The Neapolitan Novels

But she regretted that phrase as soon as she uttered it, she laughed uneasily, and it was she, right afterward, who spoke of her father. She said: It was bound to happen. And she quoted Franco, she said that he had been among the first to understand that either everything would change, and in a hurry, or even harder times would come and there would be no more hope. She was angry: My father thought you could change one thing here and one there, deliberately. But when you change almost nothing like that you’re forced to enter into the system of lies and either you tell them, like the others, or they get rid of you. I asked her:

“Guido is guilty, he took money?”

She laughed nervously:

“Yes. But he is entirely innocent, in his whole life he never put a single lira that wasn’t more than legal in his pocket.”

Then she turned again to me, but in an almost offensive tone. She repeated: You write too much, you no longer surprise me. And although I had been the one to call, it was she who said goodbye and hung up.

The incongruous double judgment that Mariarosa had pronounced on her father was true. The media storm around Guido slowly faded and he returned to his study, but as an innocent who surely was guilty and, if you like, as a guilty man who surely was innocent. It seemed to me that at that point I could telephone Adele. She thanked me ironically for my concern, showed that she was better informed than I was regarding the life and studies of Dede and Elsa, uttered remarks like: This is a country where one is exposed to every insult, respectable people should be in a hurry to emigrate. When I asked if I could say hello to Guido she said: I’ll say it for you, he’s resting now. Then she exclaimed bitterly: His only crime was to be surrounded by newly literate types with no ethics, young arrivistes ready for anything, scum.

That very evening the television showed a particularly cheerful image of the former socialist deputy Giovanni Sarratore—who was not exactly a youth, at the time: he was fifty—and inserted him in the increasingly crowded list of corrupters and corrupt.

40.

That news especially upset Imma. In those first years of her conscious life she had seen her father very little, and yet had made him her idol. She boasted of him to her schoolmates, she boasted to her teachers, she showed everyone a photograph from the newspapers in which they were hand in hand right at the entrance to Montecitorio. If she had to imagine the man she would marry, she said: He will surely be very tall, dark, and handsome. When she learned that her father had ended up in jail like an ordinary inhabitant of the neighborhood—a place that she considered horrible: now that she was growing up she said in no uncertain terms that she was afraid of it, and, increasingly, she had reason to be—she lost the bit of serenity I had been able to guarantee her. She sobbed in her sleep, she woke in the middle of the night and wanted to get in bed with me.

Once we met Marisa, worn-out, shabby, angrier than usual. She said, paying no attention to Imma: Nino deserves it, he’s always thought only of himself, and, as you well know, he never wanted to give us any help, he acted like an honest man only with his relatives, that piece of shit. My daughter couldn’t bear even a word of it, she left us on the stradone and ran away. I quickly said goodbye to Marisa, I chased after Imma, I tried to console her: You mustn’t pay any attention, your father and his sister never got along. But I stopped speaking critically of Nino in front of her. In fact I stopped speaking critically of him in front of anyone. I remembered when I went to him to find out about Pasquale and Enzo. You always needed some patron saint in Paradise to navigate the calculated opacity of the underworld, and Nino, although far from any sanctity, had helped me. Now that the saints were falling into the inferno, I had no one to ask to find out about him. Unreliable news came to me only from the infernal circle of his many lawyers.

41.