But in general her interest in the infant didn’t last long. She began to speak of her own childhood, of adolescence. She went back to when she was five, then she slid to twelve, then fourteen, and she related to me from within those ages things that had happened to her and her companions of that time. One morning she said to me in dialect: As a child I knew about death, I’ve always known about it, but I never thought it would happen to me, and even now I can’t believe it. Another time, following her own thoughts, she began to laugh, and whispered: You’re right not to baptize the baby, it’s nonsense; now that I’m dying I know that I’ll turn into little bits and pieces. But mostly it was in those slow hours that I truly felt I was her favorite child. When she embraced me before I left, it was as if she meant to slip inside me and stay there, as once I had been inside her. That contact with her body, which had irritated me when she was healthy, I now liked.
65.
It was odd how the clinic soon became a place of meeting for the old and the young of the neighborhood.
My father slept there with my mother, and when I saw him in the morning his beard was unshaven, his eyes were frightened. We barely greeted each other, but that didn’t seem unusual. I had never had much contact with him: at times affectionate, often distracted, occasionally in support of me against my mother. But it had almost always been superficial. My mother had given him a role and taken it away according to convenience, and especially when it came to me—making and unmaking my life was to be only for her—she had pushed him into the background. Now that the energy of his wife had almost completely vanished, he didn’t know how to talk to me nor I to him. I said hi, he said hi, then he added: while you keep her company, I’ll go smoke a cigarette. Sometimes I wondered how he had managed to survive, a man so ordinary, in the fierce world he had moved in, in Naples, in his job, in the neighborhood, even at home.
When Elisa arrived with her baby I saw that there was a greater intimacy between her and our father. Elisa treated him with affectionate authority. Often she stayed all day and sometimes all night, sending him home to sleep in his own bed. As soon as she arrived, my sister had to criticize everything, the dust, the windows, the food. She did it to make herself respected, she wanted it to be clear that she was in charge. And Peppe and Gianni matched her. When they felt my mother was suffering and my father desperate, both would get upset, press the bell, call the nurse. If the nurse delayed, my brothers reprimanded her harshly and then, contradicting themselves, gave her lavish tips. Gianni especially, before leaving, would stick some money in her pocket, saying: Stay right outside the door and hop up as soon as Mamma calls you, have your coffee when you’re off duty, is that clear? Then, to let it be understood that our mother was a person of consequence, he would mention three or four times the name of the Solaras. Signora Greco—he would say—is the Solaras’ business.
Occasionally the days were simpler. Carmen, for example, sometimes came to get me in her car. And Alfonso did the same. Naturally it was a sign of affection for me. They spoke respectfully to my mother, at most they gave her some satisfaction by praising her granddaughter and the comfort of the room. The rest of the time they spent either talking in the corridor with me or waiting outside, in the car, to be in time to take me to pick up the girls at school. The mornings with them were always intense and created a curious effect: they brought together the neighborhood of my mother, now near its end, and the one being constructed under Lila’s influence.
