The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  Maria’s appreciation grew. She went more and more often to give her daughter-in-law a hand, rather than her son, whose failed paternity—along with the pressures of business—had made him surly, or her daughter, who had started working in the store in Piazza dei Martiri and had strictly forbidden her mother to appear, so as not to make a bad impression with the clientele. The old Signora Carracci even took the young Signora Carracci’s side when Stefano and Pinuccia blamed her for her inability, or unwillingness, to keep a baby inside her.

  “She doesn’t want children,” Stefano complained.

  “Yes,” Pinuccia supported him, “she wants to stay a girl, she doesn’t know how to be a wife.”

  Maria reproached them both harshly: “Don’t even think such things, Our Lord gives children and Our Lord takes them away, I don’t want to hear that nonsense.”

  “You be quiet,” her daughter cried, in annoyance. “You gave that bitch the earrings I liked.”

  Their arguments, Lila’s reactions, soon became neighborhood gossip, which spread, and even I heard it. But I didn’t pay much attention, the school year had begun.

  It started right off in a way that amazed me most of all. I did well from the first days, as if, with the departure of Antonio, the disappearance of Nino, maybe even Lila’s decisive commitment to managing the grocery, something in my head had relaxed. I found that I remembered with precision everything I had learned badly in my first year; I answered the teachers’ questions with ready intelligence. Not only that. Professor Galiani, maybe because she had lost Nino, her most brilliant student, redoubled her interest in me and said that it would be stimulating and instructive for me to go to a march for world peace that started in Resina and continued on to Naples. I decided to have a look, partly out of curiosity, partly out of fear that Professor Galiani would be offended, and partly because the march went along the stradone, skirting the neighborhood, and it wouldn’t take much effort. But my mother wanted me to take my brothers. I argued, I protested, and was late. I arrived with them at the railway bridge, and down below saw the people marching; they occupied the whole street, preventing the cars from passing. They were normal people and weren’t really marching but walking, carrying banners and signs. I wanted to find Professor Galiani, to be seen, and I ordered my brothers to wait on the bridge. It was a terrible idea: I couldn’t find the professor, and, as soon as I turned my back, they joined some other children who were throwing stones at the demonstrators and yelling insults. In a sweat I rushed to get them, and hurried them away, terrified by the idea that the far-sighted Professor Galiani had picked them out and recognized that they were my brothers.

  Meanwhile the weeks passed, there were new classes and the textbooks to buy. It seemed pointless to show the list of books to my mother so that she would negotiate with my father and get money from him, I knew that there was no money. In addition, there was no news of Maestra Oliviero. Between August and September, I had gone twice to visit her in the hospital, but the first time I had found her asleep and the second I discovered that she had been discharged but had not returned home. Feeling desperate, in early November I went to ask the neighbor about her, and learned that, because of her health, she had gone to a sister in Potenza, and who knew if she would ever return to Naples, to the neighborhood, to her job. At that point I decided to ask Alfonso if, when his brother had bought the books for him, we could somehow arrange things so that I could use his. He was enthusiastic and proposed that we should study together, maybe at Lila’s house, which, ever since she had started working at the grocery, was empty from seven in the morning until nine at night. We resolved to do that.

  But one morning Alfonso said to me, somewhat annoyed, “Go and see Lila in the grocery today, she wants to see you.” He knew why, but she had sworn him to silence and it was impossible to get the secret out of him.

  In the afternoon I went to the new grocery. Carmen, with a mixture of sadness and joy, wanted to show me a card from some city in Piedmont that Enzo, her fiancé, had sent her. Lila had also received a card, from Antonio, and for a moment I thought she had wanted me to come there just to show it to me. But she didn’t show it to me or tell me what he had written. She dragged me into the back of the shop and asked, in a tone of amusement:

  “You remember our bet?”

  I nodded yes.

  “You remember that you lost?”

  I nodded yes.

  “You remember that you now have to pass with the best grades?”

  I nodded yes.

  She pointed to two large packages tied up in wrapping paper. In them were the school books.

  29.

  They were very heavy. At home, I was very excited to discover that they were not the used, often ill-smelling volumes that in the past the teacher had got for me but were brand-new, fragrant with fresh ink, and conspicuous among them were the dictionaries—Zingarelli, Rocci, and Calonghi-Georges—which the teacher had never been able to acquire.

  My mother, who had a word of contempt for anything that happened to me, burst into tears as she watched me unwrap the packages. Surprised, intimidated by that unusual reaction, I went to her, caressed her arm. It’s difficult to say what had moved her: maybe her sense of impotence in the face of our poverty, maybe the generosity of the grocer’s wife, I don’t know. She calmed down quickly, muttered something incomprehensible, and became engrossed in her duties.

  In the little room where I slept with my sister and brothers I had a small, rough table, riddled with worm holes, where I usually did my homework. On it I arranged all the books, and, seeing them lined up there, against the wall, I felt charged with energy.

  The days began to fly by. I gave back to Professor Galiani the books she had lent me for the summer, she gave me others, which were even more difficult. I read them diligently on Sundays, but I didn’t understand much. I ran my eyes along the lines, I turned the pages, and yet the style annoyed me, the meaning escaped me. That year, my fourth year of high school, between studying and difficult readings, I was exhausted, but it was the exhaustion of contentment.

  One day Professor Galiani asked me, “What newspaper do you read, Greco?”

  That question provoked the same uneasiness I had felt talking to Nino at Lila’s wedding. The professor took it for granted that I normally did something that at my house, in my environment, was not at all normal. How could I tell her that my father didn’t buy the newspaper, that I had never read one? I didn’t have the heart, and my mind raced to remember if Pasquale, who was a Communist, read one. A useless effort. Then I thought of Donato Sarratore and I remembered Ischia, the Maronti, I remembered that he wrote for Roma. I answered:

  “I read Roma.”

  The professor gave an ironic half smile, and the next day began handing on her newspapers. She bought two, sometimes three, and after school she would give me one. I thanked her and went home upset by what seemed to me still more homework.

  At first I left the paper around the house, and put off reading it until I had finished my homework, but at night it had disappeared, my father had grabbed it to read in bed or in the bathroom. So I got in the habit of hiding it among my books, and took it out only at night, when everyone was sleeping. Sometimes it was Unità, sometimes Il Mattino, sometimes Corriere della Sera, but all three were difficult for me, it was like having to follow a comic strip whose preceding episodes you didn’t know. I hurried from one column to the next, more out of duty than out of real curiosity, hoping, as in all things imposed by school, that what I didn’t understand today I would, by sheer persistence, understand tomorrow.

  In that period I saw little of Lila. Sometimes, right after school, before I rushed off to do my homework, I went to the new grocery. I was starving, she knew it, and would make me a generously stuffed sandwich. While I devoured it, I would articulate, in good Italian, statements I had memorized from Professor Galiani’s books and newspapers. I would mention, l
et’s say, “the atrocious reality of the Nazi extermination camps,” or “what men were able to do and what they can do today as well,” or “the atomic threat and the obligation to peace,” or the fact that “as a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature,” or “the need for a culture that combats and eliminates suffering,” or the idea that “religion will disappear from men’s consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound scientific conception of society and of life.” I talked to her about these and other things because I wanted to show her that I was sailing toward passing with high marks, and because I didn’t know who else to say them to, and because I hoped she would respond so that we could resume our old habit of discussion. But she said almost nothing, in fact she seemed embarrassed, as if she didn’t really understand what I was talking about. Or if she made a remark, she concluded by digging up an old obsession that now—I didn’t know why—had started working inside her again. She began to talk about the origin of Don Achille’s money, and of the Solaras’, even in the presence of Carmen, who immediately agreed. But as soon as a customer came in she stopped, she became very polite and efficient, she sliced, weighed, took money.

  Once, she left the cash drawer open and, staring at the money, said, angrily, “I earn this with my labor and Carmen’s. But nothing in there is mine, Lenù, it’s made with Stefano’s money. And Stefano to make money started with his father’s money. Without what Don Achille put under the mattress, working the black market and loan-sharking, today there would not be this and there would not be the shoe factory. Not only that. Stefano, Rino, my father would not have sold a single shoe without the money and the connections of the Solara family, who are also loan sharks. Is it clear what I’ve got myself into?”

  Clear, but I didn’t understand the point of those discussions.

  “It’s water under the bridge,” I said, and reminded her of the conclusions she had come to when she was engaged to Stefano. “What you’re talking about is what’s behind us, we are something else.”

  But although she had invented that theory, she did not seem convinced by it. She said to me, and I have a vivid memory of the phrase, which was in dialect:

  “I don’t like what I’ve done and what I’m doing.”

  I thought that she must be spending time with Pasquale, who had always had opinions like that. I thought that maybe their relationship had been strengthened by the fact that Pasquale was engaged to Ada, who worked in the old grocery, and was the brother of Carmen, who worked with her in the new one. I went home dissatisfied, struggling to hold off an old childhood feeling, from the period when I suffered because Lila and Carmela had become friends and tried to exclude me. I calmed myself down by studying until very late.

  One night as I was reading Il Mattino, my eyes heavy with sleep, a short, unsigned article jolted me awake like an electric charge. I couldn’t believe it—the article was about the shop in Piazza dei Martiri and it praised the panel that Lila and I had created.

  I read and reread it, I can still recall a few lines: “The young women who manage the friendly shop in Piazza dei Martiri did not want to reveal the name of the artist. A pity. Whoever invented that anomalous mixture of photography and color has an avant-garde imagination that, with sublime ingenuity but also with unusual energy, subdues the material to the urgent needs of an intimate, potent grief.” Otherwise, it had generous praise for the shoe store, “an important sign of the dynamism that, in recent years, has invested Neapolitan entrepreneurial endeavors.”

  I didn’t sleep a wink.

  After school I hurried to find Lila. The shop was empty, Carmen had gone home to her mother, Giuseppina, who wasn’t well, Lila was on the phone with a local supplier who had not delivered mozzarella or provolone or I don’t remember what. I heard her shout, curse, I was upset. I thought maybe the man at the other end was old, he would be insulted, he would send one of his sons to take revenge. I thought: Why does she always overdo it? When she got off the phone she gave a snort of contempt and turned to me to apologize: “If I don’t act like that, they won’t even listen to me.”

  I showed her the newspaper. She gave it a distracted glance, said, “I know about it.” She explained that it had been an initiative of Michele Solara’s, carried out as usual without consulting anyone. Look, she said, and went to the cash register, took out of the drawer a couple of creased clippings, handed them to me. Those, too, were about the shop in Piazza dei Martiri. One was a small article in Roma, whose author lavished praise on the Solaras, but made not the slightest mention of the panel. The other was an article spread over three columns, in Napoli Notte, and in it the shop sounded like a royal palace. The space was described in an extravagant Italian that praised the furnishings, the splendid illumination, the marvelous shoes, and, above all, “the kindness, the sweetness, and the grace of the two seductive Nereids, Miss Gigliola Spagnuolo and Miss Giuseppina Carracci, marvelous young women upon whom rests the fate of an enterprise that stands high among the flourishing commercial activities of our city.” You had to get to the end to find a mention of the panel, which was dismissed in a few lines. The author of the article called it “a crude mess, an out-of-tune note in a place of majestic refinement.”

  “Did you see the signature?” Lila asked, teasingly.

  The article in Roma was signed “d.s.” and the article in Napoli Notte bore the signature of Donato Sarratore, Nino’s father.

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “What should I say?”

  “Like father like son, you should say.”

  She laughed mirthlessly. She explained that, seeing the growing success of Cerullo shoes and the Solara shop, Michele had decided to publicize the business and had distributed a few gratuities here and there, thanks to which the city newspapers had promptly come out with admiring articles. Advertis­ing, in other words. Paid for. Pointless even to read. In those articles, she said, there was not a single true word.

  I was disappointed. I didn’t like the way she belittled the newspapers, which I was diligently trying to read, sacrificing sleep. And I didn’t like her emphasis on the relationship between Nino and the author of the two articles. What need was there to associate Nino with his father, a pompous fabricator of factitious phrases?

  30.

  Yet it was thanks to those phrases that in a short time the Solaras’ shop and Cerullo shoes became more successful. Gigliola and Pinuccia boasted a lot about how they had been quoted in the papers, but the success did not diminish their rivalry and each went on to give herself the credit for the shop’s fortunes, and began to consider the other an obstacle to further successes. On a single point they continued to agree: Lila’s panel was an abomination. They were rude to anyone who, in a refined little voice, stopped in just to have a look at it. And they framed the articles from Roma and Napoli Notte, but not the one from Il Mattino.

  Between Christmas and Easter, the Solaras and the Carraccis made a lot of money. Stefano, especially, drew a sigh of relief. The new grocery and the old one were prospering, the Cerullo shoe factory was working at full capacity. In addition, the shop in Piazza dei Martiri revealed what he had always known, and that is that the shoes Lila had designed years before sold well not only on the Rettifilo, Via Foria, and Corso Garibaldi but were coveted by the wealthy, those who casually reached for their wallets. An important market, therefore, which had to be consolidated and expanded.

  As proof of that success, in the spring some good imitations of Cerullo shoes began to appear in the shopwindows of the outlying neighborhoods. These shoes were essentially identical to Lila’s, but slightly modified by a fringe, a stud. Protests, threats immediately blocked their circulation: Michele Solara straightened things out. But he didn’t stop ther
e, he soon reached the conclusion that new models had to be designed. For that reason, one evening in the shop in Piazza dei Martiri, he summoned his brother Marcello, the Carraccis, Rino, and, naturally, Gigliola and Pinuccia. Surprisingly, Stefano showed up without Lila, he said that his wife was sorry, she was tired.

  Her absence did not please the Solara brothers. If Lila isn’t here, Michele said, making Gigliola nervous, what the fuck are we talking about. But Rino immediately interrupted. He asserted, lying, that he and his father had begun some time ago to think of new models and planned to introduce them at a trade show that was to be held in Arezzo in September. Michele didn’t believe him, and became still more irritable. He said that they had to come out with products that were really innovative and not with normal stuff. Finally he turned to Stefano:

  “Your wife is necessary, you’ve got to make her come.”

  Stefano answered with startling hostility: “My wife works hard all day in the grocery store and at night she has to stay home, she has to think of me.”

  “All right,” Michele said, with a grimace, spoiling for a moment his handsome boy’s face. “But see if she can think of us, too, a little.”

  The evening left everyone unhappy, but Pinuccia and Gigliola in particular. For different reasons, they found the importance that Michele gave Lila intolerable, and in the following days their disgruntlement became a dark mood that at the slightest opportunity gave rise to a quarrel.

  At that point—I think it was March—an accident happened; I don’t really know how. One afternoon, during one of their daily disagreements, Gigliola slapped Pinuccia. Pinuccia complained to Rino, who, believing at the time that he was riding the crest of a wave as high as a house, came to the shop with a proprietary air and told Gigliola off. Gigliola reacted aggressively and he went so far as to threaten to fire her.