The Neapolitan Novels

2.

I don’t know how to recount Lila’s grief. What befell her, what had perhaps been lying in wait in her life forever, was not the death of a daughter through illness, an accident, an act of violence, but her daughter’s sudden disappearance. The grief couldn’t coagulate around anything. She had no lifeless body to cling to in despair, there was no one for whom to hold a funeral, she couldn’t linger before a corpse that had walked, run, talked, hugged her, and had ended up a broken thing. Lila felt, I think, as if a limb, which until a moment before had been part of her body, had lost form and substance without undergoing any trauma. But I don’t know the suffering that derived from it well enough, nor can I imagine it.

In the ten years that followed the loss of Tina, although I continued to live in the same building, although I met Lila every day, I never saw her cry, I never witnessed a crisis of despair. After at first rushing through the neighborhood, day and night, in that vain search for her daughter, she gave in as if she were too weary. She sat beside the kitchen window and didn’t move for a long period, even though from there you could see only a slice of the railroad and a little sky. Then she pulled herself together and began normal life again, but without resignation. The years washed over her, her nasty character got even worse, she sowed uneasiness and fear, she grew old screeching, quarreling. At first she talked about Tina on every occasion and with anyone, she clung to the name of the child as if uttering it would serve to bring her back. But later it was impossible even to mention that loss in her presence, and even if it was I who did so she got rid of me rudely after a few seconds. She seemed to appreciate only a letter from Pietro, mainly—I think—because he managed to write to her lovingly without ever mentioning Tina. Even in 1995, before I left, except on very rare occasions she acted as if nothing had happened. Once Pinuccia spoke of the child as a little angel watching over us all. Lila said: Get out.