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.
41.
Lila, I have to say, never showed any interest in Nino’s fate; she reacted to the news of his legal troubles as if it were something to laugh about. She said, with the expression of someone who has remembered a detail that explained everything: Whenever he needed money he got Bruno Soccavo to give it to him, and he certainly never paid it back. Then she muttered that she could imagine what had happened to him. He had smiled, he had shaken hands, he had felt he was the best of all, he had continuously wanted to demonstrate that he was equal to any possible situation. If he had done something wrong he had done it out of a desire to be more likable, to seem the most intelligent, to climb higher and higher. That’s it. And later she acted as if Nino no longer existed. As much as she had exerted herself for Pasquale and Enzo, so she appeared completely indifferent to the problems of the former Honorable Sarratore. It’s likely that she followed the proceedings in the papers and on television, where Nino appeared often, pale, suddenly grizzled, with the expression of a child who says: I swear it wasn’t me. Certainly she never asked me what I knew about him, if I had managed to see him, what he expected, how his father, his mother, his siblings had reacted. Instead, for no clear reason, her interest in Imma was rekindled, she got involved with her again.
While she had abandoned her son Rino to me like a puppy who, having grown fond of another mistress, no longer greets the old one, she became very attached to my daughter again, and Imma, always greedy for affection, went back to loving her. I saw them talking, and they often went out together. Lila said to me: I showed her the botanic garden, the museum, Capodimonte.
In the last phase of our life in Naples, she guided Imma all over the city, transmitting an interest in it that remained with her. Aunt Lina knows so many things, Imma said in admiration. And I was pleased, because Lila, taking her around on her wanderings, managed to diminish her anguish about her father, the anger at the fierce insults of her classmates, prompted by their parents, and the loss of the attention she had received from her teachers thanks to her surname. But it wasn’t only that. I learned from Imma’s reports, and with greater and greater precision, that the object in which Lila’s mind was engaged, and on which she was writing for perhaps hours and hours, bent over her computer, was not this or that monument but Naples in its entirety. An enormous project that she had never talked to me about. The time had passed in which she tended to involve me in her passions, she had chosen my daughter as her confidante. To her she repeated the things she learned, or dragged her to see what had excited or fascinated her.
42.
Imma was very receptive, and memorized everything rapidly. It was she who taught me about Piazza dei Martiri, so important for Lila and me in the past. I knew nothing about it, whereas Lila had studied its history and told her about it. She repeated it to me right in the piazza, one morning when we went shopping, mixing up, I think, facts, her fantasies, fantasies of Lila’s. Here, Mamma, in the eighteenth century it was all countryside. There were trees, there were the peasants’ houses, inns, and a road that went straight down to the sea called Calata Santa Caterina a Chiaia, from the name of the church there at the corner, which is old but quite ugly. After May 15, 1848, when, right in this spot, many patriots who wanted a constitution and a parliament were killed, the Bourbon King Ferdinando II, to show that peace had returned, decided to construct a Road of Peace and put up in the piazza a column with a Madonna at the top. But when the annexation of Naples by the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed and the Bourbon was driven out, the mayor Giuseppe Colonna di Stigliano asked the sculptor Enrico Alvino to transform the column with the Madonna of Peace at the top into a column in memory of the Neapolitans who had died for freedom. So Enrico Alvino put at the base of the column these four lions, which symbolized the great moments of revolution in Naples: the lion of 1799, mortally wounded; the lion of the movements of 1820, pierced by the sword but still biting the air; the lion of 1848, which represents the force of the patriots subdued but not conquered; finally, the lion of 1859, threatening and avenging. Then, Mamma, up there, instead of the Madonna of Peace he put the bronze statue of a beautiful young woman, that is, Victory, who is balanced on the world: that Victory holds the sword in her left hand and in the right a garland for the Neapolitan citizens, martyrs for Freedom, who, fallen in battle and on the gallows, avenged the people with their blood, et cetera et cetera.
I often had the impression that Lila used the past to make Imma’s tempestuous present normal. In the Neapolitan facts as she recounted them there was always something terrible, disorderly, at the origin, which later took the form of a beautiful building, a street, a monument, only to be forgotten, to lose meaning, to decline, improve, decline, according to an ebb and flow that was by its nature unpredictable, made of waves, flat calm, downpours, cascades. The essential, in Lila’s scheme, was to ask questions. Who were the martyrs, what did the lions mean, and when had the battles and the gallows occured, and the Road of Peace, and the Madonna, and the Victory. The stories were a lineup of the befores, the afters, the thens. Before elegant Chiaia, the neighborhood for the wealthy, there was the playa cited in the letters of Gregory, the swamps that went down to the beach and the sea, the wild forest that crept up to the Vomero. Before the Risanamento, or cleanup, of the end of the nineteenth century, before the railroad cooperatives, there was an unhealthy area, polluted in every stone, but also with quite a few splendid monuments, swept away by the mania for tearing down under the pretense of cleaning up. And one of the areas to be cleaned up had, for a very long time, been called Vasto. Vasto was a place name that indicated the terrain between Porta Capuana and Porta Nolana, and the neighborhood, once cleaned up, had kept the name. Lila repeated that name—Vasto—she liked it, and Imma, too, liked it: Vasto and Risanamento, waste and good health, a yearning to lay waste, sack, ruin, gut, and a yearning to build, order, design new streets or rename the old, for the purpose of consolidating new worlds and hiding old evils, which, however, were always ready to exact their revenge.
In fact, before the Vasto was called Vasto and was in essence wasteland—Aunt Lina recounted—there had been villas, gardens, fountains. In that very place the Marchese di Vico had built a palace, with a garden, called Paradise. The garden of Paradise was full of hidden water games, Mamma. The most famous was a big white mulberry tree, which had a system of almost invisible channels: water flowed through them, falling like rain from the branches or coursing like a waterfall down the trunk. Understand? From the Paradise of the Marchese di Vico to the Vasto of the Marchese del Vasto, to the Cleanup of Mayor Nicola Amore, to the Vasto again, to further renaissances and so on at that rate.