Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

How much that evening had hurt her I learned later from her notebooks. She admitted that she had asked to go with me. She admitted she had thought she could at least for one evening get away from the grocery and be comfortable with me, share in that sudden widening of my world, meet Professor Galiani, talk to her. She admitted she thought she would find a way of making a good impression. She admitted she had been sure she would be attractive to the males, she always was. Instead she immediately felt voiceless, graceless, deprived of movement, of beauty. She listed details: even when we were next to each other, people chose to speak only to me; they had brought me pastries, a drink, no one had done anything for her; Armando had shown me a family portrait, something from the seventeenth century, he had talked to me about it for a quarter of an hour; she had been treated as if she weren’t capable of understanding. They didn’t want her. They didn’t want to know anything about what sort of person she was. That evening for the first time it had become clear to her that her life would forever be Stefano, the grocery stores, the marriage of her brother and Pinuccia, the conversations with Pasquale and Carmen, the petty war with the Solaras. This she had written, and more, maybe that very night, maybe in the morning, in the store. There, for the entire evening, she had felt irrefutably lost.

But in the car, as we returned to the neighborhood, she didn’t allude in the slightest to her feeling, she just became mean, treacherous. She began as soon as she got in the car, when her husband asked resentfully if we had had a good time. I let her answer, I was dazed by the effort, by excitement, by pleasure. And then she went on slowly to hurt me. She said in dialect that she had never been so bored in her life. It would have been better if we’d gone to a movie, she apologized to her husband, and — it was unusual, done evidently on purpose to wound me, to remind me: See, good or bad I have a man, while you’ve got nothing, you’re a virgin, you know everything but you don’t know anything about this — she caressed the hand that he kept on the gear shift. Even watching television, she said, would have been more entertaining than spending time with those disgusting people. There’s not a thing there, an object, a painting, that was acquired by them directly. The furniture is from a hundred years ago. The house is at least three hundred years old. The books yes, some are new, but others are very old, they’re so dusty they haven’t been opened since who knows when, old law books, history, science, politics. They’ve read and studied in that house, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers. For hundreds of years they’ve been, at the least, lawyers, doctors, professors. So they all talk just so, so they dress and eat and move just so. They do it because they were born there. But in their heads they don’t have a thought that’s their own, that they struggled to think. They know everything and they don’t know a thing. She kissed her husband on the neck, she smoothed his hair with her fingertips. If you were up there, Ste’, all you’d see is parrots going cocorico, cocorico . You couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying and they didn’t even understand each other. You know what the O.A.S. is, you know what the opening to the left is? Next time, Lenù, don’t take me, take Pasquale, I’ll show you, he’ll put them in their place in a flash. Chimpanzees that piss and shit in the toilet instead of on the ground, and that’s why they give themselves a lot of airs, and they say they know what should be done in China and in Albania and in France and in Katanga. You, too, Lenù, I have to tell you: Look out, or you’ll be the parrots’ parrot. She turned to her husband, laughing. You should have heard her, she said. She made a little voice, cheechee, cheechee . Show Stefano how you speak to those people? You and Sarratore’s son: the same. The world brigade for peace; we have the technical capability; hunger, war . But do you really work that hard in school so you can say things just like he does? Whoever finds a solution to the problems is working for peace . Bravo. Do you remember how the son of Sarratore was able to find a solution: Do you remember, do you — and you pay attention to him? You, too, you want to be a puppet from the neighborhood who performs so you can be welcomed into the home of those people? You want to leave us alone in our own shit, cracking our skulls, while all of you go cocorico cocorico , hunger, war, working class, peace?

She was so spiteful, all the way home along Corso Vittorio Emanuele, that I was silent, and felt the poison that was transforming what had seemed to me an important moment of my life into a false step that had made me ridiculous. I struggled not to believe her. I felt she was truly hostile and capable of anything. She knew how to set the nerves of good people alight, in their breasts she kindled the fire of destruction. I felt that Gigliola and Pinuccia were right: it was she herself who in the photograph had blazed up like the devil. I hated her, and even Stefano noticed, and when he stopped at the gate and let me out on his side he said, “Bye, Lenù, good night, Lina’s joking,” and I muttered “Bye,” and went in. Only when the car had left did I hear Lila shouting at me, re-creating the voice that in her view I had deliberately assumed at the Galiani house: “Bye, hey, bye.”

That night began the long, painful period that led to our first break and a long separation.

I had trouble recovering. There had been a thousand causes of tension up until that moment; her unhappiness and, at the same time, her yearning to dominate were constantly surfacing. But never, ever, ever had she so explicitly set out to humiliate me. I stopped dropping in at the grocery. Although she had paid for my schoolbooks, although we had made that bet, I didn’t tell her that I had passed with all A’s and two A-pluses. Just after school ended, I started working in a bookstore on Via Mezzocannone, and I disappeared from the neighborhood without telling her. The memory of the sarcastic tone of that night, instead of fading, became magnified, and my resentment, too, increased. It seemed to me that nothing could justify what she had done to me. It never occurred to me, as, in fact, it had on other occasions, that she had felt the need to humiliate me in order to better endure her own humiliation.

I soon had confirmation that I really had made a good impression at the party, and that made the separation easier. I was wandering along Via Mezzocannone during my lunch break when I heard someone call me. It was Armando, on his way to take an exam. I learned that he was studying medicine and that the exam was difficult but, just the same, before vanishing in the direction of San Domenico Maggiore, he stopped to talk, piling on compliments and starting in again on politics. In the evening he showed up in the bookstore, he’d gotten a high mark, and was happy. He asked for my telephone number, I said I didn’t have a telephone; he asked if we could go for a walk the following Sunday, I said that on Sunday I had to help my mother in the house. He started talking about Latin America, where he intended to go right after graduating, to treat the destitute, and persuade them to take up arms against their oppressors, and he went on for so long that I had to send him away before the owner got irritated. In other words, I was pleased because he obviously liked me, and I was polite, but not available. Lila’s words had indeed done damage. My clothes were wrong, my hair was wrong, my tone of voice was false, I was ignorant. Besides, with the end of school, and without Professor Galiani, I had lost the habit of reading the newspapers and, partly because money was tight, I didn’t want to buy them out of my own pocket. Thus Naples, Italy, the world quickly went back to being a foggy terrain in which I could no longer orient myself. Armando talked, I nodded yes, but I understood little of what he was saying.