The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She never talked to you about it?”

  “What?”

  “Michele Solara.”

  He told me in brief, tense phrases that in all these years Michele had never stopped asking Lila to work for him. He had proposed that she manage a new shop on the Vomero. Or the accounting and the taxes. Or be a secretary for a friend of his, an important Christian Democratic politician. He had even gone so far as to offer her a salary of two hundred thousand lire a month just to invent things, crazy notions, anything that came into her head. Even though he lived on Posillipo, he still kept the headquarters of all his businesses in the neighborhood, at his mother and father’s house. So Lila found him around her constantly, on the street, in the market, in the shops. He stopped her, always very friendly, he joked with Gennaro, gave him little gifts. Then he became very serious, and even when she refused the jobs he offered, he wasn’t impatient, he said goodbye, joking as usual: I’m not giving up, I’ll wait for you for eternity, call me when you want and I’ll come running. Until he found out she was working for IBM. That had angered him, and he had gone so far as to get people he knew to remove Enzo from the market for consultants, and hence Lila, too. He hadn’t had any success, IBM urgently needed technicians and there weren’t many good technicians like Enzo and Lila. But the climate had changed. Enzo had found Gino’s fascists outside the house and he escaped because he managed to reach the front door in time and lock it behind him. But shortly afterward an alarming thing had happened to Gennaro. Lila’s mother had gone to pick him up at school as usual. All the students had come out and the child was nowhere to be seen. The teacher: He was here a minute ago. His classmates: He was here and then he disappeared. Nunzia, terribly frightened, had called her daughter at work; Lila returned right away and went to look for Gennaro. She found him on a bench in the gardens. The child was sitting quietly, with his smock, his ribbon, his schoolbag, and he laughed at the questions—where did you go, what did you do—with expressionless eyes. She wanted to go and kill Michele right away, both for the attempted beating of Enzo and the kidnapping of her son, but Enzo restrained her. The fascists now went after anyone on the left and there was no proof that it was Michele who ordered the kidnapping. As for Gennaro, he himself had admitted that his brief absence was only an act of disobedience. In any case, once Lila calmed down, Enzo had decided on his own to go and talk to Michele. He had showed up at the Bar Solara and Michele had listened without batting an eye. Then he had said, more or less: I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Enzù: I’m fond of Gennaro, anyone who touches him is dead, but among all the foolish things you’ve said the only true thing is that Lina is smart and it’s a pity that she’s wasting her intelligence, I’ve been asking her to work with me for years. Then he continued: That irritates you? Who gives a damn. But you’re wrong, if you love her you should encourage her to use her capabilities. Come here, sit down, have a coffee and a pastry, tell me what those computers of yours do. And it hadn’t ended there. They had met two or three times, by chance, and Michele had demonstrated increasing interest in the System 3. One day he even said, amused, that he had asked someone at IBM who was smarter, him or Lila, and that person had said that Enzo was certainly smart, but the best in the business was Lila. After that, he had stopped her on the street again and made her a significant offer. He intended to rent the System 3 and use it in all his commercial activities. Result: he wanted her as the chief technician, at four hundred thousand lire a month.

  “She didn’t even tell you that?” Enzo asked me warily.

  “No.”

  “You see she didn’t want to bother you, you have your life. but you understand that for her personally it would be a significant step up, and for the two of us it would be a fortune: we’d have seven hundred and fifty thousand lire a month altogether, I don’t know if that’s clear.”

  “But Lina?”

  “She has to answer by September.”

  “And what will she do?”

  “I don’t know. Have you ever been able to figure out what’s in her mind ahead of time?”

  “No. But what do you think she should do?”

  “I think what she thinks.”

  “Even if you don’t agree?”

  “Even then.”

  I went out to the car with him. On the stairs it occurred to me that maybe I should tell him what he surely didn’t know, that Michele harbored for Lila a love like a spiderweb, a dangerous love that had nothing to do with physical possession or even with a loyal subservience. And I was about to do it, I was fond of him, I didn’t want him to believe that he was merely dealing with a quasi-camorrist who had been planning for a long time to buy the intelligence of this woman. When he was already behind the wheel I asked him:

  “And if Michele wants to sleep with her?”

  He was impassive.

  “I’ll kill him. But anyway he doesn’t want her, he already has a lover and everybody knows it.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Marisa, he’s got her pregnant again.”

  For a moment it seemed to me that I hadn’t understood.

  “Marisa Sarratore?”

  “Marisa, the wife of Alfonso.”

  I recalled my conversation with my schoolmate. He had tried to tell me how complicated his life was and I had retreated, struck more by the surface of his revelation than by the substance. And to me his uneasiness seemed confused—to get things straight I would have had to talk to him again, and maybe not even then would I have understood—and yet it pierced me unpleasantly, painfully. I asked:

  “And Alfonso?”

  “He doesn’t give a damn, they say he’s a fag.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Everyone is very general, Enzo. What else does everyone say?”

  He looked at me with a flash of conspiratorial irony:

  “A lot of things, the neighborhood is always gossiping.”

  “Like?”

  “Old stories have come back to the surface. They say it was the mother of the Solaras who murdered Don Achille.”

  He left, and I hoped he would take away his words, too. But what I had learned stayed with me, worried me, made me angry. In an attempt to get rid of it I went to the telephone and talked to Lila, mixing anxieties and reproaches: Why didn’t you say anything about Michele’s job offers, especially the last one; why did you tell Alfonso’s secret; why did you start that story about the mother of the Solaras, it was a game of ours; why did you send me Gennaro, are you worried about him, tell me plainly, I have the right to know; why, once and for all, don’t you tell me what’s really in your mind? It was an outburst, but, sentence by sentence, deep inside myself, I hoped that we wouldn’t stop there, that the old desire to confront our entire relationship and re-examine it, to elucidate and have full consciousness of it, would be realized. I hoped to provoke her and draw her in to other, increasingly personal questions. But Lila was annoyed, she treated me coldly, she wasn’t in a good mood. She answered that I had been gone for years, that I now had a life in which the Solaras, Stefano, Marisa, Alfonso meant nothing, counted for less than zero. Go on vacation, she said, abruptly, write, act the intellectual, here we’ve remained too crude for you, stay away; and please, make Gennaro get some sun, otherwise he’ll come home stunted like his father.

  The sarcasm in her voice, the belittling, almost rude tone, removed any weight from Enzo’s story and eliminated any possibility of drawing her into the books I was reading, the vocabulary I had learned from Mariarosa and the Florentine women, the questions that I was trying to ask myself and that, once I had provided her with the basic concepts, she would surely know how to take on better than all of us. But yes, I thought, I’ll mind my own business and you mind yours: if you like, don’t grow up
, go on playing in the courtyard even now that you’re about to turn thirty; I’ve had enough, I’m going to the beach. And so I did.

  85.

  Pietro took the three children and me in the car to an ugly house in Viareggio that we had rented, then he returned to Florence to try to finish his book. Look, I said to myself, now I’m a vacationer, a well-off lady with three children and a pile of toys, a beach umbrella in the front row, soft towels, plenty to eat, five bikinis in different colors, menthol cigarettes, the sun that darkens my skin and makes me even blonder. I called Pietro and Lila every night. Pietro reported on people who had called for me, remnants of a distant time, and, more rarely, talked about some hypothesis having to do with his work that had just come to mind. I handed Lila to Gennaro, who reluctantly recounted what he considered important events of his day and said good night. I said almost nothing to either one or the other. Lila especially seemed reduced to voice alone.

  But I realized after a while that it wasn’t exactly so: part of her existed in flesh and blood in Gennaro. The boy was certainly very like Stefano and didn’t resemble Lila at all. Yet his gestures, the way he talked, some words, certain interjections, a kind of aggressiveness were those of Lila as a child. So sometimes if I was distracted I jumped at hearing his voice, or was spellbound as I observed him gesticulating, explaining a game to Dede.

  Unlike his mother, however, Gennaro was devious. Lila’s meanness when she was a child had always been explicit, no punishment ever drove her to hide it. Gennaro, on the other hand, played the role of the well-brought-up, even timid child, but as soon as I turned my back he teased Dede, he hid her doll, he hit her. When I threatened him, saying that as a punishment we wouldn’t call his mamma to say good night he assumed a contrite expression. In reality, that possible punishment didn’t worry him at all; the ritual of the evening phone call had been established by me, and he could easily do without it. What worried him, rather, was the threat that I wouldn’t buy him ice cream. Then he began to cry; between his sobs he said he wanted to go back to Naples, and I immediately gave in. But that didn’t soothe him. He took revenge on me by secretly being mean to Dede.

  I was sure that she feared him, hated him. But no. As time passed, she responded less and less to Gennaro’s harassments: she fell in love with him. She called him Rino or Rinuccio, because he had told her that was what his friends called him, and she followed him, paying no attention to my commands, in fact it was she who urged him to wander away from our umbrella. My day was made up of shouting: Dede where are you going, Gennaro come here, Elsa what are you doing, don’t put sand in your mouth, Gennaro stop it, Dede if you don’t stop it I’m coming over and we’ll see. A pointless struggle: Elsa ate sand no matter what and, no matter what, Dede and Gennaro disappeared.

  Their refuge was a nearby expanse of reeds. Once I went with Elsa to see what they were up to and discovered that they had taken off their bathing suits and Dede was touching, with fascination, the erect penis that Gennaro was showing her. I stopped a short distance away, I didn’t know what to do. Dede—I knew, I had seen her—often masturbated lying on her stomach. But I had read a lot about infant sexuality—I had even bought for my daughter a little book of colored illustrations that explained in very short sentences what happened between man and woman, words I had read her but which aroused no interest—and, although I felt uneasy, I had not only forced myself not to stop her, not to reproach her, but, assuming that her father would, I had been careful to keep him from surprising her.

  Now, though? Should I let them play together? Should I retreat, slip away? Or approach without giving the thing any importance, talk nonchalantly about something else? And if that violent boy, much bigger than Dede, forced on her who knows what, hurt her? Wasn’t the difference in age a danger? Two things precipitated the situation: Elsa saw her sister, shouted with joy, calling her name; and at the same time I heard the dialect words that Gennaro was saying to Dede, coarse words, the same horribly vulgar words I had learned as a child in the courtyard. I couldn’t control myself, everything I had read about pleasures, latencies, neurosis, polymorphous perversions of children and women vanished, and I scolded the two severely, especially Gennaro, whom I seized by the arm and dragged away. He burst into tears, and Dede said to me coldly, fearless: You’re very mean.

  I bought them both ice cream, but a period began in which a certain alarm at how Dede’s language was absorbing obscene words of Neapolitan dialect was added to a wary supervision, intended to keep the episode from being repeated. At night, while the children slept, I got into the habit of making an effort to remember: had I played games like that with my friends in the courtyard? And had Lila had experiences of that type? We had never talked about it. At the time we had uttered repulsive words, certainly, but they were insults that served, among other things, to ward off the hands of obscene adults, bad words that we shouted as we fled. For the rest? With difficulty I reached the point of asking myself: had she and I ever touched each other? Had I ever wished to, as a child, as a girl, as an adult? And her? I hovered on the edge of those questions for a long time. I answered slowly: I don’t know, I don’t want to know. And then I admitted that there had been a kind of admiration for her body, maybe that, yes, but I ruled out anything ever happening between us. Too much fear, if we had been seen we would have been beaten to death.

  In any case, on the days when I faced that problem, I avoided taking Gennaro to the public phone. I was afraid he would tell Lila that he didn’t like being with me anymore, that he would even tell her what had happened. That fear annoyed me: why should I be concerned? I let it all fade. Even my vigilance toward the two children slowly diminished, I couldn’t oversee them continuously. I devoted myself to Elsa, I forgot about them. I shouted nervously from the shore, towels ready, only if, despite purple lips and wrinkled fingertips, they wouldn’t get out of the water.

  The days of August slipped away. House, shopping, preparing the overflowing beach bags, beach, home again, dinner, ice cream, phone call. I chatted with other mothers, all older than me, and I was pleased if they praised my children, and my patience. They talked about husbands, about the husbands’ jobs. I talked about mine, I said: He’s a Latin professor at the university. On the weekend Pietro arrived, just as, years earlier, on Ischia, Stefano and Rino had. My acquaintances shot him respectful looks and seemed to appreciate, thanks to his professorship, even his bushy hair. He went swimming with the girls and Gennaro, he drew them into make-believe dangerous adventures that they all hugely enjoyed, then he sat studying under the umbrella, complaining from time to time about his lack of sleep—he often forgot the sleeping pills. In the kitchen, when the children were sleeping, we had sex standing up to avoid the creaking of the bed. Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.

  86.

  It was Pietro who, one Saturday, picked out, in the crowd of headlines that for days had been devoted to the ‘fascists’ bombing of the Italicus express train, a brief news item in the Corriere della Sera that concerned a small factory on the outskirts of Naples.

  “Wasn’t Soccavo the name of the company where your friend worked?” he asked me.

  “What happened?”

  He handed me the paper. A commando group made up of two men and a woman had burst into a sausage factory on the outskirts of Naples. The three had first shot the legs of the guard, Filippo Cara, who was in very serious condition; then they had gone up to the office of the owner, Bruno Soccavo, a young Neapolitan entrepreneur, and had killed him with four shots, three to the chest and one to the head. I saw, as I read, Bruno’s face ruined, shattered, along with his gleaming white teeth. Oh God, God, I was stunned. I left the children with Pietro, I rushed to telephone Lila, the phone rang for a long time with no answer. I tried again in the evening, nothing. I got her the next day, she asked me in alarm: What’s the matter, is Gennaro ill? I reassured her, then told
her about Bruno. She knew nothing about it, she let me speak, finally she said tonelessly: This is really bad news you’re giving me. And nothing else. I goaded her: Telephone someone, find out, ask where I can send a telegram of condolence. She said she no longer had any contact with anyone at the factory. What telegram, she muttered, forget it.

  I forgot it. But the next day I found in Il Manifesto an article signed by Giovanni Sarratore, that is, Nino, which had a lot of information about the small Campanian business, underlining the political tensions present in those backward places, and referring affectionately to Bruno and his tragic end. I followed the development of the news for days, but to no purpose: it soon disappeared from the papers. Besides, Lila refused to talk about it. At night I called her with the children and she cut me off, saying, Give me Gennaro. She became especially irritated when I quoted Nino to her. Typical of him, she grumbled. He always has to interfere: What does politics have to do with it, there must be other matters, here people are murdered for a thousand reasons, adultery, criminal activity, even just one too many looks. So the days passed and of Bruno there remained an image and that was all. It wasn’t the image of the factory owner I had threated on the phone using the authority of the Airotas but that of the boy who had tried to kiss me and whom I had rudely rejected.

  87.

  I began to have some ugly thoughts on the beach. Lila, I said to myself, deliberately pushes away emotions, feelings. The more I sought tools to try to explain myself to myself, the more she, on the contrary, hid. The more I tried to draw her into the open and involve her in my desire to clarify, the more she took refuge in the shadows. She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.