The story of a minister had made a great impression on her. It involved the museum of our city, and Pompeii. Imma told me in a serious tone: You know, Mamma, that a Minister of Education, Nasi, a representative of the people almost a hundred years ago, accepted as a gift from workers at the excavations of Pompeii a small, valuable statue they had just dug up? You know that he had models made of the best artworks found at Pompeii to adorn his villa in Trapani? This Nasi, Mamma, even though he was a Minister of the Kingdom of Italy, acted instinctively: the workers brought him a beautiful little statue as a gift and he took it, he thought it would make a very fine impression at his house. Sometimes you make a mistake, but when as a child you haven’t been taught what the public good is, you don’t understand what a crime is.
I don’t know if she said the last part because she was reporting the words of Aunt Lina, or because she had made her own arguments. Anyway I didn’t like those words and I decided to intervene. I made a cautious speech, but explicit: Aunt Lina tells you so many wonderful things, I’m pleased, when she gets excited no one can stop her. But you mustn’t think that people carry out terrible acts lightly. You mustn’t believe it, Imma, especially if it concerns members of parliament and ministers and senators and bankers and Camorrists. You mustn’t believe that the world is chasing its tail — now it’s going well, now badly, now it’s going well again. We have to work with consistency, with discipline, step by step, no matter how things are going around us, and be careful not to make a mistake, because we pay for our mistakes.
Imma’s lower lip trembled, she asked me:
“Papa won’t go to parliament anymore?”
I didn’t know what to say and she realized it. As if to encourage me to give a positive response, she said:
“Aunt Lina thinks so, that he’ll return.”
I hesitated, then made up my mind.
“No, Imma, I don’t think so. But there’s no need for Papa to be an important person for you to love him.”
43
It was the completely wrong answer. Nino, with his usual ability, slipped out of the trap he had ended up in. Imma found out and was very pleased. She asked to see him, but he disappeared for a while, it was difficult to track him down. When we made a date he took us to a pizzeria in Mergellina, but he didn’t display his usual liveliness. He was nervous, distracted, to Imma he said one should never rely on political alignments, he described himself as the victim of a left that wasn’t a left, in fact it was worse than the fascists. You’ll see — he reassured her — Papa will fix everything up.
Later I read some very aggressive articles of his in which he returned to a thesis that he had espoused long ago: legal power had to be subject to executive power. He wrote indignantly: How can the judges one day be fighting against those who want to strike at the heart of the state and the next make the citizens believe that very same heart is sick and should be thrown out. He fought not to be thrown out. He passed through the old parties now out of commission, shifting further to the right, and in 1994, radiant, he regained a seat in parliament.
Imma was joyful when she learned that her father was again the Honorable Sarratore and that Naples had given him a very high number of preferences. As soon as she heard the news she came to tell me: You write books but you can’t see the future the way Aunt Lina does.
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.