39
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.
40
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.
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.