The Neapolitan Novels

45.

Shortly before I left for Turin I spent a lot of time with her, we had an affectionate farewell. It was a summer day in 1995. We talked about everything, for hours, but finally she focused on Imma, who was now fourteen; she was pretty, and lively, and had just graduated from middle school. She praised her without sudden malice, and I listened to her praise, I thanked her for helping her at a difficult time. She looked at me in bafflement, she corrected me:

“I’ve always helped Imma, not just now.”

“Yes, but after Nino’s troubles you were really helpful to her.”

She didn’t like those words, either, it was a moment of confusion. She didn’t want me to associate with Nino the attention she had devoted to Imma, she reminded me that she had taken care of the child from the start, she said she had done it because Tina loved her dearly, she added: Maybe Tina loved Imma even more than me. Then she shook her head in discontent.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

“What don’t you understand?”

She became nervous, she had something in mind that she wanted to tell me but restrained herself.

“I don’t understand how it’s possible that in all this time you never thought of it even once.”

“Of what, Lila?”

She was silent for a few seconds, then spoke, eyes down.

“You remember the photograph in Panorama?”

“Which one?”

“The one where you were with Tina and the caption said that it was you and your daughter.”

“Of course I remember.”

“I’ve often thought that they might have taken Tina because of that photo.”

“What?”

“They thought they were stealing your daughter, and instead they stole mine.”

She said it, and that morning I had the proof that of all the infinite hypotheses, the fantasies, the obsessions that had tormented her, that still tormented her, I had perceived almost nothing. A decade hadn’t served to calm her, her brain couldn’t find a quiet corner for her daughter. She said:

“You were always in the newspapers and on television, beautiful, elegant, blond: maybe they wanted money from you and not from me, who knows, I don’t know anything anymore, things go one way and then they change direction.”

She said that Enzo had talked to the police, that she had talked about it with Antonio, but neither the police nor Antonio had taken the possibility seriously. Yet she spoke to me as if at that moment she were again sure that that was what had happened. Who knows what else she had brooded over and was still brooding over that I hadn’t realized. Nunziatina had been taken in place of my Immacolata? My success was responsible for the kidnapping of her daughter? And that bond of hers with Imma was an anxiety, a protection, a safeguard? She imagined that the kidnappers, having thrown away the wrong child, would return to get the right one? Or what else? What had passed and was passing through her mind? Why was she talking to me about this only now? Did she want to inject in me a final poison to punish me for leaving her? Ah, I understood why Enzo had left. Living with her had become too harrowing.

She realized that I was looking at her with concern and, as if to reach safety, began to speak about what she was reading. But now in a jumbled way; her unease contorted her features. She muttered, laughing, that evil took unpredictable pathways. You cover it over with churches, convents, books—they seem so important, the books, she said sarcastically, you’ve devoted your whole life to them—and the evil breaks through the floor and emerges where you don’t expect it. Then she calmed down and began to speak again of Tina, Imma, me, but in a conciliatory way, as if apologizing for what she had said to me. When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you. She whispered: It might be that Tina will return tonight and then who gives a damn how it happened, the essential thing will be that she’s here again and forgives me for the distraction. You forgive me, too, she said, and, embracing me, concluded: Go, go, do better things than you’ve done so far. I’ve stayed near Imma also out of fear that someone might take her, and you loved my son truly also when your daughter left him. How many things you’ve endured for him, thank you. I’m so glad we’ve been friends for so long and that we are still.