The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  99.

  Lila began to be obsessed with stimulating her son’s intelligence. She didn’t know what books to buy and asked Alfonso to find out from the booksellers. Alfonso brought her a couple of volumes and she dedicated herself to them. In her notebooks I found notes on how she was reading the difficult texts: she struggled to advance, page by page, but after a while she lost the thread, she thought of something else; yet she forced her eye to keep gliding along the lines, her fingers turned the pages automatically, and by the end she had the impression that, even though she hadn’t understood, the words had nevertheless entered her brain and inspired thoughts. Starting there, she reread the book and, reading, corrected her thoughts or amplified them, until the text was no longer useful, she looked for others.

  Her husband came home at night and found that she hadn’t cooked dinner, that she had the baby playing games she had invented herself. He got angry, but she, as had happened for a long time, didn’t react. It was as if she didn’t hear him, as if the house were inhabited only by her and her son, and when she got up and started cooking she did it not because Stefano was hungry but because she was.

  In those months their relationship, after a long period of mutual tolerance, began to deteriorate again. Stefano told her one night that he was tired of her, of the baby, of everything. Another time he said that he had married too young, without understanding what he was doing. But once she answered, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, either, I’ll take the baby and go,” and he, instead of telling her to get out, lost his temper, as he hadn’t for a long time, and hit her in front of the child, who stared at her from the blanket on the floor, dazed by the uproar. Her nose dripping blood and Stefano shouting insults at her, Lila turned to her son laughing, told him in Italian (she had been speaking to him only in Italian for a long time), “Papa’s playing, we’re having fun.”

  I don’t know why, but at a certain point she began to take care of Dino, her nephew. It’s possible that it began because she needed to compare Gennaro to another child. Or maybe not, maybe she felt a qualm that she was devoting all her attention only to her own son and it seemed right to take care of her nephew as well. Pinuccia, although she still considered Dino the living proof of the disaster that her life was, and was always yelling at him, and sometimes hit him (“Will you stop it, will you stop it? What do you want from me, you want to make me crazy?”), was resolutely opposed to having Lila take him to her house to play mysterious games with little Gennaro. She said to her angrily: “You take care of raising your son and I’ll take care of mine, and instead of wasting time take care of your husband, otherwise you’ll lose him.” But here Rino intervened.

  It was a terrible time for Lila’s brother. He fought constantly with his father, who wanted to close the shoe factory because he was sick of working only to enrich the Solaras and, not understanding that it was necessary to go on at all costs, regretted his old workshop. He fought constantly with Michele and Marcello, who treated him like a petulant boy and when the problem was money spoke directly to Stefano. And mainly he fought with Stefano, shouting and insulting, because his brother-in-law wouldn’t give him a cent and, according to him, was now negotiating secretly to deliver the whole shoe business into the hands of the Solaras. He fought with Pinuccia, who accused him of having led her to believe he was a big shot when really he was a puppet who could be manipulated by anyone, by his father, by Stefano, by Marcello and Michele. So, when he realized that Stefano was mad at Lila because she was being too much a mamma and not enough a wife, and that Pinuccia wouldn’t entrust the child to her sister-in-law for even an hour, he began, defiantly, to take the baby to his sister himself, and since there was less and less work at the shoe factory, he got in the habit of staying, sometimes for hours, in the apartment in the new neighborhood to see what Lila did with Gennaro and Dino. He was fascinated by her maternal patience, by the way the children played, by the way his son, who at home was always crying or sat listlessly in his playpen like a sad puppy, with Lila became eager, quick, seemed happy.

  “What do you do to them?” he asked admiringly.

  “I make them play.”

  “My son played before.”

  “Here he plays and learns.”

  “Why do you spend so much time on it?”

  “Because I read that everything we are is decided now, in the first years of life.”

  “And is mine doing well?”

  “You see him.”

  “Yes, I see, he’s better than yours.”

  “Mine is younger.”

  “Do you think Dino is intelligent?”

  “All children are, you just have to train them.”

  “Then train them, Lina, don’t get tired of it immediately the way you usually do. Make him very intelligent for me.”

  But one evening Stefano came home early and especially irritable. He found his brother-in-law sitting on the kitchen floor and, instead of confining himself to a harsh look because of the mess, his wife’s lack of interest, the attention given to the children instead of to him, said to Rino that this was his house, that he didn’t like seeing him around every day wasting time, that the shoe factory was failing precisely because he was so idle, that the Cerullos were unreliable—in other words, Get out immediately or I’ll kick your ass.

  There was a commotion. Lila cried that he mustn’t speak like that to her brother, Rino threw in his brother-in-law’s face everything that until that moment he had only hinted at or had prudently kept to himself. Gross insults flew. The two children, abandoned in the confusion, began grabbing each other’s toys, crying, especially the smaller one, who was overpowered by the bigger one. Rino shouted at Stefano, his neck swollen, his veins like electric cables, that it was easy to be the boss with the goods that Don Achille had stolen from half the neighborhood, and added, “You’re nothing, you’re just a piece of shit, your father at least knew how to commit a crime, you don’t even know that.”

  It was a terrible moment, which Lila watched in terror. Stefano seized Rino by the hips with both hands, like a ballet dancer with his partner, and although they were of the same height, the same build, although Rino struggled and yelled and spit, Stefano picked him up with a prodigious force and hurled him against a wall. Right afterward he took him by the arm and dragged him across the floor to the door, opened it, pulled him to his feet and threw him down the stairs, even though Rino tried to resist, even though Lila had roused herself and was clinging to Stefano, begging him to calm down.

  100.

  A complicated period began. Rino stopped going to his sister’s house, but Lila didn’t want to give up keeping Rinuccio and Dino together, so she got in the habit of going to her brother’s house, but in secret from Stefano. Pinuccia endured it, sullenly, and at first Lila tried to explain to her what she was doing: exercises in reactivity, games of skill, she went so far as to confide in her that she would have liked to involve all the neighborhood children. But Pinuccia said simply, “You’re a lunatic and I don’t give a damn what nonsense you get up to. You want to take the child? You want to kill him, you want to eat him like the witches? Go ahead, I don’t want him and I never did, your brother has been the ruin of my life and you are the ruin of my brother’s life.” Then she cried, “That poor devil is perfectly right to cheat on you.”

  Lila didn’t react.

  She didn’t ask what that remark meant, in fact she made a careless gesture, one of those gestures that you make to brush away a fly. She took Rinuccio and, although she was sorry to be deprived of her nephew, she did not return.

  But in the solitude of her apartment she discovered that she was afraid. She absolutely didn’t care if Stefano was paying some whore, in fact she was glad—she didn’t have to submit at night when he approached her. But after that remark of Pinuccia’s she began to worry about the baby: if her husband had taken another woman, if he wanted her every day and every hour, he migh
t go mad, he might throw her out. Until that moment the possibility of a definitive break in her marriage had seemed to her a liberation; now instead she was afraid of losing the house, the money, the time, everything that allowed her to bring up the child in the best way.

  She hardly slept. Maybe Stefano’s rages were not only the sign of a constitutional lack of equilibrium, the bad blood that blew the lid off good-natured habits: maybe he really was in love with someone else, as had happened to her with Nino, and he couldn’t stand to stay in the cage of marriage, of paternity, even of groceries and other dealings. She felt she had to make up her mind to confront the situation, if only to control it, and yet she delayed, she gave it up, she counted on the fact that Stefano enjoyed his lover and left her in peace. Ultimately, she thought, I just have to hold out for a couple of years, long enough for the child to grow up and be educated.

  She organized her day so that he would always find the house in order, dinner ready, the table set. But, after the scene with Rino, he did not return to his former mildness, he was always disgruntled, always preoccupied.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Money.”

  “Money and that’s all?”

  Stefano got angry: “What does and that’s all mean?”

  For him there was no other problem, in life, but money. After dinner he did the accounts and cursed the whole time: the new grocery wasn’t taking in cash as it used to; the Solaras, especially Michele, were acting as if the shoe business were all theirs and the profits weren’t to be shared anymore; without saying anything to him, Rino, and Fernando, they were having the old Cerullo models made by cheap shoemakers on the outskirts, and meanwhile they were having new Solara styles designed by artisans who in fact were simply making tiny variations in Lila’s; in this way the small enterprise of his father-in-law and brother-in-law really was being ruined, dragging him down with it, the one who had invested in it.

  “Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “So try not to be a pain in the ass.”

  But Lila wasn’t convinced. She had the impression that her husband was deliberately amplifying problems that were real but old, in order to hide from her the true, new reasons for his outbursts and his increasingly explicit hostility toward her. He blamed her for all sorts of things, and especially for having complicated his relations with the Solaras. Once he yelled at her, “What did you do to that bastard Michele, I’d like to know?”

  And she answered, “Nothing.”

  And he: “It can’t be, in every discussion he brings you up but he screws me: try to talk to him and find out what he wants, otherwise I ought to smash your faces, both of you.”

  And Lila, impulsively: “If he wants to fuck me what should I do, let him fuck me?”

  A moment later she was sorry she had said that—sometimes contempt prevailed over prudence—but now she had done it and Stefano hit her. The slap counted little, it wasn’t even with his hand open, as usual, he hit her with the tips of his fingers. Rather, what he said right afterward, disgusted, carried more weight:

  “You read, you study, but you’re vulgar: I can’t bear people like you, you make me sick.”

  From then on he came home later and later. On Sunday, instead of sleeping until midday as usual, he went out early and disappeared for the whole day. At the least hint from her of concrete family problems, he got angry. For example, on the first hot days she was preoccupied about a vacation at the beach for Rinuccio, and she asked her husband how they should organize it. He answered: “You take the bus and go to Torregaveta.”

  She ventured: “Isn’t it better to rent a house?”

  He: “Why, so you can be a whore from morning to night?”

  He left, and didn’t return that night.

  Everything became clear soon afterward. Lila went to the city with the child, she was looking for a book that she had found quoted in another book, but she couldn’t find it. After much searching she went on to Piazza dei Martiri, to ask Alfonso, who was still happily managing the shop, if he could find it. She ran into a handsome young man, very well dressed, one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, his name was Fabrizio. He wasn’t a customer, he was a friend of Alfonso’s. Lila stayed to talk to him, she discovered that he knew a lot. They discussed literature, the history of Naples, how to teach children, something about which Fabrizio, who worked at the university, was very knowledgeable. Alfonso listened in silence the whole time and when Rinuccio began to whine he calmed him. Then some customers arrived, Alfonso went to take care of them. Lila talked to Fabrizio a little more; it was a long time since she had felt the pleasure of a conversation that excited her. When the young man had to leave, he kissed her with childish enthusiasm, then did the same with Alfonso, two big smacking kisses. He called to her from the doorway: “It was lovely talking to you.”

  “For me, too.”

  Lila was sad. While Alfonso continued to wait on customers, she remembered the people she had met in that place, and Nino, the lowered shutter, the shadowy light, the pleasant conversations, the way he arrived secretly, exactly at one, and disappeared at four, after they made love. It seemed to her an imaginary time, a bizarre fantasy, and she looked around uneasily. She didn’t feel nostalgia for it, she didn’t feel nostalgia for Nino. She felt only that time had passed, that what had been important was important no longer, that the tangle in her head endured and wouldn’t come untangled. She took the child and was about to leave when Michele Solara came in.

  He greeted her enthusiastically, he played with Gennaro, he said that the baby was just like her. He invited her to a bar, bought her a coffee, decided to take her home in his car. Once they were in the car he said to her, “Leave your husband, right away, today. I’ll take you and your son. I’ve bought a house on the Vomero, in Piazza degli Artisti. If you want I’ll drive you there now, I’ll show it to you, I took it with you in mind. There you can do what you like: read, write, invent things, sleep, laugh, talk, and be with Rinuccio. I’m interested only in being able to look at you and listen to you.”

  For the first time in his life Michele expressed himself without his teasing tone of voice. As he drove and talked he glanced at her obliquely, slightly anxious, to see her reactions. Lila stared at the street in front of her the whole way, trying, meanwhile, to take the pacifier out of Gennaro’s mouth, she thought he used it too much. But the child pushed her hand away energetically. When Michele stopped—she didn’t interrupt him—she asked:

  “Are you finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Gigliola?”

  “What does Gigliola have to do with it? You say yes or no, and then we’ll see.”

  “No, Michè, the answer is no. I didn’t want your brother and I don’t want you, either. First, because I don’t like either of you; and second because you think you can do anything and take anything without regard.”

  Michele didn’t react right away, he muttered something about the pacifier, like: Give it to him, don’t let him cry. Then he said, threateningly, “Think hard about it, Lina. Tomorrow you may be sorry and you’ll come begging to me.”

  “I rule it out.”

  “Yes? Then listen to me.”

  He revealed to her what everyone knew (“Even your mother, your father, and that shit your brother, but they tell you nothing in order to keep the peace”): Stefano had taken Ada as a lover, and not recently. The thing had begun before the vacation on Ischia. “When you were on vacation,” he said, “she went to your house every night.” With Lila’s return the two had stopped for a while. But they hadn’t been able to resist: they had started again, had left each other again, had gone back together when Lila disappeared from the neighborhood. Recently Stefano had rented an apartment on the Rettifilo, they saw each other there.

  “Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so?”

 
So what. Lila was disturbed not so much by the fact that her husband had a lover and that the lover was Ada but by the absurdity of every word and gesture of his when he came to get her on Ischia. The shouts, the blows, the departure returned to her mind.

  She said to Michele: “You make me sick, you, Stefano, all of you.”

  101.

  Lila suddenly felt that she was in the right and this calmed her. That evening she put Gennaro to bed and waited for Stefano to come home. He returned a little after midnight, and found her sitting at the kitchen table. Lila looked up from the book she was reading, said she knew about Ada, she knew how long it had been going on, and that it didn’t matter to her at all. “What you have done to me I did to you,” she said clearly, smiling, and repeated to him—how many times had she said it in the past, two, three?—that Gennaro wasn’t his son. She concluded that he could do what he liked, sleep where and with whom he wanted. “The essential thing,” she cried suddenly, “is that you don’t touch me again.”

  I don’t know what she had in mind, maybe she just wanted to get things out in the open. Or maybe she was prepared for anything and everything. She expected that he would confess, that then he would beat her, chase her out of the house, make her, his wife, be a servant to his lover. She was prepared for every possible aggression and the arrogance of a man who feels that he is the master and has money to buy whatever he wants. Instead, getting to words that would clarify and sanction the failure of their marriage was impossible. Stefano denied it. He said, menacing, but calm, that Ada was merely the clerk in his grocery, that whatever gossip circulated about them had no basis. Then he got mad and told her that if she said that ugly thing about his son again, as God was his witness he would kill her: Gennaro was the image of him, identical, and everyone confirmed it, to keep provoking him on this point was useless. Finally—and this was the most surprising thing—he declared to her, as he had done at other times in the past, without varying the formulas, his love. He said that he would love her forever, because she was his wife, because they had been married before the priest and nothing could separate them. When he came over to kiss her and she pushed him away, he grabbed her, lifted her up, carried her to the bedroom, where the baby’s cradle was, tore off everything she had on and entered her forcibly, while she begged him in a low voice, repressing sobs: “Rinuccio will wake up, see us, hear us, please let’s go in there.”