Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

One day when I was at Maestra Oliviero’s house for our lesson, I took advantage of Gigliola being in the bathroom to take out The Blue Fairy . I said it was a wonderful novel written by Lila and that Lila wanted her to read it. But the teacher, who for five years had been enthusiastic about everything Lila did, except when she was bad, replied coldly:

“Tell Cerullo that she would do well to study for the diploma, instead of wasting time.” And although she kept Lila’s novel, she left it on the table without even giving it a glance.

That attitude confused me. What had happened? Was she angry with Lila’s mother? Had her rage extended to Lila herself? Was she upset about the money that the parents of my friend wouldn’t give her? I didn’t understand. A few days later I cautiously asked her if she had read The Blue Fairy . She answered in an unusual tone, obscurely, as if only she and I could truly understand.

“Do you know what the plebs are, Greco?”

“Yes, the people, the tribunes of the plebs are the Gracchi.”

“The plebs are quite a nasty thing.”

“Yes.”

“And if one wishes to remain a plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children deserve nothing. Forget Cerullo and think of yourself.”

Maestra Oliviero never said anything about The Blue Fairy . Lila asked about it a couple of times, then she let it go. She said grimly:

“As soon as I have time I’ll write another, that one wasn’t good.”

“It was wonderful.”

“It was terrible.”

But she became less lively, especially in class, probably because she realized that the teacher had stopped praising her, and sometimes seemed irritated by her excesses of virtuosity. When it came time for the competition at the end of the year she was still the best, but without her old impudence. At the end of the day, the principal presented to those remaining in competition — Lila, Gigliola, and me — an extremely difficult problem that he had invented himself. Gigliola and I struggled in vain. Lila, narrowing her eyes to cracks, applied herself. She was the last to give up. She said, with a timidity unusual for her, that the problem couldn’t be solved, because there was a mistake in the premise, but she didn’t know what it was. Maestra Oliviero scolded her harshly. I saw Lila standing at the blackboard, chalk in hand, very small and pale, assaulted by volleys of cruel phrases. I felt her suffering, I couldn’t bear the trembling of her lower lip and nearly burst into tears.

“When one cannot solve a problem,” the teacher concluded coldly, “one does not say, There is a mistake in the problem, one says, I am not capable of solving it.”

The principal was silent. As far as I remember, the day ended there.

Shortly before the final test in elementary school Lila pushed me to do another of the many things that I would never have had the courage to do by myself. We decided to skip school, and cross the boundaries of the neighborhood.

It had never happened before. As far back as I could remember, I had never left the four-story white apartment buildings, the courtyard, the parish church, the public gardens, I had never felt the urge to. Trains passed continuously on the other side of the scrubland, trucks and cars passed up and down along the stradone , and yet I can’t remember a single occasion when I asked myself, my father, my teacher: where are the cars going, the trucks, the trains, to what city, to what world?

Nor had Lila appeared particularly interested, but this time she organized everything. She told me to tell my mother that after school we were all going to the teacher’s house for a party to mark the end of the school year, and although I tried to remind her that the teachers had never invited all us girls to their houses for a party, she said that that was the very reason we should say it. The event would seem so exceptional that none of our parents would be bold enough to go to school and ask if it was true or not. As usual, I trusted her, and things went just as she had said. At my house everyone believed it, not only my father and my sister and brothers but even my mother.

The night before, I couldn’t sleep. What was beyond the neighborhood, beyond its well-known perimeter? Behind us rose a thickly wooded hill and a few structures in the shelter of the gleaming railroad tracks. In front of us, beyond the stradone , stretched a pitted road that skirted the ponds. To the right was a strip of treeless countryside, under an enormous sky. To the left was a tunnel with three entrances, but if you climbed up to the railroad tracks, on clear days you could see, beyond some low houses and walls of tufa and patches of thick vegetation, a blue mountain with one low peak and one a little higher, which was called Vesuvius and was a volcano.

But nothing that we had before our eyes every day, or that could be seen if we clambered up the hill, impressed us. Trained by our schoolbooks to speak with great skill about what we had never seen, we were excited by the invisible. Lila said that in the direction of Vesuvius was the sea. Rino, who had been there, had told her that the water was blue and sparkling, a marvelous sight. On Sundays, especially in summer, but often, too, in winter, he went with friends to swim, and he had promised to take her there. He wasn’t the only one, naturally, who had seen the sea, others we knew had also seen it. Once Nino Sarratore and his sister Marisa had talked about it, in the tone of those who found it normal to go every so often to eat taralli and seafood. Gigliola Spagnuolo had also been there. She, Nino, and Marisa had, lucky for them, parents who took their children on outings far away, not just around the corner to the public gardens in front of the parish church. Ours weren’t like that, they didn’t have time, they didn’t have money, they didn’t have the desire. It was true that I seemed to have a vague bluish memory of the sea, my mother claimed she had taken me as a small child, when she had to have sand treatments for her injured leg. But I didn’t much believe my mother, and to Lila, who didn’t know anything about it, I admitted that I didn’t know anything, either. So she planned to do as Rino had, to set off on the road and get there by herself. She persuaded me to go with her. Tomorrow.

I got up early, I did everything as if I were going to school — my bread and milk, my schoolbag, my smock. I waited for Lila as usual in front of the gate, only instead of going to the right we crossed the stradone and turned left, toward the tunnel.

It was early morning and already hot. There was a strong odor of earth and grass drying in the sun. We climbed among tall shrubs, on indistinct paths that led toward the tracks. When we reached an electrical pylon we took off our smocks and put them in the schoolbags, which we hid in the bushes. Then we raced through the scrubland, which we knew well, and flew excitedly down the slope that led to the tunnel. The entrance on the right was very dark: we had never been inside that obscurity. We held each other by the hand and entered. It was a long passage, and the luminous circle of the exit seemed far away. Once we got accustomed to the shadowy light, we saw lines of silvery water that slid along the walls, large puddles. Apprehensively, dazed by the echo of our steps, we kept going. Then Lila let out a shout and laughed at the violent explosion of sound. Immediately I shouted and laughed in turn. From that moment all we did was shout, together and separately: laughter and cries, cries and laughter, for the pleasure of hearing them amplified. The tension diminished, the journey began.

Ahead of us were many hours when no one in our families would look for us. When I think of the pleasure of being free, I think of the start of that day, of coming out of the tunnel and finding ourselves on a road that went straight as far as the eye could see, the road that, according to what Rino had told Lila, if you got to the end arrived at the sea. I felt joyfully open to the unknown. It was entirely different from going down into the cellar or up to Don Achille’s house. There was a hazy sun, a strong smell of burning. We walked for a long time between crumbling walls invaded by weeds, low structures from which came voices in dialect, sometimes a clamor. We saw a horse make its way slowly down an embankment and cross the street, whinnying. We saw a young woman looking out from a balcony, combing her hair with a flea comb. We saw a lot of small snotty children who stopped playing and looked at us threateningly. We also saw a fat man in an undershirt who emerged from a tumbledown house, opened his pants, and showed us his penis. But we weren’t scared of anything: Don Nicola, Enzo’s father, sometimes let us pat his horse, the children were threatening in our courtyard, too, and there was old Don Mimì who showed us his disgusting thing when we were coming home from school. For at least three hours, the road we were walking on did not seem different from the segment that we looked out on every day. And I felt no responsibility for the right road. We held each other by the hand, we walked side by side, but for me, as usual, it was as if Lila were ten steps ahead and knew precisely what to do, where to go. I was used to feeling second in everything, and so I was sure that to her, who had always been first, everything was clear: the pace, the calculation of the time available for going and coming back, the route that would take us to the sea. I felt as if she had everything in her head ordered in such a way that the world around us would never be able to create disorder. I abandoned myself happily. I remember a soft light that seemed to come not from the sky but from the depths of the earth, even though, on the surface, it was poor, and ugly.