The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  54.

  I began to pay attention to the “For rent” signs fixed to the building entrances, indicating apartments available. Meanwhile, an invitation to the wedding of Gigliola Spagnuolo and Michele Solara arrived, not for my family but for me. And a few hours later, by hand, came another invitation: Marisa Sarratore and Alfonso Carracci were getting married, and both the Solara family and the Carracci family addressed me with deference: egregia dottoressa Elena Greco. Almost immediately, I considered the two wedding invitations an opportunity to find out if it was a good idea to encourage Lila’s return to the neighborhood. I planned to go and see Michele, Alfonso, Gigliola, and Marisa, apparently to offer congratulations and to explain that I would not be in Naples when the weddings took place but in fact to discover if the Solaras and the Carraccis still wanted to torture Lila. It seemed to me that Alfonso was the only person capable of telling me in a dispassionate way how resentful Stefano still was. And with Michele, even though I hated him—perhaps above all because I hated him—I thought I could speak with composure about Lila’s health problems, letting him know that, even though he thought he was a big shot and teased me as if I were still a little girl, I now had sufficient power to complicate his life, and his affairs, if he continued to persecute my friend. I put both cards in my purse, I didn’t want my mother to see them and be offended at the respect shown to me and not to my father and her. I set aside a day to devote to these visits.

  The weather wasn’t promising, so I carried an umbrella, but I was in a good mood, I wanted to walk, reflect, give a sort of farewell to the neighborhood and the city. Out of the habit of a diligent student, I started with the more difficult meeting, the one with Solara. I went to the bar, but neither he nor Gigliola nor even Marcello was there; someone said that they might be at the new place on the stradone. I stopped in and looked around with the attitude of someone with nothing better to do. Any memory of Don Carlo’s shop had been utterly erased—the dark, deep cave where as a child I had gone to buy liquid soap and other household things. From the windows of the building’s third floor an enormous vertical sign hung down over the wide entrance: Everything for Everyone. The store was brightly lit, even though it was day, and offered merchandise of every type, the triumph of abundance. I saw Lila’s brother, Rino, who had grown very fat. He treated me coldly, saying that he was the boss there, he didn’t know anything about the Solaras. If you’re looking for Michele, go to his house, he said bitterly, and turned his back as if he had something urgent to do.

  I started walking again, and reached the new neighborhood, where I knew that the entire Solara family had, years earlier, bought an enormous apartment. The mother, Manuela, the loan shark, opened the door; I hadn’t seen her since the time of Lila’s wedding. I felt that she had been observing me through the spyhole. She looked for a long time, then she drew back the bolt and appeared in the frame of the door, her figure partly contained by the darkness of the apartment, partly eroded by the light coming from the large window on the stairs. She was as if dried up. The skin was stretched over her large bones, one of her pupils was very bright and the other as if dead. In her ears, around her neck, against the dark dress that hung loosely, gold sparkled, as if she were getting ready for a party. She treated me politely, inviting me to come in, have coffee. Michele wasn’t there, did I know that he had another house, on Posillipo, where he was to go and live after his marriage. He was furnishing it with Gigliola.

  “They’re going to leave the neighborhood?” I asked.

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “For Posillipo?”

  “Six rooms, Lenù, three facing the sea. I would have preferred the Vomero, but Michele does as he likes. Anyway, there’s a breeze, in the morning, and a light that you can’t imagine.”

  I was surprised. I would never have believed that the Solaras would move away from the area of their trafficking, from the den where they hid their booty. But here was Michele, the shrewdest, the greediest of the family, going to live somewhere else, up, on the Posillipo, facing the sea and Vesuvio. The brothers’ craving for greatness really had increased, the lawyer was right. But at the moment the fact cheered me, I was glad that Michele was leaving the neighborhood. I found that this favored Lila’s possible return.

  55.

  I asked Signora Manuela for the address, said goodbye, and crossed the city, first by subway to Mergellina, then on foot, and by bus up Posillipo. I was curious. I now felt that I belonged to a legitimate power, universally admired, haloed by a high level of culture, and I wanted to see what garish guise was being given to the power I had had before my eyes since childhood—the vulgar pleasure of bullying, the unpunished practice of crime, the smiling tricks of obedience to the law, the display of profligacy—as embodied by the Solara brothers. But Michele escaped me again. On the top floor of a recent structure I found only Gigliola, who greeted me with obvious amazement and an equally obvious bitterness. I realized that as long as I had used her mother’s telephone at all hours I had been cordial, but ever since I’d had the phone installed at home the entire Spagnuolo family had gone out of my life, and I’d scarcely noticed. And now without warning, at noon, on a dark day that threatened rain, I showed up here, in Posillipo, bursting into the house of a bride where everything was still topsy-turvy? I was ashamed, and greeted her with artificial warmth so that she would forgive me. For a while Gigliola remained sullen, and perhaps also alarmed, then her need to boast prevailed. She wanted me to envy her, she wanted to feel in a tangible way that I considered her the most fortunate of us all. And so, observing my reactions, enjoying my enthusiasm, she showed me the rooms, one by one, the expensive furniture, the gaudy lamps, two big bathrooms, the huge hot-water heater, the refrigerator, the washing machine, three telephones, unfortunately not yet hooked up, the I don’t know how many-inch television, and finally the terrace, which wasn’t a terrace but a hanging garden filled with flowers, whose multicolored variety the ugly day kept me from appreciating.

  “Look, have you ever seen the sea like that? And Naples? And Vesuvius? And the sky? In the neighborhood was there ever all that sky?”

  Never. The sea was of lead and the gulf clasped it like the rim of a crucible. A dense churning mass of black clouds was rolling toward us. But in the distance, between sea and clouds, there was a long gash that collided with the violet shadow of Vesuvius, a wound from which a dazzling whiteness dripped. We stood looking at it for a long time, our clothes pasted to us by the wind. I was as if hypnotized by the beauty of Naples; not even from the terrace of the Galianis, years before, had I seen it like this. The defacement of the city provided high-cost observatories of concrete from which to view an extraordinary landscape; Michele had acquired a memorable one.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “Marvelous.”

  “There’s no comparison with Lina’s house in the neighborhood, is there?”

  “No, no comparison.”

  “I said Lina, but now Ada’s there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Here it’s much more upper-class.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you made a face.”

  “No, I’m happy for you.”

  “To each his own. You’re educated, you write books, and I have this.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not sure.”

  “I’m very sure.”

  “If you look at the nameplates in this building, you’ll see, only professionals, lawyers, big professors. The view and the luxuries are expensive. If you and your husband save, in my opinion you could buy a house like this.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He doesn’t want to come and live in Naples?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You never know. You’re lucky: I’ve heard Pietro’s voice on the telephone quite a few times, and I saw him from the window—it’s obvious that he’s a clever man. He’s not like Miche
le, he’ll do what you want.”

  At that point she dragged me inside, she wanted us to eat something. She unwrapped prosciutto and provolone, she cut slices of bread. It’s still camping, she apologized, but sometime when you’re in Naples with your husband come and see me, I’ll show you how I’ve arranged everything. Her eyes were big and shining, she was excited by the effort of leaving no doubts about her prosperity. But that improbable future—Pietro and I coming to Naples and visiting her and Michele—must have appeared perilous. For a moment she was distracted, she had bad thoughts, and when she resumed her boasting she had lost faith in what she was saying, she began to change. I’ve been lucky, too, she repeated, yet she spoke without satisfaction—rather, with a kind of sarcasm addressed to herself. Carmen, she enumerated, ended up with the gas pump attendant on the stradone, Pinuccia is poisoned by that idiot Rino, Ada is Stefano’s whore. Instead, I have Michele, lucky me, who is handsome, intelligent, bosses everybody, is finally making up his mind to marry me and you see where he’s put me, you don’t know what a celebration he’s prepared—not even the Shah of Persia when he married Soraya had a wedding like ours. Yes, lucky I grabbed him as a child, I was the sly one. And she went on, but taking a self-mocking turn. She wove the praises of her own cleverness, slipping slowly from the luxuries that she had acquired by winning Solara to the solitude of her duties as a bride. Michele, she said, is never here, it’s as if I were getting married by myself. And she suddenly asked me, as if she really wanted an opinion: Do you think I exist? Look at me, in your view do I exist? She hit her full breasts with her open hand, but she did it as if to demonstrate physically that the hand went right through her, that her body, because of Michele, wasn’t there. He had taken everything of her, immediately, when she was almost a child. He had consumed her, crumpled her, and now that she was twenty-five he was used to her, he didn’t even look at her anymore. He fucks here and there as he likes. The revulsion I feel, when someone asks how many children do you want and he brags, he says: Ask Gigliola, I already have children, I don’t even know how many. Does your husband say such things? Does your husband say: With Lenuccia I want three, with the others I don’t know? In front of everyone he treats me like a rag for wiping the floor. And I know why. He’s never loved me. He’s marrying me to have a faithful servant, that’s the reason all men get married. And he keeps saying to me: What the fuck am I doing with you, you don’t know anything, you have no intelligence, you have no taste, this beautiful house is wasted, with you everything becomes disgusting. She began to cry, saying between her sobs:

  “I’m sorry, I’m talking like this because you wrote that book I liked, and I know you’ve suffered.”

  “Why do you let him say those things to you?”

  “Because otherwise he won’t marry me.”

  “But after the wedding make him pay for it.”

  “How? He doesn’t give a damn about me: even now I never see him, imagine afterward.”

  “Then I don’t understand you.”

  “You don’t understand me because you’re not me. Would you take someone if you knew very well that he was in love with someone else?”

  I looked at her in bewilderment: “Michele has a lover?”

  “Lots of them, he’s a man, he sticks it in wherever he can. But that’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “Lenù, if I tell you you mustn’t repeat it to anyone, otherwise Michele will kill me.”

  I promised, and I kept the promise: I write it here, now, only because she’s dead. She said:

  “He loves Lina. And he loves her in a way he never loved me, in a way he’ll never love anyone.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You mustn’t say it’s nonsense, Lenù, otherwise it’s better that you go. It’s true. He’s loved Lina since the terrible day when she put the shoemaker’s knife to Marcello’s throat. I’m not making it up, he told me.”

  And she told me things that disturbed me profoundly. She told me that not long before, in that very house, Michele had gotten drunk one night and told her how many women he had been with, the precise number: a hundred and twenty-two, paying and free. You’re on that list, he said emphatically, but you’re certainly not among those who gave me the most pleasure. You know why? Because you’re an idiot, and even to fuck well it takes a little intelligence. For example you don’t know how to give a blow job, you’re hopeless, and it’s pointless to explain it to you, you can’t do it, it’s too obvious that it disgusts you. And he went on like that for a while, making speeches that became increasingly crude; with him vulgarity was normal. Then he wanted to explain clearly how things stood: he was marrying her because of the respect he felt for her father, a skilled pastry maker he was fond of; he was marrying her because one had to have a wife and even children and even an official house. But there should be no mistake: she was nothing to him, he hadn’t put her on a pedestal, she wasn’t the one he loved best, so she had better not be a pain in the ass, believing she had some rights. Brutal words. At a certain point Michele himself must have realized it, and he became gripped by a kind of melancholy. He had murmured that women for him were all games with a few holes for playing in. All. All except one. Lina was the only woman in the world he loved—love, yes, as in the films—and respected. He told me, Gigliola sobbed, that she would have known how to furnish this house. He told me that giving her money to spend, yes, that would be a pleasure. He told me that with her he could have become truly important, in Naples. He said to me: You remember what she did with the wedding photo, you remember how she fixed up the shop? And you, and Pinuccia, and all the others, what the fuck are you, what the fuck do you know how to do? He had said those things to her and not only those. He had told her that he thought about Lila night and day, but not with normal desire, his desire for her didn’t resemble what he knew. In reality he didn’t want her. That is, he didn’t want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn’t want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last. He wanted her not to screw her—that word applied to Lila disturbed him. He wanted to kiss her and caress her. He wanted to be caressed, helped, guided, commanded. He wanted to see how she changed with the passage of time, how she aged. He wanted to talk with her and be helped to talk. You understand? He spoke of her in way that to me, to me—when we are about to get married—he has never spoken. I swear it’s true. He whispered: My brother Marcello, and that dickhead Stefano, and Enzo with his cheeky face, what have they understood of Lina? Do they know what they’ve lost, what they might lose? No, they don’t have the intelligence. I alone know what she is, who she is. I recognized her. And I suffer thinking of how she’s wasted. He was raving, just like that, unburdening himself. And I listened to him without saying a word, until he fell asleep. I looked at him and I said: how is it possible that Michele is capable of that feeling—it’s not him speaking, it’s someone else. And I hated that someone else, I thought: Now I’ll stab him in his sleep and take back my Michele. Lila no, I’m not angry with her. I wanted to kill her years ago, when Michele took the shop on Piazza dei Martiri away from me and sent me back behind the counter in the pastry shop. Then I felt like shit. But I don’t hate her anymore, she has nothing to do with it. She always wanted to get out of it. She’s not a fool like me, I’m the one marrying him, she’ll never take him. In fact, since Michele will grab everything there is to grab, but not her, I’ve loved her for quite a while: at least there’s someone who can make him shit blood.

  I listened, now and then I tried to play it down, to console her. I said: If he’s marrying you it means that, whatever he says, you’re important to him, don’t feel hopeless. Gigliola shook her head energetically, she dried her cheeks with her fingers. You don’t
know him, she said, no one knows him like me. I asked:

  “Could he lose his head, do you think, and hurt Lina?”

  She uttered a kind exclamation, between a laugh and a cry.

  “Him? Lina? Haven’t you seen how he’s behaved all these years? He could hurt me, you, anyone, even his father, his mother, his brother. He could hurt all the people Lina is attached to, her son, Enzo. And he could do it without a qualm, coldly. But to her, her person, he will never do anything.”

  56.

  I decided to complete my exploratory tour. I walked to Mergellina and when I reached Piazza dei Martiri the black sky was so low that it seemed to be resting on the buildings. I hurried into the elegant Solara shoe store certain that the storm would burst at any moment. Alfonso was even more handsome than I remembered, with his big eyes and long lashes, his sharply drawn lips, his slender yet strong body, his Italian made slightly artificial by the study of Latin and Greek. He was genuinely happy to see me. The arduous years of middle school and high school we’d spent together had created an affectionate bond, and even though we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, we picked up again right away. We started joking. We talked easily, the words tumbling out, about our academic past, the teachers, the book I had published, his marriage, mine. It was I, naturally, who brought up Lila, and he became flustered, he didn’t want to speak ill of her, or of his brother, or Ada. He said only:

  “It was predictable that it would end like this.”

  “Why?”

  “You remember when I told you that Lina scared me?”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t fear, I understood much later.”

  “What was it?”

  “Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time.”

  “Meaning what?”