The Neapolitan Novels

82.

I moved in midsummer, Antonio took care of the logistics. He assembled some brawny men who emptied the apartment on Via Tasso and arranged everything in the apartment in the neighborhood. The new house was dark and repainting the rooms didn’t help brighten it. But, contrary to what I had thought since I returned to Naples, this didn’t bother me; in fact the dusty light that had always struggled to penetrate the windows had the effect on me of an evocative childhood memory. Dede and Elsa, on the other hand, protested at length. They had grown up in Florence, Genoa, in the bright light of Via Tasso, and they immediately hated the floors of uneven tiles, the small dark bathroom, the din of the stradone. They resigned themselves only because now they could enjoy some not insignificant advantages: see Aunt Lina every day, get up later because the school was nearby, go there by themselves, spend time on the street and in the courtyard.

I was immediately seized by a yearning to regain possession of the neighborhood. I enrolled Elsa in the elementary school where I had gone and Dede in my middle school. I resumed contact with anyone, old or young, who remembered me. I celebrated my decision with Carmen and her family, with Alfonso, with Ada, with Pinuccia. Naturally I had misgivings, and Pietro, who was very unhappy with the decision, made them worse. He said on the telephone:

“On the basis of what criteria do you want to bring up our daughters in a place that you fled?”

“I won’t bring them up here.”

“But you’ve taken a house and enrolled them in school without considering that they deserve something else.”

“I have a book to finish and I can only do it well here.”

“I could have taken them.”

“You would also take Imma? All three are my daughters and I don’t want the third to be separated from the other two.”

He calmed down. He was happy that I had left Nino and he soon forgave the move. Keep at your work, he said, I have confidence in you, you know what you’re doing. I hoped it was true. I watched the trucks that passed noisily along the stradone, raising dust. I walked in the gardens that were full of syringes. I went into the neglected, empty church. I felt sad in front of the parish cinema, which had closed, in front of the party offices, which were like abandoned dens. I listened to the shouting of men, women, children in the apartments, especially at night. The feuds between families, the hostilities between neighbors, the ease with which things came to blows, the wars between gangs of boys. When I went to the pharmacy I remembered Gino; I felt revulsion at the sight of the place where he had been killed, and went cautiously around it. I spoke compassionately to his parents, who were still behind the old dark-wood counter, more bent over, white-haired in their white smocks, and as kind as ever. As a child I endured all this, I thought, let’s see if now I can control it.

“How is it that you decided to do it?” Lila asked some time after the move. Maybe she wanted an affectionate answer, or maybe a sort of recognition of the validity of her choices, words like: You were right to stay, going out into the world was of no use, now I understand. Instead I answered:

“It’s an experiment.”

“Experiment in what?”

We were in her office. Tina was near her, Imma was wandering on her own. I said:

“An experiment in recomposition. You’ve managed to have your whole life here, but not me: I feel I’m in pieces scattered all over.”

She had an expression of disapproval.

“Forget these experiments, Lenù, otherwise you’ll be disappointed and leave again. I’m also in pieces. Between my father’s shoe repair shop and this office it’s only a few meters, but it’s as if they were at the North Pole and the South Pole.”

I said, pretending to be amused:

“Don’t discourage me. In my job I have to paste one fact to another with words, and in the end everything has to seem coherent even if it’s not.”

“But if the coherence isn’t there, why pretend?”

“To create order. Remember the novel I gave you to read and you didn’t like? There I tried to set what I know about Naples within what I later learned in Pisa, Florence, Milan. Now I’ve given it to the publisher and he thought it was good. It’s being published.”

She narrowed her eyes. She said softly:

“I told you that I don’t understand anything.”

I felt I had wounded her. It was as if I had thrown it in her face: if you can’t connect your story of the shoes with the story of the computers, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, it means only that you don’t have the tools to do it. I said hastily: You’ll see, no one will buy the book and you’ll be right. Then I listed somewhat randomly all the defects that I myself attributed to my text, and what I wanted to keep or change before it was published. But she escaped, it was as if she wanted to regain altitude, she started talking about computers and she did it as if to point out: You have your things, I mine. She said to the children: Do you want to see a new machine that Enzo bought?

She led us into a small room. She explained to Dede and Elsa: This machine is called a personal computer, it costs a lot of money but it can do wonderful things, look how it works. She sat on a stool and first she settled Tina on her knees, then she began patiently to explain every element, speaking to Dede, to Elsa, to the baby, never to me.

I looked at Tina the whole time. She talked to her mother, asked, pointing: What’s this, and if her mother didn’t pay attention she tugged on the edge of her shirt, grabbed her chin, insisted: Mamma, what’s this. Lila explained it to her as if she were an adult. Imma wandered around the room, pulling a little wagon, and sometimes she sat down on the floor, disoriented. Come, Imma, I said, over and over, listen to what Aunt Lina is saying. But she continued to play with the wagon.

My daughter did not have the qualities of Lila’s daughter. A few days earlier the anxiety that she was in some way retarded had dissipated. I had taken her to a very good pediatrician, the child showed no retardation of any sort. I was reassured. And yet comparing Imma to Tina continued to make me uneasy. How lively Tina was: to see her, to hear her talk put you in a good mood. And to see mother and daughter together was touching. As long as Lila talked about the computer—we were starting then to use that word—I observed them both with admiration. At that moment I felt happy, satisfied with myself, and so I also felt, very clearly, that I loved my friend for how she was, for her virtues and her flaws, for everything, even for that being she had brought into the world. The child was full of curiosity, she learned everything in an instant, she had a large vocabulary and a surprising manual dexterity. I said to myself: She has little of Enzo, she’s like Lila, look how she widens her eyes, narrows them, look at the ears that have no lobe. I still didn’t dare to admit that Tina attracted me more than my daughter, but when that demonstration of skill ended, I was very excited about the computer, and full of praise for the little girl, even though I knew that Imma might suffer from it (How clever you are, how pretty, how well you speak, how many things you learn), I complimented Lila, mainly to diminish the unease I had caused her by announcing the publication of my book, and, finally, I drew an optimistic portrait of the future that awaited my three daughters and hers. They’ll study, I said, they’ll travel all over the world, goodness knows what they’ll be. But Lila, after smothering Tina with kisses—yes, she’s sooo clever—replied bitterly: Gennaro was clever, too, he spoke well, he read, he was very good in school, and look at him now.