The Neapolitan Novels полностью

The weather wasn’t promising, so I carried an umbrella, but I was in a good mood, I wanted to walk, reflect, give a sort of farewell to the neighborhood and the city. Out of the habit of a diligent student, I started with the more difficult meeting, the one with Solara. I went to the bar, but neither he nor Gigliola nor even Marcello was there; someone said that they might be at the new place on the stradone. I stopped in and looked around with the attitude of someone with nothing better to do. Any memory of Don Carlo’s shop had been utterly erased—the dark, deep cave where as a child I had gone to buy liquid soap and other household things. From the windows of the building’s third floor an enormous vertical sign hung down over the wide entrance: Everything for Everyone. The store was brightly lit, even though it was day, and offered merchandise of every type, the triumph of abundance. I saw Lila’s brother, Rino, who had grown very fat. He treated me coldly, saying that he was the boss there, he didn’t know anything about the Solaras. If you’re looking for Michele, go to his house, he said bitterly, and turned his back as if he had something urgent to do.

I started walking again, and reached the new neighborhood, where I knew that the entire Solara family had, years earlier, bought an enormous apartment. The mother, Manuela, the loan shark, opened the door; I hadn’t seen her since the time of Lila’s wedding. I felt that she had been observing me through the spyhole. She looked for a long time, then she drew back the bolt and appeared in the frame of the door, her figure partly contained by the darkness of the apartment, partly eroded by the light coming from the large window on the stairs. She was as if dried up. The skin was stretched over her large bones, one of her pupils was very bright and the other as if dead. In her ears, around her neck, against the dark dress that hung loosely, gold sparkled, as if she were getting ready for a party. She treated me politely, inviting me to come in, have coffee. Michele wasn’t there, did I know that he had another house, on Posillipo, where he was to go and live after his marriage. He was furnishing it with Gigliola.

“They’re going to leave the neighborhood?” I asked.

“Yes, certainly.”

“For Posillipo?”

“Six rooms, Lenù, three facing the sea. I would have preferred the Vomero, but Michele does as he likes. Anyway, there’s a breeze, in the morning, and a light that you can’t imagine.”

I was surprised. I would never have believed that the Solaras would move away from the area of their trafficking, from the den where they hid their booty. But here was Michele, the shrewdest, the greediest of the family, going to live somewhere else, up, on the Posillipo, facing the sea and Vesuvio. The brothers’ craving for greatness really had increased, the lawyer was right. But at the moment the fact cheered me, I was glad that Michele was leaving the neighborhood. I found that this favored Lila’s possible return.

55.

I asked Signora Manuela for the address, said goodbye, and crossed the city, first by subway to Mergellina, then on foot, and by bus up Posillipo. I was curious. I now felt that I belonged to a legitimate power, universally admired, haloed by a high level of culture, and I wanted to see what garish guise was being given to the power I had had before my eyes since childhood—the vulgar pleasure of bullying, the unpunished practice of crime, the smiling tricks of obedience to the law, the display of profligacy—as embodied by the Solara brothers. But Michele escaped me again. On the top floor of a recent structure I found only Gigliola, who greeted me with obvious amazement and an equally obvious bitterness. I realized that as long as I had used her mother’s telephone at all hours I had been cordial, but ever since I’d had the phone installed at home the entire Spagnuolo family had gone out of my life, and I’d scarcely noticed. And now without warning, at noon, on a dark day that threatened rain, I showed up here, in Posillipo, bursting into the house of a bride where everything was still topsy-turvy? I was ashamed, and greeted her with artificial warmth so that she would forgive me. For a while Gigliola remained sullen, and perhaps also alarmed, then her need to boast prevailed. She wanted me to envy her, she wanted to feel in a tangible way that I considered her the most fortunate of us all. And so, observing my reactions, enjoying my enthusiasm, she showed me the rooms, one by one, the expensive furniture, the gaudy lamps, two big bathrooms, the huge hot-water heater, the refrigerator, the washing machine, three telephones, unfortunately not yet hooked up, the I don’t know how many-inch television, and finally the terrace, which wasn’t a terrace but a hanging garden filled with flowers, whose multicolored variety the ugly day kept me from appreciating.