The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  Over. Objects were sticking together again, her body slowly settled, the sweat dried. Lila was trembling now, and so tired that the walls were spinning around her, she was afraid she would faint. I have to go to Enzo, she thought, and get warm: get in his bed now, press myself against his back while he sleeps, go to sleep myself. But she gave it up. She felt on her face the pretty little expression she had made when she said to Bruno: Trust me, I have a small child, I didn’t do this thing, a charming affectation, perhaps seductive, the body of a woman acting autonomously in spite of disgust. She was ashamed: how could she behave like that, after what Soccavo had done to her in the drying room? And yet. Ah, to push men and drive them like obedient beasts toward goals that were not theirs. No, no, enough, in the past she had done it for different reasons, almost without realizing it, with Stefano, with Nino, with the Solaras, maybe even with Enzo. Now she didn’t want to anymore, she would take care of things herself: with the guard, with her fellow workers, with the students, with Soccavo, with her own mind, which, full of demands, would not resign itself and, worn out by the impact of persons and things, was collapsing.

  34.

  Upon waking she discovered that she had a fever; she took an aspirin and went to work anyway. In the still dark sky there was a weak bluish light that licked the low buildings, the muddy weeds and refuse. Already as she skirted the puddles on the unpaved stretch of road that led to the factory, she noticed that there were four students, the two from the day before, a third about the same age, and a fat kid, decidedly obese, around twenty years old. They were pasting on the boundary wall placards that called on the workers to join the struggle, and had just begun to hand out a leaflet of the same type. But if, the day before, the workers, out of curiosity, out of courtesy, had taken the pamphlet, the majority now either kept going with their heads down or took the sheet and immediately crumpled it up and threw it away.

  As soon as she saw that the youths were there, punctual as if what they called political work had a schedule stricter than hers, Lila was annoyed. The annoyance became hostility when the boy from the day before recognized her and hurried toward her, with a friendly expression, and a large number of leaflets in his hand.

  “Everything all right, Comrade?”

  Lila paid no attention, her throat was sore, her temples pounding. The boy ran after her, said uncertainly:

  “I’m Dario, maybe you don’t remember, we met on Via dei Tribunali.”

  “I know who the fuck you are,” she snapped, “but I don’t want to have anything to do with you or your friends.”

  Dario was speechless, he slowed down, he said almost to himself:

  “You don’t want the leaflet?”

  Lila didn’t answer, so that she wouldn’t yell something hostile at him. But the boy’s disoriented face, wearing the expression people have when they feel they are right and don’t understand how it is that others don’t share their opinion, stayed in her mind. She thought that she ought to explain to him carefully why she had said the things she had said at the meeting, and why she found it intolerable that those things had ended up in the pamphlet, and why she judged it pointless and stupid that the four of them, instead of still being in bed or about to enter a classroom, were standing there in the cold handing out a densely written leaflet to people who had difficulty reading, and who, besides, had no reason to subject themselves to the effort of reading, since they already knew those things, they lived them every day, and could tell even worse: unrepeatable sounds that no one would ever say, write, or read, and that nevertheless held as potential the real causes of their inferiority. But she had a fever, she was tired of everything, it would cost her too much effort. And anyway she had reached the gate, and there the situation was becoming complicated.

  The guard was yelling at the oldest boy, the fat one, shouting at him in dialect: You cross that line, cross it, shit, then you’re entering private property without permission and I’ll shoot. The student, also agitated, replied with a laugh, a broad aggressive laugh, accompanied by insults: he called him a slave, he shouted, in Italian, Shoot, show me how you shoot, this isn’t private property, everything in there belongs to the people. Lila passed both of them—how many times had she witnessed bluster like that: Rino, Antonio, Pasquale, even Enzo were masters of it—and said to Filippo, seriously: Satisfy him, don’t waste time chattering, someone who could be sleeping or studying and instead is here being a pain in the ass deserves to be shot. The guard saw her, heard her, and, openmouthed, tried to decide if she was really encouraging him to do something crazy or making fun of him. The student had no doubts: he stared at her angrily, shouted: Go on, go in, go kiss the boss’s ass, and he retreated a few steps, shaking his head, then he continued to hand out leaflets a few meters from the gate.

  Lila headed toward the courtyard. She was already tired at seven in the morning, her eyes were burning, eight hours of work seemed an eternity. Meanwhile behind her there was a noise of screeching brakes and men shouting, and she turned. Two cars had arrived, one gray and one blue. Someone had got out of the first car and begun to tear off the placards that had just been pasted on the wall. It’s getting bad, Lila thought, and instinctively went back, although she knew that, like the others, she ought to hurry in and start work.

  She took a few steps, enough to identify the youth at the wheel of the gray car: it was Gino. She saw him open the door and, tall, muscular as he had become, get out of the car holding a stick. The others, the ones who were tearing off the posters, the ones who, more slowly, were still getting out of the cars, seven or eight in all, were carrying chains and metal bars. Fascists, mostly from the neighborhood, Lila knew some of them. Fascists, as Stefano’s father, Don Achille, had been, as Stefano had turned out to be, as the Solaras were, grandfather, father, grandsons, even if at times they acted like monarchists, at times Christian Democrats, as it suited them. She had hated them ever since, as a girl, she had imagined every detail of their obscenities, since she had discovered that there was no way to be free of them, to clear everything away. The connection between past and present had never really broken down, the neighborhood loved them by a large majority, pampered them, and they showed up with their filth whenever there was a chance to fight.

  Dario, the boy from Via dei Tribunali, was the first to move, he rushed to protest the torn-down posters. He was holding the ream of leaflets, and Lila thought: Throw them away, you idiot, but he didn’t. She heard him saying in Italian useless things like Stop it, you have no right, and at the same time saw him turn to his friends for help. He doesn’t know anything about fighting: never lose sight of your adversary, in the neighborhood there’d be no talk, at most there’d be some yelling, wide-eyed, to inspire fear, and meanwhile you were the first to strike, causing as much injury as possible, without stopping—it was up to others to stop you if they could. One of the youths who were tearing down the posters acted just like that: he punched Dario in the face, with no warning, knocking him to the ground amid the leaflets he had dropped, and then he was on him, hitting him, while the pages flew around as if there were a fierce excitement in the things themselves. At that point the obese student saw that the boy was on the ground and hurried to help him, bare-handed, but he was blocked halfway by someone armed with a chain, who hit him on the arm. The youth grabbed the chain furiously, and started pulling on it, to tear it away from his attacker, and for several seconds they fought for it, screaming insults at one another. Until Gino came up behind the fat student and hit him with the stick, knocking him down.

  Lila forgot her fever and her exhaustion, and ran to the gate, but without a precise purpose. She didn’t know if she wanted to have a better view, if she wanted to help the students, if she was simply moved by an instinct she had always had, by virtue of which fighting didn’t frighten her but, rather, kindled her fury. She wasn’t in time to return to the street, she had to jump aside in order not to be run over by a group of workers who were rush
ing through the gate. A few had tried to stop the attackers, including Edo, certainly, but they hadn’t been able to, and now they were escaping. Men and women were running, pursued by two youths holding iron bars. A woman named Isa, an office worker, ran toward Filippo yelling: Help, do something, call the police, and Edo, one of whose hands was bleeding, said aloud to himself: I’m going to get the hatchet and then we’ll see. So by the time Lila reached the unpaved road, the blue car had already left and Gino was getting into the gray one, but he recognized her and paused, astonished, saying: Lina, you’ve ended up here? Then, pulled in by his comrades, he started the engine and drove off, but he shouted out window: You acted the lady, bitch, and look what the fuck you’ve become.

  35.

  The workday passed in an anxiety that, as usual, Lila contained behind an attitude that at one moment was contemptuous, the next threatening. They all made it clear that they blamed her for the tensions that had emerged suddenly in a place that had always been peaceful. But soon two parties formed: one, a small group, wanted to meet somewhere during the lunch break and take advantage of the situation to urge Lila to go to the owner with some cautious wage demands; the other, the majority, wouldn’t even speak to Lila and was opposed to any undertaking that would complicate a work life that was already complicated. Between the two groups there was no way to reach agreement. In fact Edo, who belonged to the first party and was worried about the injury to his hand, went so far as to say to someone who belonged to the second: If my hand gets infected, if they cut it off, I’m coming to your house, I’ll pour a can of gasoline on it, and set you and your family on fire. Lila ignored both factions. She kept to herself and worked, head down, with her usual efficiency, driving away the conversation, the insults, and the cold. But she reflected on what awaited her, a whirl of different thoughts passed through her feverish head: what had happened to the injured students, where had they gone, what trouble had they got her into; Gino would talk about her in the neighborhood, he would tell Michele Solara everything; it was humiliating to ask Bruno for favors, and yet there was no other way, she was afraid of being fired, she was afraid of losing a salary that, even though it was miserable, allowed her to love Enzo without considering him fundamental to her survival and that of Gennaro.

  Then she remembered the terrible night. What had happened to her, should she go to a doctor? And if the doctor found some illness, how would she manage with work and the child? Careful, don’t get agitated, she needed to put things in order. Therefore, during the lunch break, oppressed by her cares, she resigned herself to going to Bruno. She wanted to tell him about the nasty trick of the sausage, about Gino’s fascists, reiterate that it wasn’t her fault. First, however, despising herself, she went to the bathroom to comb her hair and put on a little lipstick. But the secretary said with hostility that Bruno wasn’t there and almost certainly wouldn’t be all week. Anxiety gripped her again. Increasingly nervous, she thought of asking Pasquale to keep the students from returning to the gate, she said to herself that, once the boys from the committee disappeared, the fascists, too, would disappear, the factory would settle back into its old ways. But how to find Peluso? She didn’t know where he worked, she didn’t want to look for him in the neighborhood—she was afraid of running into her mother, her father, and especially her brother, with whom she didn’t want to fight. So, exhausted, she added up all her troubles and decided to turn directly to Nadia. At the end of her shift she hurried home, left a note for Enzo to prepare dinner, bundled Gennaro up carefully in coat and hat, and set off, bus after bus, to Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

  The sky was pastel-colored, with not even a puff of a cloud, but the late-afternoon light was fading and a strong wind was blowing in the violet air. She remembered the house in detail, the entrance, all of it, and the humiliation of the past intensified the bitterness of the present. How brittle the past was, continually crumbling, falling on her. From that house where she had gone with me to a party that had made her suffer, Nadia, Nino’s old girlfriend, had tumbled out to make her suffer even more. But she wasn’t one to stay quiet, she walked up the hill, dragging Gennaro. She wanted to say to that girl: You and the others are making trouble for my son; for you it’s only an amusement, nothing terrible will happen to you; for me, for him, no, it’s a serious thing, so either do something to fix it or I’ll bash your face in. That was what she intended to say, and she coughed and her rage mounted; she couldn’t wait to explode.

  She found the street door open. She climbed the stairs, she remembered herself and me, and Stefano, who had taken us to the party, the clothes, the shoes, every word that we had said to each other on the way and on the way back. She rang, Professor Galiani herself opened the door, just as she remembered her, polite, orderly, just like her house. In comparison Lila felt dirty, because of the odor of raw meat that clung to her, the cold that clogged her chest, the fever that confused her feelings, the child whose whining in dialect irritated her. She asked abruptly:

  “Is Nadia here?”

  “No, she’s out.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know, in ten minutes, in an hour, she does as she likes.”

  “Could you tell her that Lina came to see her?”

  “Is it urgent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  Tell her what? Lila gave a start, she looked past the professor. She glimpsed the ancient nobility of furniture and lamps, the book-filled library that had captivated her, the precious paintings on the walls. She thought: This is the world that Nino aspired to before he got mixed up with me. She thought: What do I know of this other Naples, nothing; I’ll never live there and neither will Gennaro. Let it be destroyed, then, let fire and ashes come, let the lava reach the top of the hills. Then finally she answered: No, thank you, I have to talk to Nadia. And she was about to leave, it had been a fruitless journey. But she liked the hostile attitude with which the professor had spoken of her daughter and she exclaimed in a suddenly frivolous tone:

  “Do you know that years ago I was in this house at a party? I don’t know what I expected, but I was bored, I couldn’t wait to leave.”

  36.

  Professor Galiani, too, must have seen something she liked, maybe a frankness verging on rudeness. When Lila mentioned our friendship, the professor seemed pleased, she exclaimed: Ah yes, Greco, we never see her anymore, success has gone to her head. Then she led mother and son to the living room, where she had left her grandson playing, a blond child whom she almost ordered: Marco, say hello to our new friend. Lila in turn pushed her son forward, she said, go on, Gennaro, play with Marco, and she sat in an old, comfortable green armchair, still talking about the party years ago. The professor was sorry she had no recollection of it, but Lila remembered everything. She said that it had been one of the worst nights of her life. She spoke of how out of place she had felt, she described in sarcastic tones the conversations she had listened to without understanding anything. I was very ignorant, she exclaimed, with an excessive gaiety, and today even more than I was then.

  Professor Galiani listened and was impressed by her sincerity, by her unsettling tone, by the intense Italian of her sentences, by her skillfully controlled irony. She must have felt in Lila, I imagine, that elusive quality that seduced and at the same time alarmed, a siren power: it could happen to anyone, it happened to her, and the conversation broke off only when Gennaro slapped Marco, insulting him in dialect and grabbing a small green car. Lila got up quickly, and, seizing her son by the arm, forcefully slapped the hand that had hit the other child, and although Professor Galiani said weakly, Let it go, they’re children, she rebuked him harshly, insisting that he return the toy. Marco was crying, but Gennaro didn’t shed a tear; instead, he threw the toy at him with contempt. Lila hit him again, hard, on the head.

  “We’re going,” she said, nervously.