The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  Ahead of us were many hours when no one in our families would look for us. When I think of the pleasure of being free, I think of the start of that day, of coming out of the tunnel and finding ourselves on a road that went straight as far as the eye could see, the road that, according to what Rino had told Lila, if you got to the end arrived at the sea. I felt joyfully open to the unknown. It was entirely different from going down into the cellar or up to Don Achille’s house. There was a hazy sun, a strong smell of burning. We walked for a long time between crumbling walls invaded by weeds, low structures from which came voices in dialect, sometimes a clamor. We saw a horse make its way slowly down an embankment and cross the street, whinnying. We saw a young woman looking out from a balcony, combing her hair with a flea comb. We saw a lot of small snotty children who stopped playing and looked at us threateningly. We also saw a fat man in an undershirt who emerged from a tumbledown house, opened his pants, and showed us his penis. But we weren’t scared of anything: Don Nicola, Enzo’s father, sometimes let us pat his horse, the children were threatening in our courtyard, too, and there was old Don Mimì who showed us his disgusting thing when we were coming home from school. For at least three hours, the road we were walking on did not seem different from the segment that we looked out on every day. And I felt no responsibility for the right road. We held each other by the hand, we walked side by side, but for me, as usual, it was as if Lila were ten steps ahead and knew precisely what to do, where to go. I was used to feeling second in everything, and so I was sure that to her, who had always been first, everything was clear: the pace, the calculation of the time available for going and coming back, the route that would take us to the sea. I felt as if she had everything in her head ordered in such a way that the world around us would never be able to create disorder. I abandoned myself happily. I remember a soft light that seemed to come not from the sky but from the depths of the earth, even though, on the surface, it was poor, and ugly.

  Then we began to get tired, to get thirsty and hungry. We hadn’t thought of that. Lila slowed down, I slowed down, too. Two or three times I caught her looking at me, as if she had done something mean to me and was sorry. What was happening? I realized that she kept turning around and I started turning around, too. Her hand began to sweat. The tunnel, which was the boundary of the neighborhood, had been out of sight for a long time. By now the road we had just traveled was unfamiliar to us, like the one that stretched ahead. People appeared completely indifferent to our fate. Around us was a landscape of ruin: dented tanks, burned wood, wrecks of cars, cartwheels with broken spokes, damaged furniture, rusting scrap iron. Why was Lila looking back? Why had she stopped talking? What was wrong?

  I looked more carefully. The sky, which at first had been very high, was as if lowered. Behind us everything was becoming black, large heavy clouds lay over the trees, the light poles. In front of us, the light was still dazzling, but as if pressed on the sides by a purplish grayness that would suffocate it. In the distance thunder could be heard. I was afraid, but what frightened me more was Lila’s expression, new to me. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide, she was looking nervously ahead, back, to the side, and she was squeezing my hand hard. Is it possible, I wondered, that she’s afraid? What was happening to her?

  The first fat drops arrived, leaving small brown stains as they hit the dusty road.

  “Let’s go back,” Lila said.

  “And the sea?”

  “It’s too far.”

  “And home?”

  “Also.”

  “Then let’s go to the sea.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  I had never seen her so agitated. There was something—something she had on the tip of her tongue but couldn’t make up her mind to tell me—that suddenly impelled her to drag me home in a hurry. I didn’t understand: why didn’t we keep going? There was time, the sea couldn’t be too far, and whether we went back home or continued to go on, we’d get wet just the same, if it rained. It was a type of reasoning I had learned from her and I was bewildered when she didn’t apply it.

  A violet light cracked the black sky, the thunder was louder. Lila gave me a tug, I found myself running, unwillingly, back toward our own neighborhood. The wind rose, the drops fell more thickly, in a few seconds they were transformed into a cascade of water. It occurred to neither of us to seek shelter. We ran blinded by the rain, our clothes soaked, our bare feet in worn sandals that had no purchase on the now muddy ground. We ran until we were out of breath.

  We couldn’t keep it up, we slowed down. Lightning, thunder, a lava of rainwater ran along the sides of the road; noisy trucks sped by, raising waves of mud. We walked quickly, our hearts in a tumult, first in a heavy downpour, then in a fine rain, finally under a gray sky. We were soaked, our hair pasted to our heads, our lips livid, eyes frightened. We went back through the tunnel, we crossed the scrubland. The bushes dripping with rain grazed us, making us shiver. We found our schoolbags, we put over our wet clothes the dry smocks, we set out toward home. Tense, her eyes lowered, Lila had let go of my hand.

  We quickly understood that things had not happened as we expected. The sky had turned black over the neighborhood just when school was over. My mother had gone to school with an umbrella to take me to the party at the teacher’s. She had discovered that I wasn’t there, that there was no party. For hours she had been looking for me. When I saw from a distance her painfully limping figure I immediately left Lila, so that she wouldn’t get angry with her, and ran toward my mother. She slapped me and hit me with the umbrella, yelling that she would kill me if I did something like that again.

  Lila took off. At her house no one had noticed anything.

  At night my mother reported everything to my father and compelled him to beat me. He was irritated; he didn’t want to, and they ended up fighting. First he hit her, then, angry at himself, he gave me a beating. All night I tried to understand what had really happened. We were supposed to go to the sea and we hadn’t gone, I had been punished for nothing. A mysterious inversion of attitudes had occurred: I, despite the rain, would have continued on the road, I felt far from everything and everyone, and distance—I discovered for the first time—extinguished in me every tie and every worry; Lila had abruptly repented of her own plan, she had given up the sea, she had wanted to return to the confines of the neighborhood. I couldn’t figure it out.

  The next day I didn’t wait for her at the gate, I went alone to school. We met in the public gardens. She discovered the bruises on my arms and asked what had happened. I shrugged, that was how things had turned out.

  “All they did was beat you?”

  “What should they have done?”

  “They’re still sending you to study Latin?”

  I looked at her in bewilderment.

  Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid that punishment? Or—I wonder today—did she want at different moments both things?

  17.

  We took the final test in elementary school together. When she realized that I was also taking the admission test for middle school, she lost energy. Something happened that surprised everyone: I passed both tests with all tens, the highest marks; Lila got her diploma with nines and an eight in arithmetic.

  She never said a word to me of anger or discontent. She began instead to go around with Carmela Peluso, the daughter of the carpenter-gambler, as if I were no longer enough. Within a few days we became a trio, in which, however, I, who had been first in school, was almost always the third. They talked and joked continuously with each other, or, rather, Lila talked and joked, Carmela listened and was amused. When we went for a walk between the church and the stradone, Lila was always in the middle and the two of us on the sides. If I noticed that she tended to be closer to Carmela I suffered and w
anted to go home.

  In this phase she seemed dazed, like the victim of sunstroke. It was very hot and we often bathed our heads in the fountain. I remember her with her hair and face dripping as she talked constantly about going to school the next year. It had become her favorite subject and she tackled it as if it were one of the stories she intended to write in order to become rich. Now when she talked she preferred to address Carmela Peluso, who had got her diploma with all sevens and had not taken the admission test for middle school, either.

  Lila was very skillful at telling stories—they all seemed true—about the school where we were going, and the teachers, and she made me laugh, she made me worry. One morning, though, I interrupted her.

  “Lila,” I said, “you can’t go to middle school, you didn’t take the admission test. Not you and not Carmela.”

  She got angry. She said she would go just the same, test or no test.

  “And Carmela?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “You’ll see.”

  But I must have rattled her. She stopped telling stories about our scholastic future and became silent. Then, with a sudden determination, she started tormenting her family, insisting that she wanted to study Latin, like Gigliola Spa­gn­uolo and me. She was especially hard on Rino, who had promised to help her but hadn’t. It was pointless to explain to her that there was now nothing to do about it; she became even more unreasonable and mean.

  At the start of the summer I began to have a feeling difficult to put into words. I saw that she was agitated, aggressive as she had always been, and I was pleased, I recognized her. But I also felt, behind her old habits, a pain that bothered me. She was suffering, and I didn’t like her sorrow. I preferred her when she was different from me, distant from my anxieties. And the uneasiness that the discovery of her fragility brought me was transformed by secret pathways into a need of my own to be superior. As soon as I could, cautiously, especially when Carmela Peluso wasn’t there, I found a way to remind her that I had gotten a better report card. As soon as I could, cautiously, I pointed out to her that I would go to middle school and she would not. To not be second, to outdo her, for the first time seemed to me a success. She must have realized it and she became even harsher, but toward her family, not me.

  Often, as I waited for her to come down to the courtyard, I heard her shouting from the windows. She hurled insults in the worst street dialect, so vulgar that listening to them made me think of order and respect; it didn’t seem right to treat adults like that, or even her brother. Of course, her father, Fernando the shoemaker, when he lost his head turned ugly. But all fathers had fits of anger. And hers, when she didn’t provoke him, was a kind, sympathetic man, a hard worker. He looked like an actor named Randolph Scott, but unrefined. He was rough, without pale colors, a black beard covered his cheeks, and he had broad, stubby hands streaked with dirt in every crease and under the nails. He joked easily. When I went to Lila’s house he took my nose between index and middle fingers and pretended to pull it off. He wanted to make me believe that he had stolen it and that now, as his prisoner, the nose was struggling to escape and return to my face. I found this funny. But if Rino or Lila or the other children made him angry, even I, hearing him from the street, was afraid.

  I don’t know what happened, one afternoon. In the hot weather we stayed outside until dinnertime. That day Lila didn’t show up, and I went to call her at the windows, which were on the ground floor. I cried, “Lì, Lì, Lì,” and my voice joined Fernando’s extremely loud voice, his wife’s loud voice, my friend’s insistent voice. I could hear that something was going on and it terrified me. From the windows came a vulgar Neapolitan and the crash of broken objects. In appearance it was no different from what happened at my house when my mother got angry because there wasn’t enough money and my father got angry because she had already spent the part of his wages he had given her. In reality the difference was substantial. My father was restrained even when he was angry, he became violent quietly, keeping his voice from exploding even if the veins on his neck swelled and his eyes were inflamed. Fernando instead yelled, threw things; his rage fed on itself, and he couldn’t stop. In fact his wife’s attempts to stop him increased his fury, and even if he wasn’t mad at her he ended up beating her. I insisted, then, in calling Lila, just to get her out of that tempest of cries, obscenities, sounds of destruction. I cried, “Lì, Lì, Lì,” but she—I heard her—kept on insulting her father.

  We were ten, soon we would be eleven. I was filling out, Lila remained small and thin, she was light and delicate. Suddenly the shouting stopped and a few seconds later my friend flew out the window, passed over my head, and landed on the asphalt behind me.

  I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.

  I looked at her terrified while she tried to get up and said, with an almost amused grimace, “I haven’t hurt myself.”

  But she was bleeding; she had broken her arm.

  18.

  Fathers could do that and other things to impudent girls. Afterward, Fernando became sullen, and worked more than usual. That summer, Carmela and Lila and I often passed the workshop, but while Rino always gave us a friendly nod of greeting, the shoemaker wouldn’t even look at his daughter as long as her arm was in the cast. It was clear that he was sorry. His violent moments as a father were a small thing compared with the widespread violence of the neighborhood. At the Bar Solara, in the heat, between gambling losses and troublesome drunkenness, people often reached the point of disperazione—a word that in dialect meant having lost all hope but also being broke—and hence of fights. Silvio Solara, the owner, a large man, with an imposing belly, blue eyes, and a high forehead, had a dark stick behind the bar with which he didn’t hesitate to strike anyone who didn’t pay for his drinks, who had asked for a loan and didn’t repay it within the time limit, who made any sort of agreement and didn’t keep it, and often he was helped by his sons, Marcello and Michele, boys the age of Lila’s brother, who hit harder than their father. Blows were given and received. Men returned home embittered by their losses, by alcohol, by debts, by deadlines, by beatings, and at the first inopportune word they beat their families, a chain of wrongs that generated wrongs.

  Right in the middle of that long season an event took place that upset everyone, but on Lila had a very particular effect. Don Achille, the terrible Don Achille, was murdered in his house in the early afternoon of a surprisingly rainy August day.

  He was in the kitchen, and had just opened the window to let in the rain-freshened air. He had got up from bed to do so, interrupting his nap. He had on worn blue pajamas, and on his feet only socks of a yellowish color, blackened at the heels. As soon as he opened the window a gust of rain struck his face and someone plunged a knife into the right side of his neck, halfway between the jaw and the clavicle.

  The blood spurted from his neck and hit a copper pot hanging on the wall. The copper was so shiny that the blood looked like an ink stain from which—Lila told us—dripped a wavering black line. The murderer—though she inclined to a murderess—had entered without breaking in, at a time when the children were outside and the adults, if they weren’t at work, were lying down. Surely he had entered with a skeleton key. Surely he had intended to strike him in the heart while he was sleeping, but had found him awake and thrust that knife into his throat. Don Achille had turned, with the blade stuck in his neck, eyes staring and the blood pouring out and dripping all over his pajamas. He had fallen to his knees and then, facedown, to the floor.

  The murder had made such an impression on Lila that almost every day, with great seriousness, always adding some new details, she compelled us to hear the story as if she had been present. Both Carmela Peluso and I, listening to her, were frightened; Carmela couldn’t sleep at night. At the worst moments, when the black line of blood dripped alo
ng the copper pot, Lila’s eyes became two fierce cracks. Surely she imagined that the murderer was female only because it was easier for her to identify with her.

  In that period we often went to the Pelusos’ house to play checkers and three-of-a-kind, for which Lila had developed a passion. Carmela’s mother let us sit in the dining room, where all the furniture had been made by her husband before Don Achille took away his carpenter’s tools and his shop. We sat at the table, which was placed between two sideboards with mirrors, and played. I found Carmela increasingly disagreeable, but I pretended to be her friend at least as much as I was Lila’s, in fact sometimes I even let her think that I liked her better. On the other hand I really did like Signora Peluso. She had worked at the tobacco factory, but had recently lost her job and was always at home. Anyway, she was, for better or for worse, a cheerful, fat woman, with a large bosom and bright red cheeks, and although money was scarce she always had something good to offer us. Also her husband seemed more tranquil. Now he was a waiter in a pizzeria, and he tried not to go to the Bar Solara to lose at cards the little he earned.