The Neapolitan Novels

84.

In a few months we became very close. We got in the habit of going out together to do the shopping, and on Sundays, rather than strolling amid the stalls on the stradone, we insisted on going to the center of town with Enzo so that our daughters could have the sun and the sea air. We walked along Via Caracciolo or in the Villa Comunale. He carried Tina on his shoulders, he pampered her, maybe too much. But he never forgot my daughters, he bought balloons, sweets, he played with them. Lila and I stayed behind them on purpose. We talked about everything, but not the way we had as adolescents: those times would never return. She asked questions about things she had heard on television and I answered volubly. I talked about the postmodern, the problems of publishing, the latest news of feminism, whatever came into my mind, and Lila listened attentively, her expression just slightly ironic, interrupting only to ask for further explanations, never to say what she thought. I liked talking to her. I liked her look of admiration, I liked it when she said: How many things you know, how many things you think, even when I felt she was teasing. If I pressed for her opinion she retreated, saying: No, don’t make me say something stupid, you talk. Often she asked me about famous people, to find out if I knew them, and when I said no she was disappointed. She was also disappointed—I should say—when I reduced to ordinary dimensions well-known people I’d had dealings with.

“So,” she concluded one morning, “those people aren’t what they seem.”

“Not at all. Often they’re good at their work. But otherwise they’re greedy, they like hurting you, they’re allied with the strong and they persecute the weak, they form gangs to fight other gangs, they treat women like dogs on a leash, they’ll utter obscenities and put their hands on you exactly the way they do on the buses here.”

“You’re exaggerating?”

“No, to produce ideas you don’t have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.”

“Then why are you with them?”

I answered: I’m not with them, I’m here. I wanted her to feel that I was part of an upper-class world and yet different. She herself pushed me in that direction. She was amused if I was sarcastic about my colleagues. Sometimes I had the impression that she insisted so that I would confirm that I really was one of those who told people how things stood and what they should think. The decision to live in the neighborhood made sense to her only if I continued to count myself among those who wrote books, contributed to magazines and newspapers, appeared sometimes on television. She wanted me as her friend, her neighbor, provided I had that aura. And I supported her. Her approval gave me confidence. I was beside her in the Villa Comunale, with our daughters, and yet I was definitively different, I had a wide-ranging life. It flattered me to feel that, compared to her, I was a woman of great experience and I felt that she, too, was pleased with what I was. I told her about France, Germany, and Austria, about the United States, the debates I had taken part in, here and there, the men there had been recently, after Nino. She was attentive to every word with a half smile, never saying what she thought. Not even the story of my occasional relationships set off in her a need to confide.

“Are you happy with Enzo?” I asked one morning.

“Enough.”

“And you’ve never been interested in someone else?”

“No.”

“Do you really love him?”

“Enough.”

There was no way of getting anything else out of her, it was I who talked about sex and often in an explicit way. My ramblings, her silences. Yet, whatever the subject, during those walks, something was released from her very body that enthralled me, stimulating my brain as it always had, helping me reflect.

Maybe that was why I sought her out. She continued to emit an energy that gave comfort, that reinforced a purpose, that spontaneously suggested solutions. It was a force that struck not only me. Sometimes she invited me to dinner with the children, more often I invited her, with Enzo and, naturally, Tina. Gennaro, no, there was nothing to be done, he often stayed out and came home late at night. Enzo—I soon realized—was worried about him, whereas Lila said: He’s grown-up, let him do as he likes. But I felt she spoke that way to reduce her partner’s anxiety. And the tone was identical to that of our conversations. Enzo nodded, something passed from her to him like an invigorating tonic.

It was no different on the streets of the neighborhood. Going shopping with her never ceased to amaze me: she had become an authority. She was constantly stopped, people drew her aside with a respectful familiarity, they whispered something to her, and she listened, without reacting. Did they treat her like that because of the success she had had with her new business? Because she gave off the sense of someone who could do anything? Or because, now that she was nearly forty, the energy she had always had imbued her with the aura of a magician who cast spells and instilled fear? I don’t know. Of course it struck me that people paid more attention to her than to me. I was a well-known writer and the publishing house was making sure that, in view of my new book, I was often mentioned in the newspapers: the Repubblica had come out with a fairly large photograph of me to illustrate a short article on forthcoming books, which at a certain point said: Highly anticipated is the new novel by Elena Greco, a story set in an unknown Naples, with bloodred colors, et cetera. And yet next to her, in the place where we were born, I was only a decoration, that is, I bore witness to Lila’s merits. Those who had known us from birth attributed to her, to the force of her attraction, the fact that the neighborhood could have on its streets an esteemed person like me.