Once she talked to me about violence. We believed, she said, that it was a feature of the neighborhood. We had it around us from birth, it brushed up against us, touched us all our lives, we thought: we were unlucky. You remember how we used words to cause suffering, and how many we invented to humiliate? You remember the beatings that Antonio, Enzo, Pasquale, my brother, the Solaras, and even I, and even you, gave and took? You remember when my father threw me out the window? Now I’m reading an old article on San Giovanni a Carbonara, where it explains what the Carbonara or Carboneto was. I thought that there was coal there once, and coal miners. But no, it was the place for the garbage, all cities have them. It was called Fosso Carbonario, dirty water ran in it, animal carcasses were tossed into it. And since ancient times the Fosso Carbonario of Naples was where the church of San Giovanni a Carbonara stands today. In the area called Piazza di Carbonara the poet Virgil in his time ordered that every year the ioco de Carbonara take place, gladiator games that didn’t lead to the death of men, as they did later—morte de homini come de po è facto (she liked that old Italian, it amused her, she quoted it to me with visible pleasure) — but gave men practice in deeds of arms: li homini ali facti de l’arme. Soon, however, it wasn’t a matter of ioco or practice. In that place where they threw out beasts and garbage a lot of human blood was shed. It seems that the game of throwing the prete was invented there, the stone throwing that we did as girls, you remember, when Enzo hit me in the forehead — I still have the scar — and he was desperate and gave me a garland of sorb apples. But then, in Piazza di Carbonara, from stones she moved on to weapons, and it became the place where men fought to the last drop of blood. Beggars and gentlemen and princes hurried to see people killing each other in revenge. When some handsome youth fell, pierced by a blade beaten on the anvil of death, immediately beggars, bourgeois citizens, kings and queens offered applause that rose to the stars. Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario. And at times I thought that she could have held crowded rooms fascinated, but then I brought her down to size. She’s a barely educated woman of fifty, she doesn’t know how to do research, she doesn’t know what the documentary truth is: she reads, she is excited, she mixes truth and falsehood, she imagines. No more. What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered — literally covered — by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah — she laughed — underneath there’s blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books. Thus the coupling of San Giovanni and the Fosso Carbonario, that is to say the place name of San Giovanni a Carbonara: a street we’ve walked on thousands of times, Lenù, it’s near the station, near Forcella and the Tribunali.
I knew where the street of San Giovanni a Carbonara was, I knew it very well, but I didn’t know those stories. She talked about it at length. She talked so as to let me know — I suspected — that the things she was telling me orally she had in substance already written, and they belonged to a vast text whose structure, however, escaped me. I wondered: what does she have in mind, what are her intentions? Is she just organizing her wandering and readings or is she planning a book of Neapolitan curiosities, a book that, naturally, she’ll never finish but that it’s good for her to keep working on, day after day, now that not only Tina is gone but Enzo is gone, the Solaras are gone, I, too, am going, taking away Imma, who, one way and another, has helped her survive?
45
Shortly before I left for Turin I spent a lot of time with her, we had an affectionate farewell. It was a summer day in 1995. We talked about everything, for hours, but finally she focused on Imma, who was now fourteen; she was pretty, and lively, and had just graduated from middle school. She praised her without sudden malice, and I listened to her praise, I thanked her for helping her at a difficult time. She looked at me in bafflement, she corrected me:
“I’ve always helped Imma, not just now.”
“Yes, but after Nino’s troubles you were really helpful to her.”
She didn’t like those words, either, it was a moment of confusion. She didn’t want me to associate with Nino the attention she had devoted to Imma, she reminded me that she had taken care of the child from the start, she said she had done it because Tina loved her dearly, she added: Maybe Tina loved Imma even more than me. Then she shook her head in discontent.
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
“What don’t you understand?”
She became nervous, she had something in mind that she wanted to tell me but restrained herself.
“I don’t understand how it’s possible that in all this time you never thought of it even once.”
“Of what, Lila?”
She was silent for a few seconds, then spoke, eyes down.
“You remember the photograph in Panorama?”
“Which one?”
“The one where you were with Tina and the caption said that it was you and your daughter.”
“Of course I remember.”
“I’ve often thought that they might have taken Tina because of that photo.”
“What?”
“They thought they were stealing your daughter, and instead they stole mine.”
She said it, and that morning I had the proof that of all the infinite hypotheses, the fantasies, the obsessions that had tormented her, that still tormented her, I had perceived almost nothing. A decade hadn’t served to calm her, her brain couldn’t find a quiet corner for her daughter. She said:
“You were always in the newspapers and on television, beautiful, elegant, blond: maybe they wanted money from you and not from me, who knows, I don’t know anything anymore, things go one way and then they change direction.”
She said that Enzo had talked to the police, that she had talked about it with Antonio, but neither the police nor Antonio had taken the possibility seriously. Yet she spoke to me as if at that moment she were again sure that that was what had happened. Who knows what else she had brooded over and was still brooding over that I hadn’t realized. Nunziatina had been taken in place of my Immacolata? My success was responsible for the kidnapping of her daughter? And that bond of hers with Imma was an anxiety, a protection, a safeguard? She imagined that the kidnappers, having thrown away the wrong child, would return to get the right one? Or what else? What had passed and was passing through her mind? Why was she talking to me about this only now? Did she want to inject in me a final poison to punish me for leaving her? Ah, I understood why Enzo had left. Living with her had become too harrowing.
She realized that I was looking at her with concern and, as if to reach safety, began to speak about what she was reading. But now in a jumbled way; her unease contorted her features. She muttered, laughing, that evil took unpredictable pathways. You cover it over with churches, convents, books — they seem so important, the books, she said sarcastically, you’ve devoted your whole life to them — and the evil breaks through the floor and emerges where you don’t expect it. Then she calmed down and began to speak again of Tina, Imma, me, but in a conciliatory way, as if apologizing for what she had said to me. When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you. She whispered: It might be that Tina will return tonight and then who gives a damn how it happened, the essential thing will be that she’s here again and forgives me for the distraction. You forgive me, too, she said, and, embracing me, concluded: Go, go, do better things than you’ve done so far. I’ve stayed near Imma also out of fear that someone might take her, and you loved my son truly also when your daughter left him. How many things you’ve endured for him, thank you. I’m so glad we’ve been friends for so long and that we are still.