My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

  “What?”

  “I want to tell just you.”

  I took her by the arm, trying to drag her away from Carmela, but Carmela followed us. I was so worried that in the end I confessed to them both, but addressing only Lila.

  “What can it be?” I asked.

  Carmela knew all about it. She had had that bleeding for a year already, every month.

  “It’s normal,” she said. “Girls have it naturally: you bleed for a few days, your stomach and your back hurt, but then it goes away.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Lila’s silence pushed me toward Carmela. The naturalness with which she had said what she knew reassured me and made me like her. I spent all afternoon talking to her, until dinner time. You wouldn’t die from that wound, I learned. Rather, “it means that you’re grown-up and you can make babies, if a man sticks his thingy in your stomach.”

  Lila listened without saying anything, or almost anything. We asked if she had blood like us and saw her hesitate, then reluctantly answer no. Suddenly she seemed small, smaller than I had ever seen her. She was three or four inches shorter, all skin and bones, very pale in spite of the days spent outside. And she had failed. And she didn’t know what the blood was. And no boy had ever made a declaration to her.

  “You’ll get it,” we both said, in a falsely comforting tone.

  “What do I care,” she said. “I don’t have it because I don’t want to, it makes me sick. And anyone who has it makes me sick.”

  She started to leave but then stopped and asked me, “How’s Latin?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Are you good at it?”

  “Very.”

  She thought about it and muttered, “I failed on purpose. I don’t want to go to any school anymore.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Whatever I want.”

  She left us there in the middle of the courtyard.

  For the rest of the summer she didn’t appear. I became very friendly with Carmela Peluso, who, although she laughed too much and then complained too much, had absorbed Lila’s influence so potently that she became at times a kind of surrogate. In speech Carmela imitated her tone of voice, used some of her recurring expressions, gesticulated in a similar way, and when she walked tried to move like her, even though physically she was more like me: pretty and plump, bursting with health. That sort of misappropriation partly repulsed and partly attracted me. I wavered between irritation at a remake that seemed a caricature and fascination because, even diluted, Lila’s habits still enchanted me. It was with those that Carmela finally bound me to her. She told me how terrible the new school had been: everyone teased her and the teachers couldn’t stand her. She told of going to the prison of Poggioreale with her mother and siblings to see her father, and how they all wept. She told me that her father was innocent, that it was a black creature who killed Don Achille, part male but mostly female, who lived with the rats and came out of the sewer grates, even in daytime, and did whatever terrible thing had to be done before escaping underground. She told me unexpectedly, with a fatuous little smile, that she was in love with Alfonso Carracci. Right afterward her smile turned to tears: it was a love that tortured her, and sapped her strength, the daughter of the murderer was in love with the son of the victim. It was enough for her to see him crossing the courtyard or passing by on the stradone to feel faint.

  This was a confidence that made a great impression on me and consolidated our friendship. Carmela swore that she had never talked about it to anyone, not even Lila: if she had decided to open up to me it was because she couldn’t bear to keep it inside anymore. I liked her dramatic tone. We examined all the possible consequences of that passion until school started again and I no longer had time to listen to her.

  What a story! Not even Lila, perhaps, would have been able to make up such a tale.

  3.

  A period of unhappiness began. I got fat, and under the skin of my chest two hard shoots sprouted, hair flourished in my armpits and my pubis, I became sad and at the same time anxious. In school I worked harder than I ever had, yet the mathematics problems almost never gave the result expected by the textbook, the Latin sentences seemed to make no sense. As soon as I could I locked myself in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, naked. I no longer knew who I was. I began to suspect that I would keep changing, until from me my mother would emerge, lame, with a crossed eye, and no one would love me anymore. I cried often, without warning. My chest, meanwhile, became large and soft. I felt at the mercy of obscure forces acting inside my body, I was always agitated.

  One day as I came out of school, Gino, the pharmacist’s son, followed me along the street and said that his classmates claimed that my breasts weren’t real, I stuffed them with cotton batting. He laughed as he spoke. He said that he thought they were real, he had bet twenty lire on it. Finally he said that, if he won, he would keep ten lire for himself and would give me ten, but I had to prove that I didn’t use padding.

  That request frightened me. Since I didn’t know how to act, I deliberately resorted to Lila’s bold tone:

  “Give me the ten lire.”

  “Why, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  He ran away, and I was disappointed. But soon he returned with a boy from his class, a skinny boy whose name I don’t remember, with a dark down above his lip. Gino said to me, “He has to be there, otherwise the others won’t believe I’ve won.”

  Again I resorted to Lila’s tone.

  “First the money.”

  “And if you have padding?”

  “I don’t.”

  He gave me ten lire and we all went, silently, to the top floor of a building near the public gardens. There, next to the iron door that led to the terrace, where I was clearly outlined by slender segments of light, I lifted up my shirt and showed them my breasts. The two stood staring as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. Then they turned and ran down the stairs.

  I heaved a sigh of relief and went to the Bar Solara to buy myself an ice cream.

  That episode remained stamped in my memory: I felt for the first time the magnetic force that my body exercised over men, but above all I realized that Lila acted not only on Carmela but also on me like a demanding ghost. If I had had to make a decision in the pure disorder of emotions in a situation like that, what would I have done? I would have run away. And if I had been with Lila? I would have pulled her by the arm, I would have whispered, Let’s go, and then, as usual, I would have stayed, because she, as usual, would have decided to stay. Instead, in her absence, after a slight hesitation I put myself in her place. Or, rather, I had made a place for her in me. If I thought again of the moment when Gino made his request, I felt precisely how I had driven myself away, how I had mimicked Lila’s look and tone and behavior in situations of brazen conflict, and I was pleased. But sometimes I wondered, somewhat anxiously: Am I being like Carmela? I didn’t think so, it seemed to me that I was different, but I couldn’t explain in what sense and my pleasure was spoiled. When I passed Fernando’s shop with my ice cream and saw Lila intently arranging shoes on a long table, I was tempted to stop and tell her everything, hear what she thought. But she didn’t see me and I kept going.

  4.

  She was always busy. That year Rino compelled her to enroll in school again, but again she almost never went and again she failed. Her mother asked her to help in the house, her father asked her to be in the shop, and she, all of a sudden, instead of resisting, seemed in fact content to labor for both. The rare times we saw each other—on Sunday after Mass or walking between the public gardens and the stradone—she displayed no curiosity about my school, and immediately started talking intensely and with admiration about the work that her father and brother did.

  She knew that her father as a boy had wanted to be free, had fled the shop of h
er grandfather, who was also a shoemaker, and had gone to work in a shoe factory in Casoria, where he had made shoes for everyone, even soldiers going to war. She had discovered that Fernando knew how to make a shoe from beginning to end by hand, but he was also completely at home with the machines and knew how to use them, the post machine, the trimmer, the sander. She talked to me about leather, uppers, leather-goods dealers, leather production, high heels and flat heels, about preparing the thread, about soles and how the sole was applied, colored, and buffed. She used all those words of the trade as if they were magic and her father had learned them in an enchanted world—Casoria, the factory—from which he had returned like a satisfied explorer, so satisfied that now he preferred the family shop, the quiet bench, the hammer, the iron foot, the good smell of glue mixed with that of old shoes. And she drew me inside that vocabulary with such an energetic enthusiasm that her father and Rino, thanks to their ability to enclose people’s feet in solid, comfortable shoes, seemed to me the best people in the neighborhood. Above all, I came home with the impression that, not spending my days in a shoemaker’s shop, having for a father a banal porter instead, I was excluded from a rare privilege.

  I began to feel that my presence in class was pointless. For months and months it seemed to me that every promise had fled from the textbooks, all energy. Coming out of school, dazed by unhappiness, I passed Fernando’s shop only to see Lila at her workplace, sitting at a little table in the back, her thin chest with no hint of a bosom, her scrawny neck, her small face. I don’t know what she did, exactly, but she was there, active, beyond the glass door, set between the bent head of her father and the bent head of her brother, no books, no lessons, no homework. Sometimes I stopped to look at the boxes of polish in the window, the old shoes newly resoled, new ones put on a form that expanded the leather and widened them, making them more comfortable, as if I were a customer and had an interest in the merchandise. I went away only, and reluctantly, when she saw me and waved to me, and I answered her wave, and she returned to concentrate on her work. But often it was Rino who noticed me first and made funny faces to make me laugh. Embarrassed, I ran away without waiting for Lila to see me.

  One Sunday I was surprised to find myself talking passionately about shoes with Carmela Peluso. She would buy the magazine Sogno and devour the photo novels. At first it seemed to me a waste of time, then I began to look, too, and we started to read them together, and comment on the stories and what the characters said, which was written in white letters on a black background. Carmela tended to pass without a break from comments on the fictional love stories to comments on the true story of her love for Alfonso. In order not to seem inferior, I once told her about the pharmacist’s son, Gino, claiming that he loved me. She didn’t believe it. The pharmacist’s son was in her eyes a kind of unattainable prince, future heir of the pharmacy, a gentleman who would never marry the daughter of a porter, and I was on the point of telling her about the time he had asked to see my breasts and I had let him and earned ten lire. But we were holding Sogno spread out on our knees and my gaze fell on the beautiful high-heeled shoes of one of the actresses. This seemed to me a momentous subject, more than the story of my breasts, and I couldn’t resist, I began to praise them and whoever had made such beautiful shoes, and to fantasize that if we wore shoes like that neither Gino nor Alfonso would be able to resist us. The more I talked, though, the more I realized, to my embarrassment, that I was trying to make Lila’s new passion my own. Carmela listened to me distractedly, then said she had to go. In shoes and shoemakers she had little or no interest. Although she imitated Lila’s habits, she, unlike me, held on to the only things that really absorbed her: the photo novels, love stories.

  5.

  This entire period had a similar character. I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important. If she withdrew, if her voice withdrew from things, the things got dirty, dusty. Middle school, Latin, the teachers, the books, the language of books seemed less evocative than the finish of a pair of shoes, and that depressed me.

  But one Sunday everything changed again. We had gone, Carmela, Lila, and I, to catechism, we were preparing for our first communion. On the way out Lila said she had something to do and she left us. But I saw that she wasn’t heading toward home: to my great surprise she went into the elementary school building.

  I walked with Carmela, but when I got bored I said goodbye, walked around the building, and went back. The school was closed on Sunday, how could Lila go into the building? After much hesitation I ventured beyond the entranceway, into the hall. I had never gone into my old school and I felt a strong emotion, I recognized the smell, which brought with it a sensation of comfort, a sense of myself that I no longer had. I went into the only door open on the ground floor. There was a large neon-lit room, whose walls were lined with shelves of old books. I counted a dozen adults, a lot of children. They would take down volumes, page through them, put them back, and choose one. Then they got in line in front of a desk behind which sat an old enemy of Maestra Oliviero’s, lean Maestro Ferraro, with his crew-cut gray hair. Ferraro examined the chosen text, marked something in the record book, and the person went out with one or more books.

  I looked around: Lila wasn’t there, maybe she had already left. What was she doing, she didn’t go to school anymore, she loved shoes and old shoes, and yet, without saying anything to me, she came to this place to get books? Did she like this space? Why didn’t she ask me to come with her? Why had she left me with Carmela? Why did she talk to me about how soles were ground and not about what she read?

  I was angry, and ran away.

  For a while school seemed to me more meaningless than ever. Then I was sucked back in by the press of homework and end-of-the-year tests, I was afraid of getting bad grades, I studied a lot but aimlessly. And other preoccupations weighed on me. My mother said that I was indecent with those big breasts I had developed, and she took me to buy a bra. She was more abrupt than usual. She seemed ashamed that I had a bosom, that I got my period. The crude instructions she gave me were rapid and insufficient, barely muttered. I didn’t have time to ask her any questions before she turned her back and walked away with her lopsided gait.

  The bra made my chest even more noticeable. In the last months of school I was besieged by boys and I quickly realized why. Gino and his friend had spread the rumor that I would show how I was made easily, and every so often someone would ask me to repeat the spectacle. I sneaked away, I compressed my bosom by holding my arms crossed over it, I felt mysteriously guilty and alone with my guilt. The boys persisted, even on the street, even in the courtyard. They laughed, they made fun of me. I tried to keep them off once or twice by acting like Lila, but it didn’t work for me, and then I couldn’t stand it and burst into tears. Out of fear that they would bother me I stayed in the house. I studied hard, I went out now only to go, very reluctantly, to school.

  One morning in May Gino ran after me and asked me, not arrogantly but, rather, with some emotion, if I would be his girlfriend. I said no, out of resentment, revenge, embarrassment, yet proud that the son of the pharmacist wanted me. The next day he asked me again and he didn’t stop asking until June, when, with some delay due to the complicated lives of our parents, we made our first communion, the girls in white dresses, like brides.

  In those dresses, we lingered in the church square and immediately sinned by talking about love. Carmela couldn’t believe that I had refused the son of the pharmacist, and she told Lila. She, surprisingly, instead of slipping away with the air of someone saying Who cares, was interested. We all talked about it.

  “Why do you say no?” Lila asked me in dialect.

  I answered unexpectedly in proper Italian, to make an impression, to let her understand that, even if I spent my time talking about boyfriends, I wasn’t to be treated like Carmela.

  “Because I’m not sure of my feelings.”

>   It was a phrase I had learned from reading Sogno and Lila seemed struck by it. As if it were one of those contests in elementary school, we began to speak in the language of comics and books, which reduced Carmela to pure and simple listener. Those moments lighted my heart and my head: she and I and all those well-crafted words. In middle school nothing like that ever happened, not with classmates or with teachers; it was wonderful. Step by step Lila convinced me that one achieves security in love only by subjecting the wooer to hard tests. And so, returning suddenly to dialect, she advised me to become Gino’s girlfriend but on the condition that all summer he agree to buy ice cream for me, her, and Carmela.

  “If he doesn’t agree it means it’s not true love.”

  I did as she told me and Gino vanished. It wasn’t true love, then, and so I didn’t suffer from it. The exchange with Lila had given me a pleasure so intense that I planned to devote myself to her totally, especially in summer, when I would have more free time. Meanwhile I wanted that conversation to become the model for all our next encounters. I felt clever again, as if something had hit me in the head, bringing to the surface images and words.

  But the sequel of that episode was not what I expected. Instead of consolidating and making exclusive the relationship between her and me, it attracted a lot of other girls. The conversation, the advice she had given me, its effect had so struck Carmela Peluso that she ended up telling everyone. The result was that the daughter of the shoemaker, who had no bosom and didn’t get her period and didn’t even have a boyfriend, became in a few days the most reliable dispenser of advice on affairs of the heart. And she, again surprising me, accepted that role. If she wasn’t busy in the house or the shop, I saw her talking now with this girl, now with that. I passed by, I greeted her, but she was so absorbed that she didn’t hear me. I always caught phrases that seemed to me beautiful, and they made me suffer.