The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  In early September I returned to Florence, but the ugly thoughts rather than dissolving grew stronger. Useless to try to talk to Pietro. He was unhappy about the children’s and my return, he was late with his book and the idea that the academic year would soon begin made him short-tempered. One night when, at the table, Dede and Gennaro were quarreling about something or other he jumped up suddenly and left the kitchen, slamming the door so violently that the frosted glass shattered. I called Lila, I told her straight off that she had to take her child back, he’d been living with me for a month and a half.

  “You can’t keep him till the end of the month?”

  “No.”

  “It’s bad here.”

  “Here, too.”

  Enzo left in the middle of the night and arrived in the morning, when Pietro was at work. I had already packed Gennaro’s bag. I explained to him that the tensions between the children had become unbearable, I was sorry but three was too many, I couldn’t handle it anymore. He said he understood, he thanked me for all I had done. He said only, by way of apology: You know what Lina is like. I didn’t answer, because Dede was yelling, desperate at Gennaro’s departure, and because, if I had, I might have said—beginning precisely with what Lila was like—things I would later regret.

  I had in my head thoughts I didn’t want to formulate even to myself; I was afraid that the facts would magically fit the words. But I couldn’t cancel out the sentences; in my mind I heard their syntax all ready, and I was frightened by it, fascinated, horrified, seduced. I had trained myself to find an order by establishing connections between distant elements, but here it had got out of hand. I had added Gino’s violent death to Bruno Soccavo’s (Filippo, the factory guard, had survived). And I had arrived at the idea that each of these events led to Pasquale, maybe also to Nadia. This hypothesis was extremely distressing. I had thought of telephoning Carmen, to ask if she had news of her brother; then I changed my mind, frightened by the possibility that her telephone was bugged. When Enzo came to get Gennaro I said to myself: Now I’ll talk to him about it, let’s see how he responds. But then, too, I had said nothing, out of fear of saying too much, out of fear of uttering the name of the figure who was behind Pasquale and Nadia: Lila, that is. Lila, as usual: Lila who doesn’t say things, she does them; Lila who is steeped in the culture of the neighborhood and takes no account of police, the law, the state, but believes there are problems that can be resolved only with the shoemaker’s knife; Lila who knows the horror of inequality; Lila who, at the time of the collective of Via dei Tribunali, found in revolutionary theory and action a way of applying her hyperactive mind; Lila who has transformed into political objectives her rages old and new; Lila who moves people like characters in a story; Lila who has connected, is connecting, our personal knowledge of poverty and abuse to the armed struggle against the fascists, against the owners, against capital. I admit it here, openly, for the first time: in those September days I suspected that not only Pasquale—Pasquale driven by his history toward the necessity of taking up arms—not only Nadia, but Lila herself had spilled that blood. For a long time, while I cooked, while I took care of my daughters, I saw her, with the other two, shoot Gino, shoot Filippo, shoot Bruno Soccavo. And if I had trouble imagining Pasquale and Nadia in every detail—I considered him a good boy, something of a braggart, capable of fierce fighting but of murder no; she seemed to me a respectable girl who could wound at most with verbal treachery—about Lila I had never had doubts: she would know how to devise the most effective plan, she would reduce the risks to a minimum, she would keep fear under control, she would be able to give murderous intentions an abstract purity, she knew how to remove human substance from bodies and blood, she would have no scruples and no remorse, she would kill and feel that she was in the right.

  So there she was, clear and bright, along with the shadow of Pasquale, of Nadia, of who knows what others. They drove through the piazza in a car and, slowing down in front of the pharmacy, fired at Gino, at his thug’s body in the white smock. Or they drove along the dusty road to the Soccavo factory, garbage of every type piled up on either side. Pasquale went through the gate, shot Filippo’s legs, the blood spread through the guard booth, screams, terrified eyes. Lila, who knew the way well, crossed the courtyard, entered the factory, climbed the stairs, burst into Bruno’s office, and, just as he said cheerfully: Hi, what in the world are you doing around here, fired three shots at his chest and one at his face.

  Ah yes, militant anti-fascism, new resistance, proletarian justice, and other formulas to which she, who instinctively knew how to avoid rehashing clichés, was surely able to give depth. I imagined that those actions were necessary in order to join, I don’t know, the Red Brigades, Prima Linea, Nuclei Armati Proletari. Lila would disappear from the neighborhood as Pasquale had. Maybe that’s why she had tried to leave Gennaro with me, apparently for a month, in reality intending to give him to me forever. We would never see each other again. Or she would be arrested, like the leaders of the Red Brigades, Curcio and Franceschini. Or she would evade every policeman and prison, imaginative and bold as she was. And when the big thing was accomplished, she would reappear triumphant, admired for her achievements, in the guise of a revolutionary leader, to tell me: You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.

  At night every imagining seemed a thing that had happened or was still happening, and I was afraid for her, I saw her captured, wounded, like so many women and men in the chaos of the world, and I felt pity for her, but I also envied her. The childish conviction that she had always been destined for extraordinary things was magnified. And I regretted that I had left Naples, detached myself from her, the need to be near her returned. But I was also angry that she had set out on that road without consulting me, as if she hadn’t considered me up to it. And yet I knew a lot about capital, exploitation, class struggle, the inevitability of the proletarian revolution. I could have been useful, participated. And I was unhappy. I lay in bed, discontent with my situation as a mother, a married woman, the whole future debased by the repetition of domestic rituals in the kitchen, in the marriage bed.

  By day I felt more lucid, and the horror prevailed. I imagined a capricious Lila who provoked hatred deliberately and in the end found herself more deeply involved in violent acts. Certainly she had had the courage to push ahead, to take the lead with the crystalline determination, the generous cruelty of one who is spurred by just reasons. But with what purpose? To start a civil war? Transform the neighborhood, Naples, Italy into a battlefield, a Vietnam in the Mediterranean? Hurl us all into a pitiless, interminable conflict, squeezed between the Eastern bloc and the Western? Encourage its fiery spread throughout Europe, throughout the entire planet? Until victory, always? What victory? Cities destroyed, fire, the dead in the streets, the shame of violent clashes not only with the class enemy but also within the front itself, among the revolutionary groups of various regions and with various motivations, all in the name of the proletariat and its dictatorship. Maybe even nuclear war.

  I closed my eyes in terror. The children, the future. And I hung on to formulas: the unpredictable subject, the destructive logic of patriarchy, the feminine value of survival, compassion. I have to talk to Lila, I said to myself. She has to tell me everything she’s doing, what she plans, so that I can decide whether to be her accomplice or not.

  But I never called nor did she call me. I was convinced that the long voice thread that had been our only contact for years hadn’t helped us. We had maintained the bond between our two stories, but by subtraction. We had become for each other abstract entities, so that now I could invent her for myself both as an expert in computers and as a determined and implacable urban guerrilla, while she, in all likelihood, could see me both as the stereotype of the successful intellectual and as a cultured and well-off woman, all children, books, and highbrow conversation with an academic husband. We both needed new depth
, body, and yet we were distant and couldn’t give it to each other.

  88.

  Thus September passed, then October. I didn’t talk to anyone, not even Adele, who had a lot of work, or even Mariarosa, who had brought Franco to her house—an invalid Franco, in need of help, changed by depression—and who greeted me warmly, promised to say hello to him for me, but then broke off because she had too many things to do. Not to mention Pietro’s muteness. The world outside books burdened him increasingly, he went reluctantly into the regulated chaos of the university, and often said he was ill. He said he did it in order to work, but he couldn’t get to the end of his book, he rarely went into his study, and, as if to forgive himself and be forgiven, he took care of Elsa, cooked, swept, washed, ironed. I had to treat him rudely to get him to go back to teaching, but I immediately regretted it. Ever since the violence had struck people I knew, I was afraid for him. He had never given in, even though he got into dangerous situations, opposing publicly what, in a term that he preferred, he called the load of nonsense of his students and many of his colleagues. Although I was worried about him, in fact maybe just because I was worried, I never admitted he was right. I hoped that if I criticized him he would understand, would stop his reactionary reformism (I used that phrase), become more flexible. But, in his eyes, that drove me yet again to the side of the students who were attacking him, the professors who were plotting against him.

  It wasn’t like that, the situation was more complicated. On the one hand I vaguely wanted to protect him, on the other I wanted to be on Lila’s side, defend the choices I secretly attributed to her. To the point where every so often I thought of telephoning her and, starting with Pietro, with our conflicts, get her to tell me what she thought about it and, step by step, bring her out into the open. I didn’t to it, naturally, it was absurd to expect sincerity on these subjects on the phone. But one night she called me, sounding really happy.

  “I have some good news.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I’m the head of technology.”

  “In what sense?”

  “Head of the IBM data-processing center that Michele rented.”

  It seemed incredible to me. I asked her to repeat it, to explain carefully. She had accepted Solara’s proposal? After so much resistance she had gone back to working for him, as in the days of Piazza dei Martiri? She said yes, enthusiastically, and became more and more excited, more explicit: Michele had entrusted to her the System 3 that he had rented and placed in a shoe warehouse in Acerra; she would employ operators and punch-card workers; the salary was four hundred and twenty-five thousand lire a month.

  I was disappointed. Not only had the image of the guerrilla vanished in an instant but everything I thought I knew of Lila wavered. I said:

  “It’s the last thing I would have expected of you.”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Refuse.”

  “Why?”

  “We know what the Solaras are.”

  “And so what? It’s already happened, and I’m better off working for Michele than for that shit Soccavo.”

  “Do as you like.”

  I heard her breathing. She said:

  “I don’t like that tone, Lenù. I’m paid more than Enzo, who is a man: What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The revolution, the workers, the new world, and that other bullshit?”

  “Stop it. If you’ve unexpectedly decided to make a truthful speech I’m listening, otherwise let’s forget it.”

  “May I point out something? You always use true and truthfully, when you speak and when you write. Or you say: unexpectedly. But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than I that it’s all a fraud and that one thing follows another and then another. I don’t do anything truthfully anymore, Lenù. And I’ve learned to pay attention to things. Only idiots believe that they happen unexpectedly.”

  “Bravo. What do you want me to believe, that you have everything under control, that it’s you who are using Michele and not Michele you? Let’s forget it, come on. Bye.”

  “No, speak, say what you have to say.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “Speak, otherwise I will.”

  “Then speak, let me listen.”

  “You criticize me but you say nothing to your sister?”

  I was astonished.

  “What does my sister have to do with anything?”

  “You don’t know anything about Elisa?”

  “What should I know?”

  She laughed maliciously.

  “Ask your mother, your father, and your brothers.”

  89.

  She wouldn’t say anything else, she hung up, furious. I anxiously called my parents’ house, my mother answered.

  “Every so often you remember we exist,” she said.

  “Ma, what’s happening to Elisa?”

  “What happens to girls today.”

  “What?”

  “She’s with someone.”

  “She’s engaged?”

  “Let’s put it like that.”

  “Who is she with?”

  The answer went right through my heart.

  “Marcello Solara.”

  That’s what Lila wanted me to know. Marcello, the handsome Marcello of our early adolescence, her stubborn, desperate admirer, the young man she had humiliated by marrying Stefano Carracci, had taken my sister Elisa, the youngest of the family, my good little sister, the woman whom I still thought of as a magical child. And Elisa had let herself be taken. And my parents and my brothers had not lifted a finger to stop him. And my whole family, and in some way I myself, would end up related to the Solaras.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “How do I know, a year.”

  “And you two gave your consent?”

  “Did you ask our consent? You did as you liked. And she did the same thing.”

  “Pietro isn’t Marcello Solara.”

  “You’re right: Marcello would never let himself be treated by Elisa the way Pietro is treated by you.”

  Silence.

  “You could have told me, you could have consulted me.”

  “Why? You left. ‘I’ll take care of you, don’t worry.’ Hardly. You’ve only thought of your own affairs, you didn’t give a damn about us.”

  I decided to leave immediately for Naples with the children. I wanted to go by train, but Pietro volunteered to drive us, passing off as kindness the fact that he didn’t want to work. As soon as we came down from the Doganella and were in the chaotic traffic of Naples, I felt gripped by the city, ruled by its unwritten laws. I hadn’t set foot there since the day I left to get married. The noise seemed unbearable, I was irritated by the constant honking, by the insults the drivers shouted at Pietro when, not knowing the way, he hesitated, slowed down. A little before Piazza Carlo III I made him pull over. I got into the driver’s seat, and drove aggressively to Via Firenze, to the same hotel he had stayed in years before. We left our bags. I carefully dressed the two girls and myself. Then we went to the neighborhood, to my parents’ house. What did I think I could do, impose on Elisa my authority as the older sister, a university graduate, well married? Persuade her to break her engagement? Tell her: I’ve known Marcello since he grabbed my wrist and tried to pull me into the Fiat 1100, breaking Mamma’s silver bracelet, so trust me, he’s a vulgar, violent man? Yes. I felt determined, my job was to pull Elisa out of that trap.

  My mother greeted Pietro affectionately and, in turn—This is for Dede from Grandma, this is for Elsa—she gave the two girls many small gifts that, in different ways, excited them. My father’s voice was hoarse with emotion, he seemed thinner, even more subservient. I waited for my brothers to appear, but I discovered that they wer
en’t home.

  “They’re always at work,” my father said without enthusiasm.

  “What do they do?”

  “They work,” my mother broke in.

  “Where?”

  “Marcello arranged jobs for them.”

  I remembered how the Solaras had arranged a job for Antonio, what they had made him into.

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  My mother answered in irritation:

  “They bring money home and that’s enough. Elisa isn’t like you, Lenù, Elisa thinks of all of us.”

  I pretended not to hear: “Did you tell her I was coming today? Where is she?”

  My father lowered his gaze, my mother said curtly: “At her house.”

  I became angry: “She doesn’t live here anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Since when?”

  “Almost two months. She and Marcello have a nice apartment in the new neighborhood,” my mother said coldly.

  90.

  He was more than just a boyfriend, then. I wanted to go to Elisa’s house right away, even though my mother kept saying: What are you doing, your sister is preparing a surprise for you, stay here, we’ll all go together later. I paid no attention. I telephoned Elisa, she answered happily and yet embarrassed. I said: Wait for me, I’m coming. I left Pietro and the girls with my parents and set off on foot.

  The neighborhood seemed to me more run-down: the buildings dilapidated, the streets and sidewalks full of holes, littered with garbage. From black-edged posters that carpeted the walls—I had never seen so many—I learned that the old man Ugo Solara, Marcello and Michele’s grandfather, had died. As the date attested, the event wasn’t recent—it went back at least two months—and the high-flown phrases, the faces of grieving Madonnas, the very name of the dead man were faded, smudged. Yet the death notices persisted on the streets as if the other dead, out of respect, had decided to disappear from the world without letting anyone know. I saw several even at the entrance to Stefano’s grocery. The shop was open, but it seemed to me a hole in the wall, dark, deserted, and Carracci appeared in the back, in his white smock, and disappeared like a ghost.