Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

During that period I felt strong. At school I acquitted myself perfectly, I told Maestra Oliviero about my successes and she praised me. I saw Gino, and every day we walked to the Bar Solara: he bought a pastry, we shared it, we went home. Sometimes I even had the impression that it was Lila who depended on me and not I on her. I had crossed the boundaries of the neighborhood, I went to the high school, I was with boys and girls who were studying Latin and Greek, and not, like her, with construction workers, mechanics, cobblers, fruit and vegetable sellers, grocers, shoemakers. When she talked to me about Dido or her method for learning English words or the third declension or what she pondered when she talked to Pasquale, I saw with increasing clarity that it made her somewhat uneasy, as if it were ultimately she who felt the need to continuously prove that she could talk to me as an equal. Even when, one afternoon, with some uncertainty, she decided to show me how far she and Rino were with the secret shoe they were making, I no longer felt that she inhabited a marvelous land without me. It seemed instead that both she and her brother hesitated to talk to me about things of such small value.

Or maybe it was only that I was beginning to feel superior. When they dug around in a storeroom and took out the box, I encouraged them artificially. But the pair of men’s shoes they showed me seemed truly unusual; they were size 43, the size of Rino and Fernando, brown, and just as I remembered them in one of Lila’s drawings: they seemed both light and strong. I had never seen anything like them on the feet of anyone. While Lila and Rino let me touch them and demonstrated their qualities, I praised them enthusiastically. “Touch here,” Rino said, excited by my praise, “and tell me if you feel the stitches.” “No,” I said, “you can’t feel them.” Then he took the shoes out of my hands, bent them, widened them, showed me their durability. I approved, I said bravo the way Maestra Oliviero did when she wanted to encourage us. But Lila didn’t seem satisfied. The more good qualities her brother listed, the more defects she showed me and said to Rino, “How long would it take Papa to see these mistakes?” At one point she said, seriously, “Let’s test with water again.” Her brother seemed opposed. She filled a basin anyway, put her hand in one of the shoes as if it were a foot, and walked it in the water a little. “She has to play,” Rino said, like a big brother who is annoyed by the childish acts of his little sister.

But as soon as he saw Lila take out the shoe he became preoccupied and asked, “So?”

Lila took out her hand, rubbed her fingers, held it out to him.

“Touch.”

Rino put his hand in, said, “It’s dry.”

“It’s wet.”

“Only you feel the wetness. Touch it, Lenù.”

I touched it.

“It’s a little damp,” I said.

Lila was displeased.

“See? You hold it in the water for a minute and it’s already wet, it’s no good. We have to unglue it and unstitch it all again.”

“What the fuck if there’s a little dampness?”

Rino got angry. Not only that: right before my eyes, he went through a kind of transformation. He became red in the face, he swelled up around the eyes and cheekbones, he couldn’t contain himself and exploded in a series of curses and expletives against his sister. He complained that if they went on like that they would never finish. He reproached Lila because she first encouraged him and then discouraged him. He shouted that he wouldn’t stay forever in that wretched place to be his father’s servant and watch others get rich. He grabbed the iron foot, pretended to throw it at her, and if he really had he would have killed her.

I left, on the one hand confused by that rage in a youth who was usually kind and on the other proud of how authoritative, how definitive my opinion had been.

In the following days I found that my acne was drying up.

“You’re really doing well, it’s the satisfaction you get from school, it’s love,” Lila said to me, and I felt that she was a little sad.

As the New Year’s Eve celebration approached, Rino was seized by the desire to set off more fireworks than anyone else, especially the Solaras. Lila made fun of him, but sometimes she became harsh with him. She told me that her brother, who at first had been skeptical about the possibility of making money with the shoes, had now begun to count on it too heavily, already he saw himself as the owner of the Cerullo shoe factory and didn’t want to go back to repairing shoes. This worried her, it was a side of Rino she didn’t know. He had always seemed to her only generously impetuous, sometimes aggressive, but not a braggart. Now, though, he posed as what he was not. He felt he was close to wealth. A boss. Someone who could give the neighborhood the first sign of the good fortune the new year would bring by setting off a lot of fireworks, more than the Solara brothers, who had become in his eyes the model of the young man to emulate and indeed to surpass, people whom he envied and considered enemies to be beaten, so that he could assume their role.

Lila never said, as she had with Carmela and the other girls in the courtyard: maybe I planted a fantasy in his head that he doesn’t know how to control. She herself believed in the fantasy, felt it could be realized, and her brother was an important element of that realization. And then she loved him, he was six years older, she didn’t want to reduce him to a child who can’t handle his dreams. But she often said that Rino lacked concreteness, he didn’t know how to confront difficulties with his feet on the ground, he tended to get carried away. Like that competition with the Solaras, for example.

“Maybe he’s jealous of Marcello,” I said once.

“What?”

She smiled, pretending not to understand, but she had told me herself. Marcello Solara passed by and hung around in front of the shoemaker’s shop every day, both on foot and in the 1100, and Rino must have been aware of it, since he had said many times to his sister, “Don’t you dare get too familiar with that shit.” Maybe, who knows, since he wasn’t able to beat up the Solaras for chasing after his sister, he wished to demonstrate his strength by means of fireworks.

“If that’s true, you’ll agree that I’m right?”

“Right about what?”

“That he’s acting like a big shot: where’s he going to get the money for the fireworks?”

It was true. The last night of the year was a night of battle, in the neighborhood and throughout Naples. Dazzling lights, explosions. The dense smoke from the gunpowder made everything hazy, it entered the houses, burned your eyes, made you cough. But the pop of the poppers, the hiss of the rockets, the cannonades of the missiles had a cost and as usual those who set off the most were those with the most money. We Grecos had no money, at my house the contribution to the end-of-the-year fireworks was small. My father bought a box of sparklers, one of wheels, and one of slender rockets. At midnight he put in my hand, since I was the oldest, the stem of a sparkler or of a Catherine wheel, and lighted it, and I stood motionless, excited and terrified, staring at the whirling sparks, the brief swirls of fire a short distance from my fingers. He then stuck the shafts of the rockets in glass bottles on the marble windowsill, burned the fuses with the tip of his cigarette, and, excitedly, launched the luminous whistles into the sky. Then he threw the bottles, too, into the street.

Similarly at Lila’s house they set off just a few or none, and Rino rebelled. From the age of twelve he had gotten into the habit of going out to celebrate midnight with people more daring than his father, and his exploits in recovering unexploded bottles were famous — as soon as the chaos of the celebration was over he would go in search of them. He would assemble them all near the ponds, light them, and delight in the high flare, trac trac trac , the final explosion. He still had a dark scar on one hand, a broad stain, from a time when he hadn’t pulled back fast enough.