71.
It was then that I began telephoning Lila, not sporadically, as I had until then, but almost every day. I made the expensive intercity calls with the sole purpose of crouching in her shadow, letting my pregnancy run its course, hoping that, in line with an old habit, she would set my imagination in motion. Naturally I was careful not to say the wrong things, and I hoped that she wouldn’t, either. I knew clearly, now, that our friendship was possible only if we controlled our tongues. For example, I couldn’t confess to her that a dark part of me feared that she was casting an evil spell on me from afar, that that part still hoped that she was really sick and would die. For example, she couldn’t tell me the real reasons that motivated the rough, often offensive, tone in which she treated me. So we confined ourselves to talking about Gennaro, who was one of the smartest children in the elementary school, about Dede, who already knew how to read, and we did it like two mothers doing the normal boasting of mothers. Or I mentioned my attempt to write, but without making a big deal of it, I said only: I’m working, it’s not easy, being pregnant makes me tired. Or I tried to find out if Michele was still hanging around her, to somehow capture her and keep her. Or, sometimes, I would ask if she liked certain movie or television actors, and urge her to tell me if men unlike Enzo attracted her, and perhaps confide to her that it happened to me, too, that I was attracted to men unlike Pietro. But this last subject didn’t seem to interest her. When I mentioned an actor she always said: Who’s he, I’ve never seen him in the movies or on television. And if I merely uttered the name of Enzo she began updating me on the computer story, bewildering me with an incomprehensible jargon.
Her accounts were enthusiastic, and occasionally, on the hypothesis that they might be useful to me in the future, I took notes while she spoke. Enzo had made it, now he worked in an underwear factory fifty kilometers from Naples. The company had rented an IBM machine and he was the systems engineer. You know what kind of work that is? He diagrams manual processes by transforming them into flow charts. The central unit of the machine is as big as a wardrobe with three doors and it has a memory of 8 kilobytes. You can’t imagine how hot it is, Lenù: the computer is worse than a stove. Maximum abstraction along with sweat and a terrible stink. She talked to me about ferrite cores, rings traversed by an electrical cable whose tension determined the rotation, 0 or 1, and a ring was a bit, and the total of eight rings could represent a byte, that is a character. Enzo was the singular protagonist of Lila’s monologues. He dominated all that material like a god, he manipulated the vocabulary and the substance inside a large room with big air-conditioners, a hero who could make the machine do everything that people did. Is that clear? she asked me every so often. I answered yes, weakly, but I didn’t know what she was talking about. I perceived only that she noticed that nothing was clear to me, and I was ashamed of this.
Her enthusiasm grew with every phone call. Enzo was now earning a hundred and forty-eight thousand lire a month, exactly, a hundred and forty-eight. Because he was so smart, the most intelligent man she had ever met. So smart, so clever, that he had soon become indispensable and had managed to get her hired, as an assistant. Here, this was the news: Lila was working again, and this time she liked it. He’s the boss, Lenù, and I’m the deputy. I leave Gennaro with my mother—sometimes even with Stefano—and I go to the factory every morning. Enzo and I study the company point by point. We do everything the employees do so we know what we have to put into the computer. We check off, I don’t know, the transactions, we attach the stamps to the invoices, we check the trainees’ cards, the time cards, and then we transform everything into diagrams and holes in cards. Yes, yes, I’m also a punch-card operator: I’m there with three other women, and I’m getting eighty thousand lire. A hundred and forty-eight plus eighty is two hundred and twenty-eight, Lenù. Enzo and I are rich, and it will be even better in a few months, because the owner realized that I’m very capable and wants me to take a course. You see what sort of life I have, are you pleased?
72.
One night she was the one who telephoned, she said she had just had some bad news: Dario, the student she had told me about some time earlier, the kid from the committee who handed out leaflets in front of the Soccavo factory, had been beaten to death, right outside of school, in Piazza del Gesù.
She seemed worried. She spoke of a black cloud that lay oppressively on the neighborhood and the whole city, attacks and more attacks. Behind many of these beatings, she said, were Gino’s fascists, and behind Gino was Michele Solara, names that, in uttering, she charged with old disgust, new rage, as if beneath what she said there was much else about which she was silent. I thought: How can she be so sure that they’re the ones responsible? Maybe she’s stayed in touch with the students of Via dei Tribunali, maybe Enzo’s computers are not the only thing in her life. I listened without interrupting while she let the words flow in her usual gripping way. She told me in great detail about a number of expeditions by the fascists, who started at the party headquarters opposite the elementary school, spread up the Rettifilo, through Piazza Municipio, up the Vomero, and attacked comrades with iron bars and knives. Even Pasquale had been beaten a couple of times, his front teeth had been broken. And Enzo, one night, had fought with Gino himself right in front of their house.
Then she stopped, she changed her tone. Do you remember, she asked, the atmosphere of the neighborhood when we were little? It’s worse, or rather no, it’s the same. And she mentioned her father-in-law, Don Achille Carracci, the loan shark, the Fascist, and Peluso, the carpenter, the Communist, and the war taking place right before our eyes. We slipped slowly back into those times, I remembered one detail, she another. Until Lila accentuated the visionary quality of her phrases and began to tell the story of the murder of Don Achille the way she had as a girl, with many fragments of reality and many of imagination. The knife to the neck, the spurting blood that had stained a copper pot. She ruled out, as she had at the time, that it was the carpenter who killed him. She said, with adult conviction: justice then, and today, for that matter, settled for the most obvious trail, the one that led to the Communist. Then she exclaimed: Who says it was really Carmen and Pasquale’s father? And who says it was a man and not a woman? As in one of our childhood games, when it seemed to us that we were in all ways complementary, I followed her step by step, adding my voice excitedly to hers, and I had the impression that together—the girls of the past and the adults of the present—we were arriving at a truth that for two decades had been unspeakable. Think about it, she said, who really gained from that murder, who ended up with the money-lending market that Don Achille controlled? Yes, who? We found the answer in unison: the person who had gotten something out of it was the woman with the red book, Manuela Solara, the mother of Marcello and Michele. She killed Don Achille, we said excitedly, and then, turning melancholy, said softly, first I, then she: but what are we talking about, that’s enough, we’re still children, we’ll never grow up.
73.
Finally the moment seemed auspicious, it was a long time since we’d had our old harmony. Only this time the harmony really was confined to a tangle of vibrating breaths along the telephone wires. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time. She didn’t know what I looked like after two pregnancies, I didn’t know if she was still pale and very thin, or had changed. For several years I had been speaking to a mental image that the voice was slowly reviving. Maybe for that reason, the murder of Don Achille suddenly seemed like an invention, the core of a possible story. And once I got off the telephone I tried to put order into our conversation, reconstructing the passages on the basis of which Lila, fusing past and present, had led me from the murder of poor Dario to that of the loan shark, up to Manuela Solara. I had trouble sleeping, I pondered for a long time. I felt with increasing lucidity that that material might be a shore from which to lean out and grasp a story. In the following days I mixed Florence with Naples, the tumults of the present with distant voi
ces, the comfort of now and the struggle I had had to pull myself out of my origins, the anxiety of losing everything and the fascination of regression. As I thought about it I became convinced that I could make a book out of it. With great effort, with constant, painful second thoughts, I filled a graph-paper notebook, constructing a web of violence that welded together the past twenty years. Sometimes Lila telephoned, she asked:
“Why don’t you call anymore, aren’t you well?”
“I’m very well, I’m writing.”
“And when you write I no longer exist?”
“You exist but I’m distracted.”
“If I’m ill, if I need you?”
“Call.”
“And if I don’t telephone you stay inside your novel?”
“Yes.”
“I envy you, lucky you.”
I worked with growing anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to get to the end of the story before the baby was born, I was afraid I might die while I was giving birth, leaving the book unfinished. It was hard, nothing like the happy unconsciousness in which I had written the first novel. Once I had sketched out the story, I decided to give the text a more thoughtful pace. I wanted the writing to be lively, new, deliberately chaotic, and I didn’t hold back. So I worked on a second, detailed draft. I went back and rewrote every line even when, thanks to a Lettera 32 that I had bought when I was expecting Dede, thanks to carbon paper, I had transformed the notebooks into a solid typescript in triplicate, almost two hundred pages, with not a single typing mistake.
It was summer, it was very hot, my belly was enormous. The pain in my buttock had reappeared, it came and went, and my mother’s step in the hall got on my nerves. I stared at the pages, I discovered that I was afraid of them. For days I couldn’t make up my mind, I worried about giving it to Pietro to read. Maybe, I thought, I should send it directly to Adele, this isn’t the type of story for him. And besides, with the persistence that distinguished him, he continued to make life difficult for himself at the university, coming home in a state of agitation, making abstract speeches about the value of law—in other words, he wasn’t in the right state of mind to read a novel about workers, bosses, struggles, blood, camorrists, loan sharks. What’s more, my novel. He keeps me separate from the confusion inside him, he’s never been interested in what I was and what I’ve become, what’s the point of giving him the book? He’ll just discuss this or that choice of word, and the punctuation, and if I insist on an opinion he’ll say something vague. I sent Adele a copy of the manuscript, then I called her.
“I’ve finished.”
“I’m so pleased. Will you let me read it?”
“I sent it to you this morning.”
“Good, I can’t wait to read it.”
74.
I settled myself to wait, a wait that became much more anxious than that for the child who was kicking in my belly. I counted five days, one after another, no word from Adele. On the sixth day, at dinner, while Dede was making an effort to eat by herself in order not to displease me, and her grandmother was desperate to help her but didn’t, Pietro asked me:
“Did you finish your book?”
“Yes.”
“And why did you give it to my mother to read and not me?”
“You’re busy, I didn’t want to bother you. But if you want to read it, there’s a copy on my desk.”
He didn’t answer. I waited, I asked:
“Adele told you I sent it to her?”
“Who else would it have been?”
“Did she finish it?”
“Yes.”
“What does she think?”
“She’ll tell you, it’s between you two.”
He was offended. After dinner I moved the manuscript from my desk to his, I put Dede to bed, I watched television without seeing or hearing anything, and finally I went to bed. I couldn’t close my eyes: Why had Adele talked to Pietro about the book but hadn’t yet called me? The next day, July 30, 1973, I went to see if my husband had started reading: the typescript was under the books he had been working on for most of the night, it was clear that he hadn’t even looked through it. I became nervous, I shouted at Clelia to take care of Dede, not to sit around and let my mother to do everything. I was very harsh with her, and my mother evidently took it as a sign of affection. She touched my belly as if to calm me, she asked:
“If it’s another girl what will you call her?”
I had other things on my mind, my leg hurt, I answered without thinking:
“Elsa.”
She darkened, I realized too late that she was expecting me to say: We gave Dede the name of Pietro’s mother, and if it’s another girl this time we’ll give her your name. I tried to justify it, but reluctantly. I said: Ma, try to understand, your name is Immacolata, I can’t give my daughter a name like that, I don’t like it. She grumbled: Why, is Elsa nicer? I replied: Elsa is like Elisa, if I give her the name of my sister you should be pleased. She didn’t say another word. Oh, how tired I was of everything. The heat was getting worse, I was dripping with sweat, I couldn’t stand my heavy belly, I couldn’t stand my limping, I couldn’t stand anything, not a thing.
Finally, a little before lunchtime, Adele telephoned. Her voice lacked its usual ironic inflection. She spoke slowly and seriously, I felt that every word was a struggle: she said, with a lot of euphemistic phrases and many fine distinctions, that the book wasn’t good. But when I tried to defend it, she stopped looking for formulations that wouldn’t hurt me and became explicit. The protagonist was unlikable. The characters were caricatures. Situations and dialogues were mannered. The writing tried to be modern and was only confused. All that hatred was unpleasant. The ending was crude, like a spaghetti Western, it was an insult to my intelligence, my education, my talent. I resigned myself to silence, I listened to her criticisms to the end. She concluded by saying: The earlier novel was vivid, innovative, this, however, is old in its contents and so pretentiously written that the words seem empty. I said quietly: Maybe at the publisher they’ll be kinder. She stiffened and replied: If you want to send it, go ahead, but I would assume they’ll judge it unpublishable. I didn’t know what to say, I said: All right, I’ll think about it, goodbye. She kept me on the line, however, and, rapidly changing her tone, began to speak affectionately of Dede, of my mother, my pregnancy, of Mariarosa, who enraged her. Then she asked:
“Why didn’t you give the novel to Pietro?”
“I don’t know.”
“He could have advised you.”
“I doubt it.”
“You don’t respect him?”
“No.”
Afterward, shut in my study, I despaired. It had been humiliating, intolerable. I could hardly eat, I fell asleep with the window closed despite the heat. At four in the afternoon I had my first labor pains. I said nothing to my mother, I took the bag I had prepared, I got in the car, and drove to the clinic, hoping to die on the way, I and my second child. Instead everything went smoothly. The pain was excruciating, but in a few hours I had another girl. Pietro insisted the next morning that our second daughter should be given the name of my mother, it seemed to him a necessary tribute. I replied bitterly that I was tired of following tradition, I repeated that she was to be called Elsa. When I came home from the clinic, the first thing I did was call Lila. I didn’t tell her I had just given birth, I asked if I could send her the novel.
I heard her breathing lightly for a few seconds, then she said: “I’ll read it when it comes out.”
“I need your opinion right away.”
“I haven’t opened a book for a long time, Lenù, I don’t know how to read anymore, I’m not capable.”
“I’m asking you as a favor.”
“The other you just published, period; why not this one?”
“Because the other one didn’t even seem like a book to me.”
> “I can only tell you if I like it.”
“All right, that’s enough.”
75.
While I was waiting for Lila to read, we learned that there was a cholera outbreak in Naples. My mother became excessively agitated, then distracted, finally she broke a soup tureen I was fond of, and announced that she had to go home. I imagined that if the cholera figured heavily in that decision, my refusal to give her name to my new daughter wasn’t secondary. I tried to make her stay but she abandoned me anyway, when I still hadn’t recovered from the birth and my leg was hurting. She could no longer bear to sacrifice months and months of her life to me, a child of hers without respect and without gratitude, she would rather go and die of the cholera bacterium with her husband and her good children. Yet even in the doorway she maintained the impassiveness that I had imposed on her: she didn’t complain, she didn’t grumble, she didn’t reproach me for anything. She was happy for Pietro to take her to the station in the car. She felt that her son-in-law loved her and probably—I thought—she had controlled herself not to please me so that she wouldn’t make a bad impression on him. She became emotional only when she had to part from Dede. On the landing she asked the child in her effortful Italian: Are you sorry that grandma is leaving? Dede, who felt that departure as a betrayal, answered grimly: No.
The Neapolitan Novels Page 102
