The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  “Starting tomorrow,” he said to her, “you can go and stuff ricotta in the cannoli again.”

  Then Michele showed up. Smiling, he led Rino outside, to the square, to indicate the sign over the door.

  “My friend,” he said, “the shop is called Solara and you have no right to come here and tell my girlfriend: I’m firing you.”

  Rino retaliated by reminding him that everything in the shop belonged to his brother-in-law, and that he made the shoes himself, so he certainly did have the right. Inside, meanwhile, Gigliola and Pinuccia, each feeling protected by her own fiancé, had already started fighting again. The two young men hurried back inside, tried to calm them down, and couldn’t. Michele lost patience and cried that he would fire them both. Not only that: he let slip that he would have Lila manage the shop.

  Lila?

  The shop?

  The two girls were silent and the idea left even Rino speechless. Then the discussion started up again, this time focused on that outrageous statement. Gigliola, Pinuccia, and Rino were allied against Michele—what’s wrong, what use to you is Lina, we’re making money here, you can’t complain, I thought up all the shoe styles, she was a child, what could she invent—and the tension increased. Who knows how long the quarreling would have gone on if the accident I mentioned hadn’t happened. Suddenly, and it’s unclear how, the panel—the panel with the strips of black paper, the photograph, the thick patches of color—let out a rasping sound, a kind of sick breath, and burst into flame. Pinuccia had her back to the photograph when it happened. The fire blazed up behind her as if from a secret hearth and licked her hair, which crackled and would have burned completely if Rino hadn’t quickly extinguished it with his bare hands.

  31.

  Both Rino and Michele blamed Gigliola for the fire, because she smoked secretly and so had a tiny lighter. According to Rino, Gigliola had done it on purpose: while they were all occupied by their wrangling, she had set fire to the panel, which, loaded with paper, glue, paint, had instantly burst into flames. Michele was more circumspect: Gigliola, he knew, continuously toyed with the lighter and so, unintentionally, caught up in the argument, hadn’t realized that the flame was too close to the photograph. But the girl couldn’t bear either the first hypothesis or the second, and with a fiercely combative look blamed Lila herself, that is, she blamed the disfigured image, which had caught fire spontaneously, like the Devil, who, attempting to corrupt the saints, assumed the features of a woman, but the saints called on Jesus, and the demon was transformed into flames. She added, in confirmation of her version, that Pinuccia herself had told her that her sister-in-law had the ability not to stay pregnant, and, in fact, if she was unsuccessful she would let the child drain out, rejecting the gifts of the Lord.

  This gossip grew worse when Michele Solara began to go regularly to the new grocery store. He spent a lot of time joking with Lila, joking with Carmen, so that Carmen hypothesized that he came for her and on the one hand was afraid that someone would tell Enzo, doing his military service in Piedmont, while on the other she was flattered and began to flirt. Lila instead made fun of the young Solara. She heard the rumors spread by his fiancée and so she said to him: “You’d better go, we’re witches here, we’re very dangerous.”

  But when I went to see her, during that period, I never found her truly cheerful. She assumed an artificial tone and was sarcastic about everything. Did she have a bruise on her arm? Stefano had caressed her too passionately. Were her eyes red from crying? Those were tears of happiness, not grief. Be careful of Michele, he liked to hurt people? No, she said, all he has to do is touch me and he’ll burn: it’s I who hurt people.

  On that last point there had always been modest agreement. But Gigliola especially had no doubts by now: Lila was a witch-whore, she had cast a spell on her fiancé; that’s why he wanted her to manage the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. And for days, jealous, desperate, she wouldn’t go to work. Then she decided to talk to Pinuccia, they became allies, and moved to the offensive. Pinuccia worked on her brother, insisting that he was a happy cuckold, and then she attacked Rino, her fiancé, telling him that he wasn’t a boss but Michele’s servant. So one evening Stefano and Rino waited for Michele outside the bar, and when he appeared they made a very general speech that in substance, however, meant: leave Lila alone, you’re making her waste time, she has to work. Michele immediately got the message and replied coldly:

  “What the fuck are you saying?”

  “If you don’t understand it means you don’t want to understand.”

  “No, my fine friends, it’s you who don’t want to understand our commercial needs. And if you won’t understand them, I necessarily have to see to them.”

  “Meaning?” Stefano asked.

  “Your wife is wasted in the grocery.”

  “In what sense?”

  “In Piazza dei Martiri she would make in a month what your sister and Gigliola couldn’t make in a hundred years.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “Lina needs to command, Ste’. She needs to have a responsibility. She should invent things. She ought to start thinking right away about the new shoe styles.”

  They argued and finally, amid a thousand fine distinctions, came to an agreement. Stefano absolutely refused to let his wife go and work in Piazza dei Martiri: the new grocery was going well and to take Lila out of there would be foolish; but he agreed to have her design new models right away, at least for winter. Michele said that not to let Lila run the shoe store was stupid, and with a vaguely threatening coolness he put off the discussion until after the summer; he considered it a done deal that she would start designing new shoes.

  “They have to be chic,” he urged, “you have to insist on that point.”

  “She’ll do what she wants, as usual.”

  “I can advise her, she’ll listen to me,” said Michele.

  “There’s no need.”

  I went to see Lila shortly after that agreement, and she spoke to me about it herself. I had just come from school, the weather was already getting hot, and I was tired. She was alone in the grocery and for the moment she seemed as if relieved. She said that she wouldn’t design anything, not even a sandal, not even a slipper.

  “They’ll get mad.”

  “What can I do about it?”

  “It’s money, Lila.”

  “They already have enough.”

  It was her usual sort of obstinacy, I thought. She was like that, as soon as someone told her to focus on something the wish to do so vanished. But I soon realized that it wasn’t a matter of her character or even of disgust with the business affairs of her husband, Rino, and the Solaras, reinforced by the Communist arguments of Pasquale and Carmen. There was something more and she spoke slowly, seriously, about it.

  “Nothing comes to mind,” she said.

  “Have you tried?”

  “Yes. But it’s not the way it was when I was twelve.”

  The shoes—I understood—had come out of her brain only that one time and they wouldn’t again, she didn’t have any others. That game was over, she didn’t know how to start it again. The smell of leather repelled her, of skins, what she had done she no longer knew how to do. And then everything had changed. Fernando’s small shop had been consumed by the new spaces, by the workers’ benches, by three machines. Her father had as it were grown smaller, he didn’t even quarrel with his oldest son, he worked and that was all. Even affections were as if deflated. If she still felt tender toward her mother when she came to the grocery to fill her shopping bags, free, as if they still lived in poverty, if she still gave little gifts to her younger siblings, she could no longer feel the bond with Rino. Ruined, broken. The need to help and protect him had diminished. Thus the motivations for the fantasy of the shoes had vanished, the soil in which they had germinated was arid. It was most of all, she said suddenly, a way of showing you that
I could do something well even if I had stopped going to school. Then she laughed nervously, glancing obliquely at me to see my reaction.

  I didn’t answer, prevented by a strong emotion. Lila was like that? She didn’t have my stubborn diligence? She drew out of herself thoughts, shoes, words written and spoken, complicated plans, rages and inventions, only to show me something of herself? Having lost that motivation, she was lost? Even the treatment to which she had subjected her wedding photograph—even that she would never be able to repeat? Everything, in her, was the result of the chaos of an occasion?

  I felt that in some part of me a long painful tension was relaxing, and her wet eyes, her fragile smile moved me. But it didn’t last. She continued to speak, she touched her forehead with a gesture that was customary with her, she said, regretfully, “I always have to prove that I can be better,” and she added darkly, “When we opened this place, Stefano showed me how to cheat on the weight; and at first I shouted you’re a thief, that’s how you make money, and then I couldn’t resist, I showed him that I had learned and immediately found my own ways to cheat and I showed him, and I was constantly thinking up new ones: I’ll cheat you all, I cheat you on the weight and a thousand other things, I cheat the neighborhood, don’t trust me, Lenù, don’t trust what I say and do.”

  I was uneasy. In the space of a few seconds she had changed, already I no longer knew what she wanted. Why was she speaking to me like this now? I didn’t know if she had decided to or if the words came out of her mouth unwittingly, an impetuous stream in which the intention of reinforcing the bond between us—a real intention—was immediately swept away by the equally real need to deny it specificity: you see, with Stefano I behave the way I do with you, I act like this with everyone, I’m beauty and the beast, good and evil. She interlaced her long thin fingers, clasped them tight, asked, “Did you hear that Gigliola says the photograph caught fire by itself?”

  “It’s stupid, Gigliola is mad at you.”

  She gave a little laugh that was like a shock, something in her twisted too abruptly.

  “I have something that hurts here, behind the eyes, something is pressing. You see the knives there? They’re too sharp—I just gave them to the knife grinder. While I’m slicing salami I think how much blood there is in a person’s body. If you put too much stuff in things, they break. Or they catch fire and burn. I’m glad the wedding picture burned. The marriage should burn, too, the shop, the shoes, the Solaras, everything.”

  I realized that, no matter how she struggled, worked, proclaimed, she couldn’t get out of it: since the day of her wedding she had been pursued by an ever greater, increasingly ungovernable unhappiness, and I felt pity. I told her to be calm, she nodded yes.

  “You have to try to relax.”

  “Help me.”

  “How.”

  “Stay near me.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “It’s not true. I tell you all my secrets, even the worst, you tell me hardly anything about yourself.”

  “You’re wrong. The only person I don’t hide anything from is you.”

  She shook her head no energetically, she said, “Even if you’re better than me, even if you know more things, don’t leave me.”

  32.

  They pressured her, wearing her down, and so she pretended to give in. She told Stefano that she would design the new shoes, and at the first opportunity she also told Michele. Then she summoned Rino and spoke to him exactly as he had always wanted her to: “You design them, I can’t. Design them with papa, you’re in the business, you know how to do it. But until you put them on the market and sell them, don’t tell anyone that I didn’t do them, not even Stefano.”

  “And if they don’t go well?”

  “It will be my fault.”

  “And if they do well?”

  “I’ll say how things are and you’ll get the credit you deserve.”

  Rino was very pleased with that lie. He set to work with Fernando, but every so often he went to Lila in complete secrecy to show her what he had in mind. She examined the styles and at first pretended to admire them, partly because she couldn’t tolerate his anxious expression, partly to get rid of him quickly. But soon she herself marveled at how genuinely good the new shoes were—they resembled the ones now selling and yet were different. “Maybe,” she said to me one day, in an unexpectedly lighthearted tone, “I really didn’t think up those shoes, they really are my brother’s work.” And at that point she truly did seem to be rid of a weight. She rediscovered her affection for Rino, or rather she realized that she had exaggerated: that bond couldn’t be dissolved, it would never be dissolved, whatever he did, even if a rat came out of his body, a skittish horse, any sort of animal. The lie—she hypothesized—has relieved Rino of the anxiety of being inadequate, and that has taken him back to the way he was as a boy, and now he is discovering that he knows his job, that he’s good at it. As for Rino himself, he was increasingly satisfied with his sister’s praise. At the end of every consultation, he asked in a whisper for the house key and, also in complete secrecy, went to spend an hour there with Pinuccia.

  For my part, I tried to show her that I would always be her friend, and on Sundays I often invited her to go out with me. Once we ventured as far as the Mostra d’Oltremare neighborhood with two of my schoolmates, who were intimidated, however, when they found out that she had been married for more than a year, and behaved respectfully, sedately, as if I had compelled them to go out with my mother. One asked her hesitantly:

  “Do you have a child?”

  Lila shook her head no.

  “They haven’t come?”

  She shook her head no.

  From that moment on the evening was more or less a failure.

  In mid-May I dragged her to a cultural club where, because Professor Galiani had urged me to, I felt obliged to go to a talk by a scientist named Giuseppe Montalenti. It was the first time we had had an experience of that type: Montalenti gave a kind of lesson, not for children but, rather, for the adults who had come to hear him. We sat at the back of the bare room and I was quickly bored. The professor had sent me but she hadn’t shown up. I murmured to Lila, “Let’s go.” But Lila refused, she whispered that she wasn’t bold enough to get up, she was afraid of disrupting the lecture. But it wasn’t her type of worry; it was the sign of an unexpected submissiveness, or of an interest that she didn’t want to admit. We stayed till the end. Montalenti talked about Darwin; neither of us knew who Darwin was. As we left, I said jokingly, “He said a thing that I already knew: you’re a monkey.”

  But she didn’t want to joke: “I don’t want to ever forget it,” she said.

  “That you’re a monkey?”

  “That we’re animals.”

  “You and I?”

  “Everyone.”

  “But he said there are a lot of differences between us and the apes.”

  “Yes? Like what? That my mother pierced my ears and so I’ve worn earrings since I was born, but the mothers of monkeys don’t, so their offspring don’t wear earrings?”

  A fit of laughter possessed us, as we listed differences, one after the other, each more ridiculous than the last: we were enjoying ourselves. But when we returned to the neighborhood our good mood vanished. We met Pasquale and Ada taking a walk on the stradone and learned from them that Stefano was looking everywhere for Lila, very upset. I offered to go home with her, she refused. Instead she agreed to let Pasquale and Ada take her in the car.

  I found out the next day why Stefano had been looking for her. It wasn’t because we were late. It wasn’t even because he was annoyed that his wife sometimes spent her free time with me and not with him. It was something else. He had just learned that Pinuccia was often seen with Rino at his house. He had just learned that the two were together in his bed, that Lila gave them the keys. He had just learned that Pinuccia was pr
egnant. But what had most infuriated him was that when he slapped his sister because of the disgusting things she and Rino had done, Pinuccia shouted at him, “You’re jealous because I’m a woman and Lina isn’t, because Rino knows how to behave with women and you don’t.” Lila, seeing him so upset, listening to him—and recalling the composure he had always shown when they were engaged—had burst out laughing, and Stefano had gone for a drive, so as not to murder her. According to her, he had gone to look for a prostitute.

  33.

  The preparations for Rino and Pinuccia’s wedding were carried out in a rush. I was not much concerned with it, I had my final class essays, the final oral exams. And then something else happened that caused me great agitation. Professor Galiani, who was in the habit of violating the teachers’ code of behavior with indifference, invited me—me and no one else in the school—to her house, to a party that her children were giving.

  It was unusual enough that she lent me books and newspapers, that she had directed me to a march for peace and a demanding lecture. Now she had gone over the limit: she had taken me aside and given me that invitation. “Come as you like,” she had said, “alone or with someone, with your boyfriend or without: the important thing is to come.” Like that, a few days before the end of the school year, without worrying about how much I had to study, without worrying about the earthquake that it set off inside me.

  I had immediately said yes, but I quickly discovered that I would never have the courage to go. A party at any professor’s house was unthinkable, imagine at the house of Professor Galiani. For me it was as if I were to present myself at the royal palace, curtsey to the queen, dance with the princes. A great pleasure but also an act of violence, like a yank: to be dragged by the arm, forced to do a thing that, although it appeals to you, you know is not suitable—you know that, if circumstances did not oblige you, you would happily avoid doing it. Probably it didn’t even occur to Professor Galiani that I had nothing to wear. In class I wore a shapeless black smock. What did she expect there was, the professor, under that smock: clothes and slips and underwear like hers? There was inadequacy, rather, there was poverty, poor breeding. I possessed a single pair of worn-out shoes. My only nice dress was the one I had worn to Lila’s wedding, but now it was hot, the dress was fine for March but not for the end of May. And yet the problem was not just what to wear. There was the solitude, the awkwardness of being among strangers, kids with ways of talking among themselves, joking, with tastes I didn’t know. I thought of asking Alfonso if he would go with me, he was always kind to me. But—I recalled—Alfonso was a schoolmate and Professor Galiani had addressed the invitation to me alone. What to do? For days I was paralyzed by anxiety, I thought of talking to the professor and coming up with some excuse. Then it occurred to me to ask Lila’s advice.