The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  “What do you think, fast, isn’t it?”

  “Incredibly fast,” I said, enthusiastically.

  Lila made no comment. She looked around, at times she touched my shoulder to point out the houses, the ragged poverty along the street, as if she saw a confirmation of something and I was supposed to understand it right away. Then she asked Stefano, seriously, without preamble, “Are you really different?”

  He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “From whom?”

  “You know.”

  He didn’t answer immediately. Then he said in dialect, “Do you want me to tell you the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “The intention is there, but I don’t know how it will end up.”

  At that point I was sure that Lila must not have told me quite a few things. That allusive tone was evidence that they were close, that they had talked other times and not in jest but seriously. What had I missed in the period of Ischia? I turned to look at her, she delayed replying, I thought that Stefano’s answer had made her nervous because of its vagueness. I saw her flooded by sunlight, eyes half closed, her shirt swelled by her breast and by the wind.

  “The poverty here is worse than among us,” she said. And then, without connection, laughing, “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about when you wanted to prick my tongue.”

  Stefano nodded.

  “That was another era,” he said.

  “Once a coward, always a coward—you were twice as big as me.”

  He gave a small, embarrassed smile and, without answering, accelerated in the direction of the port. The drive lasted less than half an hour, we went back on the Rettifilo and Piazza Garibaldi.

  “Your brother isn’t well,” Stefano said when we had returned to the outskirts of the neighborhood. He looked at her again in the mirror and asked, “Are those shoes displayed in the window the ones you made?”

  “What do you know about the shoes?”

  “It’s all Rino talks about.”

  “And so?”

  “They’re very beautiful.”

  She narrowed her eyes, squeezed them almost until they were closed.

  “Buy them,” she said in her provocative tone.

  “How much will you sell them for?”

  “Talk to my father.”

  Stefano made a decisive U turn that threw me against the door, we turned onto the street where the shoe repair shop was.

  “What are you doing?” Lila asked, alarmed now.

  “You said to buy them and I’m going to buy them.”

  37.

  He stopped the car in front of the shoemaker’s shop, came around and opened the door for me, gave me his hand to help me out. He didn’t concern himself with Lila, who got out herself and stayed behind. He and I stopped in front of the window, under the eyes of Fernando and Rino, who looked at us from inside the shop with sullen curiosity.

  When Lila joined us Stefano opened the door of the shop, let me go first, went in without making way for her. He was very courteous with father and son, and asked if he could see the shoes. Rino rushed to get them, and Stefano examined them, praised them: “They’re light and yet strong, they really have a nice line.” He asked me, “What do you think, Lenù?”

  I said, with great embarrassment, “They’re very handsome.”

  He turned to Fernando: “Your daughter said that all three of you worked on them and that you have a plan to make others, for women as well.”

  “Yes,” said Rino, looking in wonder at his sister.

  “Yes,” said Fernando, puzzled, “but not right away.”

  Rino said to his sister, a little worked up, because he was afraid she would refuse, “Show him the designs.”

  Lila, continuing to surprise him, didn’t resist. She went to the back of the shop and returned, handing the sheets of paper to her brother, who gave them to Stefano. They were the models that she had designed almost two years earlier.

  Stefano showed me a drawing of a pair of women’s shoes with a very high heel.

  “Would you buy them?”

  “Yes.”

  He went back to examining the designs. Then he sat down on a stool, took off his right shoe.

  “What size is it?”

  “43, but it could be a 44,” Rino lied.

  Lila, surprising us again, knelt in front of Stefano and using the shoehorn helped him slip his foot into the new shoe. Then she took off the other shoe and did the same.

  Stefano, who until that moment had been playing the part of the practical, businesslike man, was obviously disturbed. He waited for Lila to get up, and remained seated for some seconds as if to catch his breath. Then he stood, took a few steps.

  “They’re tight,” he said.

  Rino turned gray, disappointed.

  “We can put them on the machine and widen them,” Fernando interrupted, but uncertainly.

  Stefano turned to me and asked, “How do they look?”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Then I’ll take them.”

  Fernando remained impassive, Rino brightened.

  “You know, Ste’, these are an exclusive Cerullo design, they’ll be expensive.”

  Stefano smiled, took an affectionate tone: “And if they weren’t an exclusive Cerullo design, do you think I would buy them? When will they be ready?”

  Rino looked at his father, radiant.

  “We’ll keep them in the machine for at least three days,” Fernando said, but it was clear that he could have said ten days, twenty, a month, he was so eager to take his time in the face of this unexpected novelty.

  “Good: you think of a friendly price and I’ll come in three days to pick them up.”

  He folded the pieces of paper with the designs and put them in his pocket before our puzzled eyes. Then he shook hands with Fernando, with Rino, and headed toward the door.

  “The drawings,” Lila said coldly.

  “Can I bring them back in three days?” Stefano asked in a cordial tone, and without waiting for an answer opened the door. He made way for me to pass and went out after me.

  I was already settled in the car next to him when Lila joined us. She was angry.

  “You think my father is a fool, that my brother is a fool?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you think you’ll make fools of my family and me, you are mistaken.”

  “You are insulting me: I’m not Marcello Solara.”

  “And who are you?”

  “A businessman: the shoes you’ve designed are unusual. And I don’t mean just the ones I bought, I mean all of them.”

  “So?”

  “So let me think and we’ll see each other in three days.”

  Lila stared at him as if she wanted to read his mind, she didn’t move away from the car. Finally she said something that I would never have had the courage to utter:

  “Look, Marcello tried in every possible way to buy me but no one is going to buy me.”

  Stefano looked her straight in the eyes for a long moment.

  “I don’t spend a lira if I don’t think it can produce a hundred.”

  He started the engine and we left. Now I was sure: the drive had been a sort of agreement reached at the end of many encounters, much talk. I said weakly, in Italian, “Please, Stefano, leave me at the corner? If my mother sees me in a car with you she’ll bash my face in.”

  38.

  Lila’s life changed decisively during that month of September. It wasn’t easy, but it changed. As for me, I had returned from Ischia in love with Nino, branded by the lips and hands of his father, sure that I would weep night and day because of the mixture of happiness and horror I felt inside. Instead I made no attempt to find a form for my emotions, in a few hours everything was reduced. I put aside Nino’s voice, the irritation of his f
ather’s mustache. The island faded, lost itself in some secret corner of my head. I made room for what was happening to Lila.

  In the three days that followed the astonishing ride in the convertible, she, with the excuse of doing the shopping, went often to Stefano’s grocery, but always asked me to go with her. I did it with my heart pounding, frightened by the possible appearance of Marcello, but also pleased with my role as confidante generous with advice, as accomplice in weaving plots, as apparent object of Stefano’s attentions. We were girls, even if we imagined ourselves wickedly daring. We embroidered on the facts—Marcello, Stefano, the shoes—with our usual eagerness and it seemed to us that we always knew how to make things come out right. “I’ll say this to him,” she hypothesized, and I would suggest a small variation: “No, say this.” Then she and Stefano would be deep in conversation in a corner behind the counter, while Alfonso exchanged a few words with me, Pinuccia, annoyed, waited on the customers, and Maria, at the cash register, observed her older son apprehensively, because he had been neglecting the job lately, and was feeding the gossip of the neighbors.

  Naturally we were improvising. In the course of that back and forth I tried to understand what was really going through Lila’s head, so as to be in tune with her goals. At first I had the impression that she intended simply to enable her father and brother to earn some money by selling Stefano, for a good price, the only pair of shoes produced by the Cerullos, but soon it seemed to me that her principal aim was to get rid of Marcello by making use of the young grocer. In this sense, she was decisive when I asked her:

  “Which of the two do you like more?”

  She shrugged.

  “I’ve never liked Marcello, he makes me sick.”

  “You would become engaged to Stefano just to get Marcello out of your house?”

  She thought for a moment and said yes.

  From then on the ultimate goal of all our plotting seemed to us that—to fight by every means possible Marcello’s intrusion in her life. The rest came crowding around almost by chance and we merely gave it a rhythm and, at times, a true orchestration. Or so at least we believed. In fact, the person who was acting was only and was always Stefano.

  Punctually, three days later, he went to the store and bought the shoes, even though they were tight. The two Cerullos with much hesitation asked for twenty-five thousand lire, but were ready to go down to ten thousand. He didn’t bat an eye and put down another twenty thousand in exchange for Lila’s drawings, which—he said—he liked, he wanted to frame them.

  “Frame?” Rino asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Like a picture by a painter?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you told my sister that you’re buying her drawings?”

  “Yes.”

  Stefano didn’t stop there. In the following days he again poked his head in at the shop and announced to father and son that he had rented the space adjacent to theirs. “For now it’s there,” he said, “but if you one day decide to expand, remember that I am at your disposal.”

  At the Cerullos’ they discussed for a long time what that statement meant. “Expand?” Finally Lila, since they couldn’t get there on their own, said:

  “He’s proposing to transform the shoe shop into a workshop for making Cerullo shoes.”

  “And the money?” Rino asked cautiously.

  “He’ll invest it.”

  “He told you?” Fernando, incredulous, was alarmed, immediately followed by Nunzia.

  “He told the two of you,” Lila said, indicating her father and brother.

  “But he knows that handmade shoes are expensive?”

  “You showed him.”

  “And if they don’t sell?”

  “You’ve wasted the work and he’s wasted the money.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  The entire family was upset for days. Marcello moved to the background. He arrived at night at eight-thirty and dinner wasn’t ready. Often he found himself alone in front of the television with Melina and Ada, while the Cerullos talked in another room.

  Naturally the most enthusiastic was Rino, who regained energy, color, good humor, and, as he had been the close friend of the Solaras, so he began to be Stefano’s close friend, Alfonso’s, Pinuccia’s, even Signora Maria’s. When, finally, Fernando’s last reservation dissolved, Stefano went to the shop and, after a small discussion, came to a verbal agreement on the basis of which he would put up the expenses and the two Cerullos would start production of the model that Lila and Rino had already made and all the other models, it being understood that they would split the possible profits half and half. He took the documents out of a pocket and showed them to them one after another.

  “You’ll do this, this, this,” he said, “but let’s hope that it won’t take two years, as I know happened with the other.”

  “My daughter is a girl,” Fernando explained, embarrassed, “and Rino hasn’t yet learned the job well.”

  Stefano shook his head in a friendly way.

  “Leave Lina out of it. You’ll have to take on some workers.”

  “And who will pay them?” Fernando asked.

  “Me again. You choose two or three, freely, according to your judgment.”

  Fernando, at the idea of having, no less, employees, turned red and his tongue was loosened, to the evident annoyance of his son. He spoke of how he had learned the trade from his late father. He told of how hard the work was on the machines, in Casoria. He said that his mistake had been to marry Nunzia, who had weak hands and no wish to work, but if he had married Ines, a flame of his youth who had been a great worker, he would in time have had a business all his own, better than Campanile, with a line to display perhaps at the regional trade show. He told us, finally, that he had in his head beautiful shoes, perfect, that if Stefano weren’t set on those silly things of Lina’s, they could start production now and you know how many they would sell. Stefano listened patiently, but repeated that he, for now, was interested only in having Lila’s exact designs made. Rino then took his sister’s sheets of paper, examined them carefully, and asked him in a lightly teasing tone:

  “When you get them framed where will you hang them?”

  “In here.”

  Rino looked at his father, but he had turned sullen again and said nothing.

  “My sister agrees about everything?” he asked.

  Stefano smiled: “Who can do anything if your sister doesn’t agree?”

  He got up, shook Fernando’s hand vigorously, and headed toward the door. Rino went with him and, with sudden concern, called to him from the doorway, as Stefano was going to the red convertible:

  “The brand of the shoes is Cerullo.”

  Stefano waved to him, without turning: “A Cerullo invented them and Cerullo they will be called.”

  39.

  That same night Rino, before he went out with Pasquale and Antonio, said, “Marcè, have you seen that car Stefano’s got?”

  Marcello, stupefied by the television and by sadness, didn’t even answer.

  Then Rino drew his comb out of his pocket, pulled it through his hair, and said cheerfully: “You know that he bought our shoes for twenty-five thousand lire?”

  “You see he’s got money to throw away,” Marcello answered, and Melina burst out laughing, it wasn’t clear if she was reacting to that remark or to what was showing on the television.

  From that moment Rino found a way, night after night, to annoy Marcello, and the atmosphere became increasingly tense. Besides, as soon as Solara, who was always greeted kindly by Nunzia, arrived, Lila disappeared, saying she was tired, and went to bed. One night Marcello, very depressed, talked to Nunzia.

  “If your daughter goes to bed as soon as I arrive, what am I coming here for?”

  Evidently he hoped that she
would comfort him, saying something that would encourage him to persevere. But Nunzia didn’t know what to say and so he stammered, “Does she like someone else?”

  “But no.”

  “I know she goes to do the shopping at Stefano’s.”

  “And where should she go, my boy, to do the shopping?”

  Marcello was silent, eyes lowered.

  “She was seen in the car with the grocer.”

  “Lenuccia was there, too: Stefano is interested in the porter’s daughter.”

  “Lenuccia doesn’t seem to me a good companion for your daughter. Tell her not to see her anymore.”

  I was not a good companion? Lila was not supposed to see me anymore? When my friend reported that request of Marcello’s I went over conclusively to Stefano’s side and began to praise his tactful ways, his calm determination. “He’s rich,” I said to her finally. But even as I said that I realized how the idea of the riches girls dreamed of was changing further. The treasure chests full of gold pieces that a procession of servants in livery would deposit in our castle when we published a book like Little Women—riches and fame—had truly faded. Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured. But the fundamental feature that now prevailed was concreteness, the daily gesture, the negotiation. This wealth of adolescence proceeded from a fantastic, still childish illumination—the designs for extraordinary shoes—but it was embodied in the petulant dissatisfaction of Rino, who wanted to spend like a big shot, in the television, in the meals, and in the ring with which Marcello wanted to buy a feeling, and, finally, from step to step, in that courteous youth Stefano, who sold groceries, had a red convertible, spent forty-five thousand lire like nothing, framed drawings, wished to do business in shoes as well as in cheese, invested in leather and a workforce, and seemed convinced that he could inaugurate a new era of peace and well-being for the neighborhood: it was, in short, wealth that existed in the facts of every day, and so was without splendor and without glory.

  “He’s rich,” I heard Lila repeat, and we started laughing. But then she added, “Also nice, also good,” and I agreed, these last were qualities that Marcello didn’t have, a further reason for being on Stefano’s side. Yet those two adjectives confused me, I felt that they gave the final blow to the shine of childish fantasies. No castle, no treasure chest—I seemed to understand—would concern Lila and me alone, intent on writing our Little Women. Wealth, incarnated in Stefano, was taking the form of a young man in a greasy apron, was gaining features, smell, voice, was expressing kindness and goodness, was a male we had known forever, the oldest son of Don Achille.