Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

When, after some awkward attempts, he tore her flesh with passionate brutality, Lila was absent. The night, the room, the bed, his kisses, his hands on her body, every sensation was absorbed by a single feeling: she hated Stefano Carracci, she hated his strength, she hated his weight on her, she hated his name and his surname.

They returned to the neighborhood four days later. That same evening Stefano invited his parents-in-law and his brother-in-law to the new house. With a humbler expression than usual, he asked Fernando to tell Lila what had happened with Silvio Solara. Fernando confirmed to his daughter, in unhappy, disjointed sentences, Stefano’s version. As for Rino, Carracci asked him, right afterward, to tell why, in the end, they had made the mutual but painful decision to give Marcello the shoes he insisted on. Rino, in the manner of a man who knows what’s what, declared pompously: There are situations in which certain choices are obligatory, then he started in with the serious trouble Pasquale, Antonio, and Enzo had got into when they beat up the Solara brothers and wrecked their car.

“You know who was more at risk?” he said, leaning toward his sister and raising his voice. “Them, your friends, those knights in shining armor. Marcello recognized them and was convinced that you had sent them. Stefano and I — what were we supposed to do? You wanted those three idiots to get a beating a lot worse than the one they gave? You wanted to ruin them? And for what, anyway? For a pair of size 43 shoes that your husband can’t wear because they’re too narrow for him and when it rains the water gets in? We made peace, and, since those shoes were so important to Marcello, we gave them to him.”

Words: with them you can do and undo as you please. Lila had always been good with words, but on that occasion, contrary to expectations, she didn’t open her mouth. Relieved, Rino reminded her spitefully that it was she who, ever since she was a child, had been harassing him, telling him they had to get rich. Then, she said, laughing, make us rich without complicating our life, which is already too complicated.

At that point — a surprise for the mistress of the house, though certainly not for the others — the doorbell rang, and Pinuccia, Alfonso, and their mother, Maria, appeared, with a tray of pastries freshly made by Spagnuolo himself, the Solaras’ pastry maker.

At first it seemed that they had come to celebrate the newlyweds’ return from their honeymoon, since Stefano passed around the wedding pictures, which he had just picked up from the photographer (for the movie, he explained, it would take a little longer). But it soon became clear that the wedding of Stefano and Lila was already old news, the pastries were intended to mark a new happy event: the engagement of Rino and Pinuccia. All the tension was set aside. Rino replaced the violent tones of a few minutes earlier with tender modulations in dialect, exaggerated pronouncements of love, the wonderful idea of having the engagement party right away, in his sister’s lovely house. Then, with a theatrical gesture, he took a package out of his pocket; the package, when it was unwrapped, revealed a dark rounded case; and the case, when it was opened, revealed a diamond ring.

Lila noted that it wasn’t that different from the one she wore on her finger, next to the wedding ring, and wondered where her brother had got the money. There were hugs and kisses. There was a lot of talk of the future, speculation about who would manage the Cerullo shoe store in Piazza dei Martiri when the Solaras opened it, in the fall. Rino supposed that Pinuccia would manage it, maybe by herself, maybe with Gigliola Spagnuolo, who was officially engaged to Michele and so was making claims. The family reunion became livelier and full of hope.

Lila remained standing most of the time, it hurt to sit down. No one, not even her mother, who was silent during the entire visit, seemed to notice her swollen, black right eye, the cut on her lower lip, the bruises on her arms.

She was still in that state when, there on the stairs that led to the house of her mother-in-law, I took off her glasses, unwound her scarf. The skin around her eye had a yellowish color, and her lower lip was a purple stain with fiery red stripes.

To her friends and relatives she said that she had fallen on the rocks in Amalfi on a beautiful sunny morning, when she and her husband had taken a boat to a beach just at the foot of a yellow wall. During the engagement lunch for her brother and Pinuccia she had used, in telling that lie, a sarcastic tone and they had all sarcastically believed her, especially the women, who knew what had to be said when the men who loved them and whom they loved beat them severely. Besides, there was no one in the neighborhood, especially of the female sex, who did not think that she had needed a good thrashing for a long time. So the beatings did not cause outrage, and in fact sympathy and respect for Stefano increased — there was someone who knew how to be a man.

But when I saw her so battered, my heart leaped to my throat, I embraced her. And when she said she hadn’t come to visit because she didn’t want me to see her in that state, tears came to my eyes. The story of her honeymoon, as the photonovels put it, although stripped down, almost cold, made me angry, pained me. And yet, I have to admit, I also felt a tenuous pleasure. I was content to discover that Lila now needed help, maybe protection, and that admission of fragility not toward the neighborhood but toward me moved me. I felt that the distances had unexpectedly gotten shorter again and I was tempted to tell her right away that I had decided to quit school, that school was useless, that I didn’t have the right qualities. It seemed to me that the news would comfort her.

But her mother-in-law looked out over the banister on the top floor and called her. Lila ended her story with a few hurried sentences, she said that Stefano had tricked her, that he was just like his father.

“You remember that Don Achille gave us money instead of the dolls?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“We shouldn’t have taken it.”

“We bought Little Women .”

“We were wrong: ever since that moment I’ve been wrong about everything.”

She wasn’t upset, she was sad. She put her dark glasses back on, she reknotted the scarf. I was pleased about that we ( we shouldn’t have taken it, we were wrong), but the abrupt transition to the I annoyed me: I have been wrong about everything. We , I would have liked to correct her, always we , but I didn’t. It seemed to me that she was trying to comprehend her new condition, and that she urgently needed to know what she could hold on to in order to confront it. Before starting up the flight of stairs she asked, “Would you like to come and study at my house?”

“When?”

“This afternoon, tomorrow, every day.”

“Stefano will be annoyed.”

“If he is the master, I am the master’s wife.”

“I don’t know, Lila.”

“I’ll give you a room, I’ll shut you in.”

“What’s the point?”

She shrugged.

“To know that you’re there.”

I didn’t say yes or no. I went off, and wandered through the city as usual. Lila was sure that I would never quit school. She had assigned me the role of the friend with glasses and pimples, always bent over her books, smart in school, and she couldn’t even imagine that I might change. But I didn’t want that role anymore. It seemed to me that, thanks to the humiliation of the unpublished article, I had thoroughly understood my inadequacy. Even though Nino was born and had grown up like Lila and me in that wretched outlying neighborhood, he was able to use school with intelligence, I was not. So stop deluding myself, stop striving. Accept your lot, as Carmela, Ada, Gigliola, and, in her way, Lila herself have long since done. I didn’t go to her house that afternoon or the following ones, and I continued to skip school, tormenting myself.