46
The idea that Tina had been taken in the belief that she was my daughter upset me, but not because I considered that it had some foundation. I thought rather of the tangle of obscure feelings that had generated it, and I tried to put them in order. I even remembered, after so long, that for completely coincidental reasons — under the most insignificant coincidences expanses of quicksand lie hidden — Lila had given her daughter the name of my beloved doll, the one that, as a child, she herself had thrown into a cellar. It was the first time, I recall, that I fantasized about it, but I couldn’t stand it for long, I looked into a dark well with a few glimmers of light and drew back. Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever. But I went to Turin conviced that Enzo was right: Lila was very far from a quiet old age within the confines she had established for herself. The last image she gave me of herself was that of a woman of fifty-one who looked ten years older and who from time to time, as she spoke, was hit by waves of heat, and turned fiery red. There were patches on her neck, too, her gaze dimmed, she grabbed the edge of her dress with her hands and fanned herself, showing Imma and me her underwear.
47
In Turin now everything was ready: I had found an apartment near the Isabella bridge and had worked hard to get most of my things and Imma’s moved. We departed. The train, I remember, had just left Naples, my daughter was sitting across from me, and for the first time she seemed sad about what she was leaving behind. I was very tired from the traveling back and forth of the past months, from the thousands of things I had had to arrange, from what I had done, from what I had forgotten to do. I collapsed against the seat back, I looked out the window at the outskirts of the city and Vesuvius as they grew distant. Just at that moment the certainty sprang to mind that Lila, writing about Naples, would write about Tina, and the text — precisely because it was nourished by the effort of expressing an inexpressible grief — would be extraordinary.
That certainty took hold forcefully and never weakened. In the years of Turin — as long as I ran the small but promising publishing house that had hired me, as long as I felt much more respected, I would say in fact more powerful, than Adele had been in my eyes decades earlier — the certainty took the form of a wish, a hope. I would have liked Lila to call me one day and say: I have a manuscript, a notebook, a zibaldone, in other words a text of mine that I’d like you to read and help me arrange. I would have read it immediately. I would have worked to give it a proper form, probably, passage by passage, I would have ended up rewriting it. Lila, in spite of her intellectual liveliness, her extraordinary memory, the reading she must have done all her life, at times talking to me about it, more often hiding it from me, had an absolutely inadequate basic education and no skill as a narrator. I was afraid it would be a disorderly accumulation of good things badly formulated, splendid things put in the wrong place. But it never occurred to me — never — that she might write an inane little story, full of clichés, in fact I was absolutely sure that it would be a worthy text. In the periods when I was struggling to put together an editorial plan of a high standard, I even went so far as to urgently interrogate Rino, who, for one thing, showed up frequently at my house; he would arrive without calling, say I came to say hello, and stay at least a couple of weeks. I asked him: Is your mother still writing? Have you ever happened to take a look, to see what it is? But he said yes, no, I don’t remember, it’s her business, I don’t know. I insisted. I fantasized about the series in which I would put that phantom text, about what I would do to give it the maximum visibility and get some prestige from it myself. Occasionally I called Lila, I asked how she was, I questioned her discreetly, sticking to generalities: Do you still have your passion for Naples, are you taking more notes? She automatically responded: What passion, what notes, I’m a crazy old woman like Melina, you remember Melina, who knows if she’s still alive. Then I dropped the subject, we moved on to other things.
48
In the course of those phone calls we spoke more and more frequently of the dead, which was an occasion to mention the living, too.
Her father, Fernando, had died, and a few months later Nunzia died. Lila then moved with Rino to the old apartment where she was born and that she had bought long ago with her own money. But now the other siblings claimed that it was the property of her parents and harassed her by claiming rights to a part of it.
Stefano had died after another heart attack — they hadn’t had time even to call an ambulance, he had fallen facedown on the ground — and Marisa had left the neighborhood, with her children. Nino had finally done something for her. Not only had he found her a job as a secretary in a law firm on Via Crispi but he gave her money to support her children at the university.
A man I had never met but who was known to be the lover of my sister, Elisa, had died. She had left the neighborhood but neither she nor my father nor my brothers had told me. I found out from Lila that she had gone to Caserta, had met a lawyer who was also a city councilman, and had remarried, but hadn’t invited me to the wedding.
We talked about things like this, she kept me updated on all the news. I told her about my daughters, about Pietro, who had married a colleague five years older than he, of what I was writing, of how my publishing experience was going. Only a couple of times did I go so far as to ask somewhat explicit questions on the subject important to me.
“If you, let’s say, were to write something — it’s a hypothesis — would you let me read it?”
“What sort of something?”
“Something. Rino says you’re always at the computer.”
“Rino talks nonsense. I’m going on the Internet. I’m finding out new information about electronics. That’s what I’m doing when I’m at the computer.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Do I never respond to your e-mails?”
“No, and you make me mad: I always write to you and you write nothing.”
“You see? I write nothing to no one, not even to you.”
“All right. but if you should write something, you’d let me read it, you’d let me publish it?”
“You’re the writer.”
“You didn’t answer me.”