My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

  6.

  These were desolate days, at the height of which came a humiliation that I should have predicted and which instead I had pretended not to care about: Alfonso Carracci was promoted with an average of eight, Gigliola Spagnuolo was promoted with an average of seven, and I had all sixes and four in Latin. I would have to take the exam again in September in that one subject.

  This time it was my father who said it was pointless for me to continue. The schoolbooks had already cost a lot. The Latin dictionary, the Campanini and Carboni, even though it was bought used, had been a big expense. There was no money to send me to private lessons during the summer. But above all it was now clear that I wasn’t clever: the young son of Don Achille had passed and I hadn’t, the daughter of Spagnuolo the pastry maker had passed and I hadn’t: one had to be resigned.

  I wept night and day, I made myself ugly on purpose to punish myself. I was the oldest, after me there were two boys and another girl, Elisa: Peppe and Gianni, the two boys, came in turn to console me, now bringing me some fruit, now asking me to play with them. But I felt alone just the same, with a cruel fate, and I couldn’t calm down. Then one afternoon I heard my mother come up behind me. She said in dialect, in her usual harsh tone:

  “We can’t pay for the lessons, but you can try to study by yourself and see if you pass the exam.” I looked at her uncertainly. She was the same: lusterless hair, wandering eye, large nose, heavy body. She added, “Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.”

  That was all she said, or at least it’s what I remember. Starting the next day, I began to study, forcing myself never to go to the courtyard or the public gardens.

  But one morning I heard someone calling me from the street. It was Lila, who since we finished elementary school had completely gotten out of the habit.

  “Lenù,” she called.

  I looked out.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Come down.”

  I went down reluctantly, it irritated me to admit to her that I had to take the exam again. We wandered a bit in the courtyard, in the sun. I asked unwillingly what was new on the subject of boyfriends. I remember that I asked her explicitly if there had been developments between Carmela and Alfonso.

  “What sort of developments?”

  “She loves him.”

  She narrowed her eyes. When she did that, turning serious, without a smile, as if leaving the pupils only a crack allowed her to see in a more concentrated way, she reminded me of birds of prey I had seen in films at the parish cinema. But that day it seemed to me she had perceived something that made her angry and at the same time frightened her.

  “She didn’t tell you anything about her father?” she asked.

  “That he’s innocent.”

  “And who is the murderer?”

  “A creature half male and half female who hides in the sewers and comes out of the grates like the rats.”

  “So it’s true,” she said, as if suddenly in pain, and she added that Carmela believed everything she said, that all the girls did. “I don’t want to talk anymore, I don’t want to talk to anyone,” she muttered, scowling, and I felt that she wasn’t speaking with contempt, that the influence she had on us didn’t please her, so that for a moment I didn’t understand: in her place I would have been extremely proud. In her, though, there was no pride but a kind of impatience mixed with the fear of responsibility.

  “But it’s good to talk to other people,” I murmured.

  “Yes, but only if when you talk there’s someone who answers.”

  I felt a burst of joy in my heart. What request was there in that fine sentence? Was she saying that she wanted to talk only to me because I didn’t accept everything that came out of her mouth but responded to it? Was she saying that only I knew how to follow the things that went through her mind?

  Yes. And she was saying it in a tone that I didn’t recognize, that was feeble, although brusque as usual. She had suggested to Carmela, she told me, that in a novel or a film the daughter of the murderer would fall in love with the son of the victim. It was a possibility: to become a true fact a true love would have to arise. But Carmela hadn’t understood and right away, the next day, had gone around telling everyone that she was in love with Alfonso: a lie just to show off, whose consequences were unknown. We discussed it. We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two—I thought—understood one another. We together, we alone, knew how the pall that had weighed on the neighborhood forever, that is, ever since we could remember, might lift at least a little if Peluso, the former carpenter, had not plunged the knife into Don Achille’s neck, if it was an inhabitant of the sewers who had done it, if the daughter of the murderer married the son of the victim. There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

  She asked me at one point, without an obvious connection but as if all our conversation could arrive only at that question:

  “Are we still friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then will you do me a favor?”

  I would have done anything for her, on that morning of reconciliation: run away from home, leave the neighborhood, sleep in farmhouses, feed on roots, descend into the sewers through the grates, never turn back, not even if it was cold, not even if it rained. But what she asked seemed to me nothing and at the moment disappointed me. She wanted simply to meet once a day, in the public gardens, even just for an hour, before dinner, and I was to bring the Latin books.

  “I won’t bother you,” she said.

  She knew already that I had to take the exam again and wanted to study with me.

  7.

  In those middle school years many things changed right before our eyes, but day by day, so that they didn’t seem to be real changes.

  The Bar Solara expanded, became a well-stocked pastry shop—whose skilled pastry maker was Gigliola Spagnuolo’s father—which on Sunday was crowded with men, young and old, buying pastries for their families. The two sons of Silvio Solara, Marcello, who was around twenty, and Michele, just a little younger, bought a blue-and-white Fiat 1100 and on Sundays paraded around the streets of the neighborhood.

  Peluso’s former carpenter shop, which, once in the hands of Don Achille, had become a grocery, was filled with good things that spilled out onto the sidewalk, too. Passing by you caught a whiff of spices, of olives, of salami, of fresh bread, of pork fat and cracklings that made you hungry. The death of Don Achille had slowly detached his threatening shadow from that place and from the whole family. The widow, Donna Maria, had grown very friendly and now managed the store herself, along with Pinuccia, the fifteen-year-old daughter, and Stefano, who was no longer the wild boy who had tried to pierce Lila’s tongue but a self-possessed young man, his gaze charming, his smile gentle. The clientele had increased greatly. My mother sent me there to do the shopping, and my father wasn’t opposed, partly because when there was no money Stefano wrote everything in a ledger book and we paid at the end of the month.

  Assunta, who sold fruit and vegetables on the streets with her husband, Nicola, had had to retire because of bad back pain, and a few months later pneumonia almost killed her husband. Yet those two misfortunes had turned out to be a blessing. Now, going around the streets of the neighborhood every morning with the horse-drawn cart, summer and winter, rain and shine, was the oldest son, Enzo, who had almost nothing about him of the child who threw rocks at us: he had become a stocky youth, with a strong, healthy look, disheveled b
lond hair, blue eyes, a thick voice with which he praised his wares. He had excellent products and by his gestures alone conveyed an honest, reassuring willingness to serve his customers. He handled the scale adroitly. I liked the speed with which he pushed the weight along the arm to find the right balance, the sound of iron scraping rapidly against iron, then wrapped the potatoes or the fruit and hurried to put the package in Signora Spagnuolo’s basket, or Melina’s, or my mother’s.

  Initiatives flourished in the whole neighborhood. A young dressmaker became a partner in the dry goods store, where Carmela Peluso had just started working as a clerk, and the store expanded, aspiring to become a ladies’ clothing shop. The auto-repair shop where Melina’s son, Antonio, worked was trying, thanks to the son of the old owner, Gentile Gorresio, to get into motorcycles. In other words everything was quivering, arching upward as if to change its characteristics, not to be known by the accumulated hatreds, tensions, ugliness but, rather, to show a new face. While Lila and I studied Latin in the public gardens, even the pure and simple space around us, the fountain, the shrubbery, a pothole on one side of the street, changed. There was a constant smell of pitch, the steamroller sputtered, advancing slowly over the steamy asphalt, as bare-chested or T-shirted workers paved the streets and the stradone. Even the colors changed. Pasquale, Carmela’s older brother, was hired to cut down the brush near the railroad tracks. How much he cut—we heard the sound of annihilation for days: the trees groaned, they gave off a scent of fresh green wood, they cleaved the air, they struck the ground after a long rustling that seemed a sigh, and he and others sawed them, split them, pulled up roots that exhaled an odor of underground. The green brush vanished and in its place appeared an area of flat yellow ground. Pasquale had found that job through a stroke of luck. Sometime earlier a friend had told him that people had come to the Bar Solara looking for young men to do night work cutting down trees in a piazza in the center of Naples. He—even though he didn’t like Silvio Solara and his sons, he was in that bar because his father was ruined—had to support the family and had gone. He had returned, exhausted, at dawn, his nostrils filled with the odor of living wood, of mangled leaves, and of the sea. Then one thing led to another, and he had been summoned again for that kind of work. And now he was on the construction site near the railroad and we sometimes saw him climbing up the scaffolding of the new buildings that were rising floor by floor, or in a hat made of newspaper, in the sun, eating bread with sausage and greens during his lunch break.

  Lila got mad if I looked at Pasquale and was distracted. It was soon obvious, to my great amazement, that she already knew a lot of Latin. She knew the declensions, for example, and also the verbs. Hesitantly I asked her how, and she, with that spiteful expression of a girl who has no time to waste, admitted that during my first year of middle school she had taken a grammar out of the circulating library, the one managed by Maestro Ferraro, and had studied it out of curiosity. The library was a great resource for her. As we talked, she showed me proudly all the cards she had, four: one her own, one in Rino’s name, one for her father, and one for her mother. With each she borrowed a book, so she could get four at once. She devoured them, and the following Sunday she brought them back and took four more.

  I never asked her what books she had read and what books she was reading, there wasn’t time, we had to study. She drilled me, and was furious if I didn’t have the answers. Once she slapped me on the arm, hard, with her long, thin hands, and didn’t apologize; rather, she said that if I kept making mistakes she would hit me again, and harder. She was enchanted by the Latin dictionary, so large, pages and pages, so heavy—she had never seen one. She constantly looked up words, not only the ones in the exercises but any that occurred to her.

  She assigned homework in the tone she had learned from our teacher Maestra Oliviero. She obliged me to translate thirty sentences a day, twenty from Latin to Italian and ten from Italian to Latin. She translated them, too, much more quickly than I did. At the end of the summer, when the exam was approaching, she said warily, having observed skeptically how I looked up words I didn’t know in the dictionary, in the same order in which I found them in the sentence to be translated, fixed on the principal definitions, and only then made an effort to understand the meaning:

  “Did the teacher tell you to do it like that?”

  The teacher never said anything, she simply assigned the exercises. I came up with that method.

  She was silent for a moment, then she said to me:

  “Read the whole sentence in Latin first, then see where the verb is. According to the person of the verb you can tell what the subject is. Once you have the subject you look for the complements: the object if the verb is transitive, or if not other complements. Try it like that.”

  I tried. Suddenly translating seemed easy. In September I went to the exam, I did the written part without a mistake and answered all the questions in the oral part.

  “Who gave you lessons?” the teacher asked, frowning.

  “A friend.”

  “A university student?”

  I didn’t know what that meant. I said yes.

  Lila was waiting for me outside, in the shade. When I came out I hugged her, I told her that I had done really well and asked if we would study together the following year. Since it was she who had first proposed that we meet just to study, inviting her to continue seemed to me a good way of expressing my joy and gratitude. She detached herself with a gesture almost of annoyance. She said she just wanted to understand what that Latin was that those clever ones studied.

  “And then?”

  “I’ve understood, that’s enough.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Yes. I’ll get some books from the library.”

  “In Latin?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s still a lot to study.”

  “You study for me, and if I have trouble you’ll help me. Now I have something to do with my brother.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll show you later.”

  8.

  School began again and right away I did well in all the subjects. I couldn’t wait for Lila to ask me to help her in Latin or anything else, and so, I think, I studied not so much for school as for her. I became first in the class; even in elementary school I hadn’t done so well.

  That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough. I became fuller in the chest, the thighs, the rear. One Sunday when I was going to the gardens, where I was planning to meet Gigliola Spagnuolo, the Solara brothers approached me in the 1100. Marcello, the older, was at the wheel, Michele, the younger, was sitting next to him. They were both handsome, with glossy black hair, white teeth. But of the two I liked Marcello better; he resembled Hector as he was depicted in the school copy of the Iliad. They followed me the whole way, I on the sidewalk and they next to me, in the 1100.

  “Have you ever been in a car?”

  “No.”

  “Get in, we’ll take you for a ride.”

  “My father won’t let me.”

  “And we won’t tell him. When do you get the chance to ride in a car like this?”

  Never, I thought. But meanwhile I said no and kept saying no all the way to the gardens, where the car accelerated and disappeared in a flash beyond the buildings that were under construction. I said no because if my father found out that I had gone in that car, even though he was a good and loving man, even though he loved me very much, he would have beat me to death, while at the same time my little brothers, Peppe and Gianni, young as they were, would feel obliged, now and in the future, to try to kill the Solara brothers. There were no written rules, everyone knew that was how it was. The Solaras knew it, too, since they had been polite, and had merely invited me to get in.

  They were not, some time later, with Ada, the oldest daughter of Melina Cappuccio, that is the crazy widow who had caused the
scandal when the Sarratores moved. Ada was fourteen. On Sunday, in secret from her mother, she put on lipstick and, with her long, straight legs, and breasts even larger than mine, she looked grown-up and pretty. The Solara brothers made some vulgar remarks to her, Michele grabbed her by the arm, opened the car door, pulled her inside. They brought her back an hour later to the same place, and Ada was a little angry, but also laughing.

  But among those who saw her dragged into the car were some who reported it to Antonio, her older brother, who worked as a mechanic in Gorresio’s shop. Antonio was a hard worker, disciplined, very shy, obviously wounded by both the untimely death of his father and the unbalanced behavior of his mother. Without saying a single word to friends and relatives he waited in front of the Bar Solara for Marcello and Michele, and when the brothers showed up he confronted them, punching and kicking without even a word of preamble. For a few minutes he managed pretty well, but then the father Solara and one of the barmen came out. They beat Antonio bloody and none of the passersby, none of the customers, intervened to help him.

  We girls were divided on this episode. Gigliola Spagnuolo and Carmela Peluso took the part of the Solaras, but only because they were handsome and had an 1100. I wavered. In the presence of my two friends I favored the Solaras and we competed for who loved them most, since in fact they were very handsome and it was impossible not to imagine the impression we would make sitting next to one of them in the car. But I also felt that they had behaved badly with Ada, and that Antonio, even though he wasn’t very good-looking, even though he wasn’t muscular like the brothers, who went to the gym every day to lift weights, had been courageous in confronting them. So in the presence of Lila, who expressed without half measures that same position, I, too, expressed some reservations.