The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  She said that their meetings there in the shop, amid all the anxieties, had ended the moment she had the urine analysis and discovered the pregnancy. Now she and Nino needed their own house, their own life. She wanted to share with him friendships, books, lectures, movies, theater, music. “I can’t bear living apart anymore,” she said. She had hidden some money and was negotiating for a small apartment in Campi Flegrei, twenty thousand lire a month. They would hide there, waiting for the baby to be born.

  How? Without a job? With Nino who had to study? I couldn’t control myself, I said:

  “What need is there to leave Stefano? You’re good at telling lies, you’ve told him so many, you can perfectly well continue.”

  She looked at me with narrow eyes. She had clearly perceived the sarcasm, the bitterness, even the contempt that those words contained behind the appearance of friendly advice. She also noticed that Nino had abruptly raised his head, that his mouth was half open as if he wanted to say something, but he contained himself in order to avoid an argument. She replied, “Lying was useful in order not to be killed. But now I would prefer to be killed rather than continue like this.”

  When I said goodbye, wishing them well, I hoped for my sake that I wouldn’t see them again.

  83.

  The years at the Normale were important, but not for the story of our friendship. I arrived at the university very timid and awkward. I immediately realized I spoke a bookish Italian that at times was almost absurd, especially when, right in the middle of a much too carefully composed sentence, I needed a word and transformed a dialect word into Italian to fill the gap: I began to struggle to correct myself. I knew almost nothing about etiquette, I spoke in a loud voice, I chewed noisily; I became aware of other people’s embarrassment and tried to restrain myself. In my anxiety to appear friendly I interrupted conversations, gave opinions on things that had nothing to do with me, assumed manners that were too familiar: so I endeavored to be polite but distant. Once a girl from Rome, answering a question of mine I don’t remember what about, parodied my inflections and everyone laughed. I felt wounded, but I laughed, too, and gaily emphasized the dialectal accent as if I were the one making fun of myself.

  In the first weeks I fought the desire to go home by burrowing inside my usual meek diffidence. But from within that I began to distinguish myself and gradually became liked. Students male and female, janitors, professors liked me, and though it might have appeared effortless, in fact I worked hard. I learned to subdue my voice and gestures. I assimilated rules of behavior, written and unwritten. I kept my Neapolitan accent as much under control as possible. I managed to demonstrate that I was smart and deserving of respect by never appearing arrogant, by being ironic about my ignorance, by pretending to be surprised at my good results. Above all I avoided making enemies. When one of the girls appeared hostile, I would focus my attention on her, I was friendly yet restrained, obliging but tactful, and my attitude didn’t change even when she softened and was the one who sought me out. I did the same with the professors. Naturally with them I behaved more circumspectly, but my goal was the same: to be appreciated, to gain approval and affection. I approached the most aloof, the most severe, with serene smiles and an air of devotion.

  I took the exams as scheduled, studying with my usual fierce self-discipline. I was terrified by the idea of failing, of losing what immediately seemed to me, in spite of the difficulties, paradise on earth: a space of my own, a bed of my own, a desk, a chair, books and more books, a city a world away from the neighborhood and Naples, around me only people who studied and who tended to discuss what they studied. I applied myself with such diligence that no professor ever gave me less than an A, and within a year I became one of the most promising students, whose polite greetings could be met with kindness.

  There were only two difficult moments, both in the first few months. The girl from Rome who had made fun of my accent assailed me one morning, yelling at me in front of other girls that money had disappeared from her purse, and I must give it back immediately or she would report me to the dean. I realized that I couldn’t respond with an accommodating smile. I slapped her violently and heaped insults on her in dialect. They were all frightened. I was classified as a person who always made the best of things, and my reaction disoriented them. The girl from Rome was speechless, she stopped up her nose, which was bleeding, a friend took her to the bathroom. A few hours later they both came to see me and the one who had accused me of being a thief apologized—she had found her money. I hugged her, said that her apologies seemed genuine, and I really thought so. The way I had grown up, I would never have apologized, even if I had made a mistake.

  The other serious difficulty had to do with the opening party, which was to be held before Christmas vacation. It was a sort of dance for the first-year students that everyone essentially had to attend. The girls talked about nothing else: the boys, who lived in Piazza dei Cavalieri, would come, it was a great moment of intimacy between the university’s male and female divisions. I had nothing to wear. It was cold that autumn; it snowed a lot, and the snow enchanted me. But then I discovered how troublesome the ice in the streets could be, hands that, without gloves, turned numb, feet with chilblains. My wardrobe consisted of two winter dresses made by my mother a couple of years earlier, a worn coat inherited from an aunt, a big blue scarf that I had made myself, a single pair of shoes, with a half heel, that had been resoled many times. I had enough problems with my clothes, I didn’t know how to deal with that party. Ask my classmates? Most of them were having dresses made just for the occasion, and it was likely that they had something among their everyday clothes that would have been fine for me. But after my experience with Lila I couldn’t bear the idea of trying on someone else’s clothes and discovering that they didn’t fit. Pretend to be sick? I was tempted by that solution but it depressed me: to be healthy, and desperate to be a Natasha at the ball with Prince Andrei or Kuryagin, and instead to be sitting alone, staring at the ceiling, while listening to the echo of the music, the sound of voices, the laughter. In the end I made a choice that was probably humiliating but that I was sure I wouldn’t regret: I washed my hair, put it up, put on some lipstick, and wore one of my two dresses, the one whose only merit was that it was dark blue.

  I went to the party, and at first I felt uncomfortable. But my outfit had the advantage of not arousing envy; rather, it produced a sense of guilt that encouraged camaraderie. In fact many sympathetic girls kept me company and the boys often asked me to dance. I forgot how I was dressed and even the state of my shoes. Besides, that night I met Franco Mari, a rather ugly but very amusing boy with a quick intelligence, insolent and profligate. He was a year older than me, and from a wealthy family in Reggio Emilia, a militant Communist but critical of the Party’s social-democratic leanings. I happily spent a lot of my little free time with him. He gave me everything: clothes, shoes, a new coat, glasses that didn’t obscure my eyes and my whole face, books about politics, because that was the subject dearest to him. I learned from him terrible things about Stalinism and he urged me to read Trotsky; as a result I developed an anti-Stalinist sensibility and the conviction that in the U.S.S.R. there was neither socialism nor even Communism: the revolution had been truncated and needed to be started up again.

  He took me on my first trip abroad. We went to Paris, to a conference of young Communists from all over Europe. I hardly saw Paris: we spent all our time in smoky places. I was left with an impression of streets much more colorful than those of Naples and Pisa, irritation at the sound of the police sirens, and amazement at the widespread presence of blacks on the streets and in the meeting rooms; Franco gave a long speech, in French, that was much applauded. When I told Pasquale about my political experience, he wouldn’t believe that I—really, you, he said—had done a thing like that. Then he was silent, embarrassed, when I showed off my reading, declaring that I was now a Trotskyite.

  From Franco I also got
many habits that were later reinforced by the instructions and conversations of some of the professors: to use the word “study” even if I was reading a book of science fiction; to compile very detailed note cards on every text I studied; to get excited whenever I came upon passages in which the effects of social inequality were well described. He was very attached to what he called my reeducation and I willingly let myself be reeducated. But to my great regret I couldn’t fall in love. I loved him, I loved his restless body, but I never felt that he was indispensable. The little that I felt was gone in a short time, when he lost his place at the Normale: he failed an exam and had to leave. For several months we wrote to each other. He tried to reenter the Normale; he said that he was doing it only to be near me. I encouraged him to take the exam, he failed. We wrote occasionally, and then for a long time I had no news of him.

  84.

  This is more or less what happened to me between the end of 1963 and the end of 1965. How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done.

  It’s more complicated to recount what happened to her in those years. The belt slows down, accelerates, swerves abruptly, goes off the tracks. The suitcases fall off, fly open, their contents scatter here and there. Her things end up among mine: to accommodate them, I am compelled to return to the narrative concerning me (and that had come to me unobstructed), and expand phrases that now sound too concise. For example, if Lila had gone to the Normale in my place would she ever have decided simply to make the best of things? And the time I slapped the girl from Rome, how much did her behavior influence me? How did she manage—even at a distance—to sweep away my artificial meekness, how much of the requisite determination did she give me, how much did she dictate even the insults? And the audacity, when, amid a thousand doubts and fears, I brought Franco to my room—where did that come from if not from her example? And the sense of unhappiness, when I realized that I didn’t love him, when I observed the coldness of my feelings, what was its origin if not, by comparison, the capacity to love that she had demonstrated and was demonstrating?

  Yes, it’s Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less. Not to mention what she never said but let me guess, what I didn’t know and read later in her notebooks. Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.

  I have to admit, for example, that everything about Lila’s sufferings escaped me. Because she had taken Nino, because with her secret arts she had become pregnant by him and not by Stefano, because for love she was on the point of carrying out an act inconceivable in the environment we had grown up in—abandoning her husband, throwing away the comfort so recently acquired, running the risk of being murdered along with her lover and the child she carried in her womb—I considered her happy, with that tempestuous happiness of novels, films, and comic strips, the only kind that at that time truly interested me, that is to say not conjugal happiness but the happiness of passion, a furious confusion of evil and good that had befallen her and not me.

  I was mistaken. Now I return to the moment when Stefano took us away from Ischia, and I know for certain that the moment the boat pulled out from the shore and Lila realized that she would no longer find Nino waiting for her on the beach in the morning, would no longer debate, talk, whisper with him, that they would no longer swim together, no longer kiss and caress and love each other, she was violently scarred by suffering. Within a few days the entire life of Signora Carracci—balances and imbalances, strategies, battles, wars and alliances, troubles with suppliers and customers, the art of cheating on the weight, the devotion to piling up money in the drawer of the cash register—dematerialized, lost truth. Only Nino was concrete and true, and she who wanted him, who desired him day and night, who clung to her husband in the darkness of the bedroom to forget the other even for a few moments. A terrible fraction of time. It was in those very moments that she felt most strongly the need to have him, and so clearly, with such a precision of detail, that she pushed Stefano away like a stranger and took refuge in a corner of the bed, weeping and shouting insults, or she ran to the bathroom and locked herself in.

  85.

  At first she thought of sneaking out at night and returning to Forio, but she realized that her husband would find her right away. Then she thought of asking Alfonso if Marisa knew when her brother would return from Ischia, but she was afraid that her brother-in-law would tell Stefano she had asked that question and she let it go. She found in the telephone book the number of the Sarratore house and she telephoned. Donato answered. She said she was a friend of Nino, he cut her off in an angry tone, hung up. Out of desperation she returned to the idea of taking the boat, and had nearly made up her mind, when, one afternoon in early September, Nino appeared in the doorway of the crowded grocery, unshaved and totally drunk.

  Lila restrained Carmen, who had jumped up to chase out the disorderly youth, in her eyes a crazy stranger. “I’ll take care of it,” she said, and dragged him away. Precise gestures, cold voice, the certainty that Carmen Peluso hadn’t recognized the son of Sarratore, now very different from the child who had gone to elementary school with them.

  She acted fast. She appeared normal, like a woman who knows how to solve every problem. In truth, she no longer knew where she was. The shelves stacked with goods had faded, the street had lost every definition, the pale façades of the new apartment buildings had dissolved; but most of all she didn’t feel the risk she was running. Nino Nino Nino: she felt only joy and desire. He was before her again, finally, and his every feature loudly proclaimed that he had suffered and was suffering, had looked for her and wanted her, so much that he tried to grab her, kiss her on the street.

  She took him to her house, it seemed to her the safest place. Passersby? She saw none. Neighbors? She saw none. They began to make love as soon as she closed the door of the apartment behind her. She felt no scruple. She felt only the need to grab Nino, immediately, hold him, keep him. That need didn’t diminish even when they calmed down. The neighborhood, the neighbors, the grocery, the streets, the sounds of the trains, Stefano, Carmen waiting, perhaps anxious, slowly returned, but only as objects to be arranged hastily, so that they would not get in the way, but with enough care so that, piled up haphazardly, they would not suddenly fall.

  Nino reproached her for having left without warning him, he held her tight, he still wanted her. He demanded that they go away immediately, together, but then he didn’t know where. She answered yes yes yes, and shared his madness in everything, although, unlike him, she felt the time, the real seconds and minutes that, slipping by, magnified the danger of being surprised. So, lying with him on the floor, she looked at the lamp hanging from the ceiling just above them, like a threat, and if before she had been preoccupied only with having Nino right away, no matter what might come crashing down, now she thought about how to keep him close to her without the lamp detaching itself from the ceiling, without the floor cleaving in two, with him forever on one side, her on the other.

  “Go.”

  “No.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Please, I’m begging you, go.”

  She convinced him. She waited for Carmen to say something, for the neighbors to gossip maliciously, for Stefano to return from the other grocery and beat her. It didn’
t happen, and she was relieved. She increased Carmen’s pay, she became affectionate toward her husband, she invented excuses that allowed her to meet Nino secretly.

  86.

  At first the larger problem was not the possibility of gossip that would ruin everything but him, the beloved. Nothing mattered to him except to clutch her, kiss her, bite her, penetrate her. It seemed that he wanted, that he needed, to live his whole life with his mouth on her mouth, inside her body. And he couldn’t tolerate the separations, he was frightened by them, he feared that she would vanish again. So he stupefied himself with alcohol, he didn’t study, he smoked constantly. It was as if for him there was nothing in the world but the two of them, and if he resorted to words he did it only to cry to her his jealousy, to tell her obsessively how intolerable he found it that she continued to live with her husband.

  “I’ve left everything,” he murmured wearily, “and you don’t want to leave anything.”

  “What are you thinking of doing?” she then asked him.

  Nino was silent, disoriented by the question, or he became enraged, as if the situation offended him. He said desperately, “You don’t want me anymore.”

  But Lila wanted him, wanted him again and again, but she also wanted something else, and right away. She wanted him to return to studying, she wanted him to continue to stimulate her mind the way he had on Ischia. The phenomenal child of elementary school, the girl who had charmed Maestra Oliviero, who had written The Blue Fairy, had reappeared and was stirring with new energy. Nino had found her under the pile of dirt where she had ended up and pulled her out. That girl was now urging him to be once more the studious youth he had been and allow her to develop the power to sweep away Signora Carracci. Which she gradually did.