The Neapolitan Novels

I was enraged. That’s why Nino had gone out and hadn’t been seen again. Here was how he cared for his daughter. I called him, he didn’t hear me. Dede turned, she laughed with Elsa at my faint voice, they always did when I shouted. I called again. I wanted Nino to come back right away, return home, alone, alone with my daughters. But there was the deafening whistle of the peanut seller and the din of a truck passing, every one of its parts rattling, raising clouds of dust. I grumbled, I joined them. Why was Lila holding my daughter in her arms, what need was there? And why was Imma not playing with Tina? I didn’t say hello, I said to Imma: What are you doing being held, you’re a big girl, come down, and I pulled her away from Lila. Then I turned to Nino: The children have to eat, it’s ready. Meanwhile I realized that my daughter was attached to my skirt, she hadn’t left me to run to her friend. I looked around, I asked Lila: Where is Tina?

She still had on her face the expression of cordial assent with which until a minute earlier she had been listening to Nino’s conversation. She must be with Dede and Elsa, she said. I answered: She’s not. And I wanted her to see about her daughter, together with Enzo, instead of inserting herself between mine and her father on the only day he had made himself available. But while Enzo looked around for Tina, Lila continued talking to Nino. She told him about the times Gennaro had disappeared. She laughed, saying: One morning he couldn’t be found, everyone had gone to school and he wasn’t there. I was terrified, I imagined the worst things, and instead he was sitting quietly in the gardens. But it was precisely as she remembered that episode that she lost color. Her eyes emptied, in a changed voice she asked Enzo:

“Did you find her, where is she?”

110.

We looked for Tina along the stradone, then throughout the whole neighborhood, then again along the stradone. Many people joined us. Antonio came, Carmen came, Roberto, Carmen’s husband, came, and even Marcello Solara mobilized some of his people, walking the streets himself, until late into the night. Lila now seemed like Melina, she ran here and there with no reason. But Enzo seemed even crazier than she was. He screamed, he got angry at the peddlers, he threatened terrible things, he wanted to look in their cars and vans and carts. The carabinieri had to intervene to calm him.

At every moment it seemed that Tina had been found and there was a sigh of relief. Everyone knew the child, there was no one who wouldn’t swear to have seen her a moment before standing at this stall or that corner or in the courtyard or in the gardens over by the tunnel with a tall man, a short one. But every sighting turned out to be illusory, people lost faith and goodwill.

In the evening a rumor took hold that later prevailed. The child had left the sidewalk to chase a blue ball. But just at that moment a truck was passing. The truck was a mud-colored hulk, traveling at high speed, clattering and bouncing because of the holes in the stradone. No one had seen anything else, but the collision was heard, the collision that passed directly from the story into the memory of whoever was listening. The truck hadn’t braked, or even tried to, and had disappeared at the end of the stradone along with Tina’s body, her braids. On the asphalt not a drop of blood remained, nothing, nothing at all. In that nothing the vehicle was lost, the child was lost forever.

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The Story of Bad Blood

1.

I left Naples definitively in 1995, when everyone said that the city was reviving. But I no longer believed in its resurrections. Over the years I had seen the advent of the new railway station, the dull tower of the skyscraper on Via Novara, the soaring structures of Scampia, the proliferation of tall, shining buildings above the gray stone of Arenaccia, of Via Taddeo da Sessa, of Piazza Nazionale. Those buildings, conceived in France or Japan and rising between Ponticelli and Poggioreale with the usual breakdowns and delays, had immediately, at high speed, lost all their luster and become dens for the desperate. So what resurrection? It was only cosmetic, a powder of modernity applied randomly, and boastfully, to the corrupt face of the city.