The Neapolitan Novels

66.

Only Nino and Lila never came to the clinic. Nino was explicit: I have no desire to meet that Camorrist, I’m sorry for your mother, give her my best, but I can’t go with you. Sometimes I convinced myself that it was a way of justifying his disappearances, but more often he seemed truly hurt, because he had gone to a lot of trouble for my mother and then I and my whole family had ended up going along with the Solaras. I explained to him that it was a difficult system. I said: It doesn’t have to do with Marcello, we only agreed to what made our mother happy. But he grumbled: that’s why Naples will never change.

As for Lila, she said nothing about the move to the clinic. She continued to help me out even though she was about to give birth herself at any moment. I felt guilty. I said: Don’t worry about me, you should look after yourself. But no—she answered pointing to her stomach with an expression between sarcasm and alarm—he’s late, I don’t want to and he doesn’t want to. And as soon as I needed something she hurried over. Naturally, she never offered to drive me to Capodimonte, as Carmen and Alfonso did. But if the children had a fever and I couldn’t send them to school—as happened several times in Immacolata’s first three weeks of life, which were cold and rainy—she was available, she left the job to Enzo and Alfonso, she came up to Via Tasso to take all three of them.

I was glad; the time Dede and Elsa spent with Lila was always valuable. She was able to bring the two sisters closer to the third, making Dede take responsibility, keeping Elsa under control, soothing Imma without sticking the pacifier in her mouth, as Mirella did. The only problem was Nino. I was afraid I would discover that—though he was always busy when I was alone—he had miraculously managed to find time to help Lila when she was with the girls. And so in a hidden corner of myself I was never really serene. Lila arrived, I gave her endless advice, I wrote down the number of the clinic, I alerted my neighbor just in case, I hurried to Capodimonte. I stayed with my mother no longer than an hour and then I slipped away to get home in time for nursing, for cooking. But sometimes, on the way home, I’d have a flash of entering the house and finding Nino and Lila together, talking about everything under the sun, as they used to do in Ischia. I also tended, naturally, to more intolerable fantasies, but I repressed them, horrified. The most persistent fear was a different one, and, while I drove, it appeared to me the most well founded. I imagined that her labor would begin while Nino was there, so that he would have to take her to the emergency room, leaving Dede to play, terrified, the part of the sensible woman, Elsa to rummage in Lila’s bag and steal something, Imma to wail in her cradle, tormented by hunger and diaper rash.

Something like that did happen, but Nino had no part in it. I returned home one morning, punctual, within the half hour, and discovered that Lila wasn’t there; her labor had begun. An intolerable anguish seized me. More than anything she feared the shaking and bending of matter, she hated illness in any form, she detested the hollowness of words when they were emptied of any possible meaning. So I prayed that she would hold up.