The Story of the Lost Child (52 page)

From Lila, however, I learned that Rino—when I was absent and Elsa didn’t come home from school and stayed out all night—had gone to her in despair. Pay some attention to your daughter, she said one evening, try to understand what she wants. But she said it indifferently, without concern for Elsa’s future or for Rino’s. In fact she added: Besides, look, if you have your commitments and you don’t want to do anything it’s all right just the same. Then she muttered: We weren’t made for children. I wanted to respond that I felt I was a good mother and wore myself out trying to do my work without taking anything away from Dede, Elsa, and Imma. But I didn’t, I perceived that at that moment she wasn’t angry with me or my daughter, she was only trying to make her own indifference toward Rino seem normal.

Things were different when Elsa left the professor, and began going out with a classmate with whom she was studying for her final exams. She told Rino right away, so that he would understand that it was over. Lila then came up to my house, and, taking advantage of the fact that I was in Turin, made an ugly scene. What did your mother put in your head, she said in dialect, you have no sensitivity, you hurt people and don’t realize it. Then she yelled at her: My dear, you think you’re so important, but you’re a whore. Or at least Elsa reported that, entirely confirmed by Imma, who said to me: It’s true, Mamma, she called her a whore.

Whatever Lila had said, my second daughter was marked by it. She lost her lightness. She also gave up the schoolmate she was studying with, and became nice to Rino, but she left him alone in the bed and moved to Imma’s room. When the exams were over she decided to visit her father and Dede, even though Dede had never given any sign of wanting to reconcile with her. She left for Boston, and there the two sisters, helped by Pietro, agreed on the fact that being in love with Rino had been a mistake. Once they made peace they had a good time, traveling around the United States, and when Elsa returned to Naples she seemed more serene. But she didn’t stay with me for long. She enrolled in Physics, she became frivolous and sharp again, she changed boyfriends frequently. Since she was pursued by her schoolmate, by the young mathematics teacher, and naturally by Rino, she didn’t take her exams, returned to her old loves, mixed them with new ones, accomplished nothing. Finally she flew off again to the United States, having decided to study there. She, like Dede, left without saying goodbye to Lila, but completely unexpectedly she spoke of her positively. She said that she understood why I had been her friend for so many years, and, without irony, called her the best person she had ever known.

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.

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.

Guido Airota never appeared before the judges, but for days dailies and weeklies drew maps of corruption in which even he played a part. I was glad, in that situation, that Pietro was in America, that Dede and Elsa, too, now had a life on the other side of the ocean. But I was worried about Adele, I thought I should at least telephone her. But I hesitated, I said to myself: she’ll think that I’m enjoying it and it will be hard to convince her it’s not true.

Instead I called Mariarosa, it seemed to me an easier path to take. I was wrong. It was years since I’d seen or spoken to her, she answered coldly. She said with a note of sarcasm: What a career you’ve had, my dear, now you’re read everywhere, one can’t open a newspaper or a journal without finding your name. Then she spoke in detail about herself, something she had never done in the past. She cited books, she cited articles, she cited travels. It struck me mainly that she had left the university.

“Why?” I asked.

“It disgusted me.”

“And now?”

“Now what?”

“How do you live?”

“I have a rich family.”

But she regretted that phrase as soon as she uttered it, she laughed uneasily, and it was she, right afterward, who spoke of her father. She said: It was bound to happen. And she quoted Franco, she said that he had been among the first to understand that either everything would change, and in a hurry, or even harder times would come and there would be no more hope. She was angry: My father thought you could change one thing here and one there, deliberately. But when you change almost nothing like that you’re forced to enter into the system of lies and either you tell them, like the others, or they get rid of you. I asked her:

“Guido is guilty, he took money?”

She laughed nervously:

“Yes. But he is entirely innocent, in his whole life he never put a single lira that wasn’t more than legal in his pocket.”

Then she turned again to me, but in an almost offensive tone. She repeated: You write too much, you no longer surprise me. And although I had been the one to call, it was she who said goodbye and hung up.

The incongruous double judgment that Mariarosa had pronounced on her father was true. The media storm around Guido slowly faded and he returned to his study, but as an innocent who surely was guilty and, if you like, as a guilty man who surely was innocent. It seemed to me that at that point I could telephone Adele. She thanked me ironically for my concern, showed that she was better informed than I was regarding the life and studies of Dede and Elsa, uttered remarks like: This is a country where one is exposed to every insult, respectable people should be in a hurry to emigrate. When I asked if I could say hello to Guido she said: I’ll say it for you, he’s resting now. Then she exclaimed bitterly: His only crime was to be surrounded by newly literate types with no ethics, young arrivistes ready for anything, scum.

That very evening the television showed a particularly cheerful image of the former socialist deputy Giovanni Sarratore—who was not exactly a youth, at the time: he was fifty—and inserted him in the increasingly crowded list of corrupters and corrupt.

That news especially upset Imma. In those first years of her conscious life she had seen her father very little, and yet had made him her idol. She boasted of him to her schoolmates, she boasted to her teachers, she showed everyone a photograph from the newspapers in which they were hand in hand right at the entrance to Montecitorio. If she had to imagine the man she would marry, she said: He will surely be very tall, dark, and handsome. When she learned that her father had ended up in jail like an ordinary inhabitant of the neighborhood—a place that she considered horrible: now that she was growing up she said in no uncertain terms that she was afraid of it, and, increasingly, she had reason to be—she lost the bit of serenity I had been able to guarantee her. She sobbed in her sleep, she woke in the middle of the night and wanted to get in bed with me.

Once we met Marisa, worn-out, shabby, angrier than usual. She said, paying no attention to Imma: Nino deserves it, he’s always thought only of himself, and, as you well know, he never wanted to give us any help, he acted like an honest man only with his relatives, that piece of shit. My daughter couldn’t bear even a word of it, she left us on the
stradone
and ran away. I quickly said goodbye to Marisa, I chased after Imma, I tried to console her: You mustn’t pay any attention, your father and his sister never got along. But I stopped speaking critically of Nino in front of her. In fact I stopped speaking critically of him in front of anyone. I remembered when I went to him to find out about Pasquale and Enzo. You always needed some patron saint in Paradise to navigate the calculated opacity of the underworld, and Nino, although far from any sanctity, had helped me. Now that the saints were falling into the inferno, I had no one to ask to find out about him. Unreliable news came to me only from the infernal circle of his many lawyers.