The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  “It’s hard to say: you and I became friends immediately, you I love. With her that always seemed impossible. There was something tremendous about her that made me want to go down on my knees and confess my most secret thoughts.”

  I said ironically: “Great, an almost religious experience.”

  He remained serious: “No, only an admission of inferiority. But when she helped me study, that was great, yes. She would read the textbook and immediately understand it, then she’d summarize it for me in a simple way. There have been, and still are today, moments when I think: If I had been born a woman I would have wanted to be like her. In fact, in the Carracci family we were both alien bodies, neither she nor I could endure. So her faults never mattered to me, I always felt on her side.”

  “Is Stefano still angry with her?”

  “I don’t know. Even if he hates her, he has too many problems to be aware of it. Lina is the least of his troubles at the moment.”

  The statement seemed sincere and, above all, well founded. I put Lina aside. I went back instead to asking him about Marisa, the Sarratore family, finally Nino. He was vague about all of them, especially Nino, whom no one—by Donato’s wishes, he said—had dared to invite to the intolerable wedding that was in store for him.

  “You’re not happy to be getting married?” I ventured.

  He looked out the window: there was lightning and thunder but still no rain. He said: “I was fine the way I was.”

  “And Marisa?”

  “No, she wasn’t fine.”

  “You wanted her to be your fiancée for life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So finally you’ve satisfied her.”

  “She went to Michele.”

  I looked at him uncertainly. “In what sense?”

  He laughed, a nervous laugh.

  “She went to him, she set him against me.”

  I was sitting on a pouf, he was standing, against the light. He had a tense, compact figure, like the toreador in a bullfighting film.

  “I don’t understand: you’re marrying Marisa because she asked Solara to tell you that you had to do it?”

  “I’m marrying Marisa in order not to upset Michele. He put me in here, he trusted my abilities, I’m fond of him.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You say that because you all have the wrong idea about Michele, you don’t know what he’s like.” His face contracted, he tried vainly to hold back tears. He added, “Marisa is pregnant.”

  “Ah.”

  So that was the real reason. I took his hand, in great embarrassment I tried to soothe him. He became quiet with a great effort, and said:

  “Life is a very ugly business, Lenù.”

  “It’s not true: Marisa will be a good wife and a fine mother.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Marisa.”

  “Now don’t overdo it.”

  He fixed his eyes on me, I felt he was examining me as if to understand something about me that left him bewildered. He asked: “Lina never said anything even to you?”

  “What should she have said?”

  He shook his head, suddenly amused.

  “You see I’m right? She is an unusual person. Once I told her a secret. I was afraid and I needed to tell someone the reason for my fear. I told her and she listened attentively, and I calmed down. It was important for me to talk to her, it seemed to me that she listened not with her ears but with an organ that she alone had and that made the words acceptable. At the end I didn’t ask her, as one usually does: swear, please, not to betray me. But it’s clear that if she hasn’t told you she hasn’t told anyone, not even out of spite, not even in the period that was hardest for her, when my brother hated her and beat her.”

  I didn’t interrupt him. I felt only that I was sorry because he had confided something to Lila and not to me, although I had been his friend forever. He must have realized that and he decided to make up for it. He hugged me tight, and whispered in my ear:

  “Lenù, I’m a queer, I don’t like girls.”

  When I was about to leave, he said softly, embarrassed: I’m sure you already knew. This increased my unhappiness; in fact it had never occurred to me.

  57.

  The long day passed in that way, without rain but dark. And then began a reversal that rapidly changed a phase of apparent growth in the relationship between Lila and me into a desire to cut it off and return to taking care of my own life. Or maybe it had begun before that, in tiny details that I scarcely noticed as they struck me, and now instead were starting to add up. The trip had been useful, and yet I came home unhappy. What sort of friendship was mine and Lila’s, if she had been silent about Alfonso for years, though she knew I had a close relationship with him? Was it possible that she hadn’t realized Michele’s absolute dependence on her, or for her own reasons had she decided not to say anything? On the other hand, I—how many things had I kept hidden from her?

  For the rest of the day I inhabited a chaos of places, times, various people: the haunted Signora Manuela, the vacuous Rino, Gigliola in elementary school, Gigliola in middle school, Gigliola seduced by the potent good looks of the Solara boys, Gigliola dazzled by the Fiat 1100, and Michele who attracted women like Nino but, unlike him, was capable of an absolute passion, and Lila, Lila who had aroused that passion, a rapture that was fed not only by a craving for possession, by thuggish bragging, by revenge, by low-level desire, as she might say, but was an obsessive form of appreciation of a woman, not devotion, not subservience, but rather a sought-after form of male love, a complex feeling that was capable—with determination, with a kind of ferocity—of making a woman the chosen among women. I felt close to Gigliola, I understood her humiliation.

  That night I went to see Lila and Enzo. I didn’t say anything about that exploration I had made for love of her and also to protect the man she lived with. I took advantage instead of a moment when Lila was in the kitchen feeding the child to tell Enzo that she wanted to go back to the neighborhood. I decided not to hide my opinion. I said it didn’t seem like a good idea to me, but that anything that could help stabilize her—she was healthy, she had only to regain some equilibrium—or that she considered such, should be encouraged. All the more since time had passed and, as far as I knew, in the neighborhood they wouldn’t be worse off than in San Giovanni a Teduccio. Enzo shrugged.

  “I have nothing against it. I’ll have to get up earlier in the morning, return a little later in the evening.”

  “I saw that Don Carlo’s old apartment is for rent. The children have gone to Caserta and the widow wants to join them.”

  “What’s the rent?”

  I told him: in the neighborhood the rents were lower than in San Giovanni a Teduccio.

  “All right,” Enzo agreed.

  “You realize you’ll have some problems anyway.”

  “There are problems here, too.”

  “The irritations will increase, and also the claims.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “You’ll stay with her?”

  “As long as she wants, yes.”

  We joined Lila in the kitchen. She had just had a fight with Gennaro. Now that the child spent more time with his mother and less with the neighbor he was disoriented. He had less freedom, he was forced to give up a set of habits, and he rebelled by insisting, at the age of five, on being fed with a spoon. Lila had started yelling, he had thrown the plate, which shattered on the floor. When we went into the kitchen she had just slapped him. She said to me aggressively:

  “Was it you who pretended the spoon was an airplane?”

  “Just once.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  I said: “It won’t happen again.”

  “No, never again, because you’re going to be a writer and I have to waste my time like this.”

  Slo
wly she grew calmer, I wiped up the floor. Enzo told her that looking for a place in the neighborhood was fine with him, and I told her about Don Carlo’s apartment, smothering my resentment. She listened unwillingly as she comforted the child, then she reacted as if it were Enzo who wanted to move, as if I were the one encouraging that choice. She said: All right, I’ll do as you like.

  The next day we all went to see the apartment. It was in poor condition, but Lila was enthusiastic: she liked that it was on the edge of the neighborhood, almost near the tunnel, and that from the windows you could see the gas pump of Carmen’s fiancé. Enzo observed that at night they would be disturbed by the trucks that passed on the stradone and by the trains at the shunting yard. But since she found pleasure even in the sounds that had been part of our childhood, they came to an agreement with the widow for a suitable rent. From then on, every evening Enzo, instead of returning to San Giovanni a Teduccio, went to the neighborhood to carry out a series of improvements that would transform the apartment into a worthy home.

  It was now almost May, the date of my wedding was approaching, and I was going back and forth to Florence. But Lila, as if she considered that deadline irrelevant, drew me into shopping for the finishing touches for the apartment. We bought a double bed, a cot for Gennaro, we went together to apply for a telephone line. People saw us on the street, some greeted only me, some both, others pretended not to have seen either of us. Lila seemed in any case relaxed. Once we ran into Ada; she was alone, she nodded cordially, and kept going as if she were in a hurry. Once we met Maria, Stefano’s mother, Lila and I greeted her, she turned her head. Once Stefano himself passed in the car and stopped of his own initiative; he got out of the car, spoke only to me, cheerfully, asked about my wedding, praised Florence, where he had been recently with Ada and the child; finally patted Gennaro, gave a nod to Lila, and left. Once we saw Fernando, Lila’s father: bent and very aged, he was standing in front of the elementary school, and Lila became agitated, she told Gennaro that she wanted him to meet his grandfather. I tried to restrain her, but she wanted to go anyway, and Fernando, behaving as if his daughter weren’t present, looked at his grandson for a few seconds and said plainly, If you see your mother, tell her she’s a whore, and went off.

  But the most disturbing encounter, even if at the time it seemed the least significant, was a few days before she finally moved to the new apartment. Just as we came out of the house, we ran into Melina, who was holding by the hand her granddaughter Maria, the child of Stefano and Ada. She had her usual absent-minded air but she was nicely dressed, she had peroxided her hair, her face was heavily made up. She recognized me but not Lila, or maybe at first she chose to speak only to me. She talked to me as if I were still the girlfriend of her son, Antonio: she said that he would be back soon from Germany and that in his letters he always asked about me. I complimented her warmly on her dress and her hair, she seemed pleased. But she was even more pleased when I praised her granddaughter, who timidly clung to her grandmother’s skirt. At that point she must have felt obliged to say something nice about Gennaro, and she turned to Lila: Is he your son? Only then did she seem to remember her. Until that moment she had stared at her without saying a word, and it must have occurred to her that here was the woman whose husband her own daughter Ada had taken. Her eyes were sunk deep in the large sockets, she said seriously: Lina, you’ve gotten ugly and thin, of course Stefano left you, men like flesh, otherwise they don’t know where to put their hands and they leave. Then with a rapid jerk of her head she turned to Gennaro, and pointing to the little girl almost screamed: You know that’s your sister? Give each other a kiss, come on, my goodness how cute you are. Gennaro immediately kissed the girl, who let herself be kissed without protesting, and Melina, seeing the two faces next to each other, exclaimed: They both take after their father, they’re identical. After that statement, as if she had urgent things to do, she tugged her granddaughter and left without another word.

  Lila had stood mute the whole time. But I understood that something extremely violent had happened to her, like the time when, as a child, she had seen Melina walking on the stradone eating soap flakes. As soon as the woman and the child were some distance away, she started, she ruffled her hair with one hand, she blinked, she said: I’ll become like that. Then she tried to smooth her hair, saying:

  “Did you hear what she said?”

  “It’s not true that you’re ugly and skinny.”

  “Who gives a damn if I’m ugly and skinny, I’m talking about the resemblance.”

  “What resemblance?”

  “Between the two children. Melina’s right, they’re both identical to Stefano.”

  “Come on, the girl is, but Gennaro is different.”

  She burst out laughing: after a long time her old, mean laugh was back.

  She repeated: “They’re two peas in a pod.”

  58.

  I absolutely had to go. What I could do for her I had done, now I was in danger of getting caught up in useless reflections on who the real father of Gennaro was, on how far-seeing Melina was, on the secret motions of Lila’s mind, on what she knew or didn’t know or supposed and didn’t say, or was convenient for her to believe, and so on, in a spiral that was damaging to me. We discussed that encounter, taking advantage of the fact that Enzo was at work. I used clichés like: A woman always knows who the father of her children is. I said: You always felt that child was Nino’s, in fact you wanted him for that reason, and now you’re sure it’s Stefano’s just because crazy Melina said so? But she sneered, she said: What an idiot, how could I not have known, and—something incomprehensible to me—she seemed pleased. So in the end I was silent. If that new conviction helped her to feel better, good. And if it was another sign of her instability, what could I do? Enough. My book had been bought in France, Spain, and Germany, it would be translated. I had published two more articles on women working in factories in Campania, and l’Unità was content. From the publisher came solicitations for a new novel. In other words, I had to take care of countless things of my own; for Lila I had done all I could, and I couldn’t continue to get lost in the tangles of her life. In Milan, encouraged by Adele, I bought a cream-colored suit for the wedding, it looked good on me, the jacket was fitted, the skirt short. When I tried it on I thought of Lila, of her gaudy wedding dress, of the photograph that the dressmaker had displayed in the shop window on the Rettifilo, and the contrast made me feel definitively different. Her wedding, mine: worlds now far apart. I had told her earlier that I wasn’t getting married in a church, that I wouldn’t wear a traditional wedding dress, that Pietro had barely agreed to the presence of close relatives.

  “Why?” she had asked, but without particular interest.

  “Why what?”

  “Why aren’t you getting married in church.”

  “We aren’t believers.”

  “And the finger of God, the Holy Spirit?” she had quoted, reminding me of the article we had written together as girls.

  “I’m grown up.”

  “But at least have a party, invite your friends.”

  “Pietro doesn’t want to.”

  “You wouldn’t invite even me?”

  “Would you come?”

  She laughed, shaking her head.

  “No.”

  That was it. But in early May, when I had decided on a final venture before leaving the city for good, things took an unpleasant turn concerning my wedding, but not only that. I decided to go and see Professor Galiani. I looked for her number, I called. I said I was about to get married, I was going to live in Florence, I wanted to come and say goodbye to her. She, without surprise, without joy, but politely, invited me for five o’clock the next day. Before hanging up she said: Bring your friend, Lina, if you want.

  Lila in that case didn’t have to be asked twice, and she left Gennaro with Enzo. I put on makeup, I fixed my hair, I dressed according to th
e taste I had developed from Adele, and helped Lila to at least look respectable, since it was difficult to persuade her to dress up. She wanted to bring pastries, I said it wasn’t suitable. Instead I bought a copy of my book, although I assumed that Professor Galiani had read it: I did it so that I would have a way of inscribing it to her.

  We arrived punctually, rang the bell, silence. We rang again. Nadia opened the door, breathless, half dressed, without her usual courtesy, as if we had introduced disorder not only into her appearance but also into her manners. I explained that I had an appointment with her mother. She’s not here, she said, but make yourselves comfortable in the living room. She disappeared. We remained mute, but exchanged little smiles of uneasiness in the silent house. Perhaps five minutes passed, finally steps could be heard in the hall. Pasquale appeared, slightly disheveled. Lila didn’t show the least surprise, but I exclaimed, in real astonishment: What are you doing here? He answered seriously, unfriendly: What are you two doing here. And the phrase reversed the situation, I had to explain to him, as if that were his house, that I had an appointment with my professor.

  “Ah,” he said, and asked Lila, teasingly, “Are you recovered?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I’m glad.”

  I got angry, I answered for her, I said that Lila was only now beginning to get better and that anyway the Soccavo factory had been taught a lesson—the inspectors had paid a visit, the business had had to pay Lila everything she was owed.

  “Yes?” he said just as Nadia reappeared, now immaculate, as if she were going out. “You understand, Nadia? Dottoressa Greco says she taught Soccavo a lesson.”

  I exclaimed: “Not me.”

  “Not her, God Almighty taught Soccavo a lesson.”

  Nadia gave a slight smile, crossed the room and although there was a sofa free she sat on Pasquale’s lap. I felt ill at ease.

  “I only tried to help Lina.”

  Pasquale put his arm around Nadia’s waist, leaned toward me, said: