The Story of the Lost Child Read Free

Gerace,
high-school teacher. 

    Professor Galiani,
high-school teacher.
     
    Other characters:
    Gino,
son of the pharmacist; Elena’s first boyfriend.

    Nella Incardo,
the cousin of Maestra Oliviero.
    Armando,
doctor, son of Professor Galiani. Married to Isabella, with whom he has a son named Marco.
    Nadia,
student, daughter of Professor Galiani, was Nino’s girlfriend. During a period of militant political activity, she becomes attached to Pasquale Peluso.
    Bruno Soccavo,
friend of Nino Sarratore and the heir to a sausage factory. He is killed in his factory.
    Franco Mari,
Elena’s boyfriend during her first years at the university, has devoted himself to political activism. He loses an eye in a Fascist attack.
    Silvia
, a university student and political activist. She has a son, Mirko, from a brief relationship with Nino Sarratore.

M ATURITY

1.
    F rom October 1976 until 1979, when I returned to Naples to live, I avoided resuming a steady relationship with Lila. But it wasn’t easy. She almost immediately tried to reenter my life by force, and I ignored her, tolerated her, endured her. Even if she acted as if there were nothing she wanted more than to be close to me at a difficult moment, I couldn’t forget the contempt with which she had treated me.
    Today I think that if it had been only the insult that wounded me—You’re an idiot, she had shouted on the telephone when I told her about Nino, and she had never,
ever
spoken to me like that before—I would have soon calmed down. In reality, what mattered more than that offense was the mention of Dede and Elsa. Think of the harm you’re doing to your daughters, she had warned me, and at the moment I had paid no attention. But over time those words acquired greater weight, and I returned to them often. Lila had never displayed the slightest interest in Dede and Elsa; almost certainly she didn’t even remember their names. If, on the phone, I mentioned some intelligent remark they had made, she cut me off, changed the subject. And when she met them for the first time, at the house of Marcello Solara, she had confined herself to an absentminded glance and a few pat phrases—she hadn’t paid the least attention to how nicely they were dressed, how neatly their hair was combed, how well both were able to express themselves, although they were still small. And yet
I
had given birth to them,
I
had brought them up, they were part of me, who had been her friend forever: she should have taken this into account—I won’t say out of affection but at least out of politeness—for my maternal pride. Yet she hadn’t even attempted a little good-natured sarcasm; she had displayed indifference and nothing more. Only now—out of jealousy, surely, because I had taken Nino—did she remember the girls, and wanted to emphasize that I was a terrible mother, that although I was happy, I was causing them unhappiness. The minute I thought about it I became anxious. Had Lila worried about Gennaro when she left Stefano, when she abandoned the child to the neighbor because of her work in the factory, when she sent him to me as if to get him out of the way? Ah, I had my faults, but I was certainly more a mother than she was.

2.
    Such thoughts became a habit in those years. It was as if Lila, who, after all, had uttered only that one malicious remark about Dede and Elsa, had become the defense lawyer for their needs as daughters, and, every time I neglected them to devote myself to myself, I felt obliged to prove to her that she was wrong. But it was a voice invented by ill feeling; what she really thought of my behavior as a mother I don’t know. Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I’m able to say. I wish for this intrusion, I’ve hoped for it ever since I began to write