My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

  In a short while I wished I could talk every day to a boy on that level: how many mistakes I had made with him; what foolishness it had been to want him, love him, and yet always avoid him. His father’s fault. But also my fault: I—I who was so upset by my mother—I had let the father throw his ugly shadow over the son? I repented, I reveled in my repentance, in the novel I felt myself immersed in. Meanwhile I often raised my voice to be heard over the clamor of the room, the music, and so did he. From time to time I looked at Lila’s table: she laughed, she ate, she talked, she didn’t realize where I was, the person I was talking to. Rarely, however, did I look toward Antonio’s table, I was afraid he would make me a sign to join him. But I felt that he kept his eyes on me, that he was nervous, getting angry. Never mind, I thought, I’ve already decided, I’ll break up tomorrow: I can’t go on with him, we’re too different. Of course, he adored me, he was entirely devoted to me, but like a dog. I was dazzled instead by the way Nino talked to me: without any subservience. He set out his future, the ideas on the basis of which he would build it. To listen to him lighted up my mind almost the way Lila once had. His devotion to me made me grow. He, yes, he would take me away from my mother, he who wanted only to leave his father.

  I felt someone touch my shoulder, it was Antonio again. He said, “Let’s dance.”

  “My mother doesn’t want me to,” I whispered.

  He replied, tensely, “Everyone’s dancing, what’s the problem?”

  I half-smiled at Nino, embarrassed, he knew that Antonio was my boyfriend. He looked at me seriously, he turned to Alfonso. I left.

  “Don’t hold me close.”

  “I’m not holding you close.”

  There was a loud din, a drunken gaiety. Young people, adults, children were dancing. But I could feel the reality behind the appearance of festivity. The distorted faces of the bride’s relatives signaled a quarrelsome discontent. Especially the women. They had spent their last cent for the gift, for what they were wearing, had gone into debt, and now they were treated like poor relations, with bad wine, intolerable delays in service? Why didn’t Lila intervene, why didn’t she protest to Stefano? I knew them. They would restrain their rage for love of Lila but at the end of the reception, when she went to change, when she came back, dressed in her beautiful traveling clothes, when she handed out the wedding favors, when she had left, with her husband, then a huge fight would erupt, and it would be the start of hatreds lasting months, years, and offenses and insults that would involve husbands, sons, all with an obligation to prove to mothers and sisters and grandmothers that they knew how to be men. I knew all the women, the men. I saw the gazes of the young men turned fiercely to the singer, to the musicians who looked insultingly at their girlfriends or made allusive remarks to one another. I saw how Enzo and Carmela talked while they danced, I saw also Pasquale and Ada sitting at the table: it was clear that before the end of the party they would be together and then they would be engaged and in all probability in a year, in ten, they would marry. I saw Rino and Pinuccia. In their case everything would happen more quickly: if the Cerullo shoe factory seriously got going, in a year at most they would have a wedding celebration no less ostentatious than this. They danced, they looked into each other’s eyes, they held each other closely. Love and interest. Grocery plus shoes. Old houses plus new houses. Was I like them? Was I still?

  “Who’s that?” Antonio asked.

  “Who do you think? You don’t recognize him?”

  “No.”

  “It’s Nino, Sarratore’s oldest son. And that’s Marisa, you remember her?”

  He didn’t care at all about Marisa, about Nino he did. He said nervously, “So first you bring me to Sarratore to threaten him, and then you sit talking to his son for hours? I have a new suit made so I can sit watching you amuse yourself with that kid, who doesn’t even get a haircut, doesn’t even wear a tie?”

  He left me in the middle of the room and headed quickly toward the glass door that opened onto the terrace.

  For a few seconds I was uncertain what to do. Join Antonio. Return to Nino. I had on me my mother’s gaze, even if her wandering eye seemed to be looking elsewhere. I had on me my father’s gaze, and it was an ugly gaze. I thought: if I go back to Nino, if I don’t join Antonio on the terrace, it will be he who leaves me and for me it will be better like that. I crossed the room while the band kept playing, couples continued to dance. I sat down.

  Nino seemed not to have taken the least notice of what had happened. Now he was speaking in his torrential way about Professor Galiani. He was defending her to Alfonso, who I knew detested her. He was saying that he, too, often ended up disagreeing with her—too rigid—but as a teacher she was extraordinary, she had always encouraged him, had transmitted the capacity to study. I tried to enter the conversation. I felt an urgent need to be caught up again by Nino, I didn’t want him to start talking to my classmate exactly the way, until a moment earlier, he had been talking to me. I needed—in order not to rush to make up with Antonio, to tell him, in tears: yes, you’re right, I don’t know what I am and what I really want, I use you and then I throw you away, but it’s not my fault, I feel half and half, forgive me—Nino to draw me exclusively into the things he knew, into his powers, to recognize me as like him. So I almost cut him off and, while he tried to resume the interrupted conversation, I enumerated the books that the teacher had lent me since the beginning of the year, the advice she had given me. He nodded yes, somewhat sulkily, he remembered that the teacher, some time earlier, had lent one of those texts to him and he began to talk about it. But I had an increasing urgency for gratifications that would distract me from Antonio, and I asked him, without any connection:

  “When will the magazine come out?”

  He stared at me uncertainly, slightly apprehensive.

  “It came out a couple of weeks ago.”

  I had a start of joy, I asked, “Where can I find it?”

  “They sell it at the Guida bookstore. Anyway I can get it for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  He hesitated, then he said, “But they didn’t put your piece in, it turned out there wasn’t room.”

  Alfonso suddenly smiled with relief and murmured, “Thank goodness.”

  62.

  We were sixteen. I was sitting with Nino Sarratore, Alfonso, Marisa, and I made an effort to smile, I said with pretended indifference, “All right, another time.” Lila was at the other end of the room—she was the bride, the queen of the celebration—and Stefano was whispering in her ear and she was smiling.

  The long, exhausting wedding lunch was ending. The band was playing, the singer was singing. Antonio, with his back to me, was suppressing in his chest the pain I had caused him, and looking at the sea. Enzo was perhaps murmuring to Carmela that he loved her. Rino certainly had already done so with Pinuccia, who, as she talked, was staring into his eyes. Pasquale in all likelihood was wandering around frightened, but Ada would manage so that, before the party was over, she would tear out of his mouth the necessary words. For a while toasts with obscene allusions had been tumbling out; the metal merchant shone in that art. The floor was splattered with sauces from a plate dropped by a child, wine spilled by Stefano’s grandfather. I swallowed my tears. I thought: maybe they’ll publish my piece in the next issue, maybe Nino didn’t insist enough, maybe I should have taken care of it myself. But I said nothing, I kept smiling, I even found the energy to say, “Anyway, I already argued once with the priest, to argue a second time would have been pointless.”

  “Right,” said Alfonso.

  But nothing diminished the disappointment. I struggled to detach myself from a sort of fog in my mind, a painful drop of tension, and I couldn’t. I discovered that I had considered the publication of those few lines, my name in print, as a sign that I really had a destiny, that the hard work of school would surely lead upward, somewhere, that Maestra Oliviero had b
een right to push me forward and to abandon Lila. “Do you know what the plebs are?” “Yes, Maestra.” At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.

  Probably disgusted by the spectacle in progress, Nino got up, said he was going. He made an arrangement with Marisa for returning home together, and Alfonso promised to take her at the agreed-on time to the agreed-on place. She seemed very proud of having such a dutiful knight. I said uncertainly to Nino:

  “Don’t you want to greet the bride?”

  He gestured broadly, he muttered something about his outfit, and, without even a handshake, or a nod to me or Alfonso, he headed toward the door with his usual swinging gait. He could enter and leave the neighborhood as he wished, without being contaminated by it. He could do it, he was capable of doing it, maybe he had learned years before, at the time of the stormy move that had almost cost him his life.

  I doubted that I could make it. Studying was useless: I could get the highest possible marks on my work, but that was only school: instead, those who worked at the journal had sniffed my report, my and Lila’s report, and hadn’t printed it. Nino could do anything: he had the face, the gestures, the gait of one who would always do better. When he left it seemed that the only person in the whole room who had the energy to take me away had vanished.

  Later I had the impression that a gust of wind had shut the door of the restaurant. In reality there was no wind or even a banging of doors. There happened only what could have been predicted to happen. Just in time for the cake, for the favors, the very handsome, very well-dressed Solara brothers appeared. They moved through the room greeting this one and that in their lordly way. Gigliola threw her arms around Michele’s neck and drew him down next to her. Lila, with a sudden flush on her throat and around her eyes, pulled her husband energetically by the arm and said something in his ear. Silvio nodded slightly to his children, Manuela looked at them with a mother’s pride. The singer started Lazzarella, modestly imitating Aurelio Fierro. Rino with a friendly smile invited Marcello to sit down. Marcello sat down, loosened his tie, crossed his legs.

  The unpredictable revealed itself only at that point. I saw Lila lose her color, become as pale as when she was a child, whiter than her wedding dress, and her eyes had that sudden contraction that turned them into cracks. She had in front of her a bottle of wine and I was afraid that her gaze would go through it with a violence that would shatter it, with the wine spraying everywhere. But she wasn’t looking at the bottle. She was looking farther away, she was looking at the shoes of Marcello Solara.

  They were Cerullo shoes for men. Not the model for sale, not the ones with the gilded pin. Marcello had on his feet the shoes bought earlier by Stefano, her husband. It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter.