The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  It was immediately clear that Enzo didn’t know much about it. He moved very little, in a serious, composed way, but he was very attentive to Lila, he obviously wished to do her a favor, let her show off. And although she wasn’t as good as Carmen, she managed as usual to win everyone’s attention. Even Enzo likes her, I said to myself in desolation. And—I realized right away—Stefano, the grocer: he gazed at her the whole time the way one gazes at a movie star.

  But while Lila was dancing the Solara brothers arrived.

  The mere sight of them agitated me. They greeted the pastry maker and his wife, they gave Stefano a pat of sympathy, and then they, too, started watching the dancers. First, like masters of the neighborhood, as they felt they were, they looked in a vulgar fashion at Ada, who avoided their gaze; then they spoke to each other and, indicating Antonio, gave him an exaggerated nod of greeting, which he pretended not to see; finally they noticed Lila, stared at her for a long time, then whispered to each other, Michele giving an obvious sign of assent.

  I didn’t let them out of my sight, and I quickly realized that in particular Marcello—Marcello, whom all the girls liked—didn’t seem in the least angered by the knife business. On the contrary. In a few seconds he was completely captivated by Lila’s lithe and elegant body, by her face, which was unusual in the neighborhood and perhaps in the whole city of Naples. He gazed without ever taking his eyes off her, as if he had lost the little brain he had. He gazed at her even when the music stopped.

  It was an instant. Enzo made as if to push Lila into the corner where I was, Stefano and Marcello moved together to ask her to dance; but Pasquale preceded them. Lila made a gracious skip of consent, clapped her hands happily. At the same moment, four males, of various ages, each convinced in a different way of his own absolute power, reached out toward the figure of a fourteen-year-old girl. The needle scratched on the record, the music started. Stefano, Marcello, Enzo retreated uncertainly. Pasquale began to dance with Lila, and, given his virtuosity, she immediately let go.

  At that point Michele Solara, perhaps out of love for his brother, perhaps out of a pure taste for making trouble, decided to complicate the situation in his own way. He nudged Stefano with his elbow and said aloud, “Are you some kind of a sissy? That’s the son of the man who killed your father, he’s a lousy Communist, and you stand there watching him dance with the girl you wanted to dance with?”

  Pasquale certainly didn’t hear him, because the music was loud and he was busy performing acrobatics with Lila. But I heard, and Enzo next to me heard, and naturally Stefano heard. We waited for something to happen but nothing happened. Stefano was someone who knew his own business. The grocery was thriving, he was planning to buy a neighboring space to expand it, he felt, in short, fortunate, and in fact he was very sure that life would give him everything he wanted. He said to Michele with his enchanting smile, “Let him dance, he’s a good dancer.” And he continued to watch Lila as if the only thing that mattered to him at that moment were her. Michele made a grimace of disgust and went to look for the pastry maker and his wife.

  What did he want to do now? I saw him talking with the hosts in an agitated manner, he pointed to Maria in one corner, he pointed to Stefano and Alfonso and Pinuccia, he pointed to Pasquale, who was dancing, he pointed to Carmela, who was showing off with Antonio. As soon as the music stopped Gigliola’s mother took Pasquale under the arm in a friendly way, led him into a corner, said something in his ear.

  “Go ahead,” Michele said to his brother, “the way’s clear.” And Marcello Solara tried again with Lila.

  I was sure she would say no, I knew how she detested him. But that wasn’t what happened. The music started, and she, with the desire to dance in every muscle, first looked for Pasquale, then, not seeing him, grasped Marcello’s hand as if it were merely a hand, as if beyond it there were not an arm, his whole body, and, all sweaty, began again to do what at that moment counted most for her: dance.

  I looked at Stefano, I looked at Enzo. Everything was charged with tension. My heart was pounding as Pasquale, scowling, went over to Carmela and spoke sharply to her. Carmela protested in a low voice, in a low voice he silenced her. Antonio approached them, spoke to Pasquale. Together they glared at Michele Solara, who was again talking to Stefano, at Marcello, who was dancing with Lila, pulling her, lifting her, lowering her down. Then Antonio went to drag Ada out of the dancing. The music stopped, Lila returned to my side. I said to her, “Something’s happening, we have to go.”

  She laughed, exclaimed, “Even if there’s an earthquake coming I’m going to have another dance,” and she looked at Enzo, who was leaning against a wall. But meanwhile Marcello asked and she let him draw her again into a dance.

  Pasquale came over and said somberly that we had to go.

  “Let’s wait till Lila finishes her dance.”

  “No, right now,” he said in a tone that would not admit a response, hard, rude. Then he went straight toward Michele Solara and bumped him hard with one shoulder. Michele laughed, said something obscene out of the corner of his mouth. Pasquale continued toward the door, followed by Carmela, reluctantly, and by Antonio, who had Ada with him.

  I turned to see what Enzo was doing, but he was still leaning against the wall, watching Lila dance. The music ended. Lila moved toward me, followed by Marcello, whose eyes were shining with happiness.

  “We have to go,” I nearly shrieked.

  I must have put such anguish into my voice that she finally looked around as if she had woken up. “All right, let’s go,” she said, puzzled.

  I headed toward the door, without waiting any longer, the music started again. Marcello Solara grabbed Lila by the arm, said to her between a laugh and an entreaty: “Stay, I’ll take you home.”

  Lila, as if only then recognizing him, looked at him incredulously: suddenly it seemed to her impossible that he was touching her with such assurance. She tried to free her arm but Marcello held it in a strong grip, saying, “Just one more dance.”

  Enzo left the wall, grabbed Marcello’s wrist without saying a word. I see him before my eyes: he was calm; although younger in years and smaller in size, he seemed to be making no effort. The strength of his grip could be seen only on the face of Marcello Solara, who let go of Lila with a grimace of pain and seized his wrist with his other hand. As we left I heard Lila saying indignantly to Enzo, in the thickest dialect, “He touched me, did you see: me, that shit. Luckily Rino wasn’t there. If he does it again, he’s dead.”

  Was it possible she didn’t realize that she had danced with Marcello twice? Yes, possible, she was like that.

  Outside we found Pasquale, Antonio, Carmela, and Ada. Pasquale was beside himself, we had never seen him like that. He was shouting insults, shouting at the top of his lungs, his eyes like a madman’s, and there was no way to calm him. He was angry with Michele, of course, but above all with Marcello and Stefano. He said things that we weren’t capable of understanding. He said that the Bar Solara had always been a place for loan sharks from the Camorra, that it was the base for smuggling and for collecting votes for the monarchists. He said that Don Achille had been a spy for the Nazi Fascists, he said that the money Stefano was using to expand the grocery store his father had made on the black market. He yelled, “Papa was right to kill him.” He yelled, “The Solaras, father and sons—I’ll cut their throats, and then I’ll eliminate Stefano and his whole family from the face of the earth.” Finally, turning to Lila, he yelled, as if it were the most serious thing, “And you, you were even dancing with that piece of shit.”

  At that point, as if Pasquale’s rage had pumped breath into his chest, Antonio, too, began shouting, and it was almost as if he were angry at Pasquale because he wished to deprive him of a joy: the joy of killing the Solaras for what they had done to Ada. And Ada immediately began to cry and Carmela couldn’t restrain herself and she, too, burst into tears. And Enzo tried to persua
de all of us to get off the street. “Let’s go home,” he said. But Pasquale and Antonio silenced him, they wanted to stay and confront the Solaras. Fiercely, but with pretended calm, they kept repeating to Enzo, “Go, go, we’ll see you tomorrow.” Enzo said softly, “If you stay, I’m going to stay, too.” At that point I, too, burst into tears and a moment afterward—the thing that moved me most—Lila, whom I had never seen cry, ever, began weeping.

  We were four girls in tears, desperate tears. But Pasquale yielded only when he saw Lila crying. He said in a tone of resignation, “All right, not tonight, I’ll settle things with the Solaras some other time, let’s go.” Immediately, between sobs, Lila and I took him under the arm, dragged him away. For a moment we consoled him by saying mean things about the Solaras, but also insisting that the best thing was to act as if they didn’t exist. Then Lila, drying her tears with the back of her hand, asked “Who are the Nazi Fascists, Pascà? Who are the monarchists? What’s the black market?”

  17.

  It’s hard to say what Pasquale’s answers did to Lila. I’m in danger of getting it wrong, partly because on me, at the time, they had no concrete effect. But she, in her usual way, was moved and altered by them, so that for the entire summer she tormented me with a single concept that I found quite unbearable. I’ll try to summarize it, using the language of today, like this: there are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.

  Naturally she said it in another way. But what matters is that she was gripped by a frenzy of absolute disclosure. She pointed to people, things, streets, and said, “That man fought in the war and killed, that one bludgeoned and administered castor oil, that one turned in a lot of people, that one starved his own mother, in that house they tortured and killed, on these stones they marched and gave the Fascist salute, on this corner they inflicted beatings, these people’s money comes from the hunger of others, this car was bought by selling bread adulterated with marble dust and rotten meat on the black market, that butcher shop had its origins in stolen copper and vandalized freight trains, behind that bar is the Camorra, smuggling, loan-sharking.”

  Soon she became dissatisfied with Pasquale. It was as if he had set in motion a mechanism in her head and now her job was to put order into a chaotic mass of impressions. Increasingly intent, increasingly obsessed, probably overcome herself by an urgent need to find a solid vision, without cracks, she complicated his meager information with some book she got from the library. So she gave concrete motives, ordinary faces to the air of abstract apprehension that as children we had breathed in the neighborhood. Fascism, Nazism, the war, the Allies, the monarchy, the republic—she turned them into streets, houses, faces, Don Achille and the black market, Alfredo Peluso the Communist, the Camorrist grandfather of the Solaras, the father, Silvio, a worse Fascist than Marcello and Michele, and her father, Fernando the shoemaker, and my father, all—all—in her eyes stained to the marrow by shadowy crimes, all hardened criminals or acquiescent accomplices, all bought for practically nothing. She and Pasquale enclosed me in a terrible world that left no escape.

  Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila’s capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides. I often looked at them walking together and, if at first it had been she who hung on his words, now it was he who hung on hers. He’s in love, I thought. I also thought: Lila will fall in love, too, they’ll be engaged, they’ll marry, they’ll always be talking about these political things, they’ll have children who will talk about the same things. When school started again, on the one hand I suffered because I knew I wouldn’t have time for Lila anymore, on the other I hoped to detach myself from that sum of the misdeeds and compliances and cowardly acts of the people we knew, whom we loved, whom we carried—she, Pasquale, Rino, I, all of us—in our blood.

  18.

  The first two years of high school were much more difficult than middle school. I was in a class of forty-two students, one of the very rare mixed classes in that school. There were few girls, and I didn’t know any of them. Gigliola, after much boasting (“Yes, I’m going to high school, too, definitely, we’ll sit at the same desk”), ended up going to help her father in the Solaras’ pastry shop. Of the boys, instead, I knew Alfonso and Gino, who, however, sat together in one of the front desks, elbow to elbow, with frightened looks, and nearly pretended not to know me. The room stank, an acid odor of sweat, dirty feet, fear.

  For the first months I lived my new scholastic life in silence, constantly picking at my acne-studded forehead and cheeks. Sitting in one of the rows at the back, from which I could barely see the teachers or what they wrote on the blackboard, I was unknown to my deskmate as she was unknown to me. Thanks to Maestra Oliviero I soon had the books I needed; they were grimy and well worn. I imposed on myself a discipline learned in middle school: I studied all afternoon until eleven and then from five in the morning until seven, when it was time to go. Leaving the house, weighed down with books, I often met Lila, who was hurrying to the shoe shop to open up, sweep, wash, get things in order before her father and brother arrived. She questioned me about the subjects I had for the day, what I had studied, and wanted precise answers. If I didn’t give them she besieged me with questions that made me fear I hadn’t studied enough, that I wouldn’t be able to answer the teachers as I wasn’t able to answer her. On some cold mornings, when I rose at dawn and in the kitchen went over the lessons, I had the impression that, as usual, I was sacrificing the warm deep sleep of the morning to make a good impression on the daughter of the shoemaker rather than on the teachers in the school for rich people. Breakfast was hurried, too, for her sake. I gulped down milk and coffee and ran out to the street so as not to miss even a step of the way we would go together.

  I waited at the entrance. I saw her arriving from her building and noticed that she was continuing to change. She was now taller than I was. She walked not like the bony child she had been until a few months before but as if, as her body rounded, her pace had also become softer. Hi, hi, we immediately started talking. When we stopped at the intersection and said goodbye, she going to the shop, I to the metro station, I kept turning to give her a last glance. Once or twice I saw Pasquale arrive out of breath and walk beside her, keeping her company.

  The metro was crowded with boys and girls stained with sleep, with the smoke of the first cigarettes. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t talk to anyone. During the few minutes of the journey I went over my lessons again, in panic, frantically pasting strange languages into my head, tones different from those used in the neighborhood. I was terrified of failing in school, of the crooked shadow of my displeased mother, of the glares of Maestra Oliviero. And yet I had now a single true thought: to find a boyfriend, immediately, before Lila announced to me that she was going with Pasquale.

  Every day I felt more strongly the anguish of not being in time. I was afraid, coming home from school, of meeting her and learning from her melodious voice that now she was making love with Peluso. Or if it wasn’t him, it was Enzo. Or if it wasn’t Enzo, it was Antonio. Or, what do I know, Stefano Carracci, the grocer, or even Marcello Solara: Lila was unpredictable. The males who buzzed around her were almost men, full of demands. As a result, between the plan for the shoes, reading about the terrible world we had been born into, and boyfriends, she would no longer have time for me. Sometimes, on the way home from school, I made a wide circle in order not to pass the shoemaker’s shop. If instead I saw her in person, from a distance, in distress I would change my route. But then I couldn’t resist and went to meet her as if it were fated.

  Entering and leaving the school, an enormous gloomy, run-down gray building, I looked at the boys. I looked at them insistently, so that they would feel my gaze on them and look at me. I looked at my classmates, some still in short pants, others in knickers or long pants. I looked at the older boys, in the upper classes, who mostly w
ore jacket and tie, though never an overcoat, they had to prove, especially to themselves, that they didn’t suffer from the cold: hair in crew cuts, their necks white because of the high tapering. I preferred them, but I would have been content even with one from the class above mine, the main thing was that he should wear long pants.

  One day I was struck by a student with a shambling gait, who was very thin, with disheveled brown hair and a face that seemed to me handsome and somehow familiar. How old could he be: sixteen? Seventeen? I observed him carefully, looked again, and my heart stopped: it was Nino Sarratore, the son of Donato Sarratore, the railroad worker poet. He returned my look, but distractedly, he didn’t recognize me. His jacket was shapeless at the elbows, tight at the shoulders, his pants were threadbare, his shoes lumpy. He showed no sign of prosperity, such as Stefano and, especially, the Solaras displayed. Evidently his father, although he had written a book of poems, was not yet wealthy.

  I was disturbed by that unexpected apparition. As I left I had a violent impulse to tell Lila right away, but then I changed my mind. If I told her, surely she would ask to go to school with me to see him. And I knew already what would happen. As Nino hadn’t noticed me, as he hadn’t recognized the slender blond child of elementary school in the fat and pimply fourteen-year-old I had become, so he would immediately recognize Lila and be vanquished. I decided to cultivate the image of Nino Sarratore in silence, as he left school with his head bent and his rocking gait and went off along Corso Garibaldi. Now I went to school as if to see him, even just a glimpse, were the only real reason to go.

  The autumn flew by. One morning I was questioned on the Aeneid: it was the first time I had been called to the front of the room. The teacher, an indolent man in his sixties named Gerace, who was always yawning noisily, burst out laughing when I said “or-A-cle” instead of “OR-a-cle.” It didn’t occur to him that, although I knew the meaning of the word, I lived in a world where no one had ever had any reason to use it. The others laughed, too, especially Gino, sitting at the front desk with Alfonso. I felt humiliated. Days passed, and we had our first homework in Latin. When Gerace brought back the corrected homework he said, “Who is Greco?”