But I never called nor did she call me. I was convinced that the long voice thread that had been our only contact for years hadn’t helped us. We had maintained the bond between our two stories, but by subtraction. We had become for each other abstract entities, so that now I could invent her for myself both as an expert in computers and as a determined and implacable urban guerrilla, while she, in all likelihood, could see me both as the stereotype of the successful intellectual and as a cultured and well-off woman, all children, books, and highbrow conversation with an academic husband. We both needed new depth, body, and yet we were distant and couldn’t give it to each other.
Thus September passed, then October. I didn’t talk to anyone, not even Adele, who had a lot of work, or even Mariarosa, who had brought Franco to her house—an invalid Franco, in need of help, changed by depression—and who greeted me warmly, promised to say hello to him for me, but then broke off because she had too many things to do. Not to mention Pietro’s muteness. The world outside books burdened him increasingly, he went reluctantly into the regulated chaos of the university, and often said he was ill. He said he did it in order to work, but he couldn’t get to the end of his book, he rarely went into his study, and, as if to forgive himself and be forgiven, he took care of Elsa, cooked, swept, washed, ironed. I had to treat him rudely to get him to go back to teaching, but I immediately regretted it. Ever since the violence had struck people I knew, I was afraid for him. He had never given in, even though he got into dangerous situations, opposing publicly what, in a term that he preferred, he called the load of nonsense of his students and many of his colleagues. Although I was worried about him, in fact maybe just because I was worried, I never admitted he was right. I hoped that if I criticized him he would understand, would stop his reactionary reformism (I used that phrase), become more flexible. But, in his eyes, that drove me yet again to the side of the students who were attacking him, the professors who were plotting against him.
It wasn’t like that, the situation was more complicated. On the one hand I vaguely wanted to protect him, on the other I wanted to be on Lila’s side, defend the choices I secretly attributed to her. To the point where every so often I thought of telephoning her and, starting with Pietro, with our conflicts, get her to tell me what she thought about it and, step by step, bring her out into the open. I didn’t to it, naturally, it was absurd to expect sincerity on these subjects on the phone. But one night she called me, sounding really happy.
“I have some good news.”
“What’s happening?”
“I’m the head of technology.”
“In what sense?”
“Head of the IBM data-processing center that Michele rented.”
It seemed incredible to me. I asked her to repeat it, to explain carefully. She had accepted Solara’s proposal? After so much resistance she had gone back to working for him, as in the days of Piazza dei Martiri? She said yes, enthusiastically, and became more and more excited, more explicit: Michele had entrusted to her the System 3 that he had rented and placed in a shoe warehouse in Acerra; she would employ operators and punch-card workers; the salary was four hundred and twenty-five thousand lire a month.
I was disappointed. Not only had the image of the guerrilla vanished in an instant but everything I thought I knew of Lila wavered. I said:
“It’s the last thing I would have expected of you.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Refuse.”
“Why?”
“We know what the Solaras are.”
“And so what? It’s already happened, and I’m better off working for Michele than for that shit Soccavo.”
“Do as you like.”
I heard her breathing. She said:
“I don’t like that tone, Lenù. I’m paid more than Enzo, who is a man: What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.”
“The revolution, the workers, the new world, and that other bullshit?”
“Stop it. If you’ve unexpectedly decided to make a truthful speech I’m listening, otherwise let’s forget it.”
“May I point out something? You always use
true
and
truthfully
, when you speak and when you write. Or you say:
unexpectedly
. But when do people ever speak
truthfully
and when do things ever happen
unexpectedly
? You know better than I that it’s all a fraud and that one thing follows another and then another. I don’t do anything
truthfully
anymore, Lenù. And I’ve learned to pay attention to things. Only idiots believe that they happen
unexpectedly
.”
“Bravo. What do you want me to believe, that you have everything under control, that it’s you who are using Michele and not Michele you? Let’s forget it, come on. Bye.”
“No, speak, say what you have to say.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Speak, otherwise I will.”
“Then speak, let me listen.”
“You criticize me but you say nothing to your sister?”
I was astonished.
“What does my sister have to do with anything?”
“You don’t know anything about Elisa?”
“What should I know?”
She laughed maliciously.
“Ask your mother, your father, and your brothers.”
She wouldn’t say anything else, she hung up, furious. I anxiously called my parents’ house, my mother answered.
“Every so often you remember we exist,” she said.
“Ma, what’s happening to Elisa?”
“What happens to girls today.”
“What?”
“She’s with someone.”
“She’s engaged?”
“Let’s put it like that.”
“Who is she with?”
The answer went right through my heart.
“Marcello Solara.”
That’s what Lila wanted me to know. Marcello, the handsome Marcello of our early adolescence, her stubborn, desperate admirer, the young man she had humiliated by marrying Stefano Carracci, had taken my sister Elisa, the youngest of the family, my good little sister, the woman whom I still thought of as a magical child. And Elisa had let herself be taken. And my parents and my brothers had not lifted a finger to stop him. And my whole family, and in some way I myself, would end up related to the Solaras.
“Since when?” I asked.
“How do I know, a year.”
“And you two gave your consent?”
“Did you ask our consent? You did as you liked. And she did the same thing.”
“Pietro isn’t Marcello Solara.”
“You’re right: Marcello would never let himself be treated by Elisa the way Pietro is treated by you.”
Silence.
“You could have told me, you could have consulted me.”
“Why? You left. ‘I’ll take care of you, don’t worry.’ Hardly. You’ve only thought of your own affairs, you didn’t give a damn about us.”
I decided to leave immediately for Naples with the children. I wanted to go by train, but Pietro volunteered to drive us, passing off as kindness the fact that he didn’t want to work. As soon as we came down from the Doganella and were in the chaotic traffic of Naples, I felt gripped by the city, ruled by its unwritten laws. I hadn’t set foot there since the day I left to get married. The noise seemed unbearable, I was irritated by the constant honking, by the insults the drivers shouted at Pietro when, not knowing the way, he hesitated, slowed down. A little before Piazza Carlo III I made him pull over. I got into the driver’s seat, and drove aggressively to Via Firenze, to the same hotel he had stayed in years before. We left our bags. I carefully dressed the two girls and myself. Then we went to the neighborhood, to my parents’ house. What did I think I could do, impose on Elisa my authority as the older sister, a university graduate, well married? Persuade her to break her engagement? Tell her: I’ve known Marcello since he grabbed my wrist and tried to pull me into the Fiat 1100, breaking Mamma’s silver bracelet, so trust me, he’s a vulgar, violent man? Yes. I felt determined, my job was to pull Elisa out of that trap.
My mother greeted Pietro affectionately and, in turn—
This is for Dede from Grandma, this is for Elsa
—she gave the two girls many small gifts that, in different ways, excited them. My father’s voice was hoarse with emotion, he seemed thinner, even more subservient. I waited for my brothers to appear, but I discovered that they weren’t home.
“They’re always at work,” my father said without enthusiasm.
“What do they do?”
“They work,” my mother broke in.
“Where?”
“Marcello arranged jobs for them.”
I remembered how the Solaras had
arranged a job
for Antonio, what they had made him into.
“Doing what?” I asked.
My mother answered in irritation:
“They bring money home and that’s enough. Elisa isn’t like you, Lenù, Elisa thinks of all of us.”
I pretended not to hear: “Did you tell her I was coming today? Where is she?”
My father lowered his gaze, my mother said curtly: “At her house.”
I became angry: “She doesn’t live here anymore?”
“No.”
“Since when?”
“Almost two months. She and Marcello have a nice apartment in the new neighborhood,” my mother said coldly.
He was more than just a boyfriend, then. I wanted to go to Elisa’s house right away, even though my mother kept saying: What are you doing, your sister is preparing a surprise for you, stay here, we’ll all go together later. I paid no attention. I telephoned Elisa, she answered happily and yet embarrassed. I said: Wait for me, I’m coming. I left Pietro and the girls with my parents and set off on foot.
The neighborhood seemed to me more run-down: the buildings dilapidated, the streets and sidewalks full of holes, littered with garbage. From black-edged posters that carpeted the walls—I had never seen so many—I learned that the old man Ugo Solara, Marcello and Michele’s grandfather, had died. As the date attested, the event wasn’t recent—it went back at least two months—and the high-flown phrases, the faces of grieving Madonnas, the very name of the dead man were faded, smudged. Yet the death notices persisted on the streets as if the other dead, out of respect, had decided to disappear from the world without letting anyone know. I saw several even at the entrance to Stefano’s grocery. The shop was open, but it seemed to me a hole in the wall, dark, deserted, and Carracci appeared in the back, in his white smock, and disappeared like a ghost.
I climbed up toward the railroad, passing what we used to call the new grocery. The lowered shutter, partly off its tracks, was rusty and defaced by obscene words and drawings. That whole part of the neighborhood appeared abandoned, the shiny white of long ago had turned gray, the plaster had flaked off in places, revealing the bricks. I walked by the building where Lila had lived. Few of the stunted trees had survived. Packing tape held together the crack in the glass of the front door. Elisa lived farther on, in a better maintained area, more pretentious. The porter, a small bald man with a thin mustache, appeared, and stopped me, asking with hostility who I was looking for. I didn’t know what to say. I muttered, Solara. He became deferential and let me go.
Only in the elevator did I realize that my entire self had in a sense slid backward. What would have seemed to me acceptable in Milan or Florence—a woman’s freedom to dispose of her own body and her own desires, living with someone outside of marriage—there in the neighborhood seemed inconceivable: at stake was my sister’s future, I couldn’t control myself. Elisa had set up house with a dangerous person like Marcello? And my mother was pleased? She who had been enraged because I was married in a civil and not a religious ceremony; she who considered Lila a whore because she lived with Enzo, and Ada a prostitute because she had become Stefano’s lover:
she
allowed her young daughter to sleep with Marcello Solara—a bad person—outside of marriage? I had thoughts of that sort as I went up to Elisa’s, and a rage that I felt was justified. But my mind—my disciplined mind—was confused, I didn’t know what arguments I would resort to. Those my mother would have asserted until a few years before, if I had made such a choice? Would I therefore regress to a level that she had left behind? Or should I say: Go and live with whoever you like but not with Marcello Solara? Should I say that? But what girl, today, in Florence, in Milan, would I ever force to leave a man, whoever he was, if she was in love with him?
When Elisa opened the door, I hugged her so hard that she said, laughing: You’re hurting me. I felt her alarm as she invited me to sit down in the living room—a showy room full of flowered sofas and chairs with gilded backs—and began to speak quickly, but of other things: how well I looked, what pretty earrings I was wearing, what a nice necklace, how chic I was, she was so eager to meet Dede and Elsa. I described her nieces in detail, I took off my earrings, made her try them at the mirror, gave them to her. I saw her brighten; she laughed and said:
“I was afraid you’d come to scold me, to say you were opposed to my relationship with Marcello.”
I stared at her for a long moment, I said:
“Elisa, I
am
opposed to it. And I made this trip purposely to tell you, Mamma, Papa, and our brothers.”
Her expression changed; her eyes filled with tears.
“Now you’re upsetting me: why are you against it?”
“The Solaras are terrible people.”
“Not Marcello.”
She began to tell me about him. She said it had started when I was pregnant with Elsa. Our mother had left to stay with me and she had found all the weight of the family on her. Once when she had gone to do the shopping at the Solaras’ supermarket, Rino, Lila’s brother, had said that if she left the list of what she needed he would have it delivered. And while Rino was talking, she noticed that Marcello gave her a nod of greeting as if to let her know that that order had been given by him. From then on he had begun to hang around, doing kind things for her. Elisa had said to herself: He’s old, I don’t like him. But he had become increasingly present in her life, always courteous, there hadn’t been a word or a gesture that recalled the hateful side of the Solaras. Marcello was really a respectable person, with him she felt safe, he had a strength, an authority, that made him seem ten meters tall. Not only that. From the moment it became clear that he was interested in her, Elisa’s life had changed. Everyone, in the neighborhood and outside it, had begun to treat her like a queen, everyone had begun to consider her important. It was a wonderful feeling, she wasn’t yet used to it. Before, she said, you’re nobody, and right afterward even the mice in the sewer grates know you: of course, you’ve written a book, you’re famous, you’re used to it, but I’m not, I was astonished. It had been thrilling to discover that she didn’t have to worry about anything. Marcello took care of it all, every desire of hers was a command for him. So as time passed she fell in love. In the end she had said yes. And now if a day went by and she didn’t see or hear from him, she was awake all night crying.