Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

I never asked her what books she had read and what books she was reading, there wasn’t time, we had to study. She drilled me, and was furious if I didn’t have the answers. Once she slapped me on the arm, hard, with her long, thin hands, and didn’t apologize; rather, she said that if I kept making mistakes she would hit me again, and harder. She was enchanted by the Latin dictionary, so large, pages and pages, so heavy — she had never seen one. She constantly looked up words, not only the ones in the exercises but any that occurred to her.

She assigned homework in the tone she had learned from our teacher Maestra Oliviero. She obliged me to translate thirty sentences a day, twenty from Latin to Italian and ten from Italian to Latin. She translated them, too, much more quickly than I did. At the end of the summer, when the exam was approaching, she said warily, having observed skeptically how I looked up words I didn’t know in the dictionary, in the same order in which I found them in the sentence to be translated, fixed on the principal definitions, and only then made an effort to understand the meaning:

“Did the teacher tell you to do it like that?”

The teacher never said anything, she simply assigned the exercises. I came up with that method.

She was silent for a moment, then she said to me:

“Read the whole sentence in Latin first, then see where the verb is. According to the person of the verb you can tell what the subject is. Once you have the subject you look for the complements: the object if the verb is transitive, or if not other complements. Try it like that.”

I tried. Suddenly translating seemed easy. In September I went to the exam, I did the written part without a mistake and answered all the questions in the oral part.

“Who gave you lessons?” the teacher asked, frowning.

“A friend.”

“A university student?”

I didn’t know what that meant. I said yes.

Lila was waiting for me outside, in the shade. When I came out I hugged her, I told her that I had done really well and asked if we would study together the following year. Since it was she who had first proposed that we meet just to study, inviting her to continue seemed to me a good way of expressing my joy and gratitude. She detached herself with a gesture almost of annoyance. She said she just wanted to understand what that Latin was that those clever ones studied.

“And then?”

“I’ve understood, that’s enough.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Yes. I’ll get some books from the library.”

“In Latin?”

“Yes.”

“But there’s still a lot to study.”

“You study for me, and if I have trouble you’ll help me. Now I have something to do with my brother.”

“What?”

“I’ll show you later.”

School began again and right away I did well in all the subjects. I couldn’t wait for Lila to ask me to help her in Latin or anything else, and so, I think, I studied not so much for school as for her. I became first in the class; even in elementary school I hadn’t done so well.

That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough. I became fuller in the chest, the thighs, the rear. One Sunday when I was going to the gardens, where I was planning to meet Gigliola Spagnuolo, the Solara brothers approached me in the 1100. Marcello, the older, was at the wheel, Michele, the younger, was sitting next to him. They were both handsome, with glossy black hair, white teeth. But of the two I liked Marcello better; he resembled Hector as he was depicted in the school copy of the Iliad. They followed me the whole way, I on the sidewalk and they next to me, in the 1100.

“Have you ever been in a car?”

“No.”

“Get in, we’ll take you for a ride.”

“My father won’t let me.”

“And we won’t tell him. When do you get the chance to ride in a car like this?”

Never, I thought. But meanwhile I said no and kept saying no all the way to the gardens, where the car accelerated and disappeared in a flash beyond the buildings that were under construction. I said no because if my father found out that I had gone in that car, even though he was a good and loving man, even though he loved me very much, he would have beat me to death, while at the same time my little brothers, Peppe and Gianni, young as they were, would feel obliged, now and in the future, to try to kill the Solara brothers. There were no written rules, everyone knew that was how it was. The Solaras knew it, too, since they had been polite, and had merely invited me to get in.

They were not, some time later, with Ada, the oldest daughter of Melina Cappuccio, that is the crazy widow who had caused the scandal when the Sarratores moved. Ada was fourteen. On Sunday, in secret from her mother, she put on lipstick and, with her long, straight legs, and breasts even larger than mine, she looked grown-up and pretty. The Solara brothers made some vulgar remarks to her, Michele grabbed her by the arm, opened the car door, pulled her inside. They brought her back an hour later to the same place, and Ada was a little angry, but also laughing.

But among those who saw her dragged into the car were some who reported it to Antonio, her older brother, who worked as a mechanic in Gorresio’s shop. Antonio was a hard worker, disciplined, very shy, obviously wounded by both the untimely death of his father and the unbalanced behavior of his mother. Without saying a single word to friends and relatives he waited in front of the Bar Solara for Marcello and Michele, and when the brothers showed up he confronted them, punching and kicking without even a word of preamble. For a few minutes he managed pretty well, but then the father Solara and one of the barmen came out. They beat Antonio bloody and none of the passersby, none of the customers, intervened to help him.

We girls were divided on this episode. Gigliola Spagnuolo and Carmela Peluso took the part of the Solaras, but only because they were handsome and had an 1100. I wavered. In the presence of my two friends I favored the Solaras and we competed for who loved them most, since in fact they were very handsome and it was impossible not to imagine the impression we would make sitting next to one of them in the car. But I also felt that they had behaved badly with Ada, and that Antonio, even though he wasn’t very good-looking, even though he wasn’t muscular like the brothers, who went to the gym every day to lift weights, had been courageous in confronting them. So in the presence of Lila, who expressed without half measures that same position, I, too, expressed some reservations.

Once the discussion became so heated that Lila, maybe because she wasn’t developed as we were and didn’t know the pleasure-fear of having the Solaras’ gaze on her, became paler than usual and said that, if what happened to Ada had happened to her, to avoid trouble for her father and her brother Rino she would take care of the two of them herself.

“Because Marcello and Michele don’t even look at you,” said Gigliola Spagnuolo, and we thought that Lila would get angry.

Instead she said seriously, “It’s better that way.”

She was as slender as ever, but tense in every fiber. I looked at her hands and marveled: in a short time they had become like Rino’s, like her father’s, with the skin at the tips yellowish and thick. Even if no one forced her — that wasn’t her job, in the shop — she had started to do small tasks, she prepared the thread, took out stitches, glued, even stitched, and now she handled Fernando’s tools almost like her brother. That was why that year she never asked me anything about Latin. Eventually, she told me the plan she had in mind, a thing that had nothing to do with books: she was trying to persuade her father to make new shoes. But Fernando didn’t want to hear about it. “Making shoes by hand,” he told her, “is an art without a future: today there are cars and cars cost money and the money is either in the bank or with the loan sharks, not in the pockets of the Cerullo family.” Then she insisted, she filled him with sincere praise: “No one knows how to make shoes the way you do, Papa.” Even if that was true, he responded, everything was made in factories now, and since he had worked in the factories he knew very well what lousy stuff came out of them; but there was little to do about it, when people needed new shoes they no longer went to the neighborhood shoemaker, they went to the stores in the center of town, on the Rettifilo, so even if you wanted to make the handcrafted product properly, you wouldn’t sell it, you’d be throwing away money and labor, you’d ruin yourself.