The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  He asked Lila with some anxiety: Do you like it, this way? And the shop owner applauded enthusiastically, he said conspiratorially: I know exactly who’d like you, you’re beautiful. Allusions. Facts that I didn’t know and they did. Lila had a malicious smile, she muttered: I want to give it to you. Nothing more. Alfonso accepted it happily but nothing else was said, as if Lila had commanded him and his friend, silently, that it was enough, I had seen and heard enough.

  47.

  That deliberate oscillation of hers between the obvious and the opaque struck me in a particularly painful way once—the only time—when things went badly at one of our appointments with the gynecologist. It was November and yet the city gave off heat as if summer had never ended. Lila felt sick on the way, and we sat in a café for a few minutes, then went, slightly alarmed, to the doctor. Lila explained to her in self-mocking tones that the now large thing she had inside was kicking her, pushing her, stifling her, disturbing her, weakening her. The gynecologist listened, amused, calmed her, said: You’ll have a son like you, very lively, very imaginative. All good, then, very good. But before leaving I insisted with the doctor:

  “You’re sure everything’s all right?”

  “Very sure.”

  “What’s the matter with me?” Lila protested.

  “Nothing that has to do with your pregnancy.”

  “What does it have to do with?”

  “With your head.”

  “What do you know about my head?”

  “Your friend Nino was full of praise for it.”

  Nino? Friend? Silence.

  When we left I had to struggle to persuade Lila not to change doctors. Before going off she said, in her fiercest tones: your lover is certainly not my friend, but in my view he’s not your friend, either.

  Here I was, then, driven forcefully into the heart of my problems: the unreliability of Nino. In the past Lila had showed me that she knew things about him I didn’t know. Was she now suggesting that there were still other facts known to her and not to me? It was pointless to ask her to explain; she left, cutting short any conversation.

  48.

  Afterward I quarreled with Nino for his lack of tact, for the confidences that, although he denied it indignantly, he must surely have made to the wife of his colleague, for everything I kept inside me and that this time, too, in the end I stifled.

  I didn’t say to him: Lila considers you a traitorous liar. It was pointless, he would have started laughing. But the suspicion remained that that mention of his unreliability alluded to something concrete. It was a slow, reluctant suspicion, I myself had no intention of transforming it into some intolerable certainty. And yet it persisted. So one Sunday in November, I went first to my mother, then, around six, to Lila’s house. My daughters were in Florence with their father, Nino was celebrating his father-in-law’s birthday with his family (that was how I put it now: your family). I knew that Lila was alone; Enzo had had to go and see some relatives of his in Avellino and had taken Gennaro.

  The creature in my womb was nervous, I blamed the heavy air. Lila, too, complained that the baby was moving too much, she said it was forever creating a choppy sea in her belly. To calm him she wanted to take a walk, but I had brought pastries; I made the coffee myself, I wanted to have a private conversation, in the intimacy of that bare house with windows onto the stradone.

  I pretended I was in the mood for idle talk. I mentioned matters that interested me less—Why does Marcello say you’re the ruin of his brother, what did you do to Michele—and in a tone partly of fun, as if they were just something to laugh about. I counted on slowly getting to the question that I really cared about: What do you know about Nino that I don’t know.

  Lila answered unwillingly. She sat down, she got up, she said her stomach felt as if she had swallowed liters of carbonated drinks, she complained about the smell of the cannoli, which she usually liked but which now seemed to her bad. Marcello—you know what he’s like, she said, he’s never forgotten what I did to him as a girl, and since he’s a coward he doesn’t say things to your face, he acts like a good person, harmless, but he spreads gossip. Then she took the tone she always had in that phase, affectionate and at the same time slightly teasing: But you’re a lady, forget my troubles, tell me how your mother is. As usual she wanted me to talk about myself, but I didn’t yield. Moving from my mother, from her worries about Elisa and my brothers, I led her back to the Solaras. She grumbled, she said sarcastically that men place such an enormous importance on fucking, she laughed: not Marcello—although even he doesn’t joke—but Michele, who went crazy, he’s been obsessed with me for a long time, and even runs after the shadow of my shadow. She repeated that expression allusively—shadow of my shadow—she said that was why Marcello was angry and threatened her, he couldn’t bear the fact that she had put a leash on his brother and led him in directions that in his view were humiliating. She laughed again, she muttered: Marcello thinks he can scare me, but look, the only person who really knew how to scare people was his mother and you know how she ended up.

  As she talked she kept touching her forehead, she complained of the heat, of the slight headache she’d had since the morning. I understood that she wanted to reassure me but also, in a contradictory manner, show me a little of what was there where she lived and worked every day, behind the façade of the houses, on the streets of the new neighborhood and the old one. Thus on the one hand she repeatedly denied the danger, on the other drew me a picture of spreading crime, extortion, assault, theft, usury, revenge followed by revenge. The secret red book that Manuela maintained and that after her death had passed to Michele was now controlled by Marcello, who was also taking away from his brother—out of distrust—the management of the legal and illegal trafficking, the political friendships. She said suddenly: Marcello has been bringing drugs to the neighborhood for several years, and I want to see where it’s going to end up. A remark like that. She was very pale, fanning herself with the edge of her skirt.

  Of all her allusions, only the one to drugs struck me, particularly because of her tone of disgust and disapproval. Drugs for me at that time meant Mariarosa’s house, or, on certain evenings, the apartment on Via Tasso. I had never used drugs, apart from smoking once or twice, out of curiosity, but I wasn’t outraged if others did, in the circles I had frequented and did frequent no one was outraged. So, to keep the conversation going, I stated an opinion, drawing on the days in Milan, and on Mariarosa, for whom taking drugs was one of many channels for individual well-being, a way of freeing oneself from taboos, a cultivated form of release. But Lila shook her head in opposition: What release, Lenù, the son of Signora Palmieri died two weeks ago, they found him in the gardens. And I perceived the irritation she felt at that word, release, at my way of saying it, assigning it a positive value. I stiffened, I ventured: He must have had some heart trouble. She answered, He had heroin trouble, and she quickly added: That’s enough, I’m fed up, I don’t want to spend Sunday talking about the revolting activities of the Solaras.

  Yet she had done so, and more than usual. A long moment slipped by. Out of restlessness, out of weariness, out of choice—I don’t know—Lila had slightly widened the net of her conversation, and I realized that even if she hadn’t said much she had filled my head with new images. I had long known that Michele wanted her—wanted her in that abstractly obsessive way that was harmful to him—and it was clear that she had taken advantage of it by bringing him to his knees. But now she had evoked the shadow of her shadow, and with that expression had thrust before my eyes Alfonso, the Alfonso who posed as a reflection of her in a maternity dress in the store on Via dei Mille, and I had seen Michele, a dazzled Michele, lifting his dress, holding him tight. As for Marcello, in a flash drugs stopped being what they had seemed to me, a liberating game for wealthy people, and moved into the sticky theater of the gardens beside the church, they had become a viper, a poison that spread throug
h the blood of my brothers, of Rino, perhaps of Gennaro, and murdered, and brought money into the red book once kept by Manuela Solara and now—having passed from Michele to Marcello—by my sister, in her house. I felt all the fascination of the way Lila governed the imagination of others or set it free, at will, with just a few words: that speaking, stopping, letting images and emotions go without adding anything else. I’m wrong, I said to myself in confusion, to write as I’ve done until now, recording everything I know. I should write the way she speaks, leave abysses, construct bridges and not finish them, force the reader to establish the flow: Marcello Solara who takes off quickly with my sister Elisa, with Silvio, with Peppe, with Gianni, with Rino, with Gennaro, with Michele enthralled by the shadow of the shadow of Lila; suggest that they all slip inside the veins of Signora Palmieri’s son, a boy I don’t even know and who now causes me pain, veins far away from those of the people Nino brings to Via Tasso, from Mariarosa’s, from those of a friend of hers—I now remembered—who was sick, and had to detox, and my sister-in-law, too, wherever she is, I haven’t heard from her for a long time, some people are always saved and some perish.

  I tried to expel images of voluptuous penetrations between men, of needles in veins, of desire and death. I tried to resume the conversation but something wasn’t right, I felt the heat of that late afternoon in my throat, I remember that my legs felt heavy and my neck was sweaty. I looked at the clock on the kitchen wall, it was just after seven-thirty. I discovered I no longer felt like talking about Nino, like asking Lila, sitting opposite me in a low yellowish light, what do you know about him that I don’t know. She knew a lot, too much, she could make me imagine whatever she wanted and I would never be able to erase the images from my mind. They had slept together, they had studied together, she had helped him write his articles, as I had done with the essays. For a moment jealousy and envy returned. They hurt me and I repressed them.

  Or probably what actually repressed them was a kind of thunder under the building, under the stradone, as if one of the trucks that were constantly passing had swerved in our direction, was descending rapidly underground with the engine at top speed, and running into our foundations, crashing and shattering everything.

  49.

  My breath was cut short, and for a fraction of a second I couldn’t understand what was happening. The coffee cup trembled on the saucer, the leg of the table bumped my knee. I jumped up, and realized that Lila, too, was alarmed, she was trying to get up. The chair was tilting backward, she tried to grasp it, but slowly, bent over, one hand reaching in front of her, in my direction, the other extended toward the chair back, her eyes narrowing, the way they did when she concentrated before reacting. Meanwhile thunder rumbled beneath the building, a stormy underground wind lifted waves of a secret sea against the floor. I looked at the ceiling; the light was swaying, along with the pink glass cover.

  Earthquake, I cried. The earth was moving, an invisible tempest exploding under my feet, shaking the room with the howl of a forest subdued by gusts of wind. The walls creaked, they appeared distended, they came unstuck and were pasted together again at the corners. A cloud of dust rained down from the ceiling, adding to the cloud that came out of the walls. I rushed toward the door, shouting again: earthquake. But the movement was mere intention, I couldn’t take a step. My feet were like lead, everything was heavy, my head, my chest, above all my stomach. And yet the ground on which I wanted to step was receding: for a fraction of a second it was there and then immediately it subsided.

  I remembered Lila, I sought her with my gaze. The chair had finally fallen over, the ceiling light was swaying, the furniture—especially an old sideboard with its knickknacks, glasses, silverware, chinoiserie—vibrated along with the windowpanes, like weeds growing in the eaves, stirred by the breeze. Lila was standing in the middle of the room, leaning forward, head down, eyes narrowed, brow furrowed, her hands holding her stomach as if she were afraid that it would slip away from her and get lost in the cloud of plaster dust. The seconds slid by, but nothing appeared to want to return to order; I called to her. She didn’t respond, she seemed solid, the only one of all the shapes impervious to jolts, tremors. She seemed to have erased every feeling: her ears didn’t hear, her throat didn’t inhale air, her mouth was locked, her eyelids canceled her gaze. She was a motionless organism, rigid, alive only in the hands that, fingers spread, gripped her stomach.

  Lila, I called. I moved to grab her, drag her away, it was the most urgent thing to do. The lower part of me, the part I thought was exhausted but, instead, here it was reviving, suggested to me: maybe you should be like her, stand still, bend over to protect your infant, don’t run away, think calmly. I struggled to make up my mind, to reach her was difficult, and yet it was just a step. Finally I seized her by the arm, I shook her, and she opened her eyes, which seemed white. The noise was unbearable, the whole city was making noise, Vesuvius, the streets, the sea, the old houses of the Tribunali and the Quartieri, the new ones of Posillipo. She wriggled free, she cried: Don’t touch me. It was an angry shout, and shocked me even more than the long seconds of the earthquake. I realized that I was mistaken: Lila, always in control of everything, at that moment wasn’t in control of anything. She was immobilized by horror, fearful that if I merely touched her she would break.

  50.

  I dragged her outside, tugging her violently, pushing, entreating. I was afraid the tremor that had paralyzed us would be followed immediately by another, more terrible, final, and that everything would collapse on top of us. I admonished her, I begged her, I reminded her that we had to rescue the creatures we carried in our wombs. So we flung ourselves into the wake of terrified cries, a growing clamor joined to frenzied movements—it seemed that the heart of the neighborhood, of the city, was about to burst. As soon as we reached the courtyard, Lila threw up; I fought the nausea that gripped my stomach.

  The earthquake—the earthquake of November 23, 1980, with its infinite destruction—entered into our bones. It expelled the habit of stability and solidity, the confidence that every second would be identical to the next, the familiarity of sounds and gestures, the certainty of recognizing them. A sort of suspicion of every form of reassurance took over, a tendency to believe in every prediction of bad luck, an obsessive attention to signs of the brittleness of the world, and it was hard to take control again. Minutes and minutes and minutes that wouldn’t end.

  Outside was worse than inside, everything was moving and shouting, we were assaulted by rumors that multiplied the terror. Red flashes could be seen in the direction of the railroad. Vesuvius had reawakened. The sea was beating against Mergellina, the city hall, Chiatamone. The cemetery of the Pianto had sunk, along with the dead, Poggioreale had collapsed entirely. The prisoners were either under the ruins or had escaped and now were murdering people just for the hell of it. The tunnel that led to the Marina had collapsed, burying half the fleeing neighborhood. Fantasies fed on one another, and Lila, I saw, believed everything, she trembled as she clung to my arm. The city is dangerous, she whispered, we have to go, the houses are cracking, everything is falling on us, the sewers are spurting into the air, look how the rats are escaping. Since people were running to their cars and the streets were becoming congested, she began to pull me, she whispered, they’re all going to the countryside, it’s safer there. She wanted to run to her car, she wanted to get to an open space where only the sky, which seemed weightless, could fall on our heads. I couldn’t calm her.

  We reached the car, but Lila didn’t have the keys. We had fled without taking anything, we had pulled the door shut behind us and, even if we had found the courage, we couldn’t go back to the house. I seized one of the door handles with all my strength and pulled it, shook it, but Lila shrieked, she put her hands over her ears as if my action produced intolerable sounds and vibrations. Looking around, I saw a big rock that had fallen out of a wall, and used it to break a window. I’ll get it fixed later, I said, now l
et’s stay here, it will pass. We settled ourselves in the car, but nothing passed, we felt a continuous trembling of the earth. Beyond the dusty windshield, we watched the people of the neighborhood, who had gathered in small groups to talk. But when at last things seemed quiet someone ran by shouting, which caused a general stampede, and people slammed into our car with heart-stopping violence.

  51.

  I was afraid, yes, I was terrified. But to my great amazement I wasn’t as frightened as Lila. In those seconds of the earthquake she had suddenly stripped off the woman she had been until a moment before—the one who was able to precisely calibrate thoughts, words, gestures, tactics, strategies—as if in that situation she considered her a useless suit of armor. Now she was someone else. She was the person I had glimpsed the time Melina walked along the stradone eating soap; or the one of the night of New Year’s Eve in 1958, when the fireworks war broke out between the Carraccis and the Solaras; or the one who had sent for me in San Giovanni a Teduccio, when she worked in Bruno Soccavo’s factory and, thinking something was wrong with her heart, wanted to leave me Gennaro because she was sure she would die. But now that other person seemed to have emerged directly from the churning guts of the earth; she bore almost no resemblance to the friend who a few minutes before I had envied for her ability to choose words deliberately; there was no resemblance even in the features, disfigured by anguish.

  I could never have undergone such an abrupt metamorphosis, my self-discipline was stable, the world existed around me, in a natural way, even in the most terrible moments. I knew that Dede and Elsa were with their father in Florence, and Florence was an elsewhere out of danger, which in itself calmed me. I hoped that the worst had passed, that no house in the neighborhood had collapsed, that Nino, my mother, my father, Elisa, my brothers were surely, like us, frightened, but surely, like us, alive. She, on the other hand, no, she couldn’t think in that way. She writhed, she trembled, she caressed her stomach, she no longer seemed to believe in solid connections. For her Gennaro and Enzo had lost every connection with each other and with us, they were destroyed. She emitted a sort of death rattle, eyes wide, she clutched herself, held tight. And she repeated obsessively adjectives and nouns that were completely incongruous with the situation we were in, she uttered sentences without sense and yet she uttered them with conviction, tugging on me.