The Neapolitan Novels

15.

When I told Lila about that package and showed her the polished bracelet she said: Don’t wear it and don’t even let your daughters wear it. She had returned home very weak; when she went up a flight of stairs you could hear the breath straining in her chest. She took pills and gave herself injections, but she was so pale that she seemed to have been in the kingdom of the dead and spoke of the bracelet as if she were sure that it had come from there.

The death of the Solaras overlapped with her emergency admission to the hospital, the blood she had shed was mixed—in my feeling of that chaotic Sunday—with theirs. But whenever I tried to talk to her about that execution, so to speak, in front of the church, she became irritated, she reacted with remarks like: They were shits, Lenù, who gives a damn about them, I’m sorry for your sister but if she had been a little smarter she wouldn’t have married Marcello, everyone knows that people like him end up getting killed.

Sometimes I tried to draw her into the sense of contiguity that at that time embarrassed me, I thought she should feel it more than I did. I said something like:

“We’d known them since they were boys.”

“All men were once boys.”

“They gave you work.”

“It was convenient for them and it was convenient for me.”

“Michele was certainly a bastard but so were you sometimes.”

“I should have done worse.”

She made an effort to limit herself to contempt, but she had a malicious look, she entwined her fingers and gripped them, making her knuckles turn white. I saw that behind those words, fierce in themselves, there were even fiercer ones that she avoided saying, but that she had ready in her mind. I read them in her face, I heard them shouted: If it was the Solaras who took Tina away from me, then too little was done to them, they should have been drawn and quartered, their hearts ripped out, and their guts dumped on the street; if it wasn’t them, whoever murdered them did a good thing just the same, they deserved that and more; if the assassins had whistled I would have hurried to give them a hand.

But she never expressed herself in that way. To all appearances the abrupt exit from the scene of the two brothers seemed to have little effect on her. Only it encouraged her to walk in the neighborhood more frequently, since there was no longer any chance of meeting them. She never mentioned returning to the activities of the time before Tina’s disappearance, she never resumed the life of home and office. She made her convalescence last for weeks and weeks, as she wandered around the tunnel, the stradone, the gardens. She walked with her head down, she spoke to no one, and since, partly because of her neglected appearance, she continued to seem dangerous to herself and others, no one spoke to her.

Sometimes she insisted that I go with her, and it was hard to say no. We often passed the bar-pastry shop, which bore a sign saying “Closed for mourning.” The mourning never ended, the shop never reopened, the time of the Solaras was over. But Lila glanced every time at the lowered shutters, the faded sign, and said with satisfaction: It’s still closed. The fact seemed to her so positive that, as we passed by, she might even give a small laugh, just a small laugh, as if in that closure there was something ridiculous.

Only once did we stop at the corner as if to take in its ugliness, now that it was without the old embellishments of the bar. Once, there had been tables and colored chairs, the fragrance of pastries and coffee, the coming and going of people, secret trafficking, honest deals and corrupt deals. Now there was the chipped gray wall. When the grandfather died, Lila said, after their mother’s murder, Marcello and Michele carpeted the neighborhood with crosses and Madonnas, they made endless lamentations; now that they’re dead, zero. Then she remembered when she was still in the clinic and I had told her that, according to the reticent words of the people, the bullets that killed the Solaras hadn’t been fired by anyone. No one killed them—she smiled—no one weeps for them. And she stopped, and was silent for a few seconds. Then, without any obvious connection, she told me that she didn’t want to work anymore.