The Neapolitan Novels

I brought her lunch and also dinner. The stairs were cold, I didn’t feel well, and I didn’t want to go up and down just to have unpleasant things said to me. But this time I found her surprisingly cordial, she said Wait, sit with me for a moment. She drew me into the bathroom, she brushed her hair carefully, and meanwhile spoke about my daughters with tenderness, with admiration, as if to convince me that she didn’t seriously believe what she had said to me earlier.

“At first,” she said, dividing the hair into two, and beginning to braid it without losing sight of her image in the mirror, “Dede resembled you, now instead she’s becoming like her father. The opposite is happening with Elsa: she seemed identical to her father and now instead she’s starting to look like you. Everything moves. A wish, a fantasy travels more swiftly than blood.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remember when I thought Gennaro was Nino’s?”

“Yes.”

“To me he really seemed so, he was identical to Nino, his exact image.”

“You mean that a desire can be so strong as to seem fulfilled?”

“No, I mean that for a few years Gennaro was truly Nino’s child.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

She stared at me spitefully for a moment, she took a few steps in the bathroom, limping, she burst out laughing in a slightly artificial way.

“So it seems to you that I’m exaggerating?”

I realized with some annoyance that she was imitating my walk.

“Don’t make fun of me, my hip hurts.”

“Nothing hurts, Lenù. You invented that limp in order not to let your mother die completely, and now you really do limp, and I’ve studied you, it’s good for you. The Solaras took your bracelet and you said nothing, you weren’t sorry, you weren’t worried. At the time I thought it was because you don’t know how to rebel, but now I understand it’s not that. You’re getting old properly. You feel strong, you stopped being a daughter, you truly became a mother.”

I felt uneasy, I repeated:

“It’s just a little pain.”

“Even pain does you good. You just needed a slight limp and now your mother stays quietly inside you. Her leg is glad that you limp and so you, too, are glad. Isn’t that true?”

“No.”

She gave me an ironic look to reassert that she didn’t believe me, and with her made-up eyes narrowed to cracks said:

“Do you think that when Tina is forty-two, she’ll be like this?”

I stared at her. She had a provocative expression, her hands tight around the braids. I said:

“It’s likely, yes, maybe so.”

12.

My daughters had to fend for themselves, I stayed to eat with Lila, even though I felt cold in my bones. We talked the whole time about physical resemblances; I tried to understand what was happening in her mind. But I also mentioned to her the work I was doing. Talking to you helps, I said to give her confidence, you make me think.

The idea seemed to cheer her, she said: Knowing I’m useful to you I feel better. Right afterward, thanks to the effort involved in being useful to me, she moved on to contorted or illogical arguments. She had put on a lot of powder to hide her pallor, and she didn’t seem herself but a Carnival mask with very red cheeks. At times I followed her with interest, at times I recognized only the signs of the illness that I was well acquainted with by now, and was alarmed. For example, she said, laughing: For a while I brought up Nino’s child, just as you’ve done with Imma, a flesh and blood child; but when that child became Stefano’s where did Nino’s child go, does Gennaro still have him inside, do I have him? Remarks like that: she got lost. Then she started abruptly to praise my cooking, she said she had eaten with pleasure, something she hadn’t done for a long time. When I said it wasn’t mine but Pinuccia’s, she darkened, she grumbled that she didn’t want anything from Pinuccia. At that point Elsa called me from the landing, she shouted that I had to come home right away, Dede with a fever was even worse than Dede healthy. I urged Lila to call me whenever she needed me, I told her to rest, I hurried up to my apartment.