The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  She has Stefano, I said to myself after the episode of the glasses. She snaps her fingers and immediately has my glasses repaired. What do I have?

  I answered that I had school, a privilege she had lost forever. That is my wealth, I tried to convince myself. And in fact that year all the teachers began to praise me again. My report cards were increasingly brilliant, and even the correspondence course in theology went well, I got a Bible with a black cover as a prize.

  I displayed my successes as if they were my mother’s silver bracelet, and yet I didn’t know what to do with that virtuosity. In my class there was no one to talk to about what I read, the ideas that came into my mind. Alfonso was a diligent student; after the failure of the preceding year he had got back on track and was doing well in all the subjects. But when I tried to talk to him about The Betrothed, or the marvelous books I still borrowed from Maestro Ferraro’s library, or about the Holy Spirit, he merely listened, and, out of timidity or ignorance, never said anything that would inspire me to further thoughts. Besides, while in school he used a good Italian; when it was just the two of us he never abandoned dialect, and in dialect it was hard to discuss the corruption of earthly justice, as it could be seen during the lunch at the house of Don Rodrigo, or the relations between God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus, who, although they were a single person, when they were divided in three, I thought, necessarily had to have a hierarchy, and then who came first, who last?

  I remembered what Pasquale had once said: that my high school, even if it was a classical high school, was surely not one of the best. I concluded that he was right. Rarely did I see my schoolmates dressed as well as the girls of Via dei Mille. And, when school was out, you never saw elegantly dressed young men, in cars more luxurious than those of Marcello and Stefano, waiting to pick them up. Intellectually, too, they were deficient. The only student who had a reputation like mine was Nino, but now, because of the coldness with which I had treated him, he went off with his head down, he didn’t even look at me. What to do, then?

  I needed to express myself, my head was bursting. I turned to Lila, especially when school was on vacation. We met, we talked. I told her in detail about the classes, the teachers. She listened intently, and I hoped that she would become curious and go back to the phase when in secret or openly she would eagerly get the books that would allow her to keep up with me. But it never happened, it was as if one part of her kept a tight rein on the other part. Instead she developed a tendency to interrupt right away, in general in an ironic manner. Once, just to give an example, I told her about my theology course and said, to impress her with the questions that tormented me, that I didn’t know what to think about the Holy Spirit, its function wasn’t clear to me. “Is it,” I argued aloud, “a subordinate entity, in the service of both God and Jesus, like a messenger? Or an emanation of the first two, their miraculous essence? But in the first case how can an entity who acts as a messenger possibly be one with God and his son? Wouldn’t it be like saying that my father who is a porter at the city hall is the same as the mayor, as Comandante Lauro? And, if you look at the second case, well, essence, sweat, voice are part of the person from whom they emanate: how can it make sense, then, to consider the Holy Spirit separate from God and Jesus? Or is the Holy Spirit the most important person and the other two his mode of being, or I don’t understand what his function is.” Lila, I remember, was preparing to go out with Stefano: they were going to a cinema in the center with Pinuccia, Rino, and Alfonso. I watched while she put on a new skirt, a new jacket, and she was truly another person now, even her ankles were no longer like sticks. Yet I saw that her eyes narrowed, as when she tried to grasp something fleeting. She said, in dialect, “You still waste time with those things, Lenù? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you’ll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me?” That was how she talked, more or less, confusing me. And not only in a situation like that but more and more often, until that tone became established, became her way of standing up to me. If I said something about the Very Holy Trinity, she with a few hurried but good-humored remarks cut off any possible conversation and went on to show me Stefano’s presents, the engagement ring, the necklace, a new dress, a hat, while the things that I loved, that made me shine in front of the teachers, so that they considered me clever, slumped in a corner, deprived of their meaning. I let go of ideas, books. I went on to admire all those gifts that contrasted with the humble house of Fernando the shoemaker; I tried on the dresses and the jewelry; I almost immediately noticed that they would never suit me as they did her; and I was depressed.

  44.

  In the role of fiancée, Lila was much envied and caused quite a lot of resentment. After all, her behavior had been irritating when she was a skinny little child, imagine now that she was a very fortunate young girl. She herself told me of an increasing hostility on the part of Stefano’s mother and, especially, Pinuccia. Their spiteful thoughts were stamped clearly on their faces. Who did the shoemaker’s daughter think she was? What evil potion had she made Stefano drink? How was it that as soon as she opened her mouth he opened his wallet? She wants to come and be mistress in our house?

  If Maria confined herself to a surly silence, Pinuccia couldn’t contain herself, she exploded, speaking to her brother like this: “Why do you buy all those things for her, while for me you’ve never bought anything, and as soon as I buy something nice you criticize me, you say I’m wasting money?”

  Stefano displayed his tranquil half smile and didn’t answer. But soon, in accord with his habit of accommodation, he began to give his sister presents, too. Thus a contest began between the two girls, they went to the hairdresser together, they bought the same dresses. This, however, only embittered Pinuccia the more. She wasn’t ugly, she was a few years older than us, maybe her figure was more developed, but there was no comparison between the effect made by any dress or object when Lila had it on and when Pinuccia wore it. It was her mother who realized this first. Maria, when she saw Lila and Pinuccia ready to go out, with the same hairstyle, in similar dresses, always found a way to digress and, by devious means, end up criticizing her future daughter-in-law, with false good humor, for something she had done days earlier—leaving the light on in the kitchen or the tap open after getting a glass of water. Then she turned the other way, as if she had a lot to do, and muttered, “Be home soon.”

  We girls of the neighborhood soon had similar problems. On holidays Carmela, who still wanted to be called Carmen, and Ada and Gigliola started dressing up, without admitting it, without admitting it to themselves, in competition with Lila. Gigliola in particular, who worked in the pastry shop, and who, although she wasn’t officially with Michele Solara, bought and had him buy pretty things, just to show off on walks or in the car. But there was no contest, Lila seemed inaccessible, a dazzling figurine against the light.

  At first we tried to keep her, to impose on her the old habits. We drew Stefano into our group, embraced him, coddled him, and he seemed pleased, and so one Saturday, perhaps impelled by his sympathy for Antonio and Ada, he said to Lila, “See if Lenuccia and Melina’s children will come and eat with us tomorrow evening.” By “us” he meant the two of them plus Pinuccia and Rino, who now liked to spend his free time with his future brother-in-law. We accepted, but it was a difficult evening. Ada, afraid of making a bad impression, borrowed a dress from Gigliola. Stefano and Rino
chose not a pizzeria but a restaurant in Santa Lucia. Neither I nor Antonio nor Ada had ever been in a restaurant, it was something for rich people, and we were overcome by anxiety: how should we dress, what would it cost? While the four of them went in the Giardinetta, we took the bus to Piazza Plebiscito and walked the rest of the way. At the restaurant, they casually ordered many dishes, and we almost nothing, out of fear that the bill would be more than we could afford. We were almost silent the whole time, because Rino and Stefano talked, mainly about money, and never thought of involving even Antonio in their conversations. Ada, not resigned to marginality, tried all evening to attract Stefano’s attention by flirting outrageously, which upset her brother. Then, when it was time to pay, we discovered that Stefano had already taken care of the bill, and, while it didn’t bother Rino at all, Antonio went home in a rage, because although he was the same age as Stefano and Lila’s brother, although he worked as they did, he felt he had been treated like a pauper. But the most significant thing was that Ada and I, with different feelings, realized that in a public place, outside of our intimate, neighborhood relationship, we didn’t know what to say to Lila, how to treat her. She was so well dressed, so carefully made up, that she seemed right for the Giardinetta, the convertible, the restaurant in Santa Lucia, but physically unsuited now to go on the metro with us, to travel on the bus, to walk around the neighborhood, to get a pizza in Corso Garibaldi, to go to the parish cinema, to dance at Gigliola’s house.

  That evening it became evident that Lila was changing her circumstances. In the days, the months, she became a young woman who imitated the models in the fashion magazines, the girls on television, the ladies she had seen walking on Via Chiaia. When you saw her, she gave off a glow that seemed a violent slap in the face of the poverty of the neighborhood. The girl’s body, of which there were still traces when we had woven the plot that led to her engagement to Stefano, was soon banished to dark lands. In the light of the sun she was instead a young woman who, when on Sundays she went out on the arm of her fiancé, seemed to apply the terms of their agreement as a couple, and Stefano, with his gifts, seemed to wish to demonstrate to the neighborhood that, if Lila was beautiful, she could always be more so; and she seemed to have discovered the joy of dipping into the inexhaustible well of her beauty, and to feel and show that no shape, however beautifully drawn, could contain her conclusively, since a new hairstyle, a new dress, a new way of making up her eyes or her mouth were only more expansive outlines that dissolved the preceding ones. Stefano seemed to seek in her the most palpable symbol of the future of wealth and power that he intended; and she seemed to use the seal that he was placing on her to make herself, her brother, her parents, her other relatives safe from all that she had confusedly confronted and challenged since she was a child.

  I still didn’t know anything about what she secretly called, in herself, after the bad experience of New Year’s, dissolving margins. But I knew the story of the exploded pot, it was always lying in ambush in some corner of my mind; I thought about it over and over again. And I remember that, one night at home, I reread the letter she had sent me on Ischia. How seductive was her way of talking about herself and how distant it seemed now. I had to acknowledge that the Lila who had written those words had disappeared. In the letter there was still the girl who had written The Blue Fairy, who had learned Latin and Greek on her own, who had consumed half of Maestro Ferraro’s library, even the girl who had drawn the shoes framed and hanging in the shoe store. But in the life of every day I no longer saw her, no longer heard her. The tense, aggressive Cerullo was as if immolated. Although we both continued to live in the same neighborhood, although we had had the same childhood, although we were both living our fifteenth year, we had suddenly ended up in two different worlds. I was becoming, as the months ran by, a sloppy, disheveled, spectacled girl bent over tattered books that gave off a moldy odor, volumes bought at great sacrifice at the secondhand store or obtained from Maestra Oliviero. She went around on Stefano’s arm in the clothes of an actress or a princess, her hair styled like a diva’s.

  I looked at her from the window, and felt that her earlier shape had broken, and I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter, of the cracked and crumpled copper. It was an image that I used all the time, whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.

  45.

  After the terrible evening in the restaurant in Santa Lucia there were no more occasions like that, and not because the boyfriends didn’t ask us again but because we now got out of it with one excuse or another. Instead, when I wasn’t exhausted by my homework, I let myself be drawn out to a dance at someone’s house, to have a pizza with the old group. I preferred to go, however, only when I was sure that Antonio would come; for a while he had been courting me, discreetly, attentively. True, his face was shiny and full of blackheads, his teeth here and there were bluish; he had broad hands and strong fingers—he had once effortlessly unscrewed the screws on the punctured tire of an old car that Pasquale had acquired. But he had black wavy hair that made you want to caress it, and although he was very shy the rare times he opened his mouth he said something witty. Besides, he was the only one who noticed me. Enzo seldom appeared; he had a life of which we knew little or nothing, and when he was there he devoted himself, in his detached, slow way, and never excessively, to Carmela. As for Pasquale, he seemed to have lost interest in girls after Lila’s rejection. He took very little notice even of Ada, who flirted with him tirelessly, even if she kept saying that she couldn’t stand always seeing our mean faces.

  Naturally on those evenings we sooner or later ended up talking about Lila, even if it seemed that no one wanted to name her: the boys were all a little disappointed, each one would have liked to be in Stefano’s place. But the most unhappy was Pasquale: if his hatred for the Solaras hadn’t been of such long standing, he would probably have sided publicly with Marcello against the Cerullo family. His sufferings in love had dug deep inside him and a mere glimpse of Lila and Stefano together dimmed his joy in life. Yet he was by nature honest and good-hearted, so he was careful to keep his reactions under control and to take sides according to what was just. When he found out that Marcello and Michele had confronted Rino one evening, and though they hadn’t laid a finger on him had grossly insulted him, Pasquale had entirely taken Rino’s part. When he found out that Silvio Solara, the father of Michele and Marcello, had gone in person to Fernando’s renovated shoe store and calmly reproached him for not having brought up his daughter properly, and then, looking around, had observed that the shoemaker could make all the shoes he wanted, but then where would he sell them, he would never find a store that would take them, not to mention that with all that glue around, with all that thread and pitch and wooden forms and soles and heels, it wouldn’t take much to start a fire, Pasquale had promised that, if there was a fire at the Cerullo shoe shop, he would go with a few trusted companions and burn down the Solara bar and pastry shop. But he was critical of Lila. He said that she should have run away from home rather than allow Marcello to go there and court her all those evenings. He said she should have smashed the television with a hammer and not watched it with anyone who knew that he had bought it only to have her. He said, finally, that she was a girl too intelligent to be truly in love with a hypocritical idiot like Stefano Carracci.

  On those occasions I was the only one who did not remain silent but explicitly disagreed with Pasquale’s criticisms. I refuted him, saying things like: It’s not easy to leave home; it’s not easy to go against the wishes of the people you love; nothing is easy, especially when you criticize her rather than being angry at your friend Rino—he’s the one who got her in that trouble with Marcello, and if Lila hadn’t found a way of getting out of it, she would have had to marry Marcello. I concluded by praising Stefano, who of all the boys who had known Lila since she was a child a
nd loved her was the only one with the courage to support her and help her. A terrible silence fell and I was very proud of having countered every criticism of my friend in a tone and language that, among other things, had subdued him.

  But one night we ended up quarreling unpleasantly. We were all, including Enzo, having a pizza on the Rettifilo, in a place where a margherita and a beer cost fifty lire. This time it was the girls who started: Ada, I think, said she thought Lila was ridiculous going around always fresh from the hairdresser and in clothes like Princess Soraya, even though she was sprinkling roach poison in front of the house door. We all, some more, some less, laughed. Then, one thing leading to another, Carmela ended up saying outright that Lila had gone with Stefano for the money, to settle her brother and the rest of the family. I was starting my usual official defense when Pasquale interrupted me and said, “That’s not the point. The point is that Lina knows where that money comes from.”

  “Now you want to drag in Don Achille and the black market and the trafficking and loan sharking and all the nonsense of before and after the war?” I said.

  “Yes, and if your friend were here now she would say I was right.”

  “Stefano is just a shopkeeper who’s a good salesman.”

  “And the money he put into the Cerullos’ shoe store he got from the grocery?”

  “Why, what do you think?”

  “It comes from the gold objects taken from mothers and hidden by Don Achille in the mattress. Lina acts the lady with the blood of all the poor people of this neighborhood. And she is kept, she and her whole family, even before she’s married.”

  I was about to answer when Enzo interrupted with his usual detachment: “Excuse me, Pascà, what do you mean by ‘is kept’?”

  As soon as I heard that question I knew that things would turn ugly. Pasquale turned red, embarrassed. “Keep means keep. Who pays, please, when Lina goes to the hairdresser, when she buys dresses and purses? Who put money into the shoe shop so that the shoe-repair man can play at making shoes?”