The Neapolitan Novels

13.

There are moments when what exists on the edges of our lives, and which, it seems, will be in the background forever—an empire, a political party, a faith, a monument, but also simply the people who are part of our daily existence—collapses in an utterly unexpected way, and right when countless other things are pressing upon us. This period was like that. Day after day, month after month, task was added to task, tremor to tremor. For a long time it seemed to me that I was like certain figures in novels and paintings who stand firm on a cliff or on the prow of a ship in the face of a storm, which doesn’t overwhelm them and in fact doesn’t even touch them. My telephone rang continuously. The fact that I lived in the dominion of the Solaras compelled me to an infinite chain of words, written and spoken. After the death of her husband, my sister Elisa became a terrified child, she wanted me with her day and night, she was sure that the murderers would return to kill her and her son. And above all I had to tend to Lila, who that same Sunday was suddenly torn from the neighborhood, from her son, from Enzo, from her job, and ended up in the hands of the doctors, because she was weak, she saw things that seemed real but weren’t, she was losing blood. They discovered a fibromatous uterus, they operated and took it out. Once—she was still in the hospital—she woke suddenly, exclaimed that Tina had come out of her belly again and now was taking revenge on everyone, even on her. For a fraction of a second she was sure that the killer of the Solaras was her daughter.