The Neapolitan Novels

“Even more beautiful than Aunt Lenuccia?”

“No.”

“So Aunt Lenuccia is the prettiest of all?”

“No, me.”

“You? What nonsense you talk.”

“It’s true, Mamma.”

“And what did this lady do?”

“Took photos.”

“Of whom?”

“Of me.”

“Only you?”

“Yes.”

“Liar. Imma, come here, tell me what you did.”

89.

I waited for Panorama to come out. I was pleased now, the publicity office was doing a good job, I felt proud of being the subject of an entire photographic feature. But a week passed, and the feature didn’t appear. Two weeks passed, nothing. It was the end of March, the book was in the bookstores, and still nothing. I was absorbed in other things, an interview on the radio, one in Il Mattino. At a certain point I had to go to Milan for the launch of the book. I did it in the same bookstore as fifteen years earlier, introduced by the same professor. Adele didn’t come, nor did Mariarosa, but the audience was bigger than in the past. The professor talked about the book without much warmth but positively, and some members of the audience—it was mostly women—spoke up enthusiastically about the complex humanity of the protagonist. A rite that I knew well by now. I left the next morning and returned to Naples, exhausted.

I remember that I was heading home, dragging my suitcase, when a car pulled up along the stradone. At the wheel was Michele, next to him sat Marcello. I remembered when the two Solaras had tried to pull me into their car—they had done it with Ada, too—and Lila had defended me. I had on my wrist, as I had then, my mother’s bracelet, and, though objects are impassive by nature, I drew back with a start to protect it. But Marcello stared straight ahead without greeting me, he didn’t even say in his usual good-humored tone: Here’s the sister-in-law who writes novels. Michele spoke, he was furious:

“Lenù, what the fuck did you write in that book? Despicable things about the place you were born? Despicable things about my family? Despicable things about the people who watched you grow up and who admire you and love you? Despicable things about this beautiful city of ours?”

He turned around and took from the backseat a copy of Panorama, fresh from the printer, and held it out through the window.

“You like talking shit?”

I looked. The weekly was open to the page about me. There was a big color photo that showed Tina and me sitting on the floor at my apartment. The caption struck me immediately: Elena Greco with her daughter Tina. At first I thought that the problem was the caption and I didn’t understand why Michele was so angry. I said bewildered:

“They made a mistake.”

But he shouted out a sentence, even more incomprehensible:

“They aren’t the ones who made a mistake, it was you two.”

At that point Marcello interrupted, he said with irritation:

“Forget it, Michè, Lina manipulates her and she doesn’t even realize it.”

He took off, tires screeching, and left me on the sidewalk with the magazine in my hand.

90.

I stood stock-still, my suitcase beside me. I read the article, four pages with pictures of the ugliest places in the neighborhood: the only one with me was the one with Tina, a beautiful picture in which the bleak background of the apartment gave our two figures a particular refinement. The writer wasn’t reviewing my book and didn’t speak of it as a novel, but used it to give an account of what he called “the dominion of the Solara brothers,” a borderland territory, perhaps tied to the new organized Camorra, perhaps not. Of Marcello it said little, alluding mainly to Michele, to whom it attributed initiative, unscrupulousness, a tendency to jump from one political cart to the next, according to the logic of business. What business? Panorama made a list, mixing the legal and the illegal: the bar-pastry shop, hides, shoe factories, mini-markets, night clubs, loan sharking, cigarette smuggling, receiving stolen goods, drugs, infiltration of the post-earthquake construction sites.

I broke into a cold sweat.

What had I done, how could I have been so imprudent.