The Neapolitan Novels полностью

I examined the logo, a swirl around a vertical line. I stared at it with sudden emotion, as a further manifestation of her ungovernable mind—I wondered how many I had missed. I felt a sudden longing for the good moments of our past. Lila learned, set aside, learned. She couldn’t stop, she never retreated: the 34, the 5120, BASIC, Basic Sight, the logo. Lovely, I said, and I felt then the way I hadn’t felt with my mother and my sister. They all seemed happy to have me among them again, and drew me generously into their lives. Enzo, as if to demonstrate that his ideas hadn’t changed in spite of prosperity, began to relate in his dry manner what he saw when he went around to the factories: people were working in terrible conditions for practically nothing, and sometimes he was ashamed at having to transform the filth of exploitation into the tidiness of programming. Lila, for her part, said that to obtain that tidiness the bosses had been forced to show her all their dirt close up, and she spoke sarcastically about the duplicity, the tricks, the scams that were behind the façade of orderly accounts. Carmen was not to be outdone, she talked about gas, she exclaimed: Here, too, there’s shit everywhere. And only at that point she mentioned her brother, citing all the right reasons that had led him to do wrong things. She recalled the neighborhood of our childhood and adolescence. She told the story—she had never told it before—of when she and Pasquale were children and their father listed point by point what the fascists, led by Don Achille, had done to him: the time he had been beaten up right at the entrance to the tunnel; the time they’d made him kiss the photograph of Mussolini but he had spit on it, and if they hadn’t murdered him, if he hadn’t disappeared like so many comrades—there is no history of those whom the fascists killed and then “disappeared”—it was only because he had the carpentry shop and was well known in the neighborhood, and if they had removed him from the face of the earth everyone would have noticed.

So the time passed. At a certain point there was such a strong feeling of friendship that they decided to give me real proof of it. Carmen consulted Enzo and Lila with a look, then she said warily: We can trust Lenuccia. When she saw that they agreed she said that they had recently seen Pasquale. He had appeared one night at Carmen’s house, and she had called Lila, and Lila had hurried over with Enzo. Pasquale was well. He was clean, not a hair out of place, very well dressed, he looked like a surgeon. But they had found him sad. His ideas had remained the same, but he was incredibly sad. He had said that he would never surrender, that they would have to kill him. Before leaving he had looked in at his nephews as they slept: he didn’t even know their names. Carmen here began to cry, but silently, so that her children wouldn’t come in. We said, she first of all, she more than me, more than Lila (Lila was laconic, Enzo confined himself to nodding), that we didn’t like Pasquale’s choices, that we felt horror at the bloody disorder of Italy and the world, but that he knew the same essential things that we knew, and even if he had committed whatever terrible acts—among those you read about in the papers—and even if we were comfortable with our lives in information technology, Latin and Greek, books, gas, we would never reject him. None of those who loved him would do so.

The day ended there. There was only one last question, which I asked Lila and Enzo, because I was feeling at ease and had in mind what Elisa had said to me a little earlier. I asked: And the Solaras? Enzo immediately stared at the floor. Lila shrugged, she said: The usual pieces of shit. Then she said sarcastically that Michele had gone mad: after his mother’s death he had left Gigliola, he had thrown his wife and children out of the house on Posillipo and if they showed up there he beat them. The Solaras—she said, with a hint of gratification—are finished: imagine, Marcello goes around saying it’s my fault that his brother is behaving like that. And here she narrowed her eyes, with an expression of satisfaction, as if what Marcello said were a compliment. Then she concluded: A lot of things have changed, Lenù, since you left; you should stay with us now; give me your phone number, we ought see each other as much as we can; and then I want to send you Gennaro, you have to see if you can help him.

She took a pen and got ready to write. I dictated the first two numbers right away, then I got confused, I had learned the number only a few days earlier and I couldn’t remember it. When, however, it did come to mind precisely, I hesitated again, I was afraid she would come back and settle in my life; I dictated two more numbers, and got the other numbers wrong on purpose.