The Neapolitan Novels

3.

No one in the neighborhood put faith in the forces of order or in the journalists. Men, women, even gangs of kids spent days and weeks looking for Tina, ignoring the police and television. All the relatives, all the friends were mobilized. The only one who turned up just a couple of times—and by telephone, with generic phrases that existed only to be repeated: I have no responsibility, I had just handed the child over to Lina and Enzo—was Nino. But I wasn’t surprised, he was one of those adults who when they play with a child and the child falls and skins his knee behave like children themselves, afraid that someone will say: It was you who let him fall. Besides, no one gave him any importance, we forgot about him in a few hours. Enzo and Lila trusted Antonio above all, and he put off his departure for Germany yet again, to track down Tina. He did it out of friendship but also, as he himself explained, surprising us, because Michele Solara had ordered him to.

The Solaras undertook more than anyone else in that business of the child’s disappearance and—I have to say—they made their involvement highly visible. Although they knew they would be treated with hostility they appeared one evening at Lila’s house with the attitude of those who are speaking for an entire community, and they vowed they would do everything possible to return Tina safe and sound to her parents. Lila stared at them the whole time as if she saw them but didn’t hear them. Enzo, extremely pale, listened for a few minutes and then cried that it was they who had taken his daughter. He said it then and on many other occasions, he shouted it everywhere: the Solaras had taken Tina away from them because he and Lila had refused to give them a percentage of the profits of Basic Sight. He wanted someone to object so that he could murder him. But no one ever objected in his presence. That evening not even the two brothers objected.

“We understand your grief,” Marcello said. “If they had taken Silvio I would have gone mad, just like you.”

They waited for someone to calm Enzo and they left. The next day they sent on a courtesy call their wives, Gigliola and Elisa, who were welcomed without warmth but more politely. And later they multiplied their initiatives. Probably it was the Solaras who organized a sort of roundup of all the street peddlers who were usually present in the neighborhood on Sundays and holidays and of all the Gypsies in the area. And certainly they were at the head of a real surge of anger against the police when they arrived, sirens blasting, to arrest Stefano, who had his first heart attack at that time and ended up in the hospital, and then Rino, who was released in a few days, and finally Gennaro, who wept for hours, swearing that he loved his little sister more than any other person in the world and would never harm her. Nor can it be ruled out that they were the ones responsible for surveillance of the elementary school—thanks to which the “faggot seducer of children,” who until then had been only a popular fantasy, materialized. A slender man of around thirty who, although he didn’t have children to deliver to the entrance and pick up at the exit, appeared just the same at the school, was beaten, managed to escape, was pursued by a furious mob to the gardens. There he would surely have been murdered if he hadn’t managed to explain that he wasn’t what they thought but a trainee at Il Mattino looking for news.

After that episode the neighborhood began to settle down, people slowly slipped back into the life of every day. Since no trace of Tina was found, the rumor of the truck hitting her became increasingly plausible. Those who were tired of searching took it seriously, both police and journalists. Attention shifted to the construction sites in the area and remained there for a long time. It was at that point that I saw Armando Galiani, the son of my high-school teacher. He had stopped practicing medicine, had lost in the parliamentary elections of 1983, and now, thanks to a scruffy local television station, he was attempting an aggressive type of journalism. I knew that his father had died a little over a year earlier and that his mother lived in France but wasn’t in good health, either. He asked me to take him to Lila’s, I said Lila wasn’t at all well. He insisted, I telephoned. Lila struggled to remember Armando, but when she did she—who until that moment hadn’t spoken to journalists—agreed to see him. Armando explained that he had been investigating the aftermath of the earthquake and that traveling around to the construction sites he had heard of a truck that was scrapped in a hurry because of a terrible thing it had been involved in. Lila let him speak, then said:

“You’re making it all up.”

“I’m saying what I know.”

“You don’t care a thing about the truck, the construction sites, or my daughter.”

“You’re insulting me.”

“No, I’ll insult you now. You were disgusting as a doctor, disgusting as a revolutionary, and now you’re disgusting as a journalist. Get out of my house.”

Armando scowled, nodded goodbye to Enzo, and left. Out on the street he looked annoyed. He said: Not even that great sorrow has changed her, tell her I wanted to help. Then he did a long interview with me and we said goodbye. I was struck by his kind manners, by his attentiveness to words. He must have been through some bad times both when Nadia made her decisions and when he separated from his wife. Now, though, he seemed in good shape. His old attitude, of a know-it-all who follows a strict anticapitalist line, had turned into a painful cynicism.

“Italy has become a cesspool,” he said in an aggrieved tone, “and we’ve all ended up in it. If you travel around, you see that the respectable people have understood. What a pity, Elena, what a pity. The workers’ parties are full of honest people who have been left without hope.”

“Why did you start doing this job?”

“For the same reason you do yours.”

“What’s that?”

“Once I was unable to hide behind anything, I discovered I was vain.”

“Who says I’m vain?”

“The comparison: your friend isn’t. But I’m sorry for her, vanity is a resource. If you’re vain you pay attention to yourself and your affairs. Lina is without vanity, so she lost her daughter.”

I followed his work for a while, he seemed good at it. He tracked down the burned-out wreck of an old vehicle in the neighborhood of the Ponti Rossi, and connected it to Tina’s disappearance. The news caused a certain sensation, it reverberated in the national dailies, and remained in the news for several days. Then it was ascertained that there was no possible connection between the burned vehicle and the child’s disappearance. Lila said to me:

“Tina is alive, I never want to see that piece of shit again.”