Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

Lila wouldn’t be convinced and as usual she had drawn Rino to her side. Her brother had first agreed with his father, irritated by the fact that she interfered in things to do with work, where it wasn’t a matter of books and he was the expert. Then gradually he had been captivated and now he quarreled with Fernando nearly every day, repeating what she had put into his head.

“Let’s at least try it.”

“No.”

“Have you seen the car the Solaras have, have you seen how well the Carraccis’ grocery is doing?”

“I’ve seen that the dry goods store that wanted to be a dressmaker’s gave it up and I’ve seen that Gorresio, because of his son’s stupidity, has bitten off more than he can chew with his motorcycles.”

“But the Solaras keep expanding.”

“Mind your own business and forget the Solaras.”

“Near the train tracks a new neighborhood is being developed.”

“Who gives a damn.”

“Papa, people are earning and they want to spend.”

“People spend on food because you have to eat every day. As for shoes, first of all you don’t eat them, and, second, when they break you fix them and they can last twenty years. Our work, right now, is to repair shoes and that’s it.”

I liked how that boy, who was always nice to me but capable of a brutality that frightened even his father a little, always, in every circumstance, supported his sister. I envied Lila that brother who was so solid, and sometimes I thought that the real difference between her and me was that I had only little brothers, and so no one with the power to encourage me and support me against my mother, freeing my mind, while Lila could count on Rino, who could defend her against anyone, whatever came into her mind. But really, I thought that Fernando was right, and was on his side. And discussing it with Lila, I discovered that she thought so, too.

Once she showed me the designs for shoes that she wanted to make with her brother, both men’s and women’s. They were beautiful designs, drawn on graph paper, rich in precisely colored details, as if she had had a chance to examine shoes like that close up in some world parallel to ours and then had fixed them on paper. In reality she had invented them in their entirety and in every part, as she had done in elementary school when she drew princesses, so that, although they were normal shoes, they didn’t resemble any that were seen in the neighborhood, or even those of the actresses in the photo novels.

“Do you like them?”

“They’re really elegant.”

“Rino says they’re difficult.”

“But he knows how to make them?”

“He swears he can.”

“And your father?”

“He certainly could do it.”

“Then make them.”

“Papa doesn’t want to.”

“Why?”

“He said that as long as I’m playing, fine, but he and Rino can’t waste time with me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that to actually do things takes time and money.”

She was on the point of showing me the figures she had put down, in secret from Rino, to understand how much it really would cost to make them. Then she stopped, folded up the pages she was holding, and told me it was pointless to waste time: her father was right.

“But then?”

“We ought to try anyway.”

“Fernando will get mad.”

“If you don’t try, nothing ever changes.”

What had to change, in her view, was always the same thing: poor, we had to become rich; having nothing, we had to reach a point where we had everything. I tried to remind her of the old plan of writing novels like the author of Little Women . I was stuck there, it was important to me. I was learning Latin just for that, and deep inside I was convinced that she took so many books from Maestro Ferraro’s circulating library only because, even though she wasn’t going to school anymore, even though she was now obsessed with shoes, she still wanted to write a novel with me and make a lot of money. Instead, she shrugged in her careless way, she had changed her idea of Little Women . “Now,” she explained, “to become truly rich you need a business.” So she thought of starting with a single pair of shoes, just to demonstrate to her father how beautiful and comfortable they were; then, once Fernando was convinced, production would start: two pairs of shoes today, four tomorrow, thirty in a month, four hundred in a year, so that, within a short time, they, she, her father, Rino, her mother, her other siblings, would set up a shoe factory, with machines and at least fifty workers: the Cerullo shoe factory.

“A shoe factory?”

“Yes.”

She spoke with great conviction, as she knew how to do, with sentences, in Italian, that depicted before my eyes the factory sign, Cerullo; the brand name stamped on the uppers, Cerullo; and then the Cerullo shoes, all splendid, all elegant, as in her drawings, shoes that once you put them on, she said, are so beautiful and so comfortable that at night you go to sleep without taking them off.

We laughed, we were having fun.

Then Lila paused. She seemed to realize that we were playing, as we had with our dolls years earlier, with Tina and Nu in front of the cellar grating, and she said, with an urgency for concreteness, which emphasized the impression she gave off, of being part child, part old woman, which was, it seemed to me, becoming her characteristic trait:

“You know why the Solara brothers think they’re the masters of the neighborhood?”

“Because they’re aggressive.”

“No, because they have money.”

“You think so?”

“Of course. Have you noticed that they’ve never bothered Pinuccia Carracci?”

“Yes.”

“And you know why they acted the way they did with Ada?”

“No.”

“Because Ada doesn’t have a father, her brother Antonio counts for nothing, and she helps Melina clean the stairs of the buildings.”

As a result, either we, too, had to make money, more than the Solaras, or, to protect ourselves against the brothers, we had to do them serious harm. She showed me a sharp shoemaker’s knife that she had taken from her father’s workshop.

“They won’t touch me, because I’m ugly and I don’t have my period,” she said, “but with you they might. If anything happens, tell me.”

I looked at her in confusion. We were almost thirteen, we knew nothing about institutions, laws, justice. We repeated, and did so with conviction, what we had heard and seen around us since early childhood. Justice was not served by violence? Hadn’t Signor Peluso killed Don Achille? I went home. I realized that with those last words she had admitted that I was important to her, and I was happy.

I passed the exams at the end of middle school with eights, and a nine in Italian and nine in Latin. I was the best in the school: better than Alfonso, who had an average of eight, and much better than Gino. For days and days I enjoyed that absolute superiority. I was much praised by my father, who began to boast to everyone about his oldest daughter who had gotten nine in Italian and nine, no less, in Latin. My mother, to my surprise, while she was in the kitchen washing vegetables, said to me, without turning:

“You can wear my silver bracelet Sunday, but don’t lose it.”

I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted. When I said to Carmela Peluso that I was the best in the school she immediately started talking to me about the way Alfonso looked at her when he went by. Gigliola Spagnuolo was bitter because she had to repeat the exams for Latin and mathematics and tried to regain prestige by saying that Gino was after her but she was keeping him at a distance because she was in love with Marcello Solara and maybe Marcello also loved her. Even Lila didn’t show particular pleasure. When I listed my grades, subject by subject, she said laughing, in her malicious tone, “You didn’t get ten?”