The Neapolitan Novels

51.

I was afraid, yes, I was terrified. But to my great amazement I wasn’t as frightened as Lila. In those seconds of the earthquake she had suddenly stripped off the woman she had been until a moment before—the one who was able to precisely calibrate thoughts, words, gestures, tactics, strategies—as if in that situation she considered her a useless suit of armor. Now she was someone else. She was the person I had glimpsed the time Melina walked along the stradone eating soap; or the one of the night of New Year’s Eve in 1958, when the fireworks war broke out between the Carraccis and the Solaras; or the one who had sent for me in San Giovanni a Teduccio, when she worked in Bruno Soccavo’s factory and, thinking something was wrong with her heart, wanted to leave me Gennaro because she was sure she would die. But now that other person seemed to have emerged directly from the churning guts of the earth; she bore almost no resemblance to the friend who a few minutes before I had envied for her ability to choose words deliberately; there was no resemblance even in the features, disfigured by anguish.

I could never have undergone such an abrupt metamorphosis, my self-discipline was stable, the world existed around me, in a natural way, even in the most terrible moments. I knew that Dede and Elsa were with their father in Florence, and Florence was an elsewhere out of danger, which in itself calmed me. I hoped that the worst had passed, that no house in the neighborhood had collapsed, that Nino, my mother, my father, Elisa, my brothers were surely, like us, frightened, but surely, like us, alive. She, on the other hand, no, she couldn’t think in that way. She writhed, she trembled, she caressed her stomach, she no longer seemed to believe in solid connections. For her Gennaro and Enzo had lost every connection with each other and with us, they were destroyed. She emitted a sort of death rattle, eyes wide, she clutched herself, held tight. And she repeated obsessively adjectives and nouns that were completely incongruous with the situation we were in, she uttered sentences without sense and yet she uttered them with conviction, tugging on me.

For a long time it was useless for me to point out people we knew, to open the window, wave my arms, call out to anchor her to names, to voices that would have their own stories of that terrible experience and so draw her into an orderly conversation. I pointed out Carmen with her husband and children, and others, hurrying, on foot, toward the station. I pointed out Antonio with his wife and children, I was astonished at how handsome they all were, like characters in a film, as they calmly got into a green van, which then left. I pointed out to her the Carracci family and their relations, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, people living together, lovers—that is to say Stefano, Ada, Melina, Maria, Pinuccia, Rino, Alfonso, Marisa, and all their children—who appeared and disappeared in the throng, shouting continuously for fear of losing each other. I pointed out Marcello Solara’s fancy car that was trying, with a roar, to get free of the jam of vehicles; he had my sister Elisa with her child next to him, and in the back seat the pale shadows of my mother and father. I shouted names with the window open, I tried to involve Lila, too. But she wouldn’t move. In fact, I realized that the people—especially those we knew well—frightened her even more, especially if they were agitated, if they were shouting, if they were running. She squeezed my hand hard and closed her eyes when, against all the rules, Marcello’s car went up on the sidewalk honking and made its way amid the people who were standing there talking, or were hauling things along. She exclaimed: Oh Madonna, an expression I had never heard her use. What’s wrong, I asked. Gasping for breath, she cried out that the car’s boundaries were dissolving, the boundaries of Marcello, too, at the wheel were dissolving, the thing and the person were gushing out of themselves, mixing liquid metal and flesh.

She used that term: dissolving boundaries. It was on that occasion that she resorted to it for the first time; she struggled to elucidate the meaning, she wanted me to understand what the dissolution of boundaries meant and how much it frightened her. She was still holding my hand tight, breathing hard. She said that the outlines of things and people were delicate, that they broke like cotton thread. She whispered that for her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and poured into another, into a solution of heterogeneous materials, a merging and mixing. She exclaimed that she had always had to struggle to believe that life had firm boundaries, for she had known since she was a child that it was not like that—it was absolutely not like that—and so she couldn’t trust in their resistance to being banged and bumped. Contrary to what she had been doing, she began to utter a profusion of overexcited sentences, sometimes kneading in the vocabulary of the dialect, sometimes drawing on the vast reading she had done as a girl. She muttered that she mustn’t ever be distracted: if she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give sensations clear outlines. A tactile emotion would melt into a visual one, a visual one would melt into an olfactory one, ah, what is the real world, Lenù, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively: it’s like that. And so if she didn’t stay alert, if she didn’t pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.