A few weeks ago, a debate raged on the twitter-verse over a question of hospitality: Is it strange/cold/unthinkable that a visiting kid/playmate would not be fed by the host family? Some cultures (for example, Middle Eastern countries) are perhaps excessively fond of sharing food with everyone including strangers, while in other cultures (for example, Sweden) people keep enough distance from others so as to spare them of the sense of obligation and indebtedness. There is no right or wrong, and I was only amused by the various expressions of outrage and shock making the rounds online. Because I understand both sides of the argument, growing up in a culture where relationships and kindness are used as a currency and a lubricant in daily life. More often than not, the rule of the transactions puzzled me and made me feel like a failure. Such a culture is certainly not easy on introverts.
As I am re-reading the third book in the Neapolitan series, the idea of people using people keeps returning to my mind. Never have I read an English language novel in which the subtle transactions in relationships are described so densely and pervasively. Putting aside the undefinable and entangled transactions in families, we are introduced to a huge variety of interpersonal uses. A rich example is how Lenu used her newfound connections to the prominent and well-connected in-laws, the Airota family, to help her exhausted and defeated friend in her lowest point. The Airota family referred Lenu to the editor of l'Unita to publish an expose, to a famous cardiologist to conduct a free examination on Lila, and to a lawyer who forced Lila's boss to cough up the salary he had owed her. At each stop, Lenu was reminded not so subtly that she was using her in-laws' intangible credits in society. A person with highly sensitive social antennae and adaptability, Lenu navigated the referrals with confidence and competence at a young age. In other words, she used her in-laws and their friends in the best way one can and reaped the rewards without depleting the intangible account of social favors.
Indirectly, Lila was using Lenu in the process, but Lenu instinctively remembered the emotional debt she had owed Lila and how she had used Lila just a few years ago, when Lila bought her textbooks using Stefano's money and let her study in her house, bought by Stefano, not to mention the inspiration she drew from Lila's childish book, The Blue Fairy, for her own successful debut novel. One may recall how Lila casually took money from the store cashier and gave it liberally to her friends, when she was working there as Stefano's wife. It can be interpreted as Lila using Stefano, or perhaps she perceived it as a debt owed to her because Stefano abused and controlled her in their marriage. Ah, the intricate web of the invisible currency passed between one person and the other. It defines a fundamental part of human relationships, but only the Italians can be so acutely aware of it.
Lila's stint at the sausage factory also illustrates the ways people used her. Pasquale and his comrade used her to advance their union-organizing activities against the boss Soccavo. At one point, they even used Lila's first-hand report of working conditions without her consent. When she quit her job, Pasquale was quite unsatisfied with the abrupt end of her contribution to his cause. In parallel, Lila and Enzo used each other and became emotionally dependent on each other, despite the lack of sexual gratification (yet), and enriched each other's life.
When there is love and reciprocity between two people, the flow of favors and use is free and easy and voluntary, like the relationships between Lila and Lenu, and Lila and Enzo. When it is primarily driven by greed and narcissism, such transactions become dark very quickly. When Lenu visited Gigliola at her super luxurious apartment in Posillipo with an astounding view, it quickly came out that Gigliola paid dearly for her long relationship with Michele Solara, even though she had probably thought that she had made a great bargain in the beginning. She used Michele to gain an upper class status and lifestyle, along with constant neglect and insults.
Michele may be the ultimate user of people among them all. Gigliola described his usual way of using over a hundred women, "to feel them under him, to turn them over, to turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them." As Lila held a special place in the heart of this psychopath, she was the only woman he did not want to treat the same way as he did the others. Instead, he "wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last." Reading this passage, it suddenly became clear to me that Michele's obsession with Lila's creativity, intellect, and imagination was rooted in his own hollowness and his awareness of this hollowness. So he wanted to possess her and use her and fill up the hole inside himself with her special talent.
In the two cultures with which I am most intimately familiar, sexual desire and the desire for power are so inextricably entangled that there is often no distinction. There are countless women's fantasies in which a man like Michele is the ultimate object of women's desire, in the hopes of rubbing off some of his raw dominance. Yet the author had no such illusions. Even Gigliola was unable to fool herself into enjoying her status as Michele's wife, not to mention Lila's unwavering contempt and hatred toward the Solaras. This is one of the criticisms I've heard about the novels: There is so little self-deception and self-repression in all of these characters. Their instincts are so strong and direct that we the readers are also forced to lay bare our own crudest and truest emotions and motives. There is nowhere to hide from ourselves.
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