The Neapolitan Novels

18.

For Lila, going out, wandering around, was now the solution to all the tensions and problems she struggled with. Often she left in the morning and returned in the evening, paying no attention to Enzo, who didn’t know how to deal with the clients, or to Rino, or to the commitments she made to me, when I had to travel and left her my daughters. She was now unreliable, all it took was some small setback and she dropped everything, without a thought of the consequences.

Carmen maintained that Lila took refuge in the old cemetery on the Doganella, where she chose the grave of a child to think about Tina, who had no grave, and then she walked along the shaded paths, amid plants, old niches, stopping in front of the most faded photographs. The dead—Carmen said to me—are a certainty, they have stones, the dates of birth and death, while her daughter doesn’t, her daughter will remain forever with only the date of birth, and that is terrible, that poor child will never have a conclusion, a fixed point where her mother can sit and be tranquil. But Carmen had a propensity for fantasies about death and so I took no notice. I imagined that Lila walked through the city paying no attention to anything, only to numb the grief that after years continued to poison her. Or I hypothesized that she really had decided, in her way, extreme as always, not to devote herself anymore to anything or anyone. And since I knew that her mind needed exactly the opposite, I feared that she would have a nervous breakdown, that at the first opportunity she would let loose against Enzo, against Rino, against me, against my daughters, against a passerby who annoyed her, against anyone who gave her an extra glance. At home I could quarrel, calm her down, control her. But on the street? Every time she went out I was afraid she’d get in trouble. But frequently, when I had something to do and heard the door below close and her steps on the stairs, then out in the street, I drew a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t come up to me, she wouldn’t drop in with provocative words, she wouldn’t taunt the girls, she wouldn’t disparage Imma, she wouldn’t try in every possible way to hurt me.

I went back to thinking insistently that it was time to leave. Now it was senseless for me, for Dede, for Elsa, for Imma to remain in the neighborhood. Lila herself, besides, after her stay in the hospital, after the operation, after the imbalances of her body, had begun to say more often what she first said sporadically: Go away, Lenù, what are you doing here, look at you, it’s as if you’re staying only because you made a vow to the Madonna. She wanted to remind me that I hadn’t met her expectations, that my living in the neighborhood was only an intellectual pretense, that in fact for her, for the place where we were born—with all my studies, with all my books—I had been useless, I was useless. I was irritated and I thought: she treats me as if she wanted to fire me for poor performance.