The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  10.

  But I had a hard time making up the ground I had lost, especially in science, and I tried to reduce my meetings with Antonio so that I could concentrate on my books. When I missed a date because I had to study, he became gloomy, he asked me, in alarm, “Is something wrong?”

  “I’ve got a lot of homework.”

  “How is it that all of a sudden you’ve got more homework?”

  “I’ve always had a lot.”

  “Before you didn’t have any.”

  “It was a coincidence.”

  “What are you hiding from me, Lenù?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you still love me?”

  I reassured him, but meanwhile the time moved quickly by us and I went home angry at myself because I still had so much studying to do.

  Antonio’s fixation was always the same: Sarratore’s son. He was afraid that I would talk to him, even that I would see him. Naturally, to prevent him from suffering, I concealed the fact that I ran into Nino entering school, coming out, in the corridors. Nothing particular happened, at most we exchanged a nod of greeting and went on our way: I could have talked to my boyfriend about it without any problems if he had been a reasonable person. But Antonio was not reasonable and in truth I wasn’t, either. Although Nino gave me no encouragement, a mere glimpse of him left me distracted during class. His presence a few classrooms away—real, alive, better educated than the professors, and courageous, and disobedient—drained meaning from the teachers’ lectures, the pages of books, the plans for marriage, the gas pump on the stradone.

  Even at home I couldn’t study. Added to my confusing thoughts about Antonio, about Nino, about the future was my mother’s irritability, as she yelled at me to do this or that, and my siblings, who came one by one to have me look at their homework. That permanent turmoil wasn’t new, I had always studied in disorder. But the old determination that had allowed me to do my best even in those conditions seemed to be used up, I couldn’t or didn’t want to reconcile school with everyone’s needs anymore. So I would let the afternoon go by helping my mother, correcting my sister’s and brothers’ exercises, and studying little or not at all for myself. And if once I had sacrificed sleep to books, now, since I was still exhausted and sleep seemed to me a respite, at night I forgot about homework and went to bed.

  And so I began to show up in class not only inattentive but unprepared, and I lived in fear that the teachers would call on me. Which soon happened. Once, in the same day, I got low marks in chemistry, art history, and philosophy, and my nerves were so frayed that right after the last bad grade I burst into tears in front of everyone. It was a terrible moment: I felt the horror and the pleasure of losing myself, the fear and the pride in going off the rails.

  As we were leaving school Alfonso told me that his sister-in-law had asked him to tell me to go and see her. Go on, he urged me anxiously, surely you’ll study better there than at your house. So that afternoon I made up my mind and walked to the new neighborhood. But I didn’t go to Lila’s house to find a solution to my problems with school, I took it for granted that we would talk the whole time and that my situation as a former model student would get even worse. I said to myself, rather: better to go off the rails talking to Lila than in the midst of my mother’s yelling, the petulant demands of my siblings, the yearnings for Nino, Antonio’s recriminations; at least I would learn something about married life, a life that soon—I now assumed—would be mine.

  Lila greeted me with obvious pleasure. Her eye was no longer swollen, her lip was healing. She was nicely dressed, her hair was carefully combed, she wore lipstick, yet she moved through the apartment as if her house were alien to her and she herself felt like a visitor. The wedding presents were still piled up near the door, the rooms had a smell of plaster and fresh paint mixed with the vaguely alcoholic scent that emanated from the new furniture in the dining room, the table, the sideboard with a mirror framed by dark-wood foliage, the silver chest full of silver, the plates, glasses, and bottles of colored liquors.

  Lila made coffee: it was pleasant to sit with her in the spacious kitchen and play at being ladies, as we had done as children in front of the cellar air vent. It’s relaxing, I thought, I was wrong not to come sooner. I had a friend of my age with her own house, full of opulent, orderly things. That friend, who had nothing to do all day, seemed happy for my company. Although we had changed and the changes were still occurring, the warmth between us endured intact. Why, then, not give in to it? For the first time since her wedding day I felt at ease.

  “How’s it going with Stefano?” I asked.

  “Fine.”

  “You’ve cleared things up?”

  She smiled in amusement.

  “Yes, it’s all clear.”

  “And so?”

  “Disgusting.”

  “The same as Amalfi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he beat you again?”

  She touched her face.

  “No, this is old stuff.”

  “Then?”

  “It’s the humiliation.”

  “And you?”

  “I do what he wants.”

  I thought for a moment, I asked her, suggestively, “But at least when you sleep together, isn’t it nice?”

  She made a grimace of discomfort, became serious. She began to speak of her husband with a sort of loathing acceptance. It wasn’t hostility, it wasn’t a need for retaliation, it wasn’t even disgust, but a placid disdain, a contempt that invested Stefano’s entire person like polluted water in the ground.

  I listened, I understood and I didn’t understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker’s knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As a result, since Stefano was not the hateful Marcello but the young man to whom she had declared her love, whom she had married, and with whom she had decided to live forever, she assumed complete responsibility for her choice. And yet it didn’t add up. In my eyes Lila was Lila, not an ordinary girl of the neighborhood. Our mothers, after they were slapped by their husbands, did not have that expression of calm disdain. They despaired, they wept, they confronted their man sullenly, they criticized him behind his back, and yet, more and less, they continued to respect him (my mother, for example, plainly admired my father’s devious deals). Lila instead displayed an acquiescence without respect.

  I said, “I feel comfortable with Antonio, even though I don’t love him.”

  And I hoped that, in accord with our old habits, she would be able to grasp in that statement a series of hidden questions. Although I love Nino—I was saying without saying it—I feel pleasantly excited just thinking of Antonio, of our kisses, of holding and touching each other at the ponds. Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not? What happens when you’re in a bed, crushed by a man? She had experienced that and I would have liked her to talk about it. Instead she confined herself to saying, sarcastically, Better for you if you’re comfortable, and she led me to a small room that looked out onto the railroad tracks. It was a bare space, there was only a desk, a chair, a cot, nothing on the walls.

  “Do you like it here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then study.”

  She left, closing the door behind her.

>   The room smelled of damp plaster more than the rest of the house. I looked out the window, I would have preferred to go on talking. But it was immediately clear to me that Alfonso had told her about my absence from school, maybe even about my bad grades, and that she wanted to restore to me the wisdom she had always attributed to me, even at the cost of imposing it on me. Better that way. I heard her moving through the house, making a phone call. It struck me that she didn’t say Hello, it’s Lina, or, I don’t know, It’s Lina Cerullo, but Hello, this is Signora Carracci. I sat down at the desk, opened my history book, and forced myself to study.

  11.

  The close of the school year was inauspicious. The building that housed the high school was crumbling, rain leaked into the classrooms, after one violent storm a street nearby caved in. There followed a period when we went to school on alternate days, homework began to count more than the normal lessons, the teachers loaded it on to the point where it was unbearable. Despite my mother’s protests, I got in the habit of going to Lila’s right after school.

  I arrived at two in the afternoon, I dropped my books somewhere. She made me a sandwich with prosciutto, cheese, salami—anything I wanted. Such abundance was never seen at my parents’ house: how good the smell of the fresh bread was, and the taste of the fillings, especially the prosciutto, bright red edged with white. I ate greedily and Lila made me coffee. After we’d had some intense conversation, she closed me in the little room and seldom looked in, except to bring me a snack and to eat or drink with me. Since I had no wish to run into Stefano, who generally returned from the grocery around eight at night, I always left right at seven.

  I became familiar with the apartment, with its light, with the sounds that came from the railroad. Every space, every thing was new and clean, but especially the bathroom, which had a sink, a bidet, a bathtub. One afternoon when I felt particularly lazy I asked Lila if I could have a bath, I who still washed under the tap or in a copper tub. She said I could do what I wanted and went to bring me towels. The water came out hot from the tap and I let it run. I undressed, I sank in up to my neck.

  That warmth was an unexpected pleasure. After a while I tried out the numerous little bottles that crowded the corners of the tub: a steamy foam arose, as if from my body, and almost overflowed. Ah, how many wonderful things Lila possessed. It was no longer just a matter of a clean body, it was play, it was abandon. I discovered the lipsticks, the makeup, the wide mirror that reflected an image without deformities, the hair dryer. Afterward, my skin was smoother than I had ever felt it, and my hair was full, luminous, blonder. Maybe the wealth we wanted as children is this, I thought: not strongboxes full of diamonds and gold coins but a bathtub, to immerse yourself like this every day, to eat bread, salami, prosciutto, to have a lot of space even in the bathroom, to have a telephone, a pantry and icebox full of food, a photograph in a silver frame on the sideboard that shows you in your wedding dress—to have this entire house, with the kitchen, the bedroom, the dining room, the two balconies, and the little room where I am studying, and where, even though Lila hasn’t said so, soon, when it comes, a baby will sleep.

  That evening I hurried to the ponds, I couldn’t wait for Antonio to caress me, smell me, marvel, enjoy that luxurious cleanliness that highlighted beauty. It was a gift that I wanted to give him. But he had his anxieties: he said, I’ll never be able to offer you these things, and I answered, Who says that I want them, and he replied, You always want to do what Lila does. I was offended, we quarreled. I was independent. I did only what I liked, I did what he and Lila didn’t and couldn’t do, I went to school, I studied hard, was going blind over my books. I cried that he didn’t understand me, that all he did was disparage and insult me, and I ran away.

  But Antonio understood me too well. Day by day my friend’s house charmed me more, it became a magical place where I could have everything, far from the wretched gray of the old buildings where we had grown up, the flaking walls, the scratched doors, the same objects always, dented and chipped. Lila was careful not to disturb me, I would call out: I’m thirsty, I’m kind of hungry, let’s turn on the television, can I see this, can I see that. I was bored by studying, I struggled. Sometimes I asked her to listen to me while I repeated the lessons aloud. She sat on the cot, I at the desk. I showed her the pages I had to repeat, I recited, Lila checked me line for line.

  It was on those occasions that I realized how her relationship with books had changed. Now she was intimidated by them. She no longer wanted to impose on me an order, her own rhythm, as if just a few sentences were enough to get a picture of the whole and master it so that she could tell me: This is the important concept, start here. When, following me in the textbook, she had the impression that I was mistaken, she corrected me with a thousand apologies, such as: Maybe I didn’t understand it, maybe you should check. She seemed not to realize that her capacity to learn effortlessly remained intact. But I knew. I saw, for example, that chemistry, so boring for me, provoked in her that narrow look, and her few observations awakened me from my apathy, excited me. I saw that after half a page of the philosophy textbook she was able to find surprising connections between Anaxagoras, the order that the intellect imposes on the chaos of things, and Mendeleev’s tables. But more often I had the impression that she was aware of the inadequacy of her tools, of the naïveté of her observations, and she restrained herself on purpose. As soon as she realized that she had let herself get too involved, she retreated as if before a trap, and mumbled: Lucky you who understand, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  Once, she closed the book abruptly and said with annoyance, “That’s enough.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve had it, it’s always the same story: inside something small there’s something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there’s always something larger that wants to keep it a prisoner. I’m going to cook.”

  And yet I wasn’t studying anything that had to do in an obvious way with the small and the large. Her own capacity to learn had irritated her, or perhaps frightened her, and she had retreated.

  Where?

  To make dinner, to clean the house, to watch television with the volume low in order not to disturb me, to look at the tracks, the train traffic, the fleeting outline of Vesuvius, the streets of the new neighborhood, still without trees and without shops, the rare car traffic, the women with their shopping bags, small children attached to their skirts. Occasionally, and only on Stefano’s orders, or because he asked her to go with him, she went out to the place—it was less than five hundred meters from the house; once I went with her—where the new grocery was to be built. There she took measurements with a carpenter’s measuring tape to plan shelves and furnishings.

  That was it, she had nothing else to do. I soon realized that, being married, she was more alone than before. I sometimes went out with Carmela, with Ada, even with Gigliola, and at school I had made friends with girls in my class and other classes, so that sometimes I met them for ice cream on Via Foria. But she saw only Pinuccia, her sister-in-law. As for the boys, if during the period of her engagement they still stopped to exchange a few words, now, after her marriage, they gave a nod of greeting, at most, when they met on the street. And yet she was beautiful and she dressed like the pictures in the women’s magazines that she bought in great numbers. But the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea. Pasquale, Enzo, Antonio himself would never have ventured onto the unshaded white streets of newly built houses, to her doorway, to her apartment, to talk a little or invite her to take a walk. And even the telephone, a black object attached to the kitchen wall, seemed a useless ornament. The whole time I studied at her house, it seldom rang and when it did it was usually Stefano, who had put one in the grocery as well, to take orders from customers. Their conversations as newlyweds were brief, she an
swered listlessly, yes, no.

  She used the telephone mainly for making purchases. In that period she hardly ever went out of the house, as she waited for the signs of the beating to completely disappear from her face, but she bought things just the same. For example, after my joyous bath, after my enthusiasm about the way my hair had turned out, I heard her order a new hair dryer, and when it was delivered she wanted to give it to me. She uttered that sort of magic formula (Hello, this is Signora Carracci) and then she negotiated, discussed, gave up, bought. She didn’t pay, the shopkeepers were all from the neighborhood, they knew Stefano well. She merely signed, Lina Carracci, name and last name, as Maestra Oliviero had taught us, and she wrote the signature as if it were an assignment, with an intent half-smile, never even checking the merchandise, as if those marks on paper mattered more to her than the objects that were being delivered.

  She also bought some big albums with green covers decorated with floral motifs, in which she arranged the wedding photographs. She had printed just for me copies of I don’t know how many of them, all the ones in which I, my parents, my sister and brothers, even Antonio appeared. She telephoned and ordered the photographs. I found one in which Nino could be seen: there was Alfonso, there was Marisa, and he was at the right, cut off by the edge of the frame, only his hair, his nose, his mouth.