Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

In other words, the last ten days of July gave me a sense of well-being that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. I liked everything: getting up early, making breakfast, tidying up, walking in Barano, taking the road to the Maronti, uphill and down, lying in the sun and reading, going for a swim, returning to my book. I did not feel homesick for my father, my brothers and sister, my mother, the streets of the neighborhood, the public gardens. I missed only Lila, Lila who didn’t answer my letters. I was afraid of what was happening to her, good or bad, in my absence. It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.

At the end of July Nella told me that on the first of August, in place of the English, a Neapolitan family was to arrive. It was the second year they had come. Very respectable people, very polite, refined: especially the husband, a true gentleman who always said wonderful things to her. And then the older son, really a fine boy: tall, thin but strong, this year he was seventeen. “You won’t be alone anymore,” she said to me, and I was embarrassed, immediately filled with anxiety about this young man who was arriving, fearful that we wouldn’t be able to speak two words to each other, that he wouldn’t like me.

As soon as the English departed — they left me a couple of novels to practice my reading, and their address, so that if I ever decided to go to England I should go and see them — Nella had me help her clean the rooms, do the laundry, remake the beds. I was glad to do it, and as I was washing the floor she called to me from the kitchen: “How clever you are, you can even read in English. Are the books you brought not enough?”

And she went on praising me from a distance, in a loud voice, for how disciplined I was, how sensible, for how I read all day and also at night. When I joined her in the kitchen I found her with a book in her hand. She said that the man who was arriving the next day had written it himself. Nella kept it on her night table, every evening she read a poem, first to herself and then aloud. Now she knew them all by heart.

“Look what he wrote to me,” she said, and handed me the book.

It was Attempts at Serenity , by Donato Sarratore. The dedication read: “ To darling Nella, and to her jams .”

I immediately wrote to Lila: pages and pages of apprehension, joy, the wish to flee, intense foreshadowing of the moment when I would see Nino Sarratore, I would walk to the Maronti with him, we would swim, we would look at the moon and the stars, we would sleep under the same roof. All I could think of was that intense moment when, holding his brother by the hand, a century ago — ah, how much time had passed — he had declared his love. We were children then: now I felt grown-up, almost old.

The next day I went to the bus stop to help the guests carry their bags. I was very agitated, I hadn’t slept all night. The bus arrived, stopped, the travelers got out. I recognized Donato Sarratore, I recognized Lidia, his wife, I recognized Marisa, although she was very changed, I recognized Clelia, who was always by herself, I recognized little Pino, who was now a solemn kid, and I imagined that the capricious child who was annoying his mother must be the one who, the last time I had seen the entire Sarratore family, was still in a carriage, under the projectiles hurled by Melina. But I didn’t see Nino.

Marisa threw her arms around my neck with an enthusiasm I would never have expected: in all those years I had never, absolutely never, thought of her, while she said she had often thought of me with great nostalgia. When she alluded to the days in the neighborhood and told her parents that I was the daughter of Greco, the porter, Lidia, her mother, made a grimace of distaste and hurried to grab her little child to scold him for something or other, while Donato Sarratore saw to the luggage without even a remark like: How is your father.

I felt depressed. The Sarratores settled in their rooms, and I went to the sea with Marisa, who knew the Maronti and all Ischia well, and was already impatient, she wanted to go to the Port, where there was more activity, and to Forio, and to Casamicciola, anywhere but Barano, which according to her was a morgue. She told me that she was studying to be a secretary and had a boyfriend whom I would meet soon because he was coming to see her, but secretly. Finally she told me something that tugged at my heart. She knew all about me, she knew that I went to the high school, that I was very clever, and that Gino, the pharmacist’s son, was my boyfriend.

“Who told you?”

“My brother.”

So Nino had recognized me, so he knew who I was, so it was not inattention but perhaps timidity, perhaps uneasiness, perhaps shame for the declaration he had made to me as a child.

“I stopped going with Gino ages ago,” I said. “Your brother isn’t very well informed.”

“All he thinks about is studying, it’s already a lot that he told me about you, usually he’s got his head in the clouds.”

“He’s not coming?”

“He’ll come when Papa leaves.”

She spoke to me very critically about Nino. He had no feelings. He was never excited about anything, he didn’t get angry but he wasn’t nice, either. He was closed up in himself, all he cared about was studying. He didn’t like anything, he was cold-blooded. The only person who managed to get to him a little was his father. Not that they quarreled, he was a respectful and obedient son. But Marisa knew very well that Nino couldn’t stand his father. Whereas she adored him. He was the best and most intelligent man in the world.

“Is your father staying long? When is he leaving?” I asked her with perhaps excessive interest.

“Just three days. He has to work.”

“And Nino arrives in three days?”

“Yes. He pretended that he had to help the family of a friend of his move.”

“And it’s not true?”

“He doesn’t have any friends. And anyway he wouldn’t carry that stone from here to there even for my mamma, the only person he loves even a little, imagine if he’s going to help a friend.”

We went swimming, we dried off walking along the shore. Laughing, she pointed out to me something I had never noticed. At the end of the black beach were some motionless white forms. She dragged me, still laughing, over the burning sand and at a certain point it became clear that they were people. Living people, covered with mud. It was some sort of treatment, we didn’t know for what. We lay on the sand, rolling over, shoving each other, pretending to be mummies like the people down the beach. We had fun playing, then went swimming again.

In the evening the Sarratore family had dinner in the kitchen and invited Nella and me to join them. It was a wonderful evening. Lidia never mentioned the neighborhood, but, once her first impulse of hostility had passed, she asked about me. When Marisa told her that I was very studious and went to the same school as Nino she became particularly nice. The most congenial of all, however, was Donato Sarratore. He loaded Nella with compliments, praised my scholastic record, was extremely considerate toward Lidia, played with Ciro, the baby, wanted to clean up himself, kept me from washing the dishes.

I studied him carefully and he seemed different from the way I remembered him. He was thinner, certainly, and had grown a mustache, but apart from his looks there was something more that I couldn’t understand and that had to do with his behavior. Maybe he seemed to me more paternal than my father and uncommonly courteous.