Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

I dragged Lila into our old courtyard, I couldn’t wait to tell Antonio what I had done for him. I confided to her, trembling with excitement: as soon as he calms down a little, I’ll leave him, but she had no comment, she seemed distracted.

I called. Antonio looked out, came down, serious. He said hello to Lila, apparently without noticing how she was dressed, how she was made up, in fact trying to look at her as little as possible, maybe because he was afraid that I would read in his face some male agitation. I told him that I couldn’t stay, I had only time to give him some good news. He listened, but as I was speaking I realized that he was pulling back as if before the point of a knife. He promised he’ll help you, I said anyway, emphatically, enthusiastically, and asked Lila to confirm it.

“Marcello said so, right?”

Lila confined herself to assenting. But Antonio had turned very pale, he lowered his eyes. He muttered, in a strangled voice:

“I never asked you to talk to the Solaras.”

Lila said right away, lying, “It was my idea.”

Antonio answered without looking at her. “Thank you, it wasn’t necessary.”

He said goodbye to her — said goodbye to her, not to me — turned his back, and vanished into the doorway.

I felt sick to my stomach. Where was my mistake, why had he gotten angry like that? On the street I exploded, saying to Lila that Antonio was worse than his mother, Melina, the same unstable blood, I couldn’t take it anymore. She let me speak and meanwhile wanted me go to her house with her. When we got there, she asked me to come in.

“Stefano’s there,” I objected, but that wasn’t the reason. I was upset by Antonio’s reaction and wanted to be alone, to figure out where I had made the mistake.

“Five minutes and you can go.”

I went up. Stefano was in his pajamas, disheveled, unshaved. He greeted me politely, glanced at his wife, at the package of pastries.

“You were at the Bar Solara?”

“Yes.”

“Dressed like that?”

“I don’t look nice?”

Stefano shook his head ill-humoredly, opened the package.

“Would you like a pastry, Lenù?”

“No, thank you, I have to go and eat.”

He bit into a pastry, turned to his wife. “Who did you see at the bar?”

“Your friends,” said Lila. “They paid me a lot of compliments. Isn’t that true, Lenù?”

She recounted every word the Solaras had said to her, except the matter of Antonio, that is to say the real reason we had gone to the bar, the reason that, I thought, she had decided to go with me. Then she concluded, in a tone of deliberate satisfaction, “Michele wants to put an enlargement of the photograph in the store in Piazza dei Martiri.”

“And you told him it was all right?”

“I told him they had to speak to you.”

Stefano finished the pastry in a single bite, then licked his fingers. He said, as if this were what had upset him most, “See what you force me to do? Tomorrow, because of you, I have to go and waste time with the dressmaker on the Rettifilo.” He sighed, he turned to me: “Lenù, you who are a respectable girl, try to explain to your friend that I have to work in this neighborhood, that she shouldn’t make me look like a jerk. Have a good Sunday, and say hello to Papa and Mamma for me.”

He went into the bathroom.

Lila behind his back made a teasing grimace, then went with me to the door.

“I’ll stay if you want,” I said.

“He’s a son of a bitch, don’t worry.”

She repeated, in a heavy male voice, words like try to explain to your friend, she shouldn’t make me look like a jerk , and the caricature made her eyes light up.

“If he beats you?”

“What can beatings do to me? A little time goes by and I’m better than before.”

On the landing she said again, again in a masculine voice: Lenù, I have to work in this neighborhood , and then I felt obliged to do Antonio, I whispered, Thank you, but there was no need , and suddenly it was as if we saw ourselves from the outside, both of us in trouble with our men, standing there on the threshold, actors in a recital of women, and we started laughing. I said: The minute we move we’ve done something wrong, who can understand men, ah, how much trouble they are. I hugged her warmly, and left. But I hadn’t even reached the bottom of the stairs when I heard Stefano shouting odious curses. Now he had the voice of an ogre, like his father’s.

Already on the way home I began to worry both about her and about me. If Stefano killed her? If Antonio killed me? I was racked by anxiety, I walked quickly, in the dusty heat, along Sunday streets that were beginning to empty as lunchtime approached. How difficult it was to find one’s way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations. Lila, perhaps based on secret calculations of her own, perhaps only out of spite, had humiliated her husband by going to flirt in front of everyone — she, Signora Carracci — with her former wooer Marcello Solara. I, without intending to, in fact convinced that I was doing good, had gone to argue the case of Antonio with those who years before had insulted his sister, who had beaten him up, whom he in turn had beaten up. When I entered the courtyard, I heard someone calling me, I started. It was him, he was at the window waiting for me to return.

He came down and I was afraid. I thought: he must have a knife. Instead, the whole time he spoke with his hands sunk in his pockets as if to keep them prisoner, calmly, his gaze distant. He said that I had humiliated him in front of the people he despised most in the world. He said I had made him look like someone who sends his woman to ask a favor. He said that he would not go down on his knees to anyone and that he would be a soldier not once but a hundred times, that in fact he would die in the Army rather than go and kiss the hand of Marcello Solara. He said that if Pasquale and Enzo should find out, they would spit in his face. He said that he was leaving me, because he had had the proof, finally, that I cared nothing about him and his feelings. He said that I could say and do with the son of Sarratore what I liked, he never wanted to see me again.

I couldn’t reply. Suddenly he took his hands out of his pockets, pulled me inside the doorway and kissed me, pressing his lips hard against mine, searching my mouth desperately with his tongue. Then he pulled away, turned his back, and left.

I went up the stairs in confusion. I thought that I was more fortunate than Lila, Antonio wasn’t like Stefano. He would never hurt me, the only person he could hurt was himself.

I didn’t see Lila the next day, but, surprisingly, I was compelled to see her husband.

That morning I had gone to school depressed: it was hot, I hadn’t studied, I had scarcely slept. The school day had been a disaster. I had looked for Nino outside, I would have liked to talk just a little, but I didn’t see him, maybe he was wandering through the city with his girlfriend, maybe he was in one of the movie theaters that were open in the morning, kissing her in the dark, maybe he was in the woods at Capodimonte having her do to him the things I had done to Antonio for months. In the first class I had been interrogated in chemistry and had given muddled or inadequate answers; who knows what grade I had received, and there wasn’t time to make it up, I was in danger of having to retake the exam in September. I had met Professor Galiani in the hall and she had given me a gentle speech whose meaning was: What is happening to you, Greco, why aren’t you studying anymore? And I had been unable to say anything but: Professor, I am studying, I’m studying all the time, I swear; she listened to me for a bit and then walked away and went into the teachers’ lounge. I had had a long cry in the bathroom, a cry of self-pity for how wretched my life was. I had lost everything: success in school; Antonio, whom I had always wanted to leave, and who in the end had left me, and already I missed him; Lila, who since she had become Signora Carracci was more removed every day. Worn out by a headache, I had walked home thinking of her, of how she had used me — yes, used — to provoke the Solaras, to get revenge on her husband, to show him to me in his misery as a wounded male, and the whole way I wondered: Is it possible that a person can change like that, that now there’s nothing to distinguish her from someone like Gigliola?