My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

  I turned the word over and over in my head, Communist, a word that was meaningless to me, but which the teacher had immediately branded with negativity. Communist, Communist, Communist. It captivated me. Communist and son of a murderer.

  Meanwhile, around the corner, Pasquale caught up with me. We walked together until we were a few steps from my house and, laughing again, made a date for the next day, when we would go to the shoemaker’s shop to give the books to Lila and Rino. Before we parted Pasquale also said that the following Sunday he, his sister, and anyone who wanted were going to Gigliola’s house to learn to dance. He asked if I wanted to go, maybe with Lila. I was astonished, I already knew that my mother would never let me. But still I said, all right, I’ll think about it. Then he held out his hand, and I, who was not used to such gestures, hesitated, just brushed his, which was hard and rough, and withdrew mine.

  “Are you always going to be a construction worker?” I asked, even though I already knew that he was.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re a Communist?”

  He looked at me perplexed.

  “Yes.”

  “And you go to see your father at Poggioreale?”

  He turned serious: “When I can.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  10.

  Maestra Oliviero, that same afternoon, presented herself at my house without warning, throwing my father into utter despair and embittering my mother. She made them both swear that they would enroll me in the nearest classical high school. She offered to find me the books I would need herself. She reported to my father, but looking at me severely, that she had seen me alone with Pasquale Peluso, company that was completely unsuitable for me, who embodied such high hopes.

  My parents didn’t dare contradict her. They swore solemnly that they would send me to the first year of high school, and my father said, in a menacing tone, “Lenù, don’t you dare ever speak to Pasquale Peluso again.” Before she left, the teacher asked me about Lila, still in the presence of my parents. I answered that she was helping her father and her brother, she kept the accounts and the shop in order. She made a grimace of contempt, she asked me: “Does she know you got a nine in Latin?”

  I nodded yes.

  “Tell her that now you’re going to study Greek, too. Tell her.”

  She took leave of my parents with an air of pride.

  “This girl,” she exclaimed, “will bring us great satisfaction.”

  That evening, while my mother, furious, was saying that now there was no choice but to send me to the school for rich people, otherwise Oliviero would wear her out by tormenting her and would even fail little Elisa in reprisal; while my father, as if this were the main problem, threatened to break both my legs if he heard that I had been alone with Pasquale Peluso, we heard a loud cry that silenced us. It was Ada, Melina’s daughter, crying for help.

  We ran to the window, there was a great commotion in the courtyard. It seemed that Melina, who after the Sarratores moved had generally behaved herself—a little melancholy, yes, a little absentminded, but in essence her eccentricities had become infrequent and harmless, like singing loudly while she washed the stairs of the buildings, or dumping buckets of dirty water into the street without paying attention to passersby—was having a new crisis of madness, a sort of crazy outburst of joy. She was laughing, jumping on the bed, and pulling up her skirt, displaying her fleshless thighs and her underpants to her frightened children. This my mother found out, by questioning from her window the other women looking out of their windows. I saw that Nunzia Cerullo and Lila were hurrying to see what was happening and I tried to slip out the door to join them, but my mother stopped me. She smoothed her hair and, with her limping gait, went herself to see what was going on.

  When she returned she was indignant. Someone had delivered a book to Melina. A book, yes, a book. To her, who had at most two years of elementary school and had never read a book in her life. The book bore on the cover the name of Donato Sarratore. Inside, on the first page, it had an inscription in pen to Melina and also marked, with red ink, were the poems he had written for her.

  My father, hearing that strange news, insulted the railway-worker poet obscenely. My mother said someone should undertake to bash the disgusting head of that disgusting man. All night we heard Melina singing with happiness, we heard the voices of her children, especially Antonio and Ada, trying to calm her but failing.

  I, however, was overcome with amazement. On a single day I had attracted the attention of a young man like Pasquale, a new school had opened up before me, and I had discovered that a person who until some time earlier had lived in the neighborhood, in the building across from ours, had published a book. This last fact proved that Lila had been right to think that such a thing could even happen to us. Of course, she had given it up now, but perhaps I, by going to that difficult school called high school, fortified by the love of Pasquale, could write one myself, as Sarratore had done. Who knows, if everything worked out for the best I would become rich before Lila with her shoe designs and her shoe factory.

  11.

  The next day I went secretly to meet Pasquale Peluso. He arrived out of breath and sweaty in his work clothes, spotted all over with splotches of white plaster. On the way I told him the story of Donato and Melina. I told him that in these latest events was the proof that Melina wasn’t mad, that Donato really had been in love with her and still loved her. But as I spoke, even as Pasquale agreed with me, revealing a sensitivity about things to do with love, I realized that, of these developments, what continued to excite me more than anything else was the fact that Donato Sarratore had published a book. That employee of the state railroad had become the author of a volume that Maestro Ferraro might very well put in the library and lend. Therefore, I said to Pasquale, we had all known not an ordinary man, put upon by the nagging of his wife, Lidia, but a poet. Therefore, right before our eyes a tragic love had been born, inspired by a person we knew very well, that is to say Melina. I was very excited, my heart was pounding. But I realized that here Pasquale couldn’t follow me, he said yes only so as not to contradict me. And in fact after a while he became evasive, and began to ask me questions about Lila: how she had been at school, what I thought of her, if we were close friends. I answered willingly: it was the first time anyone had asked me about our friendship and I talked about it enthusiastically the whole way. Also for the first time, I felt how, having to search for words on a subject where I didn’t have words ready, I tended to reduce the relationship between Lila and me to extreme declarations that were all exaggeratedly positive.

  When we got to the shoemaker’s shop we were still talking about it. Fernando had gone home for the afternoon rest, but Lila and Rino stood next to each other scowling, bent over something that they looked at with hostility, and as soon as they saw us outside the glass door they put it away. I handed Maestro Ferraro’s gifts to Lila, while Pasquale teased Rino, opening the prize under his nose and saying, “After you’ve read the story of this Bruges-the-dead tell me if you liked it and maybe I’ll read it, too.” They laughed a lot, and every so often whispered to each other remarks about Bruges, which were surely obscene. But I noticed that Pasquale, although he was joking with Rino, looked furtively at Lila. Why was he looking at her like that, what was he looking for, what did he see there? They were long, intense looks that she didn’t seem to be aware of, while—it seemed to me—Rino was even more aware of them than I was, and he soon drew Pasquale out into the street as if to keep us from hearing what was so funny about Bruges, but in reality irritated by the way his friend was looking at his sister.

  I went with Lila to the back of the shop, trying to perceive in her what had attracted Pasquale’s attention. She seemed to me the same slender girl, skin and bone, pale, except perhaps for the larger shape of her eyes and a slight curve in her chest. She arranged the books with other books she had,
amid the old shoes and some notebooks with battered covers. I mentioned Melina’s madness, but above all I tried to communicate my excitement at the fact that we could say we knew someone who had just published a book, Donato Sarratore. I murmured in Italian: “Think, his son Nino was in school with us; think, the whole Sarratore family might become rich.” She gave a skeptical half smile.

  “With this?” she said. She held out her hand and showed me Sarratore’s book.

  Antonio, Melina’s oldest son, had given it to her to get it out of the sight and hands of his mother. I held it, I examined the slim volume. It was called Attempts at Serenity. The cover was red, with a drawing of the sun shining on a mountaintop. It was exciting to read, right above the title: “Donato Sarratore.” I opened it, read aloud the dedication in pen: To Melina who nurtured my poetry. Donato. Naples, 12 June 1958. I was moved, I felt a shiver at the back of my neck, at the roots of my hair. I said, “Nino will have a better car than the Solaras.”

  But Lila had one of her intense looks and I saw that she was focused on the book I had in my hand. “If it happens we’ll know about it,” she muttered. “For now those poems have done only damage.”

  “Why?”

  “Sarratore didn’t have the courage to go in person to Melina and in his place he sent her the book.”

  “Isn’t it a fine thing?”

  “Who knows. Now Melina expects him, and if Sarratore doesn’t come she’ll suffer more than she’s suffered till now.”

  What wonderful conversations. I looked at her white, smooth skin, not a blemish. I looked at her lips, the delicate shape of her ears. Yes, I thought, maybe she’s changing, and not only physically but in the way she expresses herself. It seemed to me—articulated in words of today—that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily. This—I thought contentedly—distinguishes me from Carmela and all the others: I get excited with her, here, at the very moment when she’s speaking to me. What beautiful strong hands she had, what graceful gestures came to her, what looks.

  But while Lila talked about love, while I talked about it, the pleasure was spoiled by an ugly thought. I suddenly realized that I had been mistaken: Pasquale the construction worker, the Communist, the son of the murderer, had wanted to go there with me not for me but for her, to have the chance to see her.

  12.

  The thought took my breath away for a moment. When the two young men returned, interrupting our conversation, Pasquale confessed, laughing, that he had left the work site without saying anything to the boss, so he had to go back right away. I noticed that he looked at Lila again, for a long time, intensely, almost against his will, perhaps to signal to her: I’m running the risk of losing my job just for you. Addressing Rino, he said:

  “Sunday we’re all going dancing at Gigliola’s, even Lenuccia’s coming, will you two come?”

  “Sunday is a long way off, we’ll think about it later,” Rino answered.

  Pasquale gave a last look at Lila, who paid no attention to him, then he slipped away without asking if I wanted to go with him.

  I felt an irritation that made me nervous. I began touching the most inflamed areas of my cheeks with my fingers, then I realized it and forced myself not to. While Rino took out from under the bench the things he had been working on before we arrived, and was studying them in bewilderment, I started talking again to Lila about books, about love affairs. We inflated excessively Sarratore, Melina’s love madness, the role of the book. What would happen? What reactions would be unleashed not by the reading of the poems but by the object itself, the fact that its cover, the title, the name and surname had again stirred that woman’s heart? We talked so fervently that Rino suddenly lost patience and shouted at us: “Will you stop it? Lila, let’s get to work, otherwise Papa will return and we won’t be able to do anything.”

  We stopped. I glanced at what they were doing: a wooden form besieged by a tangle of soles, strips of skin, pieces of thick leather, amid knives and awls and various other tools. Lila told me that she and Rino were trying to make a man’s traveling shoe, and her brother, right afterward, made me swear on my sister Elisa that I would never say a word about it to anyone. They were working in secret from Fernando, Rino had got the skins and the leather from a friend who worked at a tannery at Ponte di Casanova. They would devote five minutes here, ten tomorrow, to making the shoe, because there was no way to persuade their father to help them; in fact when they had brought up the subject Fernando had sent Lila home, shouting that he didn’t want to see her in the shop anymore, and meanwhile he had threatened to kill Rino, who at the age of nineteen was lacking in respect and had got it in his head to be better than his father.

  I pretended to be interested in their secret undertaking, but in fact I was very sorry about it. Although the two siblings had involved me by choosing me as their confidant, it was still an experience that I could enter only as witness: on that path Lila would do great things by herself, I was excluded. But above all, how, after our intense conversations about love and poetry, could she walk me to the door, as she was doing, far more absorbed in the atmosphere of excitement around a shoe? We had talked with such pleasure about Sarratore and Melina. I couldn’t believe that, though she pointed out to me that heap of leathers and skins and tools, she did not still feel, as I did, the anxiety about a woman who was suffering for love. What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind’s eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film. I felt grieved at the waste, because I was compelled to go away, because she preferred the adventure of the shoes to our conversation, because she knew how to be autonomous whereas I needed her, because she had her things that I couldn’t be part of, because Pasquale, who was a grown-up, not a boy, certainly would seek other occasions to gaze at her and plead with her and try to persuade her to secretly be his girlfriend, and be kissed, touched, as it was said people did when they became boyfriend and girlfriend—because, in short, she would feel that I was less and less necessary.

  Therefore, as if to chase away the feeling of revulsion these thoughts inspired, as if to emphasize my value and my indispensability, I told her in a rush that I was going to the high school. I told her at the doorway of the shop, when I was already in the street. I told her that Maestra Oliviero had insisted to my parents, promising to get me used books, for nothing, herself. I did it because I wanted her to realize that I was special, and that, even if she became rich making shoes with Rino, she couldn’t do without me, as I couldn’t do without her.

  She looked at me perplexed.

  “What is high school?” she asked.

  “An important school that comes after middle school.”

  “And what are you going there to do?”

  “Study.”

  “What?”

  “Latin.”

  “That’s all?”

  “And Greek.”

  “Greek?”

  “Yes.”

  She had the expression of someone at a loss, finding nothing to say. Finally she murmured, irrelevantly, “Last week I got my period.”

  And although Rino hadn’t called her, she went back inside.

  13.

  So now she was bleeding, too. The secret movements of the body, which had reached me first, had arrived like the tremor of an earthquake in her as well and would change her, she was already changing. Pasquale—I thought—had realized it before me. He and probably
other boys. The fact that I was going to high school quickly lost its aura. For days all I could think of was the unknowability of the changes that would hit Lila. Would she become pretty like Pinuccia Carracci or Gigliola or Carmela? Would she turn ugly like me? I went home and examined myself in the mirror. What was I like, really? What would she, sooner or later, be like?

  I began to take more care with myself. One Sunday afternoon, on the occasion of the usual walk from the stradone to the gardens, I put on my best dress, which was blue, with a square neckline, and also my mother’s silver bracelet. When I met Lila I felt a secret pleasure in seeing her as she was every day, in a worn, faded dress, her black hair untidy. There was nothing to differentiate her from the usual Lila, a restless, skinny girl. Only she seemed taller, she had grown, from a small girl, almost as tall as me, maybe half an inch less. But what was that change? I had a large bosom, a womanly figure.

  We reached the gardens, we turned and went back, then walked along the street again to the gardens. It was early, there wasn’t yet the Sunday commotion, the sellers of roasted hazelnuts and almonds and lupini. Lila was again asking me tentatively about the high school. I told her what I knew, exaggerating as much as possible. I wanted her to be curious, to want at least a little to share my adventure from the outside, to feel she was losing something of me as I always feared losing much of her. I was on the street side, she on the inside. I was talking, she was listening attentively.

  The Solaras’ 1100 pulled up beside us, Michele was driving, next to him was Marcello, who began to joke with us. With both of us, not just me. He would sing softly, in dialect, phrases like: what lovely young ladies, aren’t you tired of going back and forth, look how big Naples is, the most beautiful city in the world, as beautiful as you, get in, half an hour and we’ll bring you back here.