The Neapolitan Novels

It happened like that every time. The scam of rebirth raised hopes and then shattered them, became crust upon ancient crusts. Thus, just as the obligation arose to stay in the city and support the revival under the leadership of the former Communist party, I decided to leave for Turin, drawn by the possibility of running a publishing house that at the time was full of ambition. Once I turned forty, time had begun to race, I couldn’t keep up. The real calendar had been replaced by one of contract deadlines, the years leaped from one publication to the next; giving dates to the events that concerned me, and my daughters, cost me a lot, and I forced them into the writing, which took me more and more time. When had this or that happened? In an almost heedless way I oriented myself by the publication dates of my books.

I now had quite a few books behind me, and they had won me some authority, a good reputation, a comfortable life. Over time the weight of my daughters had greatly diminished. Dede and Elsa—first one, then the other—had gone to study in Boston, encouraged by Pietro, who for seven or eight years had had a professorship at Harvard. They were at ease with their father. Apart from the letters in which they complained about the cruel climate and the pedantry of the Bostonians, they were satisfied, with themselves and with escaping the choices that, in the past, I had compelled them to confront. At that point, since Imma was desperate to do what her sisters had, what was I doing in the neighborhood? If at first the image of the writer who, although able to live elsewhere, had stayed in a dangerous outlying neighborhood to continue to nourish herself on reality, had been useful to me, now there were many intellectuals who prided themselves on the same cliché. And my books had taken other paths, the material of the neighborhood had been set aside. Wasn’t it therefore hypocritical to have a certain fame, and many advantages, and yet to limit myself, to live in a place where I could only record uneasily the deterioration of the lives of my siblings, my friends, their children and grandchildren, maybe even of my last daughter?

Imma was then fourteen; I didn’t deprive her of anything, and she studied hard. But if necessary she spoke in a harsh dialect, she had schoolmates I didn’t like, I was so worried if she went out after dinner that often she decided to stay home. I, too, when I was in the city, had a limited life. I saw my friends from cultured Naples, I let myself be courted and embarked on relationships, but they never lasted. Even the most brilliant men sooner or later turned out to be disillusioned, raging at a cruel fate, witty and yet subtly malicious. At times I had the impression that they wanted me mainly so that they could give me their manuscripts to read, ask me about television or the movies, in some cases borrow money that they never paid back. I made the best of it, exerting myself to have a social and emotional life. But going out at night, dressed up, wasn’t a pleasure, it was a cause of anxiety. On one occasion I didn’t have time to close the street door behind me before I was beaten and robbed by two kids who were no more than thirteen. The taxi driver, who was waiting right out front, didn’t even look out the window. So in the summer of 1995 I left Naples with Imma.

I rented an apartment on the Po, near the Isabella Bridge, and my life and that of my third daughter immediately improved. From there it became simpler to reflect on Naples, to write about it and let myself write about it with lucidity. I loved my city, but I uprooted from myself any dutiful defense of it. I was convinced, rather, that the anguish in which that love sooner or later ended was a lens through which to look at the entire West. Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. To be born in that city—I went so far as to write once, thinking not of myself but of Lila’s pessimism—is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.