The Neapolitan Novels

But that was only the appearance of things. Soon I had a different theory: that, more deeply, Imma—her body—must be a symbol of guilt. I thought often of the situation in which the little girl had been lost. Nino had handed her over to Lila but Lila hadn’t attended to her. She had said to her daughter, You wait here, and to my daughter, Come with your aunt. She had done it, perhaps, to show off Imma to her father, to praise her to him, to stir his affection, who knows. But Tina was lively, or more simply she had felt neglected, offended, and had wandered off. As a result Lila’s suffering had made a nest in the weight of Imma’s body in her arms, in the contact, in the living warmth it still gave off. But my daughter was fragile, slow, different in every way from Tina, who was shining, vivacious. Imma could in no way become a substitute, she was only holding back time. I imagined, in other words, that Lila kept her nearby in order to stay within that terrible Sunday, and meanwhile thought: Tina is here, soon she’ll pull on my skirt, she’ll call me, and then I’ll pick her up in my arms, and everything will return to its place. That was why she didn’t want the child to upset everything. When the little girl kept asking for her friend, when she merely reminded Lila that in fact Tina wasn’t there, Lila treated her with the same harshness with which she treated us adults. But I couldn’t accept that. As soon as she came to get Imma, I found some excuse or other to send Dede or Elsa to watch her. If she had used that tone when I was present, what might happen when she took her away for hours?

5.

Every so often I escaped from the apartment, from the flight of stairs between my rooms and hers, from the gardens, the stradone, and left for work. These were moments when I sighed with relief: I put on makeup, stylish clothes, even the slight limp that remained from the pregnancy was a sort of pleasingly distinctive trait. Although I frequently made sarcastic remarks about the ill-humored behavior of literary people and artists, at the time everything having to do with publishing, cinema, television—every type of aesthetic display—seemed to me a fantastic landscape in which it was marvelous to appear. I liked being present in the extravagant, festive chaos of big conventions, big conferences, big theater productions, big exhibitions, big films, big operas, and I was flattered on the few occasions when I had a place in the front rows, the reserved seats, from which, sitting among famous people, I could observe the spectacle of powers large and small. Lila, on the other hand, remained at the center of her horror, without any distraction. Once I had an invitation to an opera at the San Carlo—a magnificent place where not even I had been—and I insisted on taking her; she didn’t want to go, and persuaded Carmen to go instead. The only distraction, if that is the right word for it, she would allow was another reason for suffering. A new affliction acted on her as a sort of antidote. She became combative, determined, she was like someone who knows she has to drown but in spite of herself agitates her arms and legs to stay afloat.