Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

The next day there was another surprise. While I was sweeping the floor of the bookstore, Nino and Nadia appeared. They had heard from Armando where I worked and had come just to say hello. They invited me to go to the movies with them the following Sunday. I had to answer as I had answered Armando: it wasn’t possible, I worked all week, and my mother and father wanted me home on my day off.

“But a little walk in the neighborhood — you could do that?”

“That, yes.”

“So we’ll come see you.”

Since the owner was calling for me more impatiently than usual — he was a man of around sixty, the skin on his face seemed dirty, he was irascible, and had a dissolute look — they left right away.

Late in the morning on the following Sunday, I heard someone calling from the courtyard and I recognized Nino’s voice. I looked out, he was alone. I quickly tried to make myself presentable and, without even telling my mother, happy and at the same time anxious, I ran down. When I found myself before him I could hardly breathe. “I only have ten minutes,” I said, and we didn’t go out to walk along the stradone , but wandered among the houses. Why had he come without Nadia? Why had he come all the way here if she couldn’t? He answered my questions without my asking. Some relatives of Nadia’s father were visiting and she had been obliged to stay home. He had wanted to see the neighborhood again but also to bring me something to read, the latest issue of a journal called Cronache Meridionali . He handed me the issue with a petulant gesture, I thanked him, and he started, incongruously, to criticize the review, and so I asked why he had decided to give it to me. “It’s rigid,” he said, and added, laughing, “Like Professor Galiani and Armando.” Then he turned serious, he assumed a tone that was like an old man’s. He said that he owed a great deal to our professor, that without her the period of high school would have been a waste of time, but that you had to be on guard, keep her at a distance. “Her greatest defect,” he said emphatically, “is that she can’t bear for someone to have an opinion different from hers. Take from her everything she can give you, but then go your own way.” Then he returned to the review, he said that Galiani also wrote for it and suddenly, with no connection, he mentioned Lila: “Then, if possible, have her read it, too.” I didn’t tell him that Lila no longer read anything, that now she was Signora Carracci, that she had kept only her meanness from when she was a child. I was evasive, and asked about Nadia, he told me that she was taking a long car trip with her family, to Norway, and then would spend the rest of the summer in Anacapri, where her father had a family house.

“Will you go and see her?”

“Once or twice — I have to study.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Very well. She’s going back to Barano this year, she’s made up with the woman who owns the house.”

“Will you go on vacation with your family?”

“I? With my father? Never ever. I’ll be on Ischia but on my own.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a friend who has a house in Forio: his parents leave it to him for the whole summer, and we’ll stay there and study. You?”

“I’m working at Mezzocannone until September.”

“Even during the mid-August holiday?”

“No, for the holiday, no.”

He smiled. “Then come to Forio, the house is big. Maybe Nadia will come for two or three days.”

I smiled, nervously. To Forio? To Ischia? To a house without adults? Did he remember the Maronti? Did he remember that we had kissed there? I said I had to go in. “I’ll stop by again,” he promised. “I want to know what you think of the review.” He added, in a low voice, his hands stuck in his pockets, “I like talking to you.”

He had talked a lot, in fact. I was proud, thrilled, that he had felt comfortable. I murmured, “Me, too,” although I had said little or nothing, and was about to go in when something happened that disturbed us both. A cry cut the Sunday quiet of the courtyard and I saw Melina at the window, waving her arms, trying to attract our attention. When Nino also turned to look, perplexed, Melina cried even louder, a mixture of joy and anguish. She cried, Donato.

“Who is it?” Nino asked.

“Melina,” I said, “do you remember?”

He made a grimace of uneasiness. “Is she angry with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s saying Donato.”

“Yes.”

He turned again to look toward the window where the widow was leaning out, repeatedly calling that name.

“Do you think I look like my father?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

He said nervously, “I’ll go.”

“You’d better.”

He left quickly, shoulders bent, while Melina cried louder and louder, increasingly agitated: Donato, Donato, Donato.

I also escaped, I went home with my heart pounding, and a thousand tangled thoughts. Not a single feature of Nino’s connected him to Sarratore: not his height, not his face, not his manners, not even his voice or his gaze. He was an anomalous, sweet fruit. How fascinating he was with his long, untidy hair. How different from any other male form: in all Naples there was no one who resembled him. And he had respect for me, even if I still had my last year of high school to do and he was going to the university. He had come all the way to the neighborhood on a Sunday. He had been worried about me, he had come to put me on my guard. He had wanted to warn me that Professor Galiani was all well and good but even she had her flaws, and meanwhile he had brought me that journal in the conviction that I had the capacity to read it and discuss it, and he had even gone so far as to invite me to Ischia, to Forio, for the August holiday. Something impractical, not a real invitation, he himself knew perfectly well that my parents were not like Nadia’s, they would never let me go; and yet he had invited me just the same, because in the words he said I heard other words, unsaid, like I care a lot about seeing you, how I’d like to return to our talks at the Port, at the Maronti. Yes, yes, I heard myself shouting in my head, I’d like it, too, I’ll join you, in August I’ll run away, no matter what.

I hid the review among my books. But at night, as soon as I was in bed, I looked at the table of contents and was startled. There was an article by Nino. An article by him in that very serious-looking magazine: almost a book, not the faded gray student magazine in which, two years earlier, he had suggested publishing my account of the priest, but important pages written by adults for adults. And yet there he was, Antonio Sarratore, name and last name. And I knew him. And he was only two years older than me.

I read, I didn’t understand much, I reread. The article talked about Planning with a capital “P,” Plan with a capital “P,” and it was written in a complicated style. But it was a piece of his intelligence, a piece of his person, that, without boasting, quietly, he had given to me.

To me .

Tears came to my eyes, it was late when I put the magazine down. Talk about it to Lila? Lend it to her? No, it was mine. I didn’t want to have a real friendship with her anymore, just hello, trite phrases. She didn’t know how to appreciate me. Whereas others did: Armando, Nadia, Nino. They were my friends, to them I owed my confidences. They had immediately seen in me what she had hastened not to see. Because she had the gaze of the neighborhood. She was able to see only the way Melina did, who, locked in her madness, saw Donato in Nino, took him for her former lover.

At first I didn’t want to go to Pinuccia and Rino’s wedding, but Pinuccia came herself to bring me the invitation and since she treated me with exaggerated affection, and in fact asked my advice about many things, I didn’t know how to say no, even though she didn’t extend the invitation to the rest of my family. It’s not me who’s discourteous, she apologized, but Stefano. Not only had her brother refused to give her any of the family’s money so that she could buy a house (he had told her that the investments he had made in the shoes and in the new grocery had left him broke) but, since it was he who had to pay for the wedding dress, the photographer, and the refreshments, he had personally removed half the neighborhood from the guest list. It was extremely rude behavior, and Rino was even more embarrassed than she was. His bride would have liked a wedding as lavish as his sister’s and a new house, like hers, with a view of the railroad. Although he was by now the proprietor of a shoe factory, he couldn’t manage with his own resources, but it was partly because he was a spendthrift; he had just bought a Fiat 1100, he didn’t have a lira left. And so, after a lot of resistance, they had agreed to go and live in Don Achille’s old house, evicting Maria from the bedroom. They intended to save as much as possible and, as soon as they could, buy an apartment nicer than Stefano and Lila’s. My brother is a shit, Pinuccia said in conclusion, bitterly: when it comes to his wife he throws his money around, while for his sister he doesn’t have a cent.