“No.”
“So Aunt Lenuccia is the prettiest of all?”
“No, me.”
“You? What nonsense you talk.”
“It’s true, Mamma.”
“And what did this lady do?”
“Took photos.”
“Of whom?”
“Of me.”
“Only you?”
“Yes.”
“Liar. Imma, come here, tell me what you did.”
89
I waited for Panorama to come out. I was pleased now, the publicity office was doing a good job, I felt proud of being the subject of an entire photographic feature. But a week passed, and the feature didn’t appear. Two weeks passed, nothing. It was the end of March, the book was in the bookstores, and still nothing. I was absorbed in other things, an interview on the radio, one in Il Mattino. At a certain point I had to go to Milan for the launch of the book. I did it in the same bookstore as fifteen years earlier, introduced by the same professor. Adele didn’t come, nor did Mariarosa, but the audience was bigger than in the past. The professor talked about the book without much warmth but positively, and some members of the audience — it was mostly women — spoke up enthusiastically about the complex humanity of the protagonist. A rite that I knew well by now. I left the next morning and returned to Naples, exhausted.
I remember that I was heading home, dragging my suitcase, when a car pulled up along the stradone. At the wheel was Michele, next to him sat Marcello. I remembered when the two Solaras had tried to pull me into their car — they had done it with Ada, too — and Lila had defended me. I had on my wrist, as I had then, my mother’s bracelet, and, though objects are impassive by nature, I drew back with a start to protect it. But Marcello stared straight ahead without greeting me, he didn’t even say in his usual good-humored tone: Here’s the sister-in-law who writes novels. Michele spoke, he was furious:
“Lenù, what the fuck did you write in that book? Despicable things about the place you were born? Despicable things about my family? Despicable things about the people who watched you grow up and who admire you and love you? Despicable things about this beautiful city of ours?”
He turned around and took from the backseat a copy of Panorama, fresh from the printer, and held it out through the window.
“You like talking shit?”
I looked. The weekly was open to the page about me. There was a big color photo that showed Tina and me sitting on the floor at my apartment. The caption struck me immediately: Elena Greco with her daughter Tina. At first I thought that the problem was the caption and I didn’t understand why Michele was so angry. I said bewildered:
“They made a mistake.”
But he shouted out a sentence, even more incomprehensible:
“They aren’t the ones who made a mistake, it was you two.”
At that point Marcello interrupted, he said with irritation:
“Forget it, Michè, Lina manipulates her and she doesn’t even realize it.”
He took off, tires screeching, and left me on the sidewalk with the magazine in my hand.
90
I stood stock-still, my suitcase beside me. I read the article, four pages with pictures of the ugliest places in the neighborhood: the only one with me was the one with Tina, a beautiful picture in which the bleak background of the apartment gave our two figures a particular refinement. The writer wasn’t reviewing my book and didn’t speak of it as a novel, but used it to give an account of what he called “the dominion of the Solara brothers,” a borderland territory, perhaps tied to the new organized Camorra, perhaps not. Of Marcello it said little, alluding mainly to Michele, to whom it attributed initiative, unscrupulousness, a tendency to jump from one political cart to the next, according to the logic of business. What business? Panorama made a list, mixing the legal and the illegaclass="underline" the bar-pastry shop, hides, shoe factories, mini-markets, night clubs, loan sharking, cigarette smuggling, receiving stolen goods, drugs, infiltration of the post-earthquake construction sites.
I broke into a cold sweat.
What had I done, how could I have been so imprudent.
In Florence I had invented a plot, drawing on facts of my childhood and adolescence with the boldness that came from distance. Naples, seen from there, was almost a place of imagination, a city like the ones in films, which although the streets and buildings are real serve only as a background for crime stories or romances. Then, since I had moved and saw Lila every day, a mania for reality had gripped me, and although I hadn’t named it I had told the story of the neighborhood. But I must have overdone it, and the relationship between truth and fiction must have gone awry: now every street, every building had become recognizable, and maybe even the people, even the violent acts. The photographs were proof of what my pages really contained, they identified the area conclusively, and the neighborhood ceased to be, as it had always been for me while I was writing, an invention. The author of the article told the history of the neighborhood, even mentioning the murders of Don Achille Carracci and Manuela Solara. He went on at length about the latter, hypothesizing that it had been either the visible point of a conflict between Camorra families or an execution at the hands of the “dangerous terrorist Pasquale Peluso, born and raised in the area, former bricklayer, former secretary of the local section of the Communist Party.” But I hadn’t written anything about Pasquale, I hadn’t written anything about Don Achille or Manuela. The Carraccis, the Solaras had been for me only outlines, voices that had been able to enrich, with the cadence of dialect, gestures, at times violent tonalities, a completely imagined scheme. I didn’t want to stick my nose in their real business, what did “the dominion of the Solara brothers” have to do with it.
I had written a novel.
91
I went to Lila’s house in a state of great agitation, the children were with her. You’re back already, said Elsa, who felt freer when I wasn’t there. And Dede greeted me distractedly, murmuring with feigned restraint: Just a minute, Mamma, I’ll finish my homework and then hug you. The only enthusiastic one was Imma, who pressed her lips to my cheek and kissed me for a long time, refusing to let go. Tina wanted to do the same. But I had other things on my mind, and paid them almost no attention. I immediately showed Lila Panorama. I told her about the Solaras, suppressing my anxiety. I said: They’re angry. Lina read the article calmly and made a single comment: Nice photos. I exclaimed:
“I’ll send a letter, I’ll protest. Let them do a report on Naples, let them do it on, I don’t know, the kidnapping of Cirillo, on Camorra deaths, on what they want, but they shouldn’t use my book gratuitously.”
“And why?”
“Because it’s literature, I didn’t narrate real events.”
“I recall that you did.”
I looked at her uncertainly.
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t use the names, but a lot of things were recognizable.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told you I didn’t like the book. Things are told or not told: you remained in the middle.”
“It was a novel.”
“Partly a novel, partly not.”
I didn’t answer, my anxiety increased. Now I didn’t know if I was more unhappy about the Solaras’ reaction or because she, serenely, had just repeated her negative judgment of years earlier. I looked at Dede and Elsa, who had taken possession of the magazine, but almost without seeing them. Elsa exclaimed: