My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

  Once the discussion became so heated that Lila, maybe because she wasn’t developed as we were and didn’t know the pleasure-fear of having the Solaras’ gaze on her, became paler than usual and said that, if what happened to Ada had happened to her, to avoid trouble for her father and her brother Rino she would take care of the two of them herself.

  “Because Marcello and Michele don’t even look at you,” said Gigliola Spagnuolo, and we thought that Lila would get angry.

  Instead she said seriously, “It’s better that way.”

  She was as slender as ever, but tense in every fiber. I looked at her hands and marveled: in a short time they had become like Rino’s, like her father’s, with the skin at the tips yellowish and thick. Even if no one forced her—that wasn’t her job, in the shop—she had started to do small tasks, she prepared the thread, took out stitches, glued, even stitched, and now she handled Fernando’s tools almost like her brother. That was why that year she never asked me anything about Latin. Eventually, she told me the plan she had in mind, a thing that had nothing to do with books: she was trying to persuade her father to make new shoes. But Fernando didn’t want to hear about it. “Making shoes by hand,” he told her, “is an art without a future: today there are cars and cars cost money and the money is either in the bank or with the loan sharks, not in the pockets of the Cerullo family.” Then she insisted, she filled him with sincere praise: “No one knows how to make shoes the way you do, Papa.” Even if that was true, he responded, everything was made in factories now, and since he had worked in the factories he knew very well what lousy stuff came out of them; but there was little to do about it, when people needed new shoes they no longer went to the neighborhood shoemaker, they went to the stores in the center of town, on the Rettifilo, so even if you wanted to make the handcrafted product properly, you wouldn’t sell it, you’d be throwing away money and labor, you’d ruin yourself.

  Lila wouldn’t be convinced and as usual she had drawn Rino to her side. Her brother had first agreed with his father, irritated by the fact that she interfered in things to do with work, where it wasn’t a matter of books and he was the expert. Then gradually he had been captivated and now he quarreled with Fernando nearly every day, repeating what she had put into his head.

  “Let’s at least try it.”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen the car the Solaras have, have you seen how well the Carraccis’ grocery is doing?”

  “I’ve seen that the dry goods store that wanted to be a dressmaker’s gave it up and I’ve seen that Gorresio, because of his son’s stupidity, has bitten off more than he can chew with his motorcycles.”

  “But the Solaras keep expanding.”

  “Mind your own business and forget the Solaras.”

  “Near the train tracks a new neighborhood is being developed.”

  “Who gives a damn.”

  “Papa, people are earning and they want to spend.”

  “People spend on food because you have to eat every day. As for shoes, first of all you don’t eat them, and, second, when they break you fix them and they can last twenty years. Our work, right now, is to repair shoes and that’s it.”

  I liked how that boy, who was always nice to me but capable of a brutality that frightened even his father a little, always, in every circumstance, supported his sister. I envied Lila that brother who was so solid, and sometimes I thought that the real difference between her and me was that I had only little brothers, and so no one with the power to encourage me and support me against my mother, freeing my mind, while Lila could count on Rino, who could defend her against anyone, whatever came into her mind. But really, I thought that Fernando was right, and was on his side. And discussing it with Lila, I discovered that she thought so, too.

  Once she showed me the designs for shoes that she wanted to make with her brother, both men’s and women’s. They were beautiful designs, drawn on graph paper, rich in precisely colored details, as if she had had a chance to examine shoes like that close up in some world parallel to ours and then had fixed them on paper. In reality she had invented them in their entirety and in every part, as she had done in elementary school when she drew princesses, so that, although they were normal shoes, they didn’t resemble any that were seen in the neighborhood, or even those of the actresses in the photo novels.

  “Do you like them?”

  “They’re really elegant.”

  “Rino says they’re difficult.”

  “But he knows how to make them?”

  “He swears he can.”

  “And your father?”

  “He certainly could do it.”

  “Then make them.”

  “Papa doesn’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “He said that as long as I’m playing, fine, but he and Rino can’t waste time with me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that to actually do things takes time and money.”

  She was on the point of showing me the figures she had put down, in secret from Rino, to understand how much it really would cost to make them. Then she stopped, folded up the pages she was holding, and told me it was pointless to waste time: her father was right.

  “But then?”

  “We ought to try anyway.”

  “Fernando will get mad.”

  “If you don’t try, nothing ever changes.”

  What had to change, in her view, was always the same thing: poor, we had to become rich; having nothing, we had to reach a point where we had everything. I tried to remind her of the old plan of writing novels like the author of Little Women. I was stuck there, it was important to me. I was learning Latin just for that, and deep inside I was convinced that she took so many books from Maestro Ferraro’s circulating library only because, even though she wasn’t going to school anymore, even though she was now obsessed with shoes, she still wanted to write a novel with me and make a lot of money. Instead, she shrugged in her careless way, she had changed her idea of Little Women. “Now,” she explained, “to become truly rich you need a business.” So she thought of starting with a single pair of shoes, just to demonstrate to her father how beautiful and comfortable they were; then, once Fernando was convinced, production would start: two pairs of shoes today, four tomorrow, thirty in a month, four hundred in a year, so that, within a short time, they, she, her father, Rino, her mother, her other siblings, would set up a shoe factory, with machines and at least fifty workers: the Cerullo shoe factory.

  “A shoe factory?”

  “Yes.”

  She spoke with great conviction, as she knew how to do, with sentences, in Italian, that depicted before my eyes the factory sign, Cerullo; the brand name stamped on the uppers, Cerullo; and then the Cerullo shoes, all splendid, all elegant, as in her drawings, shoes that once you put them on, she said, are so beautiful and so comfortable that at night you go to sleep without taking them off.

  We laughed, we were having fun.

  Then Lila paused. She seemed to realize that we were playing, as we had with our dolls years earlier, with Tina and Nu in front of the cellar grating, and she said, with an urgency for concreteness, which emphasized the impression she gave off, of being part child, part old woman, which was, it seemed to me, becoming her characteristic trait:

  “You know why the Solara brothers think they’re the masters of the neighborhood?”

  “Because they’re aggressive.”

  “No, because they have money.”

  “You think so?”

  “Of course. Have you noticed that they’ve never bothered Pinuccia Carracci?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know why they acted the way they did with Ada?”

  “No.”

  “Because Ada doesn’t have a father, her brother Antonio counts for nothing, and she helps Melina clean the stairs of the
buildings.”

  As a result, either we, too, had to make money, more than the Solaras, or, to protect ourselves against the brothers, we had to do them serious harm. She showed me a sharp shoemaker’s knife that she had taken from her father’s workshop.

  “They won’t touch me, because I’m ugly and I don’t have my period,” she said, “but with you they might. If anything happens, tell me.”

  I looked at her in confusion. We were almost thirteen, we knew nothing about institutions, laws, justice. We repeated, and did so with conviction, what we had heard and seen around us since early childhood. Justice was not served by violence? Hadn’t Signor Peluso killed Don Achille? I went home. I realized that with those last words she had admitted that I was important to her, and I was happy.

  9.

  I passed the exams at the end of middle school with eights, and a nine in Italian and nine in Latin. I was the best in the school: better than Alfonso, who had an average of eight, and much better than Gino. For days and days I enjoyed that absolute superiority. I was much praised by my father, who began to boast to everyone about his oldest daughter who had gotten nine in Italian and nine, no less, in Latin. My mother, to my surprise, while she was in the kitchen washing vegetables, said to me, without turning:

  “You can wear my silver bracelet Sunday, but don’t lose it.”

  I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted. When I said to Carmela Peluso that I was the best in the school she immediately started talking to me about the way Alfonso looked at her when he went by. Gigliola Spagnuolo was bitter because she had to repeat the exams for Latin and mathematics and tried to regain prestige by saying that Gino was after her but she was keeping him at a distance because she was in love with Marcello Solara and maybe Marcello also loved her. Even Lila didn’t show particular pleasure. When I listed my grades, subject by subject, she said laughing, in her malicious tone, “You didn’t get ten?”

  I was disappointed. You only got ten in behavior, the teachers never gave anyone a ten in important subjects. But that sentence was enough to make a latent thought become suddenly open: if she had come to school with me, in the same class, if they had let her, she would have had all tens, and this I had always known, and she also knew, and now she was making a point of it.

  I went home with the pain of being first without really being first. Further, my parents began to talk about where they could find a place for me, now that I had a middle-school diploma. My mother wanted to ask the stationer to take me as an assistant: in her view, clever as I was, I was suited to selling pens, pencils, notebooks, and schoolbooks. My father imagined future dealings with his acquaintances at the city hall that would settle me in a prestigious post. I felt a sadness inside that, although it wasn’t defined, grew and grew and grew, to the point where I didn’t even feel like going out on Sunday.

  I was no longer pleased with myself, everything seemed tarnished. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see what I would have liked to see. My blond hair had turned brown. I had a broad, squashed nose. My whole body continued to expand but without increasing in height. And my skin, too, was spoiled: on my forehead, my chin, and around my jaws, archipelagos of reddish swellings multiplied, then turned purple, finally developed yellowish tips. I began, by my own choice, to help my mother clean the house, to cook, to keep up with the mess that my brothers made, to take care of Elisa, my little sister. In my spare time I didn’t go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. Sometimes I felt a strong need to go and see Lila at the shop and talk to her about the characters I liked best, sentences I had learned by heart, but then I let it go: she would say something mean; she would start talking about the plans she was making with Rino, shoes, shoe factory, money, and I would slowly feel that the novels I read were pointless and that my life was bleak, along with the future, and what I would become: a fat pimply salesclerk in the stationery store across from the parish church, an old maid employee of the local government, sooner or later cross-eyed and lame.

  One Sunday, inspired by an invitation that had arrived in the mail in my name, in which Maestro Ferraro summoned me to the library that morning, I finally decided to react. I tried to make myself pretty, as it seemed to me I had been in childhood, as I wished to believe I still was. I spent some time squeezing the pimples, but my face was only more inflamed; I put on my mother’s silver bracelet; I let down my hair. Still I was dissatisfied. Depressed I went out into the heat that lay on the neighborhood like a hand swollen with fever in that season, and made my way to the library.

  I immediately realized, from the small crowd of parents and elementary- and middle-school children flowing toward the main entrance, that something wasn’t normal. I went in. There were rows of chairs already occupied, colored festoons, the priest, Maestro Ferraro, even the principal of the elementary school and Maestra Oliviero. Ferraro, I discovered, had had the idea of awarding a book to the readers who, according to his records, had been most assiduous. Since the ceremony was about to begin and lending was suspended for the moment, I sat at the back of the room. I looked for Lila, but saw only Gigliola Spagnuolo with Gino and Alfonso. I moved restlessly in my chair, uneasy. After a while Carmela Peluso and her brother Pasquale sat down next to me. Hi, hi. I covered my blotchy cheeks better with my hair.

  The small ceremony began. The winners were: first Raffaella Cerullo, second Fernando Cerullo, third Nunzia Cerullo, fourth Rino Cerullo, fifth Elena Greco, that is, me.

  I wanted to laugh, and so did Pasquale. We looked at each other, suffocating our laughter, while Carmela whispered insistently, “Why are you laughing?” We didn’t answer: we looked at each other again and laughed with our hands over our mouths. Thus, still feeling that laughter in my eyes, and with an unexpected sense of well-being, after the teacher had asked repeatedly and in vain if anyone from the Cerullo family was in the room, he called me, fifth on the list, to receive my prize. Praising me generously, Ferraro gave me Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome. I thanked him and asked, in a whisper, “May I also take the prizes for the Cerullo family, so I can deliver them?”

  The teacher gave me the prize books for all the Cerullos. As we went out, while Carmela resentfully joined Gigliola, who was happily chatting with Alfonso and Gino, Pasquale said to me, in dialect, things that made me laugh even more, about Rino losing his eyesight over his books, Fernando the shoemaker who didn’t sleep at night because he was reading, Signora Nunzia who read standing up, next to the stove, while she was cooking pasta with potatoes, in one hand a novel and in the other the spoon. He had been in elementary school with Rino, in the same class, at the same desk—he said, tears of amusement in his eyes—and both of them, he and his friend, even though they took turns helping each other, after six or seven years of school, including repeats, managed to read at most: Tobacconist, Grocery, Post Office. Then he asked me what the prize for his former schoolmate was.

  “Bruges-la-Morte.”

  “Are there ghosts?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “May I come along when you give it to him? Rather, may I give it to him, with my own hands?”

  We burst out laughing again.

  “Yes.”

  “They’ve given Rinuccio a prize. Crazy. It’s Lina who reads everything, good Lord, that girl is clever.”

  The attentions of Pasquale Peluso consoled me greatly, I liked that he made me laugh. Maybe I’m not so ugly, I thought, maybe I can’t see myself.

  At that moment I heard someone calling me. It was Maestra Oliviero.

  I went over and she looked at me, as always evaluating, and said, as if confirming the legitimacy of a more generous judgment about my looks:

  “How pretty you are, how big you’ve gotten.”

  “It’s not true, Maestra.”

  “It’s true, you’re a star, healthy, nice, and plump. A
nd also clever. I heard that you were the top student in the school.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now what will you do?”

  “I’ll go to work.”

  She darkened.

  “Don’t even mention it, you have to go on studying.”

  I looked at her in surprise. What was there left to study? I didn’t know anything about the order of schools, I didn’t have a clear idea what there was after the middle school diploma. Words like high school, university were for me without substance, like many of the words I came across in novels.

  “I can’t, my parents won’t let me.”

  “What did the literature teacher give you in Latin?”

  “Nine.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll talk to your parents.”

  I started to leave, a little scared, I have to admit. If Maestra Oliviero really went to my father and mother to tell them to let me continue in school, it would again unleash quarrels that I didn’t want to face. I preferred things as they were: help my mother, work in the stationery store, accept the ugliness and the pimples, be healthy, nice, and plump, as Maestra Oliviero said, and toil in poverty. Hadn’t Lila been doing it for at least three years already, apart from her crazy dreams as the sister and daughter of shoemakers?

  “Thank you, Maestra,” I said. “Goodbye.”

  But Oliviero held me by one arm.

  “Don’t waste time with him,” she said, indicating Pasquale, who was waiting for me. “He’s a construction worker, he’ll never go farther than that. And then he comes from a bad family, his father is a Communist, and murdered Don Achille. I absolutely don’t want to see you with him—he’s surely a Communist like his father.”

  I nodded in assent and went off without saying goodbye to Pasquale, who seemed bewildered. Then, with pleasure, I heard him following me, a dozen steps behind. He wasn’t good-looking, but I wasn’t pretty anymore, either. He had curly black hair, he was dark-skinned, and sunburned, he had a wide mouth and was the son of a murderer, maybe even a Communist.