Who had put on this show? Who had mixed together different reasons to celebrate? Elisa obviously, but pushed by whom? Maybe by Marcello. But Marcello had surely been directed by Michele, who was sitting next to me, and who, at his ease, ate, drank, pretended to ignore the behavior of his wife and children, but stared ironically at my husband, who seemed fascinated by Lila. What did he want to prove? That this was the territory of the Solaras? That even if I had escaped I belonged to that place and therefore to them? That they could force on me anything by mobilizing affections, vocabulary, rituals, but also by destroying them, by making at their convenience the ugly beautiful and the beautiful ugly? He spoke to me for the first time since he had arrived. Did you see Mamma, he said, imagine, she’s sixty, but who would ever say so, look how pretty she is, she carries it well, no? He raised his voice on purpose, so that everyone could hear not so much his question as the answer that I was now obliged to give. I had to speak in praise of Mamma. Here she was, sitting next to Pietro, an old woman who was a little vague, polite, apparently innocuous, with a long bony face, a massive nose, that crazy flower in her thinning hair. And yet she was the loan shark who had founded the family fortunes; the caretaker and guardian of the red book in which were the names of so many in the neighborhood, the city, and the province; the woman of the crime without punishment, a ruthless and dangerous woman, according to the telephonic fantasy I had indulged in, along with Lila, and according to the pages of my aborted novel: Mamma who had killed Don Achille, to replace him and gain a monopoly on loan-sharking, and who had brought up her two sons to seize everything, trampling on everyone. And now I had the obligation to say to Michele: Yes, it’s true, how pretty your mother looks, how well she carries her years, congratulations. And I saw out of the corner of my eye that Lila had stopped talking to Pietro and expected nothing else, already she was turning to look at me, her full lips parted, her eyes cracks, her brow furrowed. I read the sarcasm in her face, it occurred to me that maybe she had suggested to Michele that he put me in that cage:
Michele, although he had turned to me, seemed to give my husband’s good wishes more importance. He spoke to him politely: too kind, Prof, you aren’t from here and you can’t know the good qualities of our mother. He assumed a confidential tone: We’re good folk, my late grandfather, rest his soul, started out with the bar here at the corner, started from nothing, and my father expanded it, he made a pastry shop that’s famous in all Naples, thanks also to the skill of Spagnuolo, my wife’s father, an extraordinary artisan—right, Gigliò? But, he added, it’s to my mother, to
