The Neapolitan Novels

65.

It was odd how the clinic soon became a place of meeting for the old and the young of the neighborhood.

My father slept there with my mother, and when I saw him in the morning his beard was unshaven, his eyes were frightened. We barely greeted each other, but that didn’t seem unusual. I had never had much contact with him: at times affectionate, often distracted, occasionally in support of me against my mother. But it had almost always been superficial. My mother had given him a role and taken it away according to convenience, and especially when it came to me—making and unmaking my life was to be only for her—she had pushed him into the background. Now that the energy of his wife had almost completely vanished, he didn’t know how to talk to me nor I to him. I said hi, he said hi, then he added: while you keep her company, I’ll go smoke a cigarette. Sometimes I wondered how he had managed to survive, a man so ordinary, in the fierce world he had moved in, in Naples, in his job, in the neighborhood, even at home.

When Elisa arrived with her baby I saw that there was a greater intimacy between her and our father. Elisa treated him with affectionate authority. Often she stayed all day and sometimes all night, sending him home to sleep in his own bed. As soon as she arrived, my sister had to criticize everything, the dust, the windows, the food. She did it to make herself respected, she wanted it to be clear that she was in charge. And Peppe and Gianni matched her. When they felt my mother was suffering and my father desperate, both would get upset, press the bell, call the nurse. If the nurse delayed, my brothers reprimanded her harshly and then, contradicting themselves, gave her lavish tips. Gianni especially, before leaving, would stick some money in her pocket, saying: Stay right outside the door and hop up as soon as Mamma calls you, have your coffee when you’re off duty, is that clear? Then, to let it be understood that our mother was a person of consequence, he would mention three or four times the name of the Solaras. Signora Greco—he would say—is the Solaras’ business.

The Solaras’ business. Those words enraged me, I was ashamed. But meanwhile I thought, either this or the hospital, and I said to myself: but afterward (what I meant by afterward I didn’t admit even to myself) I’ll have to clear up a lot of things with my siblings and with Marcello. For now it gave me pleasure to arrive in the room and find my mother with her friends from the neighborhood, all her contemporaries, to whom she boasted weakly, saying things like, My children wanted it like this, or, pointing to me: Elena is a famous writer, she has a house on Via Tasso from which the sea is visible, look what a beautiful baby, she’s called Immacolata, like me. When her friends left, murmuring, Sleep, I went in to check on her, then returned with Imma to the corridor, where the air seemed fresher. I left the door of the room open so I could monitor my mother’s heavy breathing; after the fatigue of those visits, she often fell asleep and groaned in her sleep.

Occasionally the days were simpler. Carmen, for example, sometimes came to get me in her car. And Alfonso did the same. Naturally it was a sign of affection for me. They spoke respectfully to my mother, at most they gave her some satisfaction by praising her granddaughter and the comfort of the room. The rest of the time they spent either talking in the corridor with me or waiting outside, in the car, to be in time to take me to pick up the girls at school. The mornings with them were always intense and created a curious effect: they brought together the neighborhood of my mother, now near its end, and the one being constructed under Lila’s influence.

I told Carmen what our friend had done for my mother. She said with satisfaction: You know no one can stop Lina, and she spoke of her as if she attributed to her magical powers. But I learned more from a quarter of an hour spent with Alfonso in the spotless corridor of the clinic, while the doctor was with my mother. He, too, usually, was inflamed with gratitude toward Lila, but what struck me was that for the first time he talked explicitly about himself. He said: Lina taught me a job with a great future. He exclaimed: Without her what would I have been, nothing, a piece of living flesh, without fulfillment. He compared Lila with his wife’s behavior: I left Marisa free to betray me as much as she wanted, I gave my name to her children, but just the same she’s angry at me, she tormented me and torments me, she has spit in my face countless times, she says I cheated her. He defended himself: How did I cheat, Lenù, you’re an intellectual and you can understand me, the one who was cheated was me, cheated by myself, and if Lina hadn’t helped me I would have died cheated. His eyes were shining. The most beautiful thing she did for me was to impose clarity on me, teach me to say: If I touch the bare foot of this woman I feel nothing, while I die of desire if I touch the foot of that man, there, and caress his hands, cut his nails with scissors, squeeze his blackheads, be with him on a dance floor and say to him, If you know how to waltz lead me, let me feel how well you lead. He recalled faraway events: Do you remember when you and Lina came to my house to ask my father to give you back the dolls and he called me, he asked, teasing, Alfò, did you take them—because I was the shame of the family, I played with my sister’s dolls and I tried on Mamma’s necklaces? He explained to me, but as if I already knew everything and was useful only in enabling him to express his true nature. Even as a child, he said, I knew I wasn’t what the others thought but not what I thought, either. I said to myself: I’m another thing, a thing that is hidden in the veins, it has no name and waits. But I didn’t know what that thing was and especially I didn’t know how it could be me, until Lila forced me—I don’t know how to say it—to take a little of her. You know what she’s like, she said: start here and see what happens; so we were mixed up—it was a lot of fun—and now I’m not what I was and I’m not Lila, either, but another person who is slowly defining himself.

He was happy to share these confidences and I was happy, too, that he made them. A new intimacy arose between us, different from when we used to walk home from school. And with Carmen, too, I had the impression that our relationship was becoming more trusting. Then I realized that both, if in different ways, were asking something more of me. It happened twice, both times connected to Marcello’s presence in the clinic.

My sister Elisa and her baby were usually driven to the clinic by an old man named Domenico. Domenico left them there and drove our father back to the neighborhood. But sometimes it was Marcello himself who brought Elisa and Silvio. One morning when he appeared in person Carmen was there with me. I was sure there would be tensions between them, but they exchanged a greeting that wasn’t warm but not confrontational, either, and she hovered around him like an animal ready to approach at the first hint of favor. Once we were alone she confided to me nervously, in a low voice, that even if the Solaras hated her she was trying to be friendly and she did it for love of Pasquale. But—she exclaimed—I can’t do it, Lenù, I hate them, I want to strangle them, it’s only out of necessity. Then she asked: How would you act in my place?

Something similar happened with Alfonso. One morning when he took me to see my mother, Marcello appeared and Alfonso panicked just at the sight of him. And yet Solara behaved just as he usually did: he greeted me with awkward politeness, and gave Alfonso a nod, pretending not to see the hand that he had mechanically extended. To avoid friction I pushed my friend into the hall with the excuse that I had to nurse Imma. Once outside the room Alfonso muttered: If they murder me, remember it was Marcello. I said: Don’t exaggerate. But he was tense, he began sarcastically to make a list of the people in the neighborhood who would gladly kill him, people I didn’t know and people I knew. On the list he put his brother Stefano (he laughed; he fucks my wife only to demonstrate that we’re not all fags in the family) and also Rino (he laughed; ever since he realized I’m able to look like his sister, he would do to me what he can’t do to her). But at the top he always left Marcello, according to him it was Marcello who hated him most. He said it with satisfaction and yet anguish: he thinks Michele went mad because of me. And he added, sneering: Lila encouraged me to be like her, she likes the effort I make, she likes to see how I distort her, she’s pleased with the effect that this distortion has on Michele, and I’m pleased, too. Then he stopped, he asked me: What do you think?

I listened, nursing the baby. He and Carmen were not satisfied that I lived in Naples, that every so often we met: they wanted me to be fully reintegrated into the neighborhood, they asked me to stand beside Lila as a guardian deity, they urged that we act as divinities at times in agreement, at times in competition, but in any case attentive to their problems. That request for greater involvement in their affairs, which in her way Lila, too, often made and which in general seemed an inappropriate pressure, in that situation moved me, I felt that it reinforced the tired voice of my mother when she proudly pointed me out to her friends of the neighborhood as an important part of herself. I hugged Imma to my breast and adjusted the blanket to protect her from the drafts.