The Neapolitan Novels

14.

Marcello and Michele died on a Sunday in December of 1986, in front of the church where they had been baptized. Just a few minutes after their murder the whole neighborhood knew the details. Michele had been shot twice, Marcello three times. Gigliola had run away, her sons had instinctively followed her. Elisa had grabbed Silvio and held him tight, turning her back on the murderers. Michele had died immediately, Marcello, no, he had sat down on a step and tried to button his jacket, but couldn’t.

When it came to saying who had actually killed the Solara brothers, those who appeared to know everything about the murders realized they had seen almost nothing. It was a single man who fired the shots, then had got calmly into a red Ford Fiesta and left. No, there had been two, two men, and at the wheel of the yellow Fiat 147 in which they escaped there was a woman. Not at all, the murderers were three, men, faces covered by ski masks, and they had fled on foot. In some cases it seemed that no one had fired the shots. In the story Carmen told me, for example, the Solaras, my sister, my nephew, Gigliola, her children became agitated in front of the church as if they had been hit by effects without cause: Michele fell to the ground backward and hit his head hard on the lava stone; Marcello sat down cautiously on a step and since he couldn’t close his jacket over the blue turtleneck sweater he cursed and lay down on one side; the wives, the children hadn’t got even a scratch and in a few seconds had gone into the church to hide. It seemed that those present had looked only in the direction of the killed and not that of the killers.

Armando, in this situation, returned to interview me for his television station. He wasn’t the only one. At that moment I said, and recounted in writing, in various places, what I knew. But in the two or three days that followed I realized that in particular the reporters for the Neapolitan papers knew much more than I did. Information that until not long before could be found nowhere was suddenly flooding in. An impressive list of criminal enterprises I had never heard of were attributed to the Solara brothers. Equally impressive was the list of their assets. What I had written with Lila, what I had published when they were still alive was nothing, almost nothing in comparison with what appeared in the papers after their death. On the other hand I realized that I knew other things, things that no one knew and no one wrote, not even me. I knew that the Solaras had always seemed very handsome to us as girls, that they went around the neighborhood in their Fiat 1100 like ancient warriors in their chariots, that one night they had defended us in Piazza dei Martiri from the wealthy youths of Chiaia, that Marcello would have liked to marry Lila but then had married my sister Elisa, that Michele had understood the extraordinary qualities of my friend long before that and had loved her for years in a way so absolute that he had ended up losing himself. Just as I realized that I knew these things I discovered that they were important. They indicated how I and countless other respectable people all over Naples had been within the world of the Solaras, we had taken part in the opening of their businesses, had bought pastries at their bar, had celebrated their marriages, had bought their shoes, had been guests in their houses, had eaten at the same table, had directly or indirectly taken their money, had suffered their violence and pretended it was nothing. Marcello and Michele were, like it or not, part of us, just as Pasquale was. But while in relation to Pasquale, even with innumerable distinctions, a clear line of separation could immediately be drawn, the line of separation in relation to people like the Solaras had been and was, in Naples, in Italy, vague. The farther we jumped back in horror, the more certain it was that we were behind the line.

The concreteness that being behind the line assumed in the reduced and overfamiliar space of the neighborhood depressed me. Someone, to sling mud on me, wrote that I was related to the Solaras and for a while I avoided going to see my sister and my nephew. I even avoided Lila. Of course, she had been the brothers’ bitterest enemy, but hadn’t she gotten the money to start her little business working for Michele, maybe stealing it from him? I wandered around that theme for a while. Then time passed, the Solaras, too, joined the many who every day ended up on the list of the murdered, and slowly what began to worry us was only that people less familiar and more violent would take their place. I forgot them to the point that when a teenage boy delivered a package from a jeweler in Montesanto, I didn’t immediately guess what it contained. The red case inside amazed me, the envelope addressed to Dottoressa Elena Greco. I had to read the note to realize what it was. Marcello had, in a laborious handwriting, written only “Sorry,” and had signed it with a swirling “M,” of the type that used to be taught in elementary school. In the case was my bracelet, so highly polished that it seemed new.