The Neapolitan Novels

85.

I think there were many who wondered why I, who in the newspapers seemed rich and famous, had come to live in a wretched apartment, situated in an increasingly run-down area. Maybe the first not to understand were my daughters. Dede came home from school one day disgusted:

“An old man peed in our doorway.”

Another day Elsa arrived terrified:

“Today someone was knifed in the gardens.”

At such times I was afraid. The part of me that had long ago left the neighborhood was indignant, was worried about the children, and said, Enough. At home, Dede and Elsa spoke a good Italian, but occasionally I heard them from the window or coming up the stairs, and I realized that Elsa especially used a very aggressive, sometimes obscene dialect. I reprimanded her, she pretended to be sorry. But I knew that it took a lot of self-discipline to resist the lure of bad behavior and so many other temptations. Was it possible that while I was devoting myself to making literature they were getting lost? I calmed myself by repeating the temporal limit of this stay: after the publication of my book I would definitively leave Naples. I said it to myself and said it again: I needed only to reach a final draft of the novel.

The book was undoubtedly benefiting from everything that came from the neighborhood. But the work proceeded so well mainly because I was attentive to Lila, who had remained completely within that environment. Her voice, her gaze, her gestures, her meanness and her generosity, her dialect were all intimately connected to our place of birth. Even Basic Sight, in spite of the exotic name (people called her office basissìt), didn’t seem some sort of meteorite that had fallen from outer space but rather the unexpected product of poverty, violence, and blight. Thus, drawing on her to give truth to my story seemed indispensable. Afterward I would leave for good, I intended to move to Milan.

I had only to sit in her office for a while to understand the background against which she moved. I looked at her brother, who was now openly consumed by drugs. I looked at Ada, who was crueler every day, the sworn enemy of Marisa, who had taken Stefano away from her. I looked at Alfonso—in whose face, in whose habits, the feminine and the masculine continually broke boundaries with effects that one day repelled me, the next moved me, and always alarmed me—who often had a black eye or a split lip because of the beatings he got, who knows where, who knows when. I looked at Carmen, who, in the blue jacket of a gas-pump attendant, drew Lila aside and interrogated her like an oracle. I looked at Antonio, who hovered around her with unfinished sentences or stood in a serene silence when he brought to the office, as if on a courtesy visit, his beautiful German wife, the children. Meanwhile I picked up endless rumors. Stefano Carracci is about to close the grocery, he doesn’t have a lira, he needs money. It was Pasquale Peluso who kidnapped so-and-so, and if it wasn’t him he certainly has something to do with it. That other so-and-so set fire to the shirt factory in Afragola by himself to fuck the insurance company. Watch out for Dede, they’re giving children drugged candy. There’s a faggot hanging around the elementary school who lures children away. The Solaras are opening a night club in the new neighborhood, women and drugs, the music will be so loud that no one will sleep again. Big trucks pass by on the stradone at night, transporting stuff that can destroy us faster than the atomic bomb. Gennaro has started hanging out with a bad crowd, and, if he continues like that, I won’t even let him go to work. The person they found murdered in the tunnel looked like a woman but was a man: there was so much blood in the body that it flowed all the way down to the gas pump.

I observed, I listened, from the vantage point of what Lila and I as children had imagined becoming and what I had actually become: the author of a big book that I was polishing—or at times rewriting—and that would soon be published. In the first draft—I said to myself—I put too much dialect. And I erased it, rewrote. Then it seemed that I had put in too little and I added some. I was in the neighborhood and yet safe in that role, within that setting. The ambitious work justified my presence there and, as long as I was occupied with it, gave meaning to the poor light in the rooms, the rough voices of the street, the risks that the children ran, the traffic on the stradone that raised dust when the weather was good and water and mud when it rained, Lila and Enzo’s swarm of clients, small provincial entrepreneurs, big luxury cars, clothes of a vulgar wealth, heavy bodies that moved sometimes aggressively, sometimes with servile manners.

Once when I was waiting for Lila at Basic Sight with Imma and Tina, everything seemed to become clearer: Lila was doing new work but totally immersed in our old world. I heard her shouting at a client in an extremely crude way about a question of money. I was shaken, where had the woman who graciously emanated authority suddenly gone? Enzo hurried in, and the man—a small man around sixty, with an enormous belly—went away cursing. Afterward I said to Lila:

“Who are you really?”

“In what sense?”

“If you don’t want to talk about it, forget it.”

“No, let’s talk, but explain what you mean.”

“I mean: in an environment like this, with the people you have to deal with, how do you behave?”

“I’m careful, like everyone.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, I’m careful and I move things around in order to make them go the way I say. Haven’t we always behaved that way?”

“Yes, but now we have responsibilities, toward ourselves and our children. Didn’t you say we have to change the neighborhood?”

“And to change it what do you think needs to be done?”

“Resort to the law.”

I was startled myself by what I was saying. I made a speech in which I was, to my surprise, even more legalistic than my ex-husband and, in many ways, more than Nino. Lila said teasingly:

“The law is fine when you’re dealing with people who pay attention if you merely say the word ‘law’. But you know how it is here.”

“And so?”

“So if people have no fear of the law, you have to instill the fear yourself. We did a lot of work for that shit you saw before, in fact a huge amount, but he won’t pay, he says he has no money. I threatened him, I told him: I’ll sue you. And he answered: Sue me, who gives a damn.”

“But you’ll sue him.”

She laughed: “I’ll never see my money that way. Some time ago, an accountant stole millions from us. We fired him and filed charges. But the law didn’t lift a finger.”

“So?”

“I was fed up with waiting and I asked Antonio. The money was returned immediately. And this money, too, will return, without a trial, without lawyers, and without judges.”