The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  We were silent, the sea returned, the tremendous sky, I felt stunned. That impelled Sarratore again toward his coarse lyricism, he thought he had to lead me back to myself with tender words. But I managed to tolerate at most a couple of phrases. I got up abruptly, shook the sand out of my hair, off my whole body, straightened myself. When he ventured, “Where can we meet tomorrow?” I answered in Italian, in a calm voice, self-assured, that he was mistaken, he must never look for me again, not at Cetara or in the neighborhood. And when he smiled skeptically, I told him that what Antonio Cappuccio, Melina’s son, could do to him was nothing in comparison to what Michele Solara, a person I knew well, would do. I need only say a word and Solara would make things very hard for him. I told him that Michele was eager to bash his face in, because he had taken money to write about the shop on Piazza dei Martiri but hadn’t done his job well.

  All the way back I continued to threaten him, partly because he had returned to his sugary-sweet little phrases and I wanted him to understand clearly my feelings, partly because I was amazed at how the tonality of threat, which since I was a child I had used only in dialect, came easily to me also in the Italian language.

  72.

  I was afraid I would find the two women awake but they were both asleep. They weren’t so worried that they would lose sleep, they considered me sensible, they trusted me. I slept deeply.

  The next day I woke up cheerful and even when Nino, Lila, and what had happened at the Maronti came back to me, in fragments, I still felt good. I chatted a long time with Nella, had breakfast with the Sarratores, didn’t mind the falsely paternal kindness with which Donato treated me. Not for a moment did I think that sex with that rather conceited, vain, garrulous man had been a mistake. Yet to see him there at the table, to listen to him, and recognize that it was he who had deflowered me, disgusted me. I went to the beach with the whole family, I went swimming with the children, I left behind me a wake of fondness. I arrived punctually at Forio.

  I called Nino, he appeared immediately. I refused to go in, partly because we had to leave as soon as possible, partly because I did not want to preserve images of rooms that Nino and Lila had inhabited by themselves for almost two days. I waited, Lila didn’t come. Suddenly my anxiety returned, I imagined that Stefano had been able to leave in the morning, that he was disembarking several hours earlier than expected, and in fact was already on his way to the house. I called again, Nino returned, he indicated that I had to wait just another minute. They came down a quarter of an hour later, they embraced and kissed for a long time in the entrance. Lila ran toward me, but she stopped suddenly, as if she had forgotten something, and went back and kissed him again. I looked away uneasily and the idea that there was something wrong with me, that I lacked a true capacity for involvement, regained strength. Yet the two of them again seemed to me so handsome, perfect in every movement, that to cry, “Lina, hurry up,” was almost to disfigure a fantastical image. She seemed drawn away by a cruel force, her hand ran slowly from his shoulder, along the arm, to the fingers, as if in the movement of a dance. Finally she joined me.

  We hardly spoke during the ride in the mini cab.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “Fine.”

  I said nothing about myself, nor did she about herself. But the reasons for that reticence were very different. I had no intention of putting into words what had happened to me: it was a bare fact, it had to do with my body, its physiological reactivity. That for the first time a tiny part of another body had entered it seemed to me irrelevant: the nighttime mass of Sarratore communicated to me nothing except a sensation of alienness, and it was a relief that it had vanished like a storm that never arrives. It seemed to me clear, instead, that Lila was silent because she didn’t have words. I felt she was in a state without thoughts or images, as if in detaching herself from Nino she had forgotten in him everything of herself, even the capacity to say what had happened to her, what was happening. This difference between us made me sad. I tried to search in my experience on the beach for something equivalent to her sorrowful-happy disorientation. I also realized that at the Maronti, in Barano, I had left nothing, not even that new self that had been revealed. I had taken everything with me, and so I didn’t feel the urgency, which I read in Lila’s eyes, in her half-closed mouth, in her clenched fists, to go back, to be reunited with the person I had had to leave. And if on the surface my condition might seem more solid, more compact, here instead, beside Lila, I felt sodden, earth too soaked with water.

  73.

  Fortunately I didn’t read her notebooks until later. There were pages and pages about that day and night with Nino, and what those pages said was exactly what I hadn’t had and couldn’t say. Lila wrote not even a word about sexual pleasures, nothing that might be useful in comparing her experience with mine. She talked instead about love and she did so in a surprising way. She said that from the day of her marriage until those days on Ischia she had been, without realizing it, on the point of dying. She described minutely a sensation of imminent death: lack of energy, lethargy, a strong pressure in the middle of her head, as if between the brain and the skull there was an air bubble that was continually expanding, the impression that everything was moving in a hurry to leave, that the speed of every movement of persons and things was excessive and hit her, wounded her, caused her physical pain in her stomach and in her eyes. She said that all this was accompanied by a dulling of the senses, as if they had been wrapped in cotton wool, and her wounds came not from the real world but from a hollow space between her body and the mass of cotton wool in which she felt she was wrapped. She admitted on the other hand that imminent death seemed to her so assured that it took away her respect for everything, above all for herself, as if nothing counted anymore and everything deserved to be ruined. At times she was overwhelmed by a mania to express herself with no mediation: express herself for the last time, before becoming like Melina, before crossing the stradone just as a truck was coming, and be hit, dragged away. Nino had changed that state, he had snatched her away from death. And he had done it when he had asked her to dance, at Professor Galiani’s house, and she had refused, frightened by that offer of salvation. Then, on Ischia, day by day, he had assumed the power of the savior. He had restored to her the capacity to feel. He had above all brought back to life her sense of herself. Yes, brought to life. Lines and lines and lines had at their center the concept of resurrection: an ecstatic rising, the end of every bond and yet the inexpressible pleasure of a new bond, a revival that was also a revolt: he and she, she and he together learned life again, banished its poison, reinvented it as the pure joy of thinking and living.

  This, more or less. Her words were very beautiful, mine are only a summary. If she had confided it to me then, in the taxi, I would have suffered even more, because I would have recognized in her fulfillment the reverse of my emptiness. I would have understood that she had come to something that I thought I knew, that I had believed I felt for Nino, and that, instead, I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, except in a weak, muted form. I would have understood that she wasn’t playing a summer game for fun but that a violent feeling was growing inside her and would overwhelm her. Instead, as we were returning to Nunzia after our violations, I couldn’t get away from the usual confused sense of disparity, the impression—recurrent in our story—that I was losing something and she was gaining. So occasionally I felt the need to even the score, to tell her how I had lost my virginity between sea and sky, at night, on the beach at the Maronti. I couldn’t tell her the name of Nino’s father, I thought, I could invent a sailor, a smuggler of American cigarettes, and tell her what had happened to me, tell her how good it had been. But I realized that to tell her about me and my pleasure didn’t matter to me, I would tell my story only to induce her to tell hers and find out how much pleasure she had had with Nino and compare it with mine and feel—I hoped—in the lead. Luckily
I sensed that she would never do it and that I would only have stupidly exposed myself. I remained silent, as she did.

  74.

  Once we were home Lila found words again, along with an overexcited expansiveness. Nunzia welcomed us, greatly relieved by our return and yet hostile. She said she hadn’t closed an eye, she had heard inexplicable noises in the house, had been afraid of ghosts and murderers. Lila embraced her and Nunzia almost pushed her away.

  “Did you have fun?” she asked.

  “A lot of fun, I want to change everything.”

  “What do you want to change?”

  Lila laughed. “I’ll think about it and let you know.”

  “Let your husband know first of all,” Nunzia said, in an unexpectedly sharp tone.

  Her daughter looked at her in amazement, a pleased, and perhaps slightly moved, amazement, as if the suggestion seemed to her right and urgent.

  “Yes,” she said, and went to her room, then to the bathroom.

  She came out after a while and, still in her slip, motioned me to come to her room. I went reluctantly. She gazed at me with feverish eyes, she spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly: “I want to study what he studies.”

  “He’s at the university, the subjects are difficult.”

  “I want to read the same books as him, I want to understand the things he thinks, I want to learn not for the university but for him.”

  “Lila, don’t act crazy: we said that you would see him this time and that’s all. What’s wrong with you, calm down, Stefano is about to get here.”

  “Do you think, if I work hard, I can understand the things he understands?”

  I couldn’t take it anymore. What I already knew and what I nevertheless was hiding from myself became at that moment perfectly clear: she, too, now saw in Nino the only person able to save her. She had taken possession of my old feeling, had made it her own. And, knowing what she was like, I had no doubts: she would knock down every obstacle and continue to the end. I answered harshly.

  “No. It’s complicated stuff, you’re too behind in everything, you don’t read a newspaper, you don’t know who’s in the government, you don’t even know who runs Naples.”

  “And do you know those things?”

  “No.”

  “He thinks you know them, I told you, he thinks a lot of you.”

  I felt myself flushing, I muttered, “I’m trying to learn, and when I don’t know I pretend to know.”

  “Even pretending to know, one gradually learns. Can you help me?”

  “No, and no, Lila, it’s not something you should do. Leave him alone, because of you he’s already saying that he wants to stop going to the university.”

  “He’ll study, he was born for that. And yet there are a lot of things that even he doesn’t know. If I study the things he doesn’t know, I’ll tell him when he needs them and so I’ll be useful to him. I have to change, Lenù, immediately.”

  I burst out again: “You’re married, you have to get him out of your head, you’re not right for what he needs.”

  “Who is right?”

  I wanted to wound her, I said, “Nadia.”

  “He left her for me.”

  “So everything’s fine? I don’t want to listen to you anymore, you’re both out of your minds, do what you like.”

  I went to my room, consumed by unhappiness.

  75.

  Stefano arrived at the usual time. We all three greeted him with false cheerfulness, and he was polite but a little tense, as if behind his benign expression he had a worry. Since his vacation was to begin that day, I was surprised that he hadn’t brought any luggage. Lila didn’t seem to notice, but Nunzia did and asked him, “You look preoccupied, Ste’, is something worrying you? Is your mamma well? And Pinuccia? And how are things with the shoes? What do the Solaras say, are they pleased?” He said that everything was fine, and we had dinner, but the conversation was forced. First Lila made an effort to seem in a good mood, but when Stefano responded with mono­­syllables and no sign of affection she became annoyed and was silent. Only Nunzia and I tried every possible means to keep the silence from becoming permanent. When we got to the fruit Stefano, with a half smile, said to his wife:

  “You go swimming with Sarratore’s son?”

  My breath failed. Lila answered with irritation: “Sometimes. Why?”

  “How many times? One, two three, five, how many? Lenù, do you know?”

  “Once,” I said, “ he came by two or three days ago and we all went swimming together.”

  Stefano, still with the half smile on his face, turned to his wife.

  “And you and the son of Sarratore are so intimate that when you come out of the water you hold hands?”

  Lila stared straight into his face: “Who told you that?”

  “Ada.”

  “And who told Ada?”

  “Gigliola.”

  “And Gigliola?”

  “Gigliola saw you, bitch. She came here with Michele, they came to visit you. And it’s not true that you and that piece of shit went swimming with Lenuccia, you went by yourselves and you were holding hands.”

  Lila got up, she said calmly, “I’m going out, I’m going for a walk.”

  “You’re not going anywhere: sit down and answer.”

  Lila remained standing. She said suddenly, in Italian and with an expression that looked like weariness but which—I realized—was contempt: “How stupid I was to marry you, you’re worthless. You know that Michele Solara wants me in his shop, you know that for that reason Gigliola would kill me if she could, and what do you do, you believe her? I don’t want to listen to you anymore, you let yourself be manipulated like a puppet. Lenù, will you come with me?”

  She was about to move toward the door and I started to get up, but Stefano leaped up and grabbed her by the arm, said to her, “You’re not going anywhere. You will tell me if it’s true or not that you went swimming by yourself with the son of Sarratore, if it’s true or not that you go around holding hands.”

  Lila tried to free herself, but she couldn’t. She whispered, “Let go of my arm, you make me sick.”

  Nunzia at that point intervened. She reproached her daughter, said she could not allow herself to say that terrible thing to Stefano. But right afterward, with a surprising energy, she nearly shouted at her son-in-law to stop it, Lila had already answered, it was envy that made Gigliola say those things, the daughter of the pastry maker was treacherous, she was afraid of losing her place in Piazza dei Martiri, she wanted to get rid of Pinuccia, too, and be the sole mistress of the shop, she who knew nothing about shoes, who didn’t even know how to make pastries, while everything—everything, everything—was due to Lila, including the success of the new grocery store, and so her daughter didn’t deserve to be treated like that, no, she didn’t deserve it.

  She was truly enraged: her face was alight, wide-eyed, at a one point she seemed to be suffocating, as she added point to point without taking a breath. But Stefano didn’t listen to a word. His mother-in-law was still speaking when he yanked Lila toward the bedroom, yelling: “You will now answer me, immediately,” and when she insulted him grossly and grabbed the door of a cupboard to resist, he pulled her with such force that the door opened, the cupboard tottered dangerously, with a sound of plates and glasses rattling, and Lila almost flew through the kitchen and hit the wall of the hall that led to their room. A moment later her husband had grabbed her again and, holding her by the arm, but as if he were steadying a cup by the handle, pushed her into the bedroom and closed the door.