But I am merely piecing together hypotheses, I would have to confront her, hear her protests, explain myself. Sometimes I feel guilty, and I understand her. Sometimes I hate her for this decision to cut me off so sharply right now, in old age, when we are in need of closeness and solidarity. She has always acted like that: when I don’t submit, see how she excludes me, punishes me, ruins even my pleasure in having written a good book. I’m exasperated. Even this staging of her own disappearance, besides worrying me, irritates me. Maybe little Tina has nothing to do with it, maybe not even her ghost, which continues to obsess Lila both in the more enduring form of the child of nearly four, and in the labile form of the woman who today, like Imma, would be thirty. It’s only and always the two of us who are involved: she who wants me to give what her nature and circumstances kept her from giving, I who can’t give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself.
E
PILOGUE
Restitution
1.
I can’t believe it myself. I’ve finished this story that I thought would never end. I finished it and patiently reread it not so much to improve the quality of the writing as to find out if there are even a few lines where it’s possible to trace the evidence that Lila entered my text and decided to contribute to writing it. But I have had to acknowledge that all these pages are mine alone. What Lila often threatened to do—enter my computer—she hasn’t done, maybe she wasn’t even capable of doing, it was long a fantasy I had as an old woman inexperienced in networks, cables, connections, electronic spirits. Lila is not in these words. There is only what I’ve been able to put down. Unless, by imagining what she would write and how, I am no longer able to distinguish what’s mine and what’s hers.
Often, during this work, I telephoned Rino, I asked about his mother. He doesn’t know anything, the police limited themselves to summoning him three or four times to show him the bodies of nameless old women—so many of them disappear. A couple of times I had to go to Naples, and I met him in the old apartment in the neighborhood, a space darker, more run-down than it had been. There really wasn’t anything of Lila anymore, everything that had been hers was gone. As for the son, he seemed more distracted than usual, as if his mother had definitively gone out of his head.
I returned to the city for two funerals, first my father’s, then Lidia’s, Nino’s mother. I missed the funeral of Donato, not out of bitterness, only because I was abroad. When I came to the neighborhood for my father there was a great uproar because a young man had just been murdered at the entrance to the library. That made me think that this story would continue forever, recounting now the efforts of children without privileges to improve themselves by getting books from the old shelves, as Lila and I had done as girls, and now the thread of seductive chatter, promises, deceptions, of blood that prevents any true improvement in my city or in the world.
The day of Lidia’s funeral was overcast, the city seemed tranquil, I felt tranquil, too. Then Nino arrived and all he did was talk loudly, joke, even laugh, as if we were not at his mother’s funeral. I found him large, bloated, a big ruddy man with thinning hair who was constantly celebrating himself. Getting rid of him, after the funeral, was difficult. I didn’t want to listen to him or even look at him. He gave me an impression of wasted time, of useless labor, that I feared would stay in my mind, extending into me, into everything.
On the occasion of both funerals I made plans ahead of time to visit Pasquale. In those years I did that whenever I could. In prison he had studied a lot, had received his high school diploma, and, recently, a degree in astronomical geography.
“If I’d known that to get a diploma and a degree all you needed to have was free time, to be shut up in a place without worrying about earning a living, and, with discipline, learning by heart pages and pages of some books, I would have done it before,” he said once, in a teasing tone.
Today he’s an old man, he speaks serenely, he is much better preserved than Nino. With me he rarely resorts to dialect. But he hasn’t moved even a hairsbreadth out of the space of generous ideas in which his father enclosed him as a boy. When I saw him after Lidia’s funeral and told him about Lila he burst out laughing. She must be doing her intelligent and imaginative things somewhere, he muttered. And it moved him to remember the time in the neighborhood library when the teacher assigned prizes to the most diligent readers, and the most diligent was Lila, who took out books illegally with her relatives’ cards. Ah, Lila the shoemaker, Lila who imitated Kennedy’s wife, Lila the artist and designer, Lila the worker, Lila the programmer, Lila always in the same place and always out of place.
“Who took Tina from her?” I asked.
“The Solaras.”
“Sure?”
He smiled, showing his bad teeth. I understood that he wasn’t telling the truth—maybe he didn’t know it and it didn’t even interest him—but was proclaiming the unshakable faith, based on the primary experience of injustice, the experience of the neighborhood, that—in spite of the reading he had done, the degree he had taken, the clandestine journeys, the crimes he had committed or been accused of—remained the currency of every certainty he had. He answered:
“Do you also want me to tell you who murdered those two pieces of shit?”
Suddenly I read in his gaze something that horrified me—an inextinguishable rancor—and I said no. He shook his head, and continued to smile. He said:
“You’ll see that when Lila decides to, she’ll show up.”
But there was not a trace of her. On those two occasions for mourning I walked through the neighborhood, I asked around out of curiosity: no one remembered her, or maybe they were pretending. I couldn’t even talk about her with Carmen. Roberto died, she left the gas pump, went to live with one of her sons, in Formia.
What is the point of all these pages, then? I intended to capture her, to have her beside me again, and I will die without knowing if I succeeded. Sometimes I wonder where she vanished. At the bottom of the sea. Through a fissure or down some subterranean tunnel whose existence she alone knows. In an old bathtub filled with a powerful acid. In an ancient garbage pit, one of those she devoted so many words to. In the crypt of an abandoned church in the mountains. In one of the many dimensions that we don’t know yet but Lila does, and now she’s there with her daughter.
Will she return?
Will they return together, Lila old, Tina a grown woman?
This morning, sitting on the balcony that looks out over the Po, I’m waiting.
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.