Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

My mother, too, must have felt the weight of that humiliation. She went home in a surly mood, she told my father that the teachers weren’t happy with me, she needed help in the house and I ought to leave school. They discussed it at length, they quarreled, and in the end my father decided that, since I at least had been promoted, while Gigliola had been held back in two subjects, I deserved to continue.

I spent the summer lethargically, in the courtyard, at the ponds, generally with Gigliola, who often talked about the young university student who came to her house to give her private lessons and who, according to her, was in love with her. I listened but I was bored. Every so often I saw Lila with Carmela Peluso; she, too, had gone to a school for something or other, and she, too, had failed. I felt that Lila no longer wanted to be my friend, and that idea brought on a weary exhaustion. Sometimes, hoping that my mother wouldn’t see me, I lay down on the bed and dozed.

One afternoon I really fell asleep and when I woke I felt wet. I went to the bathroom to see what was wrong and discovered that my underpants were stained with blood. Terrified by I don’t know what, maybe a scolding from my mother for having hurt myself between my legs, I washed the underpants carefully, wrung them out, and put them on again wet. Then I went out into the heat of the courtyard. My heart was pounding.

I met Lila and Carmela, and walked with them to the parish church. I felt that I was getting wet again, but I tried to calm down by telling myself it was the wet underpants. When the fear became unbearable I whispered to Lila, “I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I want to tell just you.”

I took her by the arm, trying to drag her away from Carmela, but Carmela followed us. I was so worried that in the end I confessed to them both, but addressing only Lila.

“What can it be?” I asked.

Carmela knew all about it. She had had that bleeding for a year already, every month.

“It’s normal,” she said. “Girls have it naturally: you bleed for a few days, your stomach and your back hurt, but then it goes away.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Lila’s silence pushed me toward Carmela. The naturalness with which she had said what she knew reassured me and made me like her. I spent all afternoon talking to her, until dinner time. You wouldn’t die from that wound, I learned. Rather, “it means that you’re grown-up and you can make babies, if a man sticks his thingy in your stomach.”

Lila listened without saying anything, or almost anything. We asked if she had blood like us and saw her hesitate, then reluctantly answer no. Suddenly she seemed small, smaller than I had ever seen her. She was three or four inches shorter, all skin and bones, very pale in spite of the days spent outside. And she had failed. And she didn’t know what the blood was. And no boy had ever made a declaration to her.

“You’ll get it,” we both said, in a falsely comforting tone.

“What do I care,” she said. “I don’t have it because I don’t want to, it makes me sick. And anyone who has it makes me sick.”

She started to leave but then stopped and asked me, “How’s Latin?”

“Wonderful.”

“Are you good at it?”

“Very.”

She thought about it and muttered, “I failed on purpose. I don’t want to go to any school anymore.”

“What will you do?”

“Whatever I want.”

She left us there in the middle of the courtyard.

For the rest of the summer she didn’t appear. I became very friendly with Carmela Peluso, who, although she laughed too much and then complained too much, had absorbed Lila’s influence so potently that she became at times a kind of surrogate. In speech Carmela imitated her tone of voice, used some of her recurring expressions, gesticulated in a similar way, and when she walked tried to move like her, even though physically she was more like me: pretty and plump, bursting with health. That sort of misappropriation partly repulsed and partly attracted me. I wavered between irritation at a remake that seemed a caricature and fascination because, even diluted, Lila’s habits still enchanted me. It was with those that Carmela finally bound me to her. She told me how terrible the new school had been: everyone teased her and the teachers couldn’t stand her. She told of going to the prison of Poggioreale with her mother and siblings to see her father, and how they all wept. She told me that her father was innocent, that it was a black creature who killed Don Achille, part male but mostly female, who lived with the rats and came out of the sewer grates, even in daytime, and did whatever terrible thing had to be done before escaping underground. She told me unexpectedly, with a fatuous little smile, that she was in love with Alfonso Carracci. Right afterward her smile turned to tears: it was a love that tortured her, and sapped her strength, the daughter of the murderer was in love with the son of the victim. It was enough for her to see him crossing the courtyard or passing by on the stradone to feel faint.

This was a confidence that made a great impression on me and consolidated our friendship. Carmela swore that she had never talked about it to anyone, not even Lila: if she had decided to open up to me it was because she couldn’t bear to keep it inside anymore. I liked her dramatic tone. We examined all the possible consequences of that passion until school started again and I no longer had time to listen to her.

What a story! Not even Lila, perhaps, would have been able to make up such a tale.

A period of unhappiness began. I got fat, and under the skin of my chest two hard shoots sprouted, hair flourished in my armpits and my pubis, I became sad and at the same time anxious. In school I worked harder than I ever had, yet the mathematics problems almost never gave the result expected by the textbook, the Latin sentences seemed to make no sense. As soon as I could I locked myself in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, naked. I no longer knew who I was. I began to suspect that I would keep changing, until from me my mother would emerge, lame, with a crossed eye, and no one would love me anymore. I cried often, without warning. My chest, meanwhile, became large and soft. I felt at the mercy of obscure forces acting inside my body, I was always agitated.

One day as I came out of school, Gino, the pharmacist’s son, followed me along the street and said that his classmates claimed that my breasts weren’t real, I stuffed them with cotton batting. He laughed as he spoke. He said that he thought they were real, he had bet twenty lire on it. Finally he said that, if he won, he would keep ten lire for himself and would give me ten, but I had to prove that I didn’t use padding.

That request frightened me. Since I didn’t know how to act, I deliberately resorted to Lila’s bold tone:

“Give me the ten lire.”

“Why, am I right?”

“Yes.”

He ran away, and I was disappointed. But soon he returned with a boy from his class, a skinny boy whose name I don’t remember, with a dark down above his lip. Gino said to me, “He has to be there, otherwise the others won’t believe I’ve won.”

Again I resorted to Lila’s tone.

“First the money.”

“And if you have padding?”

“I don’t.”

He gave me ten lire and we all went, silently, to the top floor of a building near the public gardens. There, next to the iron door that led to the terrace, where I was clearly outlined by slender segments of light, I lifted up my shirt and showed them my breasts. The two stood staring as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. Then they turned and ran down the stairs.