The Neapolitan Novels

44.

I didn’t get angry with her, in essence my daughter wanted only to point out to me that I had been spiteful about her father, that I hadn’t understood how great he was. But those words (You write books but you can’t see the future the way Aunt Lina does) had an unexpected function: they pushed me to pay attention to the fact that Lila, the woman who in Imma’s opinion could see the future, at fifty had returned officially to books, to studying, and was even writing. Pietro had imagined that with that decision she had self-prescribed a kind of therapy to fight the anguishing absence of Tina. But in my last year in the neighborhood I wasn’t satisfied with Pietro’s sensitivity or Imma’s mediation: as soon as I could, I broached the subject, I asked questions.

“Why all this interest in Naples?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, in fact I envy you. You’re studying for your own pleasure, while I now read and write only for work.”

“I’m not studying. I limit myself to seeing a building, a street, a monument, and maybe I spend a little time looking for information, that’s all.”

“And that’s studying.”

“You think?”

She was evasive, she didn’t want to confide in me. But sometimes she became excited, the way she could be, and began to speak of the city as if it were not made up of the usual streets, of the normality of everyday places, but had revealed only to her a secret sparkle. So in a few brief sentences she transformed it into the most memorable place in the world, into the place richest in meanings, and after a little conversation I returned to my things with my mind on fire. What a grave negligence it had been to be born and live in Naples without making an effort to know it. I was about to leave the city for the second time, I had been there altogether for thirty full years of my life, and yet of the place where I was born I knew almost nothing. Pietro, in the past, had admonished me for my ignorance, now I admonished myself. I listened to Lila and felt my insubstantiality.

Meanwhile, she, who learned with effortless speed, now seemed able to give to every monument, every stone, a density of meaning, a fantastic importance such that I would have happily stopped the nonsense that I was busy with to start studying in turn. But “the nonsense” absorbed all my energy, thanks to it I lived comfortably, I usually worked even at night. Some­times in the silent apartment I stopped, I thought that perhaps at that moment Lila, too, was awake, maybe she was writing like me, maybe summarizing texts she’d read in the library, maybe putting down her reflections, maybe she moved on from there to recount episodes of her own, maybe the historic truth didn’t interest her, she sought only starting points from which to let imagination wander.

Certainly she proceeded in her usual extemporaneous way, with unexpected interests that later weakened and vanished. Now, as far as I could tell, she was concerned with the porcelain factory near the Palazzo Reale. Now she was gathering information on San Pietro a Majella. Now she sought testimonies of foreign travelers in which it seemed to her she could trace a mixture of attraction and repulsion. Everyone, she said, everyone, century after century, praised the great port, the sea, the ships, the castles, Vesuvius tall and black with its disdainful flames, the city like an amphitheater, the gardens, the orchards, the palaces. But then, century after century, they began to complain about the inefficiency, the corruption, the physical and moral poverty. No institution—behind the façade, behind the pompous name and the numerous employees—truly functioned. No decipherable order, only an unruly and uncontrollable crowd on streets cluttered with sellers of every possible type of merchandise, people speaking at the top of their lungs, urchins, beggars. Ah, there is no city that gives off so much noise and such a clamor as Naples.

Once she talked to me about violence. We believed, she said, that it was a feature of the neighborhood. We had it around us from birth, it brushed up against us, touched us all our lives, we thought: we were unlucky. You remember how we used words to cause suffering, and how many we invented to humiliate? You remember the beatings that Antonio, Enzo, Pasquale, my brother, the Solaras, and even I, and even you, gave and took? You remember when my father threw me out the window? Now I’m reading an old article on San Giovanni a Carbonara, where it explains what the Carbonara or Carboneto was. I thought that there was coal there once, and coal miners. But no, it was the place for the garbage, all cities have them. It was called Fosso Carbonario, dirty water ran in it, animal carcasses were tossed into it. And since ancient times the Fosso Carbonario of Naples was where the church of San Giovanni a Carbonara stands today. In the area called Piazza di Carbonara the poet Virgil in his time ordered that every year the ioco de Carbonara take place, gladiator games that didn’t lead to the death of men, as they did later—morte de homini come de po è facto (she liked that old Italian, it amused her, she quoted it to me with visible pleasure)—but gave men practice in deeds of arms: li homini ali facti de l’arme. Soon, however, it wasn’t a matter of ioco or practice. In that place where they threw out beasts and garbage a lot of human blood was shed. It seems that the game of throwing the prete was invented there, the stone throwing that we did as girls, you remember, when Enzo hit me in the forehead—I still have the scar—and he was desperate and gave me a garland of sorb apples. But then, in Piazza di Carbonara, from stones she moved on to weapons, and it became the place where men fought to the last drop of blood. Beggars and gentlemen and princes hurried to see people killing each other in revenge. When some handsome youth fell, pierced by a blade beaten on the anvil of death, immediately beggars, bourgeois citizens, kings and queens offered applause that rose to the stars. Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario. And at times I thought that she could have held crowded rooms fascinated, but then I brought her down to size. She’s a barely educated woman of fifty, she doesn’t know how to do research, she doesn’t know what the documentary truth is: she reads, she is excited, she mixes truth and falsehood, she imagines. No more. What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered—literally covered—by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah—she laughed—underneath there’s blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books. Thus the coupling of San Giovanni and the Fosso Carbonario, that is to say the place name of San Giovanni a Carbonara: a street we’ve walked on thousands of times, Lenù, it’s near the station, near Forcella and the Tribunali.

I knew where the street of San Giovanni a Carbonara was, I knew it very well, but I didn’t know those stories. She talked about it at length. She talked so as to let me know—I suspected—that the things she was telling me orally she had in substance already written, and they belonged to a vast text whose structure, however, escaped me. I wondered: what does she have in mind, what are her intentions? Is she just organizing her wandering and readings or is she planning a book of Neapolitan curiosities, a book that, naturally, she’ll never finish but that it’s good for her to keep working on, day after day, now that not only Tina is gone but Enzo is gone, the Solaras are gone, I, too, am going, taking away Imma, who, one way and another, has helped her survive?