The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  “I also had ice cream with Antonio.”

  That name was a punch in the stomach.

  “How is he?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did he say anything about me?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “When does he leave?”

  “In September.”

  “Marcello did nothing to help him.”

  “It was predictable.”

  Predictable? If it was predictable, I thought, that the Solaras would do nothing, why did you take me there? And why do you, who are married, now want to see your friends again, like that, by yourself? And why did you have ice cream with Antonio without telling me, knowing that he is my old boyfriend and that though he doesn’t want to see me anymore I would like to see him? Do you want revenge because I went driving with your husband and didn’t report to you a word of what we said to each other? I dressed nervously, mumbled that I had things to do, had to go.

  “I have something else to tell you.”

  In a serious voice she said that Rino, Marcello, and Michele had wanted Stefano to go to Piazza dei Martiri to see how well the shop was coming along, and that the three of them, amid sacks of cement and cans of paint and brushes, had pointed out the wall opposite the entrance and told him they were thinking of putting the enlargement of the photograph of her in her wedding dress there. Stefano had listened, then he had answered that certainly it would be a good advertisement for the shoes, but that it didn’t seem to him suitable. The three had insisted, he had said no to Marcello, no to Michele, and no to Rino as well. In other words I had won the bet: her husband had not given in to the Solaras.

  I said, making an effort to appear enthusiastic, “See? Always saying mean things about poor Stefano. And instead I was right. Now you have to start studying.”

  “Wait.”

  “Wait for what? A bet is a bet and you lost.”

  “Wait,” Lila repeated.

  My bad mood got worse. She doesn’t know what she wants, I thought. She’s unhappy that she was wrong about her husband. Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe she appreciated Stefano’s refusal, but she expects a more ferocious clash of men around her image, and she’s disappointed because the Solaras weren’t insistent enough. I saw that she was lazily running a hand over her hip and along one leg, like a caress of farewell, and in her eyes appeared for a moment that mixture of suffering, fear, and disgust that I had noticed the night of Melina’s disappearance. I thought: and if, instead, she secretly wants her picture to be on display, enlarged, in the center of the city, and is sorry that Michele didn’t succeed in forcing it on Stefano? Why not, she wants to be first in everything, she’s made like that: the most beautiful, the most elegant, the wealthiest. Then I said to myself: above all, the most intelligent. And at the idea that Lila would really start studying again I felt a regret that discouraged me. Of course she would make up for all the years of school she had missed. Of course I would find her beside me, elbow to elbow, taking the high-school graduation exam. And I realized that the prospect was intolerable. But it was even more intolerable to discover that feeling in myself. I was ashamed and immediately started telling her how wonderful it would be if we studied together again, and insisting that she should find out how to proceed. She shrugged, so I said, “Now I really have to go.”

  This time she didn’t stop me.

  22.

  As usual, once I was on the stairs I began to sympathize with her reasons, or so it seemed to me: she was isolated in the new neighborhood, shut up in her modern house, beaten by Stefano, engaged in some mysterious struggle with her own body in order not to conceive children, envious of my success in school to the point of indicating to me with that crazy bet that she would like to study again. Besides, it was likely that she saw me as much freer than she was. The breakup with Antonio, my troubles with school seemed like nonsense compared to hers. Step by step, without realizing it, I felt driven to a grudging support, then renewed admiration. Yes, it would be wonderful if she started studying again. To return to the time of elementary school, when she was always first and I second. To give meaning back to studying because she knew how to give it meaning. To stay in her shadow and therefore feel strong and secure. Yes, yes, yes. Start again.

  At some point, on the way home, the mixture of suffering, fear, and disgust I had seen in her face returned to my mind. Why. I thought back to the teacher’s body in disarray, to Melina’s uncontrolled body. For no obvious reason, I began to look closely at the women on the stradone. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself?

  I was suddenly sure that, without being aware of it, I had intercepted Lila’s feelings and was adding them to mine. Why did she have that expression, that ill humor? Had she caressed her leg, her hip, as a sort of farewell? Had she touched herself, speaking, as if she felt the edges of her body besieged by Melina, by Giuseppina, and was frightened, disgusted by it? Had she turned to our friends out of a need to react?

  I remembered how, as a child, she had looked at Maestra Oliviero when she fell off the platform like a broken puppet. I remembered how she had looked at Melina on the stradone, eating the soft soap she had just bought. I remembered when she told the rest of us about the murder, and the blood on the copper pot, and claimed that the killer of Don Achille was not a man but a woman, as if, in the story she was telling us, she had heard and seen the form of a female body break, from the need for hatred, the urgency for revenge or justice, and lose its substance.

  23.

  Starting in the last week of July, I went with the stationer’s daughters to the Sea Garden every day, including Sunday. Along with the thousand things that the children might need, I brought in a canvas bag the books that Professor Galiani had lent me. They were small volumes that examined the past, the present, the world as it was and as it ought to become. The writing resembled that of textbooks, but was more difficult and more interesting. I wasn’t used to that sort of reading, and got tired quickly. Besides, the girls required a lot of attention. And then there was the lazy sea, the leaden sun that bore down on the gulf and the city, stray fantasies, desires, the ever-present
wish to undo the order of the lines—and, with it, every order that required an effort, a wait for fulfillment yet to come—and yield, instead, to what was within reach, immediately gained, the crude life of the creatures of the sky, the earth, and the sea. I approached my seventeenth birthday with one eye on the daughters of the stationer and one on Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.

  One Sunday I felt someone putting fingers over my eyes and a female voice asked, “Guess who?”

  I recognized Marisa’s voice and hoped that she was with Nino. How I would have liked him to see me made beautiful by the sun, the salt water, and intent on reading a difficult book. I exclaimed happily, “Marisa!” and immediately turned around. But Nino wasn’t there; it was Alfonso, with a blue towel over his shoulder, cigarette, wallet, and lighter in his hand, a black bathing suit with a white stripe, he himself pale as one who has never had a ray of sun in his entire life.

  I marveled at seeing them together. Alfonso had to retake exams in two subjects in October, and, since he was busy in the grocery, I imagined that on Sundays he studied. As for Marisa, I was sure that she would be at Barano with her family. Instead she told me that her parents had quarreled with Nella the year before and, with some friends from Roma, had taken a small villa at Castelvolturno. She had returned to Naples just for a few days: she needed some school books—three subjects to do again—and, then, she had to see a person. She smiled flirtatiously at Alfonso. The person was him.

  I couldn’t contain myself, I asked right away how Nino had done on his graduation exams. She made a face of disgust.

  “All A’s and A-minuses. As soon as he found out the results he went off on his own to England, without a lira. He says he’ll find a job there and stay until he learns English.”

  “Then?”

  “Then I don’t know, maybe he’ll enroll in economy and business.”

  I had a thousand other questions, I even looked for a way to ask who the girl was who waited outside school, and if he had really gone alone or in fact with her, when Alfonso said, embarrassed, “Lina’s here, too.” Then he added, “Antonio brought us in the car.”

  Antonio?

  Alfonso must have noticed how my expression changed, the flush that was spreading over my face, the jealous amazement in my eyes. He smiled, and said quickly, “Stefano had some work to do about the counters in the new grocery and couldn’t come. But Lina was extremely eager to see you, she has something to tell you, and so she asked Antonio if he would take us.”

  “Yes, she has something urgent to tell you,” Marisa said emphatically, clapping her hands gleefully to let me know that she already knew the thing.

  What thing? Judging from Marisa, it seemed good. Maybe Lila had soothed Antonio and he wanted to be with me again. Maybe the Solaras had finally roused their acquaintances at the recruiting office and Antonio didn’t have to go. These hypotheses came to mind immediately. But when the two appeared I eliminated both right away. Clearly Antonio was there only because obeying Lila gave meaning to his empty Sunday, only because to be her friend seemed to him a piece of luck and a necessity. But his expression was still unhappy, his eyes frightened, and he greeted me coldly. I asked about his mother, but he gave me scarcely any news. He looked around uneasily and immediately dived into the water with the girls, who welcomed him warmly. As for Lila, she was pale, without lipstick, her gaze hostile. She didn’t seem to have anything urgent to tell me. She sat on the concrete, picked up the book I was reading, leafed through it without a word.

  Marisa, in the face of those silences, became ill at ease; she tried to make a show of enthusiasm for everything in the world, then she got flustered and she, too, went to swim. Alfonso chose a place as far from us as possible and, sitting motionless in the sun, concentrated on the bathers, as if the sight of naked people going in and out of the water were utterly absorbing.

  “Who gave you this book?” Lila asked.

  “My professor of Latin and Greek.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it would interest you.”

  “Do you know what is of interest to me and what isn’t?”

  I immediately resorted to a conciliatory tone, but I also felt a need to brag.

  “As soon as I finish I’ll lend it to you. These are books that the professor gives the good students to read. Nino reads them, too.”

  “Who is Nino?”

  Did she do it on purpose? Did she pretend not even to remember his name in order to diminish him in my eyes?

  “The one in the wedding film, Marisa’s brother, Sarratore’s oldest son.”

  “The ugly guy you like?”

  “I told you that I don’t like him anymore. But he does great things.”

  “What?”

  “Now, for instance, he’s in England. He’s working, traveling, learning to speak English.”

  I was excited merely by summarizing Marisa’s words. I said to Lila, “Imagine if you and I could do things like that. Travel. Work as waiters to support ourselves. Learn to speak English better than the English. Why can he be free to do that and we can’t?”

  “Did he finish school?”

  “Yes, he got his diploma. Afterward, though, he’s going to do a difficult course at the university.”

  “Is he smart?”

  “As smart as you.”

  “I don’t go to school.”

  “Yes, but: you lost the bet and now you have to go back to books.”

  “Stop it, Lenù.”

  “Stefano won’t let you?”

  “There’s the new grocery, I’m supposed to manage it.”

  “You’ll study in the grocery.”

  “No.”

  “You promised. You said we’d get our diploma together.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Lila ran her hand back and forth over the cover of the book, ironing it.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. And without waiting for me to react she muttered, “It’s so hot,” left the book, went to the edge of the concrete, hurled herself without hesitation into the water, yelling at Antonio, who was playing and splashing with Marisa and the children, “Tonì, save me!”

  She flew for a few seconds, arms wide, then clumsily hit the surface of the water. She didn’t know how to swim.

  24.

  In the days that followed, Lila started on a period of feverish activity. She began with the new grocery, involving herself as if it were the most important thing in the world. She woke up early, before Stefano. She threw up, made coffee, threw up again. He had become very solicitous, he wanted to drive her, but Lila refused, she said she wanted to walk, and she went out in the cool air of the morning, before the heat exploded, along the deserted streets, past the newly constructed buildings, most of them still empty, to the store that was being fitted out. She pulled up the shutter, washed the paint-splattered floor, waited for the workers and suppliers who were delivering scales, slicers, and furnishings, gave orders on where to place them, moved things around herself, trying out new, more efficient arrangements. Large threatening men, rough-mannered boys were ordered about and submitted to her whims without protesting. Since she had barely finished giving an order when she undertook some other heavy job, they cried in apprehension: Signora Carracci, and did all they could to help her.

  Lila, in spite of the heat, which sapped her energy, did not confine herself to the shop in the new neighborhood. Sometimes she went with her sister-in-law to the small work site in Piazza dei Martiri, where Michele generally presided, but often Rino, too, was there, feeling he had the right to monitor the work both as the maker of Cerullo shoes and as the brother-in-law of Stefano, who was the Solaras’ partner. Lila would not stay still in that space, either. She inspected it, she climbed the workmen’s ladders, she observed the place from high up, she came down, she began to move things
. At first she hurt everybody’s feelings, but soon, one after the other, they reluctantly gave in. Michele, although the most sarcastically hostile, seemed to grasp most readily the advantages of Lila’s suggestions.

  “Signó,” he said teasing, “come and rearrange the bar, too, I’ll pay you.”

  Naturally she wouldn’t think of laying a hand on the Bar Solara, but when she had brought enough disorder to Piazza dei Martiri she moved on to the kingdom of the Carracci family, the old grocery, and installed herself there. She made Stefano keep Alfonso at home because he had to study for his makeup exams, and urged Pinuccia to go out more and more often, with her mother, to poke into the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. So, little by little, she reorganized the two adjacent spaces in the old neighborhood to make the work easier and more efficient. In a short time she demonstrated that both Maria and Pinuccia were substantially superfluous; she gave Ada a bigger job, and got Stefano to increase her pay.

  When, in the late afternoon, I returned from the Sea Garden and delivered the girls to the stationer, I almost always stopped at the grocery to see how Lila was doing, if her stomach had started to swell. She was nervous, and her complexion wasn’t good. To cautious questions about her pregnancy she either didn’t respond or dragged me outside the store and said nonsensical things like: “I don’t want to talk about it, it’s a disease, I have an emptiness inside me that weighs me down.” Then she started to tell me about the new grocery and the old one, and Piazza dei Martiri, with her usual exhilarating delivery, just to make me believe that these were places where marvelous things were happening and I, poor me, was missing them.