The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  Once Rino came, very upset, and Lila let him in, listened to all his chatter about how angry the Solaras were about her disappearance from the shop, about how badly things were going with Cerullo shoes, because Stefano thought only of his own affairs and was no longer investing. When at last he was silent, she said, “Rino, you’re the older brother, you’re a grownup, you have a wife and son, do me a favor: live your life without constantly turning to me.” He was hurt and he went away depressed, after a complaint about how everyone was getting richer while he, because of his sister, who didn’t care about the family, the blood of the Cerullos, but now felt she was a Carracci, was in danger of losing the little he had gained.

  It happened that even Michele Solara went to the trouble of coming to see her—in the beginning even twice a day—at times when he was sure that Stefano wouldn’t be there. But she never let him in, she sat silently in the kitchen, almost without breathing, so that once, before he left, he shouted at her from the street: “Who the fuck do you think you are, whore, you had an agreement with me and you didn’t keep it.”

  Lila welcomed willingly only Nunzia and Stefano’s mother, Maria, both of whom followed her pregnancy closely. She stopped throwing up but her complexion remained gray. She had the impression of having become large and inflated inside rather than outside, as if within the wrapping of her body every organ had begun to fatten. Her stomach seemed a bubble of flesh that was expanding because of the baby’s breathing. She was afraid of that expansion, she feared that the thing she was most afraid of would happen: she would break apart, overflow. Then suddenly she felt that the being she had inside, that absurd modality of life, that expanding nodule that at a certain point would come out of her sex like a puppet on a string—suddenly she loved it, and through it the sense of herself returned. Frightened by her ignorance, by the mistakes she could make, she began to read everything she could find about what pregnancy is, what happens inside the womb, how to prepare for the birth. She hardly went out at all in those months. She stopped buying clothes or objects for the house, she got in the habit instead of having her mother bring at least a couple of newspapers and Alfonso some journals. It was the only money she spent. Once Carmen showed up to ask for money and she told her to ask Stefano, she had none; the girl went away discouraged. She didn’t care about anyone anymore, only the baby.

  The experience wounded Carmen, who became even more resentful. She still hadn’t forgiven Lila for breaking up their alliance in the new grocery. Now she couldn’t forgive her for not opening her purse. But mainly she couldn’t forgive her because—as she began to gossip to everyone—she had done as she liked: she had vanished, she had returned, and yet she continued to play the part of the lady, to have a nice house, and now even had a baby coming. The more of a slut you are, the better off you are. She, on the other hand, who labored from morning to night with no gratification—only bad things happened to her, one after the other. Her father died in jail. Her mother died in that way she didn’t even want to think about. And now Enzo as well. He had waited for her one night outside the grocery and told her that he didn’t want to continue the engagement. Just like that, very few words, as usual, no explanation. She had run weeping to her brother, and Pasquale had met Enzo to ask for an explanation. But Enzo had given none, so now they didn’t speak to each other.

  When I returned from Pisa for Easter vacation and met Carmen in the gardens, she vented. “I’m an idiot,” she wept, “waiting for him the whole time he was a soldier. An idiot slaving from morning to night for practically nothing.” She said she was tired of everything. And with no obvious connection she began to insult Lila. She went so far as to ascribe to her a relationship with Michele Solara, who had often been seen wandering around the Carracci house. “Adultery and money,” she hissed, “that’s how she gets ahead.”

  Not a word, however, about Nino. Miraculously, the neighborhood knew nothing of that. During the same period, Antonio told me about beating him up, and about how he had sent Enzo to retrieve Lila, but he told only me, and I’m sure that for his whole life he never spoke a word to anyone else. But I learned something from Alfonso: insistently questioned, he told me he had heard from Marisa that Nino had gone to study in Milan. Thanks to them, when on Holy Saturday I ran into Lila on the stradone, completely by chance, I felt a subtle pleasure at the idea that I knew more than she about the facts of her life, and that from what I knew it was easy to deduce how little good it had done her to take Nino away from me.

  Her stomach was already quite big, it was like an excrescence on her thin body. Even her face didn’t show the florid beauty of pregnant women; it was ugly, greenish, the skin stretched over the prominent cheekbones. We both tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

  “How are you?”

  “Well.”

  “Can I touch your stomach?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that matter?”

  “Which?”

  “The one on Ischia.”

  “It’s over.”

  “Too bad.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I study, I have a place of my own and all the books I need. I even have a sort of boyfriend.”

  “A sort?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Franco Mari.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s also a student.”

  “Those glasses really suit you.”

  “Franco gave them to me.”

  “And the dress?”

  “Also him.”

  “He’s rich?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “And how is the studying going?”

  “I work hard, otherwise they’ll send me away.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I’m careful.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Well.”

  She said her due date was in July. She had a doctor, the one who had sent her to bathe in the sea. A doctor, not the obstetrician in the neighborhood. “I’m afraid for the baby,” she said. “I don’t want to give birth at home.” She had read that it was better to go to a clinic. She smiled, she touched her belly. Then she said something that wasn’t very clear.

  “I’m still here just for this.”

  “Is it nice to feel the baby inside?”

  “No, it repulses me, but I’m pleased to carry it.”

  “Was Stefano angry?”

  “He wants to believe what’s convenient for him.”

  “That is?”

  “That for a while I was a little crazy and ran away to you in Pisa.”

  I pretended not to know anything, feigning amazement: “In Pisa? You and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if he asks, should I say that’s what happened?”

  “Do as you like.”

  We said goodbye, promising to write. But we never wrote and I did nothing to find out about the birth. Sometimes a feeling stirred in me that I immediately repressed to keep it from becoming conscious: I wanted something to happen to her, so the baby wouldn’t be born.

  97.

  In that period I often dreamed of Lila. Once she was in bed in a lacy green nightgown, her hair was braided, which was something she had never done, she held in her arms a little girl dressed in pink, and she kept saying, in a sorrowful voice, “Take a picture but only of me, not of the child.” Another time she greeted me happily and then called her daughter, who had my name. “Lenù,” she said, “come and say hello to your aunt.” But a fat old giantess appeared, and Lila ordered me to undress her and wash her and change her diaper and swaddling. On waking I was tempted to look for a telephone and try to call Alfonso to find out if the baby had been born without any problems, if she was happy. But I had to study or maybe I had exams, and I forgot about it. When, in August, I was f
ree of both obligations, it happened that I didn’t go home. I wrote some lies to my parents and went with Franco to Versilia, to an apartment belonging to his family. For the first time I wore a two-piece bathing suit: it fit in one fist and I felt very bold.

  It was at Christmas that I heard from Carmen how difficult Lila’s delivery had been.

  “She almost died,” she said, “so in the end the doctor had to cut open her stomach, otherwise the baby couldn’t be born.”

  “She had a boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he well?”

  “He’s lovely.”

  “And she?”

  “She’s lost her figure.”

  I learned that Stefano wanted to give his son the name of his father, Achille, but Lila was opposed to it, and the yelling of husband and wife, which hadn’t been heard for a long time, echoed throughout the clinic, so that the nurses had reprimanded them. In the end the child was called Gennaro, that is, Rino, like Lila’s brother.

  I listened, I didn’t say anything. I felt unhappy, and to cope with my unhappiness I imposed on myself an attitude of reserve. Carmen noticed:

  “I’m talking and talking, but you don’t say a word, you make me feel like the TV news. Don’t you give a damn about us anymore?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You’ve gotten pretty, even your voice has changed.”

  “Did I have an ugly voice?”

  “You had the voice that we have.”

  “And now?”

  “You have it less.”

  I stayed in the neighborhood for ten days, from Decem­ber 24, 1964, to January 3, 1965, but I never went to see Lila. I didn’t want to see her son, I was afraid of recognizing in his mouth, in his nose, in the shape of his eyes or ears something of Nino.

  At my house now I was treated like an important person who had deigned to stop by for a quick hello. My father observed me with pleasure. I felt his satisfied gaze on me, but if I spoke to him he became embarrassed. He didn’t ask what I was studying, what was the use of it, what job I would have afterward, and not because he didn’t want to know but out of fear that he wouldn’t understand my answers. My mother instead moved angrily through the house, and, hearing her unmistakable footsteps, I thought of how I had been afraid of becoming like her. But, luckily, I had outdistanced her, and she felt it, she resented me for it. Even now, when she spoke to me, it was as if I were guilty of terrible things: in every situation I perceived in her voice a shadow of disapproval, but, unlike in the past, she never wanted me to do the dishes, clean up, wash the floors. There was some uneasiness also with my sister and brothers. They tried to speak to me in Italian and often corrected their own mistakes, ashamed. But I tried to show them that I was the same as ever, and gradually they were persuaded.

  At night I didn’t know how to pass the time, my old friends were no longer a group. Pasquale had terrible relations with Antonio and avoided him at all costs. Antonio didn’t want to see anyone, partly because he didn’t have time (he was constantly being sent here and there by the Solaras), partly because he didn’t know what to talk about: he couldn’t talk about his work and he didn’t have a private life. Ada, after the grocery, either hurried home to take care of her mother and siblings or was tired and depressed, and went to bed, so that she hardly ever saw Pasquale, and this made him very anxious. Carmen now hated everything and everyone, maybe even me: she hated the job in the new grocery, the Carraccis, Enzo, who had left her, her brother, who had confined himself to quarreling about it and hadn’t beaten him up. Yes, Enzo. Enzo, finally—whose mother, Assunta, was now seriously ill, and who, when he wasn’t laboring to earn money during the day, was taking care of her, and at night, too, and yet, surprisingly, had managed to get his engineer’s diploma—Enzo was never around. I was curious at the news that he had accomplished that very difficult goal of getting a diploma by studying on his own. Who would have imagined, I thought. Before returning to Pisa I made a big effort and persuaded him to take a short walk. I was full of congratulations for his achievement, but he had only a disparaging expression. He had reduced his vocabulary so far that I did all the talking, he said almost nothing. I remember only one phrase, which he uttered before we separated. I hadn’t mentioned Lila until that moment, not even a word. And yet, as if I had talked exclusively about her, he said suddenly,

  “Anyway, Lina is the best mother in the whole neighborhood.”

  That anyway put me in a bad mood. I had never thought of Enzo as particularly sensitive, but on that occasion I was sure that, walking beside me, he had felt—felt as if I had proclaimed it aloud—the long mute list of wrongs that I attributed to our friend, as if my body had angrily articulated it without my knowing.

  98.

  For love of little Gennaro, Lila began to go out again. She put the baby, dressed in blue or white, in the cumbersome, enormous, and expensive carriage that her brother had given her and walked alone through the new neighborhood. As soon as Rinuccio cried, she went to the grocery and nursed him, amid the enthusiasm of her mother-in-law, the tender compliments of the customers, and the annoyance of Carmen, who lowered her head, and said not a word. Lila fed the baby as soon as he cried. She liked feeling him attached to her, she liked feeling the milk that ran out of her into him, pleasantly emptying her breast. It was the only bond that gave her a sense of well-being, and she confessed in her notebooks that she feared the moment when the baby would separate from her.

  When the weather turned nice, she started going to the gardens in front of the church, since in the new neighborhood there were only bare streets with a few bushes or sickly saplings. Passersby stopped to look at the baby and praised him, which pleased her. If she had to change him, she went to the old grocery, where, as soon as she entered, the customers greeted Gennaro warmly. Ada, however, with her smock that was too tidy, the lipstick on her thin lips, her pale face, her neat hair, her commanding ways even toward Stefano, was increasingly impudent, acting like a servant-mistress, and, since she was busy, she did everything possible to let Lila understand that she, the carriage, and the baby were in the way. But Lila took little notice. The surly indifference of her husband confused her more: in private, inattentive but not hostile to the baby, in public, in front of the customers who spoke in tender childish voices and wanted to hold him and kiss him, he didn’t even look at him, in fact he made a show of disinterest. Lila went to the rear of the shop, washed Gennaro, quickly dressed him again, and went back to the gardens. There she examined her son lovingly, searching for signs of Nino in his face, and wondering if Stefano had seen what she couldn’t.

  But soon she forgot about it. In general the days passed over her without provoking the least emotion. She mostly took care of her son, the reading of a book might last weeks, two or three pages a day. In the gardens, if the baby was sleeping, every so often she let herself be distracted by the branches of the trees that were putting out new buds, and she wrote in one of her battered notebooks.

  Once she noticed that there was a funeral in the church, and when, with the baby, she went to see, she discovered that it was the funeral of Enzo’s mother. She saw him, stiff, pale, but she didn’t offer her condolences. Another time she was sitting on a bench with the carriage beside her, bent over a large volume with a green spine, when a skinny old woman appeared before her, leaning on a cane; her cheeks seemed to be sucked into her throat by her very breathing.

  “Guess who I am.”

  Lila had trouble recognizing her, but finally the woman’s eyes, in a flash, recalled the imposing Maestra Oliviero. She jumped up full of emotion, about to embrace her, but the teacher drew back in annoyance. Lila then showed her the baby, said proudly, “His name is Gennaro,” and since everyone praised her son she expected that the teacher would, too. But Maestra Oliviero completely ignored the child, she seemed interested only in the heavy book that her former pupil was holding, a finger in the pag
es to mark her place.

  “What is it?”

  Lila became nervous. The teacher’s looks had changed, her voice, everything about her, except her eyes and the sharp tones, the same tones as when she had asked her a question in the classroom. So she, too, showed that she hadn’t changed, she answered in a lazy yet aggressive way: “The title is Ulysses.”

  “Is it about the Odyssey?”

  “No, it’s about how prosaic life is today.”

  “And so?”

  “That’s all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck.”

  The teacher reproached her for that last word, as in school, and Lila posed as an insolent girl, and laughed, so that the old woman became even sterner, asked her how the book was. She answered that it was difficult and she didn’t completely understand it.

  “Then why are you reading it?”

  “Because someone I knew read it. But he didn’t like it.”

  “And you?”

  “I do.”

  “Even if it’s difficult?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t read books that you can’t understand, it’s bad for you.”

  “A lot of things are bad for you.”

  “You’re not happy?”

  “So-so.”

  “You were destined for great things.”

  “I’ve done them: I’m married and I’ve had a baby.”

  “Everyone can do that.”

  “I’m like everyone.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “No, you are wrong, and you always were wrong.”

  “You were rude as a child and you’re rude now.”

  “Clearly you weren’t much of a teacher as far as I’m concerned.”

  Maestra Oliviero looked at her carefully and Lila read in her face the anxiety of being wrong. The teacher was trying to find in her eyes the intelligence she had seen when she was a child, she wanted confirmation that she hadn’t been wrong. She thought: I have to remove from my face every sign that makes her right, I don’t want her to preach to me how I’m wasted. But meanwhile she felt exposed to yet another examination, and, contradictorily, she feared the result. She is discovering that I am stupid, she said to herself, her heart pounding harder, she is discovering that my whole family is stupid, that my forebears were stupid and my descendants will be stupid, that Gennaro will be stupid. She became upset, she put the book in her bag, she grabbed the handle of the carriage, she said nervously that she had to go. Crazy old lady, she still believed she could rap me on the knuckles. She left the teacher in the gardens, small, clutching her cane, consumed by an illness that she would not give in to.