I sat Rinuccio on my lap, asked him stupid questions that he answered with lively resignation. The woman meanwhile told me about Lila and Enzo.

“She makes salami at Soccavo,” she said.

I was surprised, only then did I remember Bruno.

“Soccavo, the sausage people?”

“Soccavo, yes.”

“I know him.”

“They are not nice people.”

“I know the son.”

“Grandfather, father, and son, same shit. They made money and forgot they ever went around in rags.”

I asked about Enzo. She said he worked at the locomotives, she used that expression, and I soon realized that she thought he and Lila were married, she called Enzo, with liking and respect, “Signor Cerullo.”

“When will Lina be back?”

“Tonight.”

“And the child?”

“He stays with me, eats, plays, does everything here.”

So the journey wasn’t over: I approached, Lila moved away. I asked, “How long does it take to walk to the factory?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Titina gave me directions, which I wrote down on a piece of paper. Meanwhile Rinuccio asked politely, “May I go play, aunt?” He waited for me to say yes, he ran into the hall with the other child, and immediately I heard him yelling a nasty insult in dialect. The woman gave me an embarrassed look and shouted from the kitchen, in Italian, “Rino, bad words aren’t nice, watch out or I’ll come and give you a rap on the knuckles.”

I smiled at her, remembering my trip on the bus. I also deserve a rap on the knuckles, I thought, I’m in the same condition as Rinuccio. When the quarrel in the hall didn’t stop, we ran out. The two boys were hitting each other, throwing things and yelling fiercely.