The Neapolitan Novels

It was becoming very clear to me that the tension between her and Enzo was increasing, and I didn’t want to be the fuse for their rages. What had been upsetting me, for a while, was that the nature of their arguments had changed. In the past Lila yelled and Enzo for the most part was silent. But now it wasn’t like that. She yelled, I often heard Tina’s name, and her voice, filtered through the floor, seemed a kind of sick whine. Then suddenly Enzo exploded. He shouted and his shouting extended into a tumultuous torrent of exasperated words, all in violent dialect. Lila was silent then; while Enzo shouted she couldn’t be heard. But as soon as he was silent you could hear the door slam. I strained my ears for the shuffling of Lila on the stairs, in the entrance. Then her steps vanished in the sounds of the traffic on the stradone.

Enzo used to run after her, but now he didn’t. I thought: maybe I should go down, talk to him, tell him: You yourself told me how Lina continues to suffer, be understanding. But I gave up and hoped that she would return soon. But she stayed away the whole day and sometimes even the night. What was she doing? I imagined that she took refuge in some library, as Pietro had told me, or that she was wandering through Naples, noting every building, every church, every monument, every plaque. Or that she was combining the two things: first she explored the city, then she dug around in books to find information. Overwhelmed by events, I had never had the wish or the time to mention that new mania, nor had she ever talked to me about it. But I knew how she could become obsessively focused when something interested her, and it didn’t surprise me that she could dedicate so much time and energy to it. I thought about it with some concern only when her disappearances followed the shouting, and the shadow of Tina joined the one vanishing into the city, even at night. Then the tunnels of tufa under the city came to mind, the catacombs with rows of death’s-heads, the skulls of blackened bronze that led to the unhappy souls of the church of Purgatorio ad Arco. And sometimes I stayed awake until I heard the street door slam and her footsteps on the stairs.

On one of those dark days the police appeared. There had been a quarrel, she had left. I looked out at the window in alarm, I saw the police heading toward our building. I was frightened, I thought something had happened to Lila. I hurried onto the landing. The police were looking for Enzo, they had come to arrest him. I tried to intervene, to understand. I was rudely silenced, they took him away in handcuffs. As he went down the stairs Enzo shouted to me in dialect: When Lina gets back tell her not to worry, it’s a lot of nonsense.

35.

For a long time it was hard to know what he was accused of. Lila stopped being hostile toward him, gathered her strength, and concerned herself only with him. In that new ordeal she was silent and determined. She became enraged only when she discovered that the state—since she had no official bond with Enzo and, furthermore, had never been separated from Stefano—wouldn’t grant her a status equivalent to a wife or, as a result, the possibility of seeing him. She began to spend a lot of money so that, through unofficial channels, he would feel her closeness and her support.

Meanwhile I went back to Nino. I knew from Marisa that it was useless to expect help from him, he wouldn’t lift a finger even for his own father, his mother, his siblings. But with me he again readily made an effort, maybe to make a good impression on Imma, maybe because it meant showing Lila, if indirectly, his power. Not even he, however, could understand precisely what Enzo’s situation was and at different times he gave me different versions that he himself admitted were not reliable. What had happened? It was certain that Nadia, in the course of her sobbing confessions, had mentioned Enzo’s name. It was certain that she had dug up the period when Enzo, with Pasquale, had frequented the worker-student collective in Via dei Tribunali. It was certain that she had implicated them both in small demonstrations, carried out, many years earlier, against the property of NATO officials who lived in Via Manzoni. It was certain that the investigators were trying to involve Enzo, too, in many of the crimes that they had attributed to Pasquale. But at this point certainties ended and suppositions began. Maybe Nadia had claimed that Enzo had had recourse to Pasquale for crimes of a nonpolitical nature. Maybe Nadia had claimed that some of those bloody acts—in particular the murder of Bruno Soccavo—had been carried out by Pasquale and planned by Enzo. Maybe Nadia had said she had learned from Pasquale himself that it was three men who killed the Solara brothers: him, Antonio Cappuccio, Enzo Scanno, childhood friends who, incited by a longtime solidarity and by an equally longstanding resentment, had committed that crime.