The Neapolitan Novels

“Not very often.”

“I’ve seen it a lot.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. I only know that she feels fatherless and isn’t even sure she has a mother.”

I tried to ignore her but it was difficult. Imma, as I’ve said, had always worried me a little, and even when she stood up well to Tina’s vivacity she still seemed to lack something. Also, some time earlier I had recognized in her features of mine that I didn’t like. She was submissive, she gave in immediately out of fear of not being liked, it depressed her that she had given in. I would have preferred her to inherit Nino’s bold capacity for seduction, his thoughtless vitality, but she wasn’t like that. Imma was unhappily compliant, she wanted everything and pretended to want nothing. Children, I said, are the product of chance, she’s got nothing of her father. Lila didn’t agree; she was always finding ways of alluding to the child’s resemblance to Nino, but she didn’t see it as positive, she spoke as if it were a congenital defect. And then she kept repeating: I’m telling you these things because I love them and I’m worried.

I tried to explain to myself her sudden persecution of my daughters. I thought that, since I had disappointed her, she was withdrawing from me by separating first of all from them. I thought that since my book was increasingly successful, which sanctioned my autonomy from her and from her judgment, she was trying to belittle me by belittling my children and my capacity to be a good mother. But neither of those hypotheses soothed me and a third advanced: Lila saw what I, as a mother, didn’t know how or didn’t want to see, and since she appeared critical of Imma in particular, I had better find out if her comments had any foundation.

So I began to observe the child and was soon convinced that she really suffered. She was the slave of Tina’s joyful expansiveness, of her elevated capacity for verbalization, of the way she aroused tenderness, admiration, affection in everyone, especially me. Although my daughter was pretty, and intelligent, beside Tina she turned dull, her virtues vanished, and she felt this deeply. One day I witnessed an exchange between them, in a good Italian, Tina’s pronunciation very precise, Imma’s still missing some syllables. They were coloring in the outlines of animals and Tina had decided to use green for a rhinoceros, while Imma added colors randomly for a cat. Tina said:

“Make it gray or black.”

“You mustn’t give me orders about the color.”

“It’s not an order, it’s a suggestion.”

Imma looked at her in alarm. She didn’t know the difference between an order and a suggestion. She said:

“I don’t want to follow the suggestion, either.”

“Then don’t.”

Imma’s lower lip trembled.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll do it but I don’t like it.”

I tried to be more attentive to her. To begin with, I stopped getting excited about everything Tina did, I reinforced Imma’s skills, I praised her for every little thing. But I soon realized it wasn’t enough. The two little girls loved each other. Dealing with each other helped them grow, some extra artificial praise was of no help in keeping Imma, looking at her reflection in Tina, from seeing something that wounded her and that her friend was certainly not the cause of.

At that point I began to turn over Lila’s words: she’s fatherless and isn’t even sure she has a mother. I remembered the mistake in the Panorama caption. That caption, buttressed by Dede and Elsa’s mean jokes (You don’t belong to this family: your name is Sarratore, not Airota), must have done its damage. But was that really the core of the problem? I ruled it out. Her father’s absence seemed to me something more serious and I was sure that her suffering came from that.

Once I had started down this road I began to notice how Imma sought Pietro’s attention. When he called his daughters, she sat in a corner and listened to the conversation. If the sisters had a good time she pretended to be having fun, too, and when the conversation ended and they said goodbye to their father in turn, Imma shouted: Bye. Often Pietro heard her and said to Dede: Give me Imma so I can say hello. But in those cases either she became shy and ran away or took the receiver and remained mute. She behaved the same way when he came to Naples. Pietro never forgot to bring her a little present, and Imma hovered near him, played at being his daughter, was happy if he said something nice or picked her up. Once when my ex-husband came to get Dede and Elsa, the child’s sadness must have seemed especially obvious, and as he left he said: Cuddle her, she’s sorry that her sisters are leaving and she has to stay behind.