The Neapolitan Novels

4.

I don’t know how long she believed that her daughter was still alive. The more Enzo despaired, worn out by tears and rage, the more Lila said: You’ll see, they’ll give her back. Certainly she never believed in the hit-and-run truck, she said that she would have noticed right away, that before anyone else she would have heard the collision, or at least a cry. And it didn’t seem to me that she gave credence to Enzo’s thesis, either, she never alluded to involvement on the part of the Solaras. Instead for a long period she thought that one of her clients had taken Tina, someone who knew what Basic Sight earned and wanted money in exchange for the child. That was also Antonio’s thesis, but it’s hard to say what concrete facts inspired it. Of course the police were interested in that possibility, but since there were never any telephone calls asking for ransom they finally let it go.

The neighborhood was soon divided into a majority that believed Tina was dead and a minority that thought she was alive and a prisoner somewhere. We who loved Lila dearly were part of that minority. Carmen was so sure of it that she repeated it insistently to everyone, and if, as time passed, someone was persuaded that Tina was dead she became that person’s enemy. I once heard her whisper to Enzo: Tell Lina that Pasquale is with you, he thinks the child will be found. But the majority prevailed, and those who kept on looking for Tina seemed to the majority either stupid or hypocritical. People also began to think that Lila’s intelligence wasn’t helping her.

Carmen was the first to intuit that the respect our friend had inspired before Tina’s disappearance and the solidarity that arose afterward were both superficial, an old aversion toward her lurked underneath. Look, she said to me, once they treated her as if she were the Madonna and now they pass by her without even a glance. I began to pay attention and saw that it was true. Deep inside, people thought: we’re sorry you lost Tina, but it means that if you had truly been what you wanted us to believe, nothing and no one would have touched you. On the street, when we were together, they began to greet me but not her. They were put off by her troubled expression and the cloud of misfortune they saw around her. In other words, the part of the neighborhood that had become used to thinking of Lila as an alternative to the Solaras withdrew in disappointment.

Not only that. An initiative was undertaken that at first seemed kind but then became malicious. In the early weeks, flowers, emotional notes addressed to Lila or directly to Tina, even poems copied from schoolbooks appeared at the entrance to the house, at the door of Basic Sight. Then there were old toys brought by mothers, grandmothers, and children. Then barrettes, colorful hair ribbons, old shoes. Then puppets sewed by hand, with ugly sneers, stained with red, and animal carcasses wrapped in dirty rags. Since Lila calmly picked everything up and threw it into the trash, but suddenly began screaming horrible curses at anyone who passed by, especially the children, who observed her from a distance, she went from being a mother who inspired pity to a madwoman who spread terror. When a girl she had been angry with because she had seen her writing with chalk on the doorway, the dead are eating Tina, became seriously ill, old rumors joined the new and people avoided Lila, as if just to look at her could bring misfortune.

Yet she seemed not to realize it. The certainty that Tina was still alive absorbed her completely and it was what, I think, pushed her toward Imma. In the first months I had tried to reduce the contact between her and my youngest daughter, I was afraid that seeing her would cause more suffering. But Lila soon seemed to want her around constantly, and I let her keep her even to sleep. One morning when I went to get her the door of the house was half open, I went in. My child was asking about Tina. After that Sunday I had tried to soothe her by telling her that Tina had gone to stay for a while with Enzo’s relatives in Avellino, but she kept asking when she would return. Now she was asking Lila directly, but Lila seemed not to hear Imma’s voice, and instead of answering was telling her in detail about Tina’s birth, her first toy, how she attached herself to her breast and never let go, things like that. I stopped in the doorway for a few seconds, I heard Imma interrupt her impatiently:

“But when is she coming back?”

“Do you feel lonely?”

“I don’t know who to play with.”

“I don’t, either.”

“Then when is she coming back?”

Lila said nothing for a long moment, then scolded her:

“It’s none of your business, shut up.”

Those words, uttered in dialect, were so brusque, so harsh, so unsuitable that I was alarmed. I said something, brought my child home.

I had always forgiven Lila her excesses and in those circumstances I was inclined to do so even more than in the past. She often went too far, and as much as possible I tried to get her to be reasonable. When the police interrogated Stefano and she was immediately convinced that he had taken Tina—so that at first she refused even to visit him in the hospital after the heart attack—I mollified her, and we went together to visit him. And it was thanks to me that she hadn’t attacked her brother when the police questioned him. I had also done all I could on the awful day when Gennaro was summoned to the police station and, once at home, felt himself accused; there was a quarrel, and he went to live at his father’s house, shouting at Lila that she had lost forever not only Tina but also him. The situation, in other words, was terrible and I could understand why she fought with everyone, even me. But with Imma, no, I couldn’t allow it. From then on, when Lila took the child I became anxious, I pondered, I looked for ways out.

But there was little to do; the threads of her grief were tangled and Imma was for a time part of that tangle. In the general chaos where we had all ended up, Lila, despite her weariness, continued to tell me about my daughter’s every little difficulty, as she had done until I decided to insist that Nino visit. I felt angry, I was irritated, and yet I tried also to see a positive aspect: she’s slowly shifting onto Imma—I thought—her maternal love, she’s saying to me: Since you’ve been lucky, and you still have your daughter, you ought to take advantage of it, pay attention to her, give her all the care you haven’t given her.

But that was only the appearance of things. Soon I had a different theory: that, more deeply, Imma—her body—must be a symbol of guilt. I thought often of the situation in which the little girl had been lost. Nino had handed her over to Lila but Lila hadn’t attended to her. She had said to her daughter, You wait here, and to my daughter, Come with your aunt. She had done it, perhaps, to show off Imma to her father, to praise her to him, to stir his affection, who knows. But Tina was lively, or more simply she had felt neglected, offended, and had wandered off. As a result Lila’s suffering had made a nest in the weight of Imma’s body in her arms, in the contact, in the living warmth it still gave off. But my daughter was fragile, slow, different in every way from Tina, who was shining, vivacious. Imma could in no way become a substitute, she was only holding back time. I imagined, in other words, that Lila kept her nearby in order to stay within that terrible Sunday, and meanwhile thought: Tina is here, soon she’ll pull on my skirt, she’ll call me, and then I’ll pick her up in my arms, and everything will return to its place. That was why she didn’t want the child to upset everything. When the little girl kept asking for her friend, when she merely reminded Lila that in fact Tina wasn’t there, Lila treated her with the same harshness with which she treated us adults. But I couldn’t accept that. As soon as she came to get Imma, I found some excuse or other to send Dede or Elsa to watch her. If she had used that tone when I was present, what might happen when she took her away for hours?