The Neapolitan Novels

2.

I have breakfast every day at seven, I go to the newsstand with the Labrador I got recently, I spend a good part of the morning in the Valentino playing with the dog, leafing through the papers. Yesterday, when I got back, I found on top of my mailbox a package roughly wrapped in newspaper. I took it, perplexed. Nothing indicated that it had been left for me or for any other tenant. There was no note with it and it didn’t even have my last name written in pen somewhere.

I cautiously opened one edge of the wrapping, and that was enough. Tina and Nu leaped out of memory even before I got them completely out of the newspaper. I immediately recognized the dolls that one after the other, almost six decades earlier, had been thrown—mine by Lila, Lila’s by me—into a cellar in the neighborhood. They were the dolls we had never found, although we had descended underground to look for them. They were the ones that Lila had pushed me to go and retrieve from the house of Don Achille, ogre and thief, and Don Achille had claimed that he hadn’t taken them, and maybe he had imagined that it was his son Alfonso who stole them, and so had compensated us with money to buy new ones. But we hadn’t bought dolls with that money—how could we have replaced Tina and Nu?—instead we bought Little Women, the novel that had led Lila to write The Blue Fairy and me to become what I was today, the author of many books and, most important, of a remarkably successful story entitled A Friendship.

The lobby of the building was silent, no voices or other sounds came from the apartments. I looked around anxiously. I wanted Lila to emerge from stairway A or B or from the deserted porter’s room, thin, gray, her back bent. I wished it more than any other thing, I wished it more than an unexpected visit from my daughters with their children. I expected that she would say in her usual mocking way: Do you like this gift? But it didn’t happen and I burst into tears. Here’s what she had done: she had deceived me, she had dragged me wherever she wanted, from the beginning of our friendship. All our lives she had told a story of redemption that was hers, using my living body and my existence.

Or maybe not. Maybe those two dolls that had crossed more than half a century and had come all the way to Turin meant only that she was well and loved me, that she had broken her confines and finally intended to travel the world by now no less small than hers, living in old age, according to a new truth, the life that in youth had been forbidden to her and that she had forbidden herself.

I went up in the elevator, I shut myself in my apartment. I examined the two dolls carefully, I smelled the odor of mold, I arranged them against the spines of my books. Seeing how cheap and ugly they were I felt confused. Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. I thought: now that Lila has let herself be seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.