37
That was not Rino’s opinion, however. Elsa’s departure did not stop him, surprising as it may seem, from continuing to live with me. He was in despair for a long time, afraid of falling again into the physical and moral wretchedness from which I had rescued him. Full of devotion he attributed that and many other virtues to me. And he continued to occupy the room that had been Dede and Elsa’s. He naturally did many jobs for me. When I left he drove me to the station and carried my suitcase, when I returned he did the same. He became my driver, my errand boy, my factotum. If he needed money he asked me for it politely, affectionately, and without the least scruple.
At times, when he made me nervous, I reminded him that he had some obligations toward his mother. He understood and disappeared for a while. But sooner or later he returned discouraged, muttering that Lila was never home, that the empty apartment made him sad, or he grumbled: She didn’t even say hello, she sits at her computer and writes.
Lila was writing? What was she writing?
My curiosity at first was faint, the equivalent of an absent-minded observation. I was nearly fifty at the time, I was in the period of my greatest success, I was publishing two books a year, and selling well. Reading and writing had become a career, and, like all careers, it began to burden me. I remember thinking: in her place I’d sit on a beach in the sun. Then I said to myself: if writing helps her, good. And I went on to something else, I forgot about it.
38
Dede’s departure and then Elsa’s grieved me. It depressed me that both, in the end, preferred their father to me. Of course they loved me, of course they missed me. I sent letters constantly, at moments of melancholy I telephoned without caring about the expense. And I liked Dede’s voice when she said, I dream of you often; how moved I was if Elsa wrote, I’m looking everywhere for your perfume, I want to use it, too. But the fact was that they were gone, I had lost them. Every letter of theirs, every telephone call attested to the fact that, even if they suffered because of our separation, with their father they didn’t have the conflicts they had had with me, he was the point of entry to their true world.
One morning Lila said to me in a tone that was hard to decipher: It makes no sense for you to keep Imma here in the neighborhood, send her to Rome to Nino, it’s very clear that she wants to be able to say to her sisters, I’ve done what you did. Those words had an unpleasant effect on me. As if she were giving dispassionate advice, she was suggesting that I separate also from my third child. She seemed to be saying: Imma would be better off and so would you. I replied: If Imma leaves me, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have a meaning? So she began to disparage all that struggle of mine to write. She said mockingly: Is the meaning that line of black markings that look like insect shit? She invited me to take a rest, she exclaimed: What need is there to work so hard. Enough.
I had a long period of uneasiness. On the one hand I thought: she wants to deprive me of Imma, too. On the other I said to myself: she’s right, I should bring Imma and her father together. I didn’t know whether to cling to the affection of the only child who remained or, for her sake, to try to reinforce her bond with Nino.
This last was not easy, and the recent elections had been proof of it. Imma was eleven — but she was inflamed by political passion. She wrote, I remember, to her father, she called him, she offered in every possible way to campaign for him and wanted me to help him, too. I hated the socialists even more than in the past. When I saw Nino I’d made remarks like: What’s become of you, I no longer recognize you. I went so far as to say, with some rhetorical exaggeration: We were born in poverty and violence, the Solaras were criminals who stole everything, but you are worse, you are gangs of looters who make laws against the looting of others. He had answered lightheartedly: You’ve never understood anything about politics and you never will understand anything, play with literature and don’t talk about things you don’t know about.
But then the situation came to a head. Long-standing corruption — commonly practiced and commonly submitted to at every level as an unwritten rule but always in force among the most widely respected — came to the surface thanks to a sudden determination of the judiciary. The high-level crooks, who at first seemed few and so inexperienced that they were caught with their hands in the till, multiplied, became the true face of the management of the republic. As the elections approached I saw that Nino was less carefree. Since I had my fame and a certain reputation, he used Imma to ask me to stand behind him publicly. I said yes to the child in order not to upset her, but then in fact I withdrew. Imma was angry, she repeated her support for her father and when he asked her to stand next to him in a campaign ad she was enthusiastic. I rebelled and found myself in a terrible situation. On the one hand I didn’t refuse Imma permission — it would have been impossible without a rift — on the other I scolded Nino on the telephone: Put Albertino, put Lidia in your ad, and don’t dare use my daughter in this way. He insisted, he hesitated, finally he gave in. I forced him to tell Imma that he had inquired and that children weren’t allowed in the ads. But she understood that I was the reason she had been deprived of the pleasure of standing publicly next to her father, and she said: You don’t love me, Mamma, you send Dede and Elsa to Pietro, but I can’t even spend five minutes with Papa. When Nino wasn’t reelected Imma began to cry, she muttered between her sobs that it was my fault.
In other words, it was all complicated. Nino was bitter, he became intractable. For a while he seemed to be the only victim of those elections, but it wasn’t so, soon the entire system of the parties was swept away and we lost track of him. The voters were angry with the old, the new, and the very new. If people had been horrified at those who wanted to overthrow the state, now they were disgusted by those who, pretending to serve it, had consumed it, like a fat worm in the apple. A black wave, which had lain hidden under gaudy trappings of power and a flow of words as impudent as it was arrogant, became increasingly visible and spread to every corner of Italy. The neighborhood of my childhood wasn’t the only place untouched by any grace, Naples wasn’t the only irredeemable city. I met Lila on the stairs one morning, she seemed cheerful. She showed me the copy of the Repubblica she had just bought. There was a photograph of Professor Guido Airota. The photographer had caught on his face, I don’t know when, a frightened expression that made him almost unrecognizable. The article, full of they-says and perhapses, advanced the hypothesis that even the prestigious scholar, not to mention old political operator, might soon be summoned by the judges as one who was well informed about the corruption of Italy.