My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

  Except for Alfonso, all the boys filled their shirts with firecrackers and missiles and arranged rows of rockets in ranks of empty bottles. Rino, increasingly agitated, shouting louder and louder, assigned to me, Lila, Ada, and Carmela the job of supplying everyone with ammunition. Then the very young, the young, the not so young—my brothers Peppe and Gianni, but also my father, also the shoemaker, who was the oldest of all—began moving around in the dark and the cold lighting fuses and throwing fireworks over the parapet or into the sky, in a celebratory atmosphere of growing excitement, of shouts like did you see those colors, wow what a bang, come on, come on—all scarcely disturbed by Melina’s faint yet terrified wails, by Rino as he snatched the fireworks from my brothers and used them himself, yelling that it was a waste because the boys threw them without waiting for the fuse to really catch fire.

  The glittering fury of the city slowly faded, died out, letting the sound of the cars, the horns emerge. Broad zones of dark sky reappeared. The Solaras’ balcony became, even through the smoke, amid the flashes, more visible.

  They weren’t far, we could see them. The father, the sons, the relatives, the friends were, like us, in the grip of a desire for chaos. The whole neighborhood knew that what had happened so far was minor, the real show would begin when the penurious had finished with their little parties and petty explosions and fine rains of silver and gold, when only the masters of the revels remained.

  And so it was. From the balcony the fire intensified abruptly, the sky and the street began to explode again. At every burst, especially if the firecracker made a sound of destruction, enthusiastic obscenities came from the balcony. But, unexpectedly, here were Stefano, Pasquale, Antonio, Rino ready to respond with more bursts and equivalent obscenities. At a rocket from the Solaras they launched a rocket, a string of firecrackers was answered by a string of firecrackers, and in the sky miraculous fountains erupted, and the street below flared, trembled. At one point Rino climbed up onto the parapet shouting insults and throwing powerful firecrackers while his mother shrieked with terror, yelling, “Get down or you’ll fall.”

  At that point panic overwhelmed Melina, who began to wail. Ada was furious, it was up to her to get her home, but Alfonso indicated that he would take care of her, and he disappeared down the stairs with her. My mother immediately followed, limping, and the other women began to drag the children away. The Solaras’ explosions were becoming more and more violent, one of their rockets instead of heading into the sky burst against the parapet of our terrace with a loud red flash and suffocating smoke.

  “They did it on purpose,” Rino yelled at Stefano, beside himself.

  Stefano, a dark profile in the cold, motioned him to calm down. He hurried to a corner where he himself had placed a box that we girls had received orders not to touch, and he dipped into it, inviting the others to help themselves.

  “Enzo,” he cried, with not even a trace now of the polite shopkeeper’s tones, “Pascà, Rino, Antò, here, come on, here, we’ll show them what we’ve got.”

  They all ran laughing. They repeated: yeah, we’ll let them have it, fuck those shits, fuck, take this, and they made obscene gestures in the direction of the Solaras’ balcony. Shivering with cold, we looked at their frenetic black forms. We were alone, with no role. Even my father had gone downstairs, with the shoemaker. Lila, I don’t know, she was silent, absorbed by the spectacle as if by a puzzle.

  The thing was happening to her that I mentioned and that she later called dissolving margins. It was—she told me—as if, on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light, eroding the circumference of the moon’s circle, and disfiguring the shining disk, reducing it to its true nature of rough insensate material. Lila imagined, she saw, she felt—as if it were true—her brother break. Rino, before her eyes, lost the features he had had as long as she could remember, the features of the generous, candid boy, the pleasing features of the reliable young man, the beloved outline of one who, as far back as she had memory, had amused, helped, protected her. There, amid the violent explosions, in the cold, in the smoke that burned the nostrils and the strong odor of sulfur, something violated the organic structure of her brother, exercising over him a pressure so strong that it broke down his outlines, and the matter expanded like a magma, showing her what he was truly made of. Every second of that night of celebration horrified her, she had the impression that, as Rino moved, as he expanded around himself, every margin collapsed and her own margins, too, became softer and more yielding. She struggled to maintain control, and succeeded: on the outside her anguish hardly showed. It’s true that in the tumult of explosions and colors I didn’t pay much attention to her. I was struck, I think, by her expression, which seemed increasingly fearful. I also realized that she was staring at the shadow of her brother—the most active, the most arrogant, shouting the loudest, bloodiest insults in the direction of the Solaras’ terrace—with repulsion. It seemed that she, she who in general feared nothing, was afraid. But they were impressions I recalled only later. At the moment I didn’t notice, I felt closer to Carmela, to Ada, than to her. She seemed as usual to have no need of male attention. We, instead, out in the cold, in the midst of that chaos, without that attention couldn’t give ourselves meaning. We would have preferred that Stefano or Enzo or Rino stop the war, put an arm around our shoulders, press us to them, side to side, and speak soft words. Instead, we were holding on to each other to get warm, while they rushed to grab cylinders with fat fuses, astonished by Stefano’s infinite reserves, admiring of his generosity, disturbed by how much money could be transformed into fiery trails, sparks, explosions, smoke for the pure satisfaction of winning.

  They competed with the Solaras for I don’t know how long, explosions from one side and the other as if terrace and balcony were trenches, and the whole neighborhood shook, vibrated. You couldn’t understand anything—roars, shattered glass, splintered sky. Even when Enzo shouted, “They’re finished, they’ve got nothing left,” ours continued, Rino especially kept going, until there remained not a fuse to light. Then they raised a victorious chorus, jumping and embracing. Finally they calmed down, silence fell.

  But it didn’t last; it was broken by the rising cry of a child in the distance, shouts and insults, cars advancing through the streets littered with debris. And then we saw flashes on the Solaras’ balcony, sharp sounds reached us, pah, pah. Rino shouted in disappointment, “They’re starting again.” But Enzo, who immediately understood what was happening, pushed us inside, and after him Pasquale, Stefano. Only Rino went on yelling vulgar insults, leaning over the parapet, so that Lila dodged Pasquale and ran to pull her brother inside, yelling insults at him in turn. We girls cried out as we went downstairs. The Solaras, in order to win, were shooting at us.

  23.

  As I said, many things about that night escaped me. But above all, overwhelmed by the atmosphere of celebration and danger, by the swirl of males whose bodies gave off a heat hotter than the fires in the sky, I neglected Lila. And yet it was then that her first inner change took place.

  I didn’t realize, as I said, what had happened to her, the action was difficult to perceive. But I was aware of the consequences almost immediately. She became lazier. Two days later, I got up early, even though I didn’t have school, to go with her to open the shop and help her do the cleaning, but she didn’t appear. She arrived late, sullen, and we walked through the neighborhood avoiding the shoemaker’s shop.

  “You’re not going to work?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like it anymore.”

  “And the new shoes?”

  “They’re nowhere.”

  “And so?”

  It seemed to me that even she didn’t know what she wanted. The only definite thing was that she seemed very worried about her brother, much more than I had seen recently. And
it was precisely as a result of that worry that she began to modify her speeches about wealth. There was always the pressure to become wealthy, there was no question about it, but the goal was no longer the same as in childhood: no treasure chests, no sparkle of coins and precious stones. Now it seemed that money, in her mind, had become a cement: it consolidated, reinforced, fixed this and that. Above all, it fixed Rino’s head. The pair of shoes that they had made together he now considered ready, and wanted to show them to Fernando. But Lila knew well (and according to her so did Rino) that the work was full of flaws, that their father would examine the shoes and throw them away. So she told him that they had to try and try again, that the route to the shoe factory was a difficult one; but he was unwilling to wait longer, he felt an urgent need to become like the Solaras, like Stefano, and Lila couldn’t make him see reason. Suddenly it seemed to me that wealth in itself no longer interested her. She no longer spoke of money with any excitement, it was just a means of keeping her brother out of trouble. But since it wasn’t around the corner, she wondered, with cruel eyes, what she had to come up with to soothe him.

  Rino was in a frenzy. Fernando, for example, never reproached Lila for having stopped coming to the shop, in fact he let her understand that he was happy for her to stay home and help her mother. Her brother instead got furious and in early January I witnessed another ugly quarrel. Rino approached us with his head down, he blocked our path, he said to her, “Come to work right now.” Lila answered that she wouldn’t think of it. He then dragged her by the arm, she defied him with a nasty insult, Rino slapped her, shouted at her, “Then go home, go and help Mamma.” She obeyed, without even saying goodbye to me.

  The climax came on the day of the Befana.1 She, it seems, woke up and found next to her bed a sock full of coal. She knew it was from Rino and at breakfast she set the table for everyone but him. Her mother appeared: Rino had left a sock full of candies and chocolate hanging on a chair, which had moved her, she doted on that boy. So, when she realized that Rino’s place wasn’t set, she tried to set it but Lila prevented her. While mother and daughter argued, Rino appeared and Lila immediately threw a piece of coal at him. Rino laughed, thinking it was a game, that she had appreciated the joke, but when he realized that his sister was serious he tried to hit her. Then Fernando arrived, in underpants and undershirt, a cardboard box in his hand.

  “Look what the Befana brought me,” he said, and it was clear that he was furious.

  He pulled out of the box the new shoes that his children had made in secret. Lila was openmouthed with surprise. She didn’t know anything about it. Rino had decided on his own to show his father their work, as if it were a gift from the Befana.

  When she saw on her brother’s face a small smile that was amused and at the same time tormented, when she caught his worried gaze on his father’s face, it seemed to her she had the confirmation of what had frightened her on the terrace, amid the smoke and fireworks: Rino had lost his usual outline, she now had a brother without boundaries, from whom something irreparable might emerge. In that smile, in that gaze she saw something unbearably wretched, the more unbearable the more she loved her brother, and felt the need to stay beside him to help him and be helped.

  “How beautiful they are,” said Nunzia, who was ignorant of the whole business.

  Fernando, without saying a word, and now looking like an angry Randolph Scott, sat down and put on first the right shoe, then the left.

  “The Befana,” he said, “made them precisely for my feet.”

  He got up, tried them, walked back and forth in the kitchen as his family watched.

  “Very comfortable,” he commented.

  “They’re gentleman’s shoes,” his wife said, giving her son admiring looks.

  Fernando sat down again. He took them off, he examined them above, below, inside and outside.

  “Whoever made these shoes is a master,” he said, but his face didn’t brighten at all. “Brava, Befana.”

  In every word you heard how much he suffered and how that suffering was charging him with a desire to smash everything. But Rino didn’t seem to realize it. At every sarcastic word of his father’s he became prouder, he smiled, blushing, formulated half-phrases: I did like this, Papa, I added this, I thought that. Lila wanted to get out of the kitchen, out of the way of her father’s imminent rage, but she couldn’t make up her mind, she didn’t want to leave her brother alone.

  “They’re light but also strong,” Fernando continued, “there’s no cutting corners. And I’ve never seen anything like them on anyone’s feet, with this wide tip they’re very original.”

  He sat down, he put them on again, he laced them. He said to his son: “Turn around Rinù, I have to thank the Befana.”

  Rino thought it was a joke that would conclusively end the whole long controversy and he appeared happy and embarrassed. But as soon as he started to turn his back his father kicked him violently in the rear, called him animal, idiot, and threw at him whatever came to hand, finally even the shoes.

  Lila got involved only when she saw that her brother, at first intent only on protecting himself from punching and kicking, began shouting, too, overturning chairs, breaking plates, crying, swearing that he would kill himself rather than continue to work for his father for nothing, terrorizing his mother, the other children, and the neighbors. But in vain. Father and son first had to explode until they wore themselves out. Then they went back to working together, mute, shut up in the shop with their desperations.

  There was no mention of the shoes for a while. Lila decided that her role was to help her mother, do the marketing, cook, wash the clothes and hang them in the sun, and she never went to the shoemaker’s shop. Rino, saddened, sulky, felt the thing as an incomprehensible injustice and began to insist that he find socks and underpants and shirts in order in his drawer, that his sister serve him and show him respect when he came home from work. If something wasn’t to his liking he protested, he said unpleasant things like you can’t even iron a shirt, you shit. She shrugged, she didn’t resist, she continued to carry out her duties with attention and care.

  He himself, naturally, wasn’t happy with the way he was behaving, he was tormented, he tried to calm down, he made not a few efforts to return to being what he had been. On good days, Sunday mornings for example, he wandered around joking, taking on a gentle tone of voice. “Are you mad at me because I took all the credit for the shoes? I did it,” he said, lying, “to keep Papa from getting angry at you.” And then he asked her, “Help me, what should we do now? We can’t stop here, I have to get out of this situation.” Lila was silent: she cooked, she ironed, at times she kissed him on the cheek to let him know that she wasn’t mad anymore. But in the meantime he would get angry again, he always ended up smashing something. He shouted that she had betrayed him, and would betray him yet again, when, sooner or later, she would marry some imbecile and go away, leaving him to live in this wretchedness forever.

  Sometimes, when no one was home, Lila went into the little room where she had hidden the shoes and touched them, looked at them, marveled to herself that for good or ill there they were and had come into being as the result of a design on a sheet of graph paper. How much wasted work.

  1In Italian folklore, the Befana is an old woman who delivers gifts to children, mostly in southern Italy, on the eve of the Epiphany (the night of January 5th), like St. Nicholas or Santa Claus.

  24.

  I returned to school, I was dragged inside the torturous rhythms that the teachers imposed on us. Many of my companions began to give up, the class thinned out. Gino got low marks and asked me to help him. I tried to but really all he wanted was for me to let him copy my homework. I did, but reluctantly: even when he copied he didn’t pay attention, he didn’t try to understand. Even Alfonso, although he was very disciplined, had difficulties. One day he burst into tears during the Greek interrogation, something that for a
boy was considered very humiliating. It was clear that he would have preferred to die rather than shed a single tear in front of the class, but he couldn’t control it. We were all silent, extremely disturbed, except Gino, who, perhaps for the satisfaction of seeing that even for his deskmate things could go badly, burst out laughing. As we left school I told him that because of that laughter he was no longer my boyfriend. He responded by asking me, worried, “You like Alfonso?” I explained that I simply didn’t like him anymore. He stammered that we had scarcely started, it wasn’t fair. Not much had happened between us as boyfriend and girlfriend: we’d kissed but without tongues, he had tried to touch my breasts and I had got angry and pushed him away. He begged me to continue just for a little, I was firm in my decision. I knew that it would cost me nothing to lose his company on the way to school and the way home.

  A few days had passed since the break with Gino when Lila confided that she had had two declarations almost at the same time, the first in her life. Pasquale, one morning, had come up to her while she was doing the shopping. He was marked by fatigue, and extremely agitated. He had said that he was worried because he hadn’t seen her in the shoemaker’s shop and thought she was sick. Now that he found her in good health, he was happy. But there was no happiness in his face at all as he spoke. He broke off as if he were choking and, to free his voice, had almost shouted that he loved her. He loved her so much that, if she agreed, he would come and speak to her brother, her parents, whoever, immediately, so that they could be engaged. She was dumbstruck, for a few minutes she thought he was joking. I had said a thousand times that Pasquale had his eyes on her, but she had never believed me. Now there he was, on a beautiful spring day, almost with tears in his eyes, and was begging her, telling her his life was worth nothing if she said no. How difficult the sentiments of love were to untangle. Lila, very cautiously, but without ever saying no, had found words to refuse him. She had said that she loved him, but not as one should love a fiancé. She had also said that she would always be grateful to him for all the things he had explained to her: Fascism, the Resistance, the monarchy, the republic, the black market, Comandante Lauro, the neo-fascists, Christian Democracy, Communism. But to be his girlfriend, no, she would never be anyone’s girlfriend. And she had concluded: “I love all of you, Antonio, you, Enzo, the way I love Rino.” Pasquale had then murmured, “I, however, don’t love you the way I do Carmela.” He had escaped and gone back to work.