The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  “I’m happy for you,” she murmured.

  But at the moment I scarcely noticed the affection of the gesture, I was struck by the swelling of her hands and the wounds, cuts old and new, a fresh one on the thumb of her left hand whose edges were inflamed, and I could imagine that under the bandage on her right hand she had an even worse injury.

  “What have you done to yourself?”

  She immediately withdrew, put her hands in her pockets.

  “Nothing. Stripping meat off the bones ruins your fingers.”

  “You strip the meat?”

  “They put me where they like.”

  “Talk to Bruno.”

  “Bruno is the worst shit of them all. He shows up only to see who of us he can fuck in the aging room.”

  “Lila.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “I’m very well. Here in the storerooms they give me ten lire more an hour for cold damage.”

  The man called: “Cerù, the two minutes are up.”

  “Coming,” she said.

  I murmured, “Maestra Oliviero died.”

  She shrugged, said, “She was sick, it was bound to happen.”

  I added in a hurry, because I saw that the man next to the cart was getting anxious, “She let me have The Blue Fairy.”

  “What’s The Blue Fairy?”

  I looked at her to see if it was true that she didn’t remember and she seemed sincere.

  “The book you wrote when you were ten.”

  “Book?”

  “That’s what we called it.”

  Lila pressed her lips together, shook her head. She was alarmed, she was afraid of getting in trouble at work, but in my presence she acted the part of someone who does as she likes. I have to go, I thought.

  She said, “A long time has passed since then,” and shivered.

  “Do you have a fever?”

  “No.”

  I looked for the packet in my purse, gave it to her. She took it, recognized it, but showed no emotion.

  “I was an arrogant child,” she muttered.

  I quickly contradicted her.

  “The story is still beautiful today,” I said. “I read it again and discovered that, without realizing it, I’ve always had it in my mind. That’s where my book comes from.”

  “From this nonsense?” she laughed loudly, nervously. “Then whoever printed it is crazy.”

  The man shouted, “I’m waiting for you, Cerullo.”

  “You’re a pain in the ass,” she answered.

  She put the packet in her pocket and took me under the arm. We went toward the exit. I thought of how I had dressed up for her and how hard it had been to get to that place. I had imagined tears, confidences, talk, a wonderful morning of confessions and reconciliation. Instead here we were, walking arm in arm, she bundled up, dirty, scarred, I disguised as a young lady of good family. I told her that Rinuccio was cute and very intelligent. I praised the neighbor, asked about Enzo. She was glad that I had found the child well, she in turn praised the neighbor. But it was the mention of Enzo that kindled her, she lighted up, became talkative.

  “He’s kind,” she said, “he’s good, he’s not afraid of anything, he’s extremely smart and he studies at night, he knows so many things.”

  I had never heard her talk about anyone in that way. I asked, “What does he study?”

  “Mathematics.”

  “Enzo?”

  “Yes. He read something about electronic calculators or saw an ad, I don’t know, and he got excited. He says a calculator isn’t like you see in the movies, all colored lights that light up and go out with a bip. He said it’s a question of languages.”

  “Languages?”

  She had that familiar narrow gaze.

  “Not languages for writing novels,” she said, and the dismissive tone in which she uttered the word “novels” disturbed me, the laugh that followed disturbed me. “Programming languages. At night, after the baby goes to sleep, Enzo starts studying.”

  Her lower lip was dry, cracked by the cold, her face marred by fatigue. And yet with what pride she had said: he starts studying. I saw that, in spite of the third person singular, it wasn’t only Enzo who was excited about the subject.

  “And what do you do?”

  “I keep him company: he’s tired and if he’s by himself he feels like sleeping. But together it’s great, one of us says one thing, one another. You know what a flow chart is?”

  I shook my head. Her eyes then became very small, she let go of my arm, she began to talk, drawing me into that new passion. In the courtyard, with the odor of the bonfire and the stink of animal fats, flesh, nerves, this Lila, wrapped up in an overcoat but also wearing a blue smock, her hands cut, disheveled, very pale, without a trace of makeup, regained life and energy. She spoke of the reduction of everything to the alternative true-false, she quoted Boolean algebra and many other things I knew nothing about. And yet her words, as usual, fascinated me. As she spoke, I saw the wretched house at night, the child sleeping in the other room; I saw Enzo sitting on the bed, worn out from work on the locomotives in who knows what factory; I saw her, after the day at the cooking tubs or in the gutting room or in the storerooms at twenty below zero, sitting with him on the blanket. I saw them both in the terrible light of sacrificed sleep, I heard their voices: they did exercises with the flow charts, they practiced cleaning the world of the superfluous, they charted the actions of the day according to only two values of truth: zero and one. Obscure words in the miserable room, whispered so as not to wake Rinuccio. I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

  “Do you like living with him?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you have children?”

  She had an expression of feigned amusement.

  “We’re not together.”

  “No?”

  “No, I don’t feel like it.”

  “And he?”

  “He’s waiting.”

  “Maybe he’s like a brother.”

  “No, I like him.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We stopped beside the fire, she gestured toward the guard. “Look out for him,” she said. “When you go out he’s liable to accuse you of stealing a mortadella just so he can search you and put his hands all over you.”

  We embraced, we kissed each other. I said I would see her again, I didn’t want to lose her, and I was sincere. She smiled, she said, “Yes, I don’t want to lose you, either.” I felt that she, too, was sincere.

  I went away in great agitation. Inside was the struggle to leave her, the old conviction that without her nothing truly important would ever happen to me, and yet I felt the need to get away, to free my nostrils of that stink of fat. After a few quick steps I couldn’t help it, I turned to wave again. I saw her standing beside the bonfire, without the shape of a woman in that outfit, as she leafed through the pages of the Blue Fairy. Suddenly she threw it on the fire.

  125.

  I hadn’t told her what the story of my book was or when it would be in bookstores. I hadn’t even told her about Pietro, of the plan to get married in a couple of years. Her life had overwhelmed me and it took days for me to restore clear outlines a
nd depth to mine. What finally restored me to myself—but what myself?—was the proofs of the book: a hundred and thirty-nine pages, thick paper, the words of the notebook, fixed by my handwriting, which had become pleasantly alien thanks to the printed characters.

  I spent happy hours reading, rereading, correcting. Outside it was cold, a frigid wind slipped in through the loose window frames. I sat at the kitchen table with Gianni and Elisa, who were studying. My mother was busily working around us, but with surprising care, in order not to disturb me.

  Soon I went to Milan again. This time I allowed myself, for the first time in my life, to take a taxi. The bald editor, at the end of a day spent evaluating the final corrections, said to me, “I’ll call you a taxi,” and I didn’t know how to say no. So it happened that when I went from Milan to Pisa, at the station I looked around and thought: why not, let’s play the great lady again. And the temptation resurfaced when I returned to Naples, in the chaos of Piazza Garibaldi. I would have liked to arrive in the neighborhood in a taxi, sitting comfortably in the back seat, a driver at my service, who, when we reached the gate, would open the door for me. I took the bus instead, I didn’t feel up to it. But something about me must have been different, because when I greeted Ada, who was taking her baby out for a walk, she looked at me distractedly, and walked by. Then she stopped, turned back, said, “How well you look, I didn’t recognize you, you’re different.”

  At the moment I was pleased, but soon I became unhappy. What advantage could I have gained from becoming different? I wanted to remain myself, chained to Lila, to the courtyard, to the lost dolls, to Don Achille, to everything. It was the only way to feel intensely what was happening to me. Yet change is hard to oppose: in that period, in spite of myself, I changed more than in the years in Pisa. In the spring the book came out, which, much more than my degree, gave me a new identity. When I showed a copy to my mother, to my father, to my sister and brothers, they passed it around in silence, but without looking through it. They stared at the cover with uncertain smiles, they were like police agents confronted with a fake document. My father said, “It’s my surname,” but he spoke without satisfaction, as if suddenly, instead of being proud of me, he had discovered that I had stolen money from his pocket.

  Days passed, the first reviews came out. I scanned them anxiously, wounded by even the slightest hint of criticism. I read the best ones aloud to the whole family, my father brightened. Elisa said teasingly, “You should have signed Lenuccia, Elena’s disgusting.”

  In those frenzied days, my mother bought a photograph album and began to paste in it everything good that was written about me. One morning she asked, “What’s the name of your fiancé?”

  She knew, but she had something in mind and to communicate it she wished to start there.

  “Pietro Airota.”

  “Then you’ll be called Airota.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you write another book, on the cover will it say Airota?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I like Elena Greco.”

  “So do I,” she said.

  But she never read it. My father didn’t read it, Peppe, Gianni, Elisa didn’t read it, and at first the neighborhood didn’t read it. One morning a photographer came and kept me for two hours, first in the gardens, then along the stradone, then at the entrance to the tunnel, taking photographs. Later, one of the pictures appeared in Il Mattino; I expected passersby would stop me on the street, would read the book out of curiosity. Instead no one, not Alfonso, Ada, Carmen, Gigliola, Michele Solara, who, unlike his brother Marcello, wasn’t a complete stranger to the alphabet, ever said to me, as soon as they could: your book is wonderful, or, who knows, your book is terrible. They only greeted me warmly and went on.

  I encountered readers for the first time in a bookstore in Milan. The event, I soon discovered, had been urgently planned by Adele Airota, who was following the book’s journey at a distance and traveled purposely from Genoa for the occasion. She came to the hotel, kept me company all afternoon, tried tactfully to calm me. I had a tremor in my hands that wouldn’t go away, I struggled with words, I had a bitter taste in my mouth. I was angry with Pietro, who had stayed in Pisa, he was busy. Mariarosa, who lived in Milan, made a quick congratulatory visit before the reading, then she had to go.

  I went to the bookstore terrified. The room was full, I went in with my eyes down. I thought I would faint with emotion. Adele greeted many of those present, they were friends and acquaintances of hers. She sat in the first row, gave me encouraging looks, turned occasionally to talk to a woman of her age who was sitting behind her. Until that moment I had spoken in public only twice, forced to by Franco, and the audience then was made up of six or seven of his friends who smiled with understanding. The situation was different now. I had before me some forty refined, cultivated strangers who stared at me in silence, with an unfriendly gaze; it was in large part the prestige of the Airotas that compelled them to be there. I wanted to get up and run away.

  But the rite began. An old critic, a university professor much esteemed in his time, said as many good things about the book as possible. I couldn’t understand his speech, I thought only of what I was to say. I fidgeted in my chair, I had a stomachache. The world had vanished into chaos, and I couldn’t find within myself the authority to call it back and put it in order again. Yet I pretended self-assurance. When it was my turn, I spoke without really knowing what I was saying, I talked in order not to be silent, I gesticulated too much, I displayed too much literary knowledge, I made a show of my classical education. Then silence fell.

  What were those people in front of me thinking? How was the critic and professor beside me evaluating my remarks? And was Adele, behind her air of cordiality, repenting her support of me? When I looked at her I realized immediately that my eyes were begging her for the comfort of a nod of approval and I was ashamed. Meanwhile the professor touched an arm as if to calm me, asked the audience for questions. Many stared in embarrassment at their knees, the floor. The first to speak was an older man with thick eyeglasses, well known to those present but not to me. At simply hearing his voice, Adele had an expression of annoyance. The man talked for a long time about the decline of publishing, which now looked more for money than for literary quality; then he moved on to the marketing collusion between critics and the cultural pages of the dailies; finally he focused on my book, first ironically, then, when he cited the slightly risqué pages, in an openly hostile tone. I turned red and rather than answer I mumbled some banal comments, off the subject. Until I broke off, exhausted, and stared at the table. The professor-critic encouraged me with a smile, with his gaze, thinking that I wanted to continue. When he realized that I didn’t intend to, he asked curtly: “Anyone else?”

  At the back a hand was raised.

  “Please.”

  A tall young man, with long, unruly hair and a thick black beard, spoke in a contemptuously polemical way of the preceding speaker, and, a few times, even of the introduction of the nice man who was sitting next to me. He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function. Then he went on to praise the modernizing force of my novel. I recognized him most of all by his voice, it was Nino Sarratore.

  THOSE WHO LEAVE

  AND THOSE WHO STAY

  INDEX OF CHARACTERS AND NOTES ON THE EVENTS

  OF THE EARLIER VOLUMES

  The Cerullo family (the shoemaker’s family):

  Fernando Cerullo, shoemaker, Lila’s father. He wouldn’t send his daughter beyond elementary school.

  Nunzia Cerullo, Lila’s mother. Close to her daughter, but without sufficient authority to support her against her father.

  Raffaella Cerullo, called Lina, or Lila. She was born in August, 1944, and is sixty-six when she di
sappears from Naples without a trace. A brilliant student, at the age of ten she writes a story titled The Blue Fairy. She leaves school after getting her elementary-school diploma and learns to be a shoemaker. She marries Stefano Carracci at a young age and successfully manages first the grocery store in the new neighborhood and then the shoe store in Piazza dei Martiri. During a vacation on Ischia she falls in love with Nino Sarratore, for whom she leaves her husband. After the shipwreck of her relationship with Nino and the birth of her son Gennaro (also called Rino), Lila leaves Stefano definitively when she discovers that he is expecting a child with Ada Cappuccio. She moves with Enzo Scanno to San Giovanni a Teduccio and begins working in the sausage factory belonging to Bruno Soccavo.

  Rino Cerullo, Lila’s older brother, also a shoemaker. With his father, Fernando, and thanks to Lila and to Stefano Carracci’s money, he sets up the Cerullo shoe factory. He marries Stefano’s sister, Pinuccia Carracci, with whom he has a son, Ferdinando, called Dino. Lila’s son bears his name, Rino.

  Other children.

  The Greco family (the porter’s family):

  Elena Greco, called Lenuccia or Lenù. Born in August, 1944, she is the author of the long story we are reading. Elena begins to write it when she learns that her childhood friend Lina Cerullo, whom she calls Lila, has disappeared. After elementary school, Elena continues to study, with increasing success; in high school her abilities and Professor Galiani’s protection allow her to survive unscathed a clash with the religion teacher about the role of the Holy Spirit. At the invitation of Nino Sarratore, with whom she has been secretly in love since childhood, and with valuable help from Lila, she writes an article about this clash, which, in the end, is not published in the magazine Nino contributes to. Elena’s brilliant schoolwork is crowned by a degree from the Scuola Normale, in Pisa, where she meets and becomes engaged to Pietro Airota, and by the publication of a novel in which she reimagines the life of the neighborhood and her adolescent experiences on Ischia.