The Neapolitan Novels

9.

Apparently, then, after Rino’s death she seemed to improve. She stopped narrowing her eyes in alarm. The skin of her face, which seemed a pure white canvas sail flattened by a strong wind, softened. But it was a momentary improvement. Soon there was a jumble of wrinkles, on her forehead, at the edges of her eyes, even on her cheeks, where they looked like fake pleats. And her whole body began to age, her back was bent, her stomach swelled.

Carmen one day used an expression of her own, she said anxiously: Tina is encysted in her, we have to get her out. And she was right, we had to find a way to flush out the story of the child. But Lila refused, everything about her daughter was fixed. I think that something shifted, very painfully, only with Antonio and with Enzo but, out of necessity, in secret. And when suddenly Antonio left—without saying goodbye to anyone, taking his blond family and crazy Melina, now old—she no longer had even the mysterious reports he gave her. She was left alone to rage at Enzo and Gennaro, often setting one against the other. Or distracted, with her own thoughts, as if she were waiting.

I stopped by every day, even when I was pressed by deadlines, and did all I could to revive our intimacy. Since she was always idle, I asked her once:

“Do you still like your work?”

“I never liked it.”

“You’re lying, I remember you liked it.”

“No, you don’t remember anything: Enzo liked it and so I made myself like it.”

“Then find something else to do.”

“I’m fine like this. Enzo’s head is in the clouds and if I don’t help we’ll go out of business.”

“You both need to emerge from your suffering.”

“What suffering, Lenù, we have to emerge from our rage.”

“Then emerge from rage.”

“We’re trying.”

“Try with more conviction. Tina doesn’t deserve it.”

“Forget Tina, think about your own daughters.”

“I am thinking about them.”

“Not enough.”

She always found, in those years, cracks through which to turn a situation upside down and force me to look at the flaws of Dede, of Elsa, of Imma. You neglect them, she said. I accepted the criticisms, some were well-founded, I too often pursued my own life, neglecting theirs. But meanwhile I waited for an opportunity to shift the conversation back to her and Tina. At a certain point, I began to harass her about her pasty complexion.

“You’re very pale.”

“You’re too red: look, you’re purple.”

“I’m talking about you: what’s wrong?”

“Anemia.”

“What anemia.”

“My period comes when it likes, but then it doesn’t go away.”

“Since when?”

“Forever.”

“Tell the truth, Lila.”

“The truth.”

I pressed her, often I provoked her, and she reacted but never to the point of losing control and letting go.

It occurred to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language. She needed to explode, lose control of the words. I wanted her to say in the authentic Neapolitan of our childhood: What the fuck do you want, Lenù, I’m like this because I lost my daughter, and maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s dead, but I can’t bear either of those possibilities, because if she’s alive she’s alive far away from me, she’s in a place where horrible things are happening to her, which I see clearly, I see them all day and all night as if they were happening right before my eyes; but if she’s dead I’m dead, too, dead here inside, a death more unbearable than real death, which is death without feeling, while this death forces you to feel everything, every day, to wake up, wash, dress, eat and drink, work, talk to you who don’t understand or won’t understand, to you who even if I just see you, all set, fresh from the hairdresser, with your daughters who do well in school, who always do everything perfectly, who aren’t spoiled even by this place of shit, which, rather, seems to do them good—makes them even more confident, even more arrogant, even more sure they have the right to take everything—all this makes me more furious than I already was: so go, go, leave me in peace, Tina would have been better than all of you, and instead they took her, and I can’t bear it anymore.

I would have liked to lead her into a conversation like that, jumbled, intoxicated. I felt that if she made up her mind she would extract from the tangled mass of her brain words of that sort. But it didn’t happen. In fact, as I think back, in that phase she was less aggressive than in other periods of our story. Maybe the outburst I hoped for was made up of my own feelings, which therefore hindered me from seeing the situation clearly and made Lila even more elusive. Sometimes I wondered if she had in her mind something unutterable that I wasn’t even capable of imagining.