Of course I intuited that behind that tension there must be a story of wrongs done and suffered, but I knew little, at the time, of family affairs, and above all I didn’t consider that terrible aunt a member of the family. She was a childhood bogeyman, a lean, demonic silhouette, an unkempt figure lurking in the corners of houses when darkness falls. Was it possible, then, that without any warning I should discover that I was getting her face? I? I who until that moment had thought that I was pretty and assumed, thanks to my father, that I would remain so forever? I who, with his constant affirmation, thought I had beautiful hair, I who wanted to be loved as he loved me, as he had accustomed me to believing I was loved, I who was already suffering because both my parents were suddenly unhappy with me, and that unhappiness distressed me, tarnishing everything?
I waited for my mother to speak, but her reaction didn’t console me. Although she hated all her husband’s relatives and detested her sister-in-law the way you detest a lizard that runs up your bare leg, she didn’t respond by yelling at him: you’re crazy, my daughter and your sister have nothing in common. She merely offered a weak, laconic: what are you talking about, of course she isn’t. And I, there in my room, hurried to close the door so as not to hear anything else. Then I wept in silence and stopped only when my father came to announce—this time in his nice voice—that dinner was ready.
I joined them in the kitchen with dry eyes, and had to endure, looking at my plate, a series of suggestions for improving my grades. Afterward I went back to pretending to study, while they settled in front of the television. My suffering wouldn’t end or even diminish. Why had my father made that statement? Why had my mother not forcefully contradicted it? Was their displeasure due to my bad grades or was it an anxiety that was separate from school, that had existed for years? And him, especially him, had he spoken those cruel words because of a momentary irritation I had caused him, or, with his sharp gaze—the gaze of someone who knows and sees everything—had he long ago discerned the features of my ruined future, of an advancing evil that upset him and that he himself didn’t know how to respond to? I was in despair all night. In the morning I was convinced that, if I wanted to save myself, I had to go and see what Aunt Vittoria’s face was really like.
3.
It was an arduous undertaking. In a city like Naples, inhabited by families with numerous branches that even when they were fighting, even when the fights were bloody, never really cut their ties, my father lived in utter autonomy, as though he had no blood relatives, as if he were self-generated. I had often had dealings with my mother’s parents and her brother. They were all affectionate people who gave me lots of presents, and until my grandparents died—first my grandfather and a year later my grandmother: sudden deaths that had upset me, had made my mother cry the way we girls cried when we hurt ourselves—and my uncle left for a job far away, we had seen them frequently and happily. Whereas I knew almost nothing about my father’s relatives. They had appeared in my life only on rare occasions—a wedding, a funeral—and always in a climate of such false affection that all I got out of it was the awkwardness of forced contact: say hello to your grandfather, give your aunt a kiss. In those relatives, therefore, I had never been much interested, also because after those encounters my parents were tense and forgot them by mutual consent, as if they’d been involved in some second-rate performance.
It should also be said that if my mother’s relatives lived in a precise place with an evocative name, Museo—they were the Museo grandparents—the space where my father’s relatives lived was undefined, nameless. I knew only one thing for certain: to visit them you had to go down, and down, keep going down, into the depths of the depths of Naples, and the journey was so long it seemed to me that we and my father’s relatives lived in two different cities. And for a long time that appeared to be true. We lived in the highest part of Naples, and to go anywhere we had inevitably to descend. My father and mother went willingly only as far as the Vomero, or, with some annoyance, to my grandparents’ house in Museo. And their friends were mainly in Via Suarez, Piazza degli Artisti, Via Luca Giordano, Via Scarlatti, Via Cimarosa, streets that were well known to me because many of my schoolmates lived there as well. Not to mention that they all led to Villa Floridiana, a park I loved, where my mother had brought me for fresh air and sunshine when I was an infant, and where I had spent pleasant hours with my friends of early childhood, Angela and Ida. Only after those place names, all happily colored by plants, fragments of the sea, gardens, flowers, games, and good manners, did the real descent begin, the one my parents considered irritating. For work, for shopping, for the need that my father, in particular, had for study, encounter, and debate, they descended daily, usually on the funiculars, to Chiaia, to Toledo, and from there went on to Piazza Plebiscito, the Biblioteca Nazionale, to Port’Alba and Via Ventaglieri and Via Foria, and, at most, Piazza Carlo III, where my mother’s school was. I knew those names well, too—my parents mentioned them frequently but didn’t often take me there, and maybe that’s why the names didn’t give me the same happiness. Outside of the Vomero, the city scarcely belonged to me, in fact the farther it spread on that lower ground, the more unknown it seemed. So it was natural that the areas where my father’s relatives lived had, in my eyes, the features of worlds still wild and unexplored. For me not only were they nameless but, from the way my parents referred to them, I felt they must be difficult to get to. The times we had to go there, my mother and father, who usually were energetic and willing, seemed especially weary, especially anxious. I was young, but their tension, their exchanges—always the same—stayed with me.
“Andrea,” my mother would say in a tired voice, “get dressed, we have to go.”
But he went on reading and underlining books with the same pencil he used to write in a notebook he had beside him.
“Andrea, it’s getting late, they’ll be angry.”
“Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“And the child?”
“The child, too.”
My father then abandoned books and notebooks, leaving them open on the desk, put on a clean shirt, his good suit. But he was taciturn, tense, as if he were rehearsing mentally the lines of an inevitable role. My mother, meanwhile, who wasn’t ready at all, kept checking her own appearance, mine, my father’s, as if only the proper clothing could guarantee that we would all three return home safe and sound. In sum, it was obvious that, on each of those occasions, they believed they had to defend themselves from people and places of which they said nothing to me, so as not to upset me. But still I noticed the anomalous anxiety, or, rather, I recognized it, it had always been there, perhaps the only memory of distress in a happy childhood. What worried me were sentences like this, uttered in an Italian that, for one thing, seemed—I don’t know how to say it—splintered.
“Remember, if Vittoria says something, pretend you didn’t hear.”