The Neapolitan Novels

39.

Guido Airota never appeared before the judges, but for days dailies and weeklies drew maps of corruption in which even he played a part. I was glad, in that situation, that Pietro was in America, that Dede and Elsa, too, now had a life on the other side of the ocean. But I was worried about Adele, I thought I should at least telephone her. But I hesitated, I said to myself: she’ll think that I’m enjoying it and it will be hard to convince her it’s not true.

Instead I called Mariarosa, it seemed to me an easier path to take. I was wrong. It was years since I’d seen or spoken to her, she answered coldly. She said with a note of sarcasm: What a career you’ve had, my dear, now you’re read everywhere, one can’t open a newspaper or a journal without finding your name. Then she spoke in detail about herself, something she had never done in the past. She cited books, she cited articles, she cited travels. It struck me mainly that she had left the university.

“Why?” I asked.

“It disgusted me.”

“And now?”

“Now what?”

“How do you live?”

“I have a rich family.”

But she regretted that phrase as soon as she uttered it, she laughed uneasily, and it was she, right afterward, who spoke of her father. She said: It was bound to happen. And she quoted Franco, she said that he had been among the first to understand that either everything would change, and in a hurry, or even harder times would come and there would be no more hope. She was angry: My father thought you could change one thing here and one there, deliberately. But when you change almost nothing like that you’re forced to enter into the system of lies and either you tell them, like the others, or they get rid of you. I asked her:

“Guido is guilty, he took money?”

She laughed nervously:

“Yes. But he is entirely innocent, in his whole life he never put a single lira that wasn’t more than legal in his pocket.”

Then she turned again to me, but in an almost offensive tone. She repeated: You write too much, you no longer surprise me. And although I had been the one to call, it was she who said goodbye and hung up.

The incongruous double judgment that Mariarosa had pronounced on her father was true. The media storm around Guido slowly faded and he returned to his study, but as an innocent who surely was guilty and, if you like, as a guilty man who surely was innocent. It seemed to me that at that point I could telephone Adele. She thanked me ironically for my concern, showed that she was better informed than I was regarding the life and studies of Dede and Elsa, uttered remarks like: This is a country where one is exposed to every insult, respectable people should be in a hurry to emigrate. When I asked if I could say hello to Guido she said: I’ll say it for you, he’s resting now. Then she exclaimed bitterly: His only crime was to be surrounded by newly literate types with no ethics, young arrivistes ready for anything, scum.

That very evening the television showed a particularly cheerful image of the former socialist deputy Giovanni Sarratore—who was not exactly a youth, at the time: he was fifty—and inserted him in the increasingly crowded list of corrupters and corrupt.