The Story of the Lost Child

“For a moment, as I looked at the dark water and smelled its odor, it seemed that the neighborhood was much farther away than when I had gone to Pisa, to Florence. Even Naples, suddenly, seemed very far from Naples. And Lila from Lila, I felt that beside me I had not her but my own anxieties. Only Nino and I were close, very close.”

Elena feels that the Naples she shares with her lover Nino is different from the city she grew up in. The fantastical idea that this Naples is further away than the more geographically distant Pisa and Florence metaphorically conveys that Elena feels distant from the unconfident girl she was growing up. Elena’s sense of alienation is also shown in the sense of her distance from Lila. The fact that she retains her own anxieties and not Lila’s indicates her feeling that she has definitively left her old friend behind.

“Night after night, I went around recognizing myself in an idea that suggested general disintegration, and, at the same time, new composition.”

Elena’s idea that she is decomposing and recomposing herself on her book tour indicates her general feeling that she is in a state of flux. As she leaves behind the phase of being a devoted wife and mother in favor of a more self-interested existence, she is impressionable and liable to be influenced by everything.

“It’s obvious that you are Elena Greco, it’s now far too obvious. But the children are my son’s daughters and we will not allow you to ruin them.”

Adele’s chilling use of Elena’s maiden name and assertion that it is far too obvious that this name suits her, indicates that Adele always looked down upon Elena’s working-class Neapolitan origins. Adele admits that Elena’s failure to integrate into the Airotas’ notions of propriety is irredeemable. Moreover, she reinforces her claim on Elena’s children by stating that Elena is a destructive force who will ruin them, while she has the class-credentials to redeem them.

“It was humiliating to have to admit that a little fame, and love for Nino, could obscure Dede and Elsa. And yet it was so. The echo of Lila’s phrase, Think of the harm you’re doing your daughters, became in that period a sort of permanent epigraph that introduced unhappiness.”

Elena raises a taboo in breaking the expectation that motherhood should be the most important aspect of a woman’s life. She admits that the distraction of love and career success can obscure her responsibilities to her daughters. The phrase “and yet it was so” emphasizes this point matter-of-factly. However, Lila’s statement takes on the voice of her conscience and stops her from being fully happy in her distraction.

“I seemed to hear in her voice, to recognize in a movement of her hand, the tones, the gestures of our friend. I thought again of Alfonso, I remembered my impression that he, a male, resembled Lila even in his features. Was the neighborhood […] finding its direction?”

Elena notices the physical resemblance between Lila and Alfonso, which occurs at the level of dress, voice, and gesture. She wonders whether it is a symptom of Lila’s increasing influence in the neighborhood. It is as though Alfonso and potentially other citizens are modelling themselves according to her ideas, rather than following the Solaras.

“As usual she was taking on the job of sticking a pin in my heart not to stop it but to make it beat harder. Her eyes were narrowed, her broad forehead wrinkled. She waited for my reaction. She wanted me to scream, weep, hand myself over to her.”

This passage expresses the dynamic between Lila and Elena. Lila’s goal is to consistently provoke Elena out of compliance and self-satisfaction with her actions, and she does so potently when she tells her that Nino is still living with his wife Eleonora. In the metaphorical state of a heart that beats faster, Lila wants Elena to transfer her passion for Nino over to her. However, Elena sees this as a game of power rather than real care and will resist Lila’s wish for her breakdown.

“I wanted my disorder to crash into him and overwhelm him, as it was overwhelming me. He had deceived me. He had held onto his family and, like a toy, me, too. I had chosen definitively, he hadn’t.”

This double standard—in which Elena totally gives up her life for Nino, but Nino keeps the privileges of his married state—sets the tenor of their relationship. Elena’s life has been turned upside down, and in her rage she wishes to have the disorder of her current situation overwhelm Nino. She wants to make him suffer a portion of the pain she has experienced in her sacrifices.

“Yes, the force of Nino’s attraction would wear out. Yes, I had a lot of things to do. Yes, Nino loved me, he loved Dede and Elsa. But there were also others, yes, whom I pretended to ignore. Yes, I was more attracted to him than ever. Yes, I was ready to neglect everything and everyone if he needed me.”

The succession of affirmatives in this passage indicates Elena’s state of surrender. She is going along with life, Nino’s expectations, and her changing feelings as though there is no alternative. This indicates the phase of her life where she is entirely dominated by Nino, despite his double standards and the imbalance in their relationship.

“Lila had struck with precision a point in myself that I kept carefully hidden and which had to do with the urge for motherhood I’d noticed for the first time a dozen years ago, when I had held little Mirko, in Mariarosa’s house. It had been a completely irrational impulse, a sort of command of love, which at the time had overwhelmed me. I had intuited then that it was not a simple wish to have a child, I wanted a particular child, a child like Mirko, a child of Nino’s.”

Elena once again finds that Lila can shed light on the deep wishes of her psyche. Elena’s continuous desire for Nino means that, despite having two children with Pietro, she will not feel complete until she has Nino’s child. Prior to her pregnancy, she can imagine that she can select the kind of child she will have and that he will resemble Mirko, the child Nino had with another woman out of wedlock.

“What’s the sea, from up there? A bit of color. Better if you’re closer, that way you notice that there’s filth, mud, piss, polluted water. But you who read and write books like to tell lies, not the truth.”

Lila disparages Elena’s choice to live away from the neighborhood in an apartment with a sea view. In describing the sea as “a bit of color,” she indicates that it is a false reason to live away from the reality of life in Naples in all its abject wonder. She accuses Elena of preferring lies to the truth and, through her reading and writing, craving distance over what is near and true.

“Lila, always in control of everything, at that moment wasn’t in control of anything. She was immobilized by horror, fearful that if I merely touched her she would break.”

Elena conveys how Lila is terrified by natural phenomena such as earthquakes because they happen apart from Lila’s sphere of control over people and events. Lila’s frozen response expresses her absolute terror at having to experience the earthquake and wait until it has passed. She has a similar response to the natural phenomenon of childbirth.

“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.”

This is a tender scene that reverses Elena’s lifelong discomfort with her mother and disgust with her body. Now that her mother’s body is dying, Elena feels close to her mother. She feels a reversal of roles; her mother prepares to slip inside her, as Elena had once been in her womb. The idea of still being her favorite child denotes how, despite the conflict between them recently, the preference still stands.

“First I saw, in the luminous space of the long mirror, Silvana’s head bent forward, and I was stuck by the stripe of the center part, the two black bands of her hair threaded with white. Then I became aware of Nino’s closed eyes, his open mouth. Suddenly, in a flash, the reflected image and the real bodies came together.”

Elena’s sighting of Nino’s infidelity in the mirror indicates the piecemeal nature in which humans process a shocking revelation. Silvana’s old-fashioned hairstyle heightens the shock, as she is the opposite of the cultivated, stylish women Elena has seen Nino flirt with. The “flash” speed in which the bodies come together and spell out the infidelity implies that Elena has always instinctively known that Nino was unfaithful to her.

“I felt strong, no longer a victim of my origins but capable of dominating them, of giving them a shape, of taking revenge on them for myself, for Lila, for whomever. What before was dragging me down was now the material for climbing higher.”

This marks a turning point in Elena’s experience, as she goes from feeling victimized and apologetic for her origins to using them as material for her own success. Having finally rejected Adele’s idea that she should try to be a Northern Italian in disguise, Elena returns to the neighborhood.

“I read the article, four pages with pictures of the ugliest places in the neighborhood: the only one with me was the one with Tina, a beautiful picture in which the bleak background of the apartment gave our two figures a particular refinement.”

The photo with Tina will become especially important when it is seen as a picture of the little girl’s final triumph prior to her disappearance. Both Elena and Tina, who is mistakenly captioned as her daughter, are mistakenly identified as diamonds in the rough, as their beauty is magnified by the depressing surroundings.

“I was paralyzed by that utterly unpredictable gesture. Not even Lila could have imagined it, we were now so used to the idea that Michele not would never touch her but would kill anyone who did. I was unable to scream, not even a choked sound came out of me.’”

The incident where Michele punches Lila at Antonio’s funeral indicates a change of tune in his attitude towards her; he will no longer act as her protector but declares himself her enemy. Normally composed Elena’s paralyzed reaction models the enormity of this changed allegiance for the reader. In the aftermath of Tina’s disappearance, Michele’s act would seem to make him the prime suspect. However, there is insufficient evidence to prove that he is responsible.

“Imma, as I’ve said, had always worried me a little, and even when she stood up well to Tina’s vivacity she still seemed to lack something. Also, some time earlier I had recognized in her features of mine that I didn’t like. She was submissive, she gave in immediately out of fear of not being liked, it depressed her that she had given in.”

Imma reflects back to Elena the qualities that she finds unattractive and even intolerable in herself. These include her dullness beside Lila and her inability to resist the will of others—namely, Lila and Nino. Elena projects her feelings of inferiority onto her daughter.

“Lila continued talking to Nino. She told him about the times Gennaro had disappeared […] I was terrified, I imagined the worst things, and instead he was sitting quietly in the gardens. But it was precisely as she remembered that episode that she lost color. Her eyes emptied, in a changed voice she asked Enzo: ‘Did you find her, where is she?’”

This passage conveys the process of Lila emerging from under Nino’s enchantment and the spell of trying to impress him. Lila now realizes that Tina’s disappearance may be more serious than Gennaro’s disappearances. The physical changes of emptying eyes and an altered tone of voice indicate her abrupt return to the urgency of the situation.

“The grief couldn’t coagulate around anything. She had no lifeless body to cling to in despair, there was no one for whom to hold a funeral, she couldn’t linger before a corpse that had walked, run, talked, hugged her, and had ended up a broken thing […] But I don’t know the suffering that derived from it well enough, nor can I imagine it.”

Here, Lila undergoes the trauma of ambiguous loss, whereby she must account for her daughter’s disappearance without having a body to mourn. Without a physical object to coagulate around and form a wound, her trauma tortures her because it has nothing to concentrate on. Elena’s incapacity to imagine exactly what Lila feels conveys Lila’s absolute loneliness.

“Now that I was surrounded by admiration, I could admit without uneasiness that talking to her incited ideas, pushed me to make connections between distant things […] I said to myself that to be adult was to recognize that I needed her impulses. If once I had hidden, even from myself, that spark she induced in me, now I was proud of it.”

From the security of her position as a successful writer, Elena recognizes that Lila is indispensable to her creativity. Lila is like a bright but uncomfortable force that makes Elena confront the hidden parts of herself and draw on those parts to write towards truth and excellence.

“Marcello and Michele were, like it or not, part of us, just as Pasquale was […] the line of separation in relation to people like the Solaras had been and was, in Naples, in Italy, vague. The farther we jumped back in horror, the more certain it was that we were behind the line.”

Although she and Lila loathe what the Camorrist Solaras stand for, Elena feels they are implicated in their violence, simply by being in the same neighborhood and associating with them in daily life. This is part of the motif of endemic corruption that emerges at the end of the novel.

“Maybe what had attracted Nino was the impression of having found in Lila what he, too, presumed he had and that now, just by comparison, he discovered that he didn’t have. She possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity.”

Elena conjectures that while Nino was initially attracted to Lila because he assumed that they were alike in possessing an extraordinary intelligence, he then discovered that her intelligence was of a superior and more effortless quality to his, because it was not applied to a specific purpose. Through the simile of an aristocratic lady who has abundant wealth and considers it lower-class to put it to use, the book humorously describes the richness of Lila’s intelligence and the spontaneous, casual way she applies it.

“Here everything was built and everything was torn down, here the people don’t trust talk and are very talkative, here is Vesuvius which reminds you every day that the greatest undertaking of powerful men, the most splendid work, can be reduced to nothing in a few seconds by the fire, and the earthquake, and the ash, and the sea.”

This passage is taken from Imma’s report of what Lila told her about Naples. According to Lila, the city runs on cycles of magnificence and destruction, which are built into its very topography. For example, the natural features of volcano, fault lines, and ocean repeatedly humble the best meager efforts of humanity. This is also a metaphor for the human fabric of the city, which is prone to the sudden horrors of violence, corruption, and internment.