Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

This sensation intensified in the next two days. Sarratore, when we went to the beach, wouldn’t allow Lidia or us two girls to carry anything. He loaded himself up with the umbrella, the bags with towels and food for lunch, on the way and, equally, on the way back, when the road was all uphill. He gave the bundles to us only when Ciro whined and insisted on being carried. He had a lean body, without much hair. He wore a bathing suit of an indefinable color, not of fabric, it seemed a light wool. He swam a lot but didn’t go far out, he wanted to show me and Marisa how to swim freestyle. His daughter swam like him, with the same very careful, slow arm strokes, and I immediately began to imitate them. He expressed himself more in Italian than in dialect and tended somewhat insistently, especially with me, to come out with convoluted sentences and unusual phrasings. He summoned us cheerfully, me, Lidia, Marisa, to run back and forth on the beach with him to tone our muscles, and meanwhile he made us laugh with funny faces, little cries, comical walks. When he swam with his wife they stayed together, floating, they talked in low voices, and often laughed. The day he left, I was sorry as Marisa was sorry, as Lidia was sorry, as Nella was sorry. The house, though it echoed with our voices, seemed silent, a tomb. The only consolation was that finally Nino would arrive.

I tried to suggest to Marisa that we should go and wait for him at the Port, but she refused, she said her brother didn’t deserve that attention. Nino arrived in the evening. Tall, thin, in a blue shirt, dark pants, and sandals, with a bag over his shoulder, he showed not the least emotion at finding me in Ischia, in that house, so I thought that in Naples they must have a telephone, that Marisa had found a way of warning him. At dinner he spoke in monosyllables, and he didn’t appear at breakfast. He woke up late, we went late to the beach, and he carried little or nothing. He dove in immediately, decisively, and swam out to sea effortlessly, without the ostentatious virtuosity of his father. He disappeared: I was afraid he had drowned, but neither Marisa nor Lidia was worried. He reappeared almost two hours later and began reading, smoking one cigarette after another. He read for the entire day, without saying a word to us, arranging the cigarette butts in the sand in a row, two by two. I also started reading, refusing the invitation of Marisa to walk along the shore. At dinner he ate in a hurry and went out. I cleared, I washed the dishes thinking of him. I made my bed in the kitchen and started reading again, waiting for him to come back. I read until one, then fell asleep with the light on and the book open on my chest. In the morning I woke up with the light off and the book closed. I thought it must have been him and felt a flare of love in my veins that I had never experienced before.

In a few days things improved. I realized that every so often he would look at me and then turn away. I asked him what he was reading, I told him what I was reading. We talked about our reading, annoying Marisa. At first he seemed to listen attentively, then, just like Lila, he started talking and went on, increasingly under the spell of his own arguments. Since I wanted him to be aware of my intelligence I endeavored to interrupt him, to say what I thought, but it was difficult, he seemed content with my presence only if I was silently listening, which I quickly resigned myself to doing. Besides, he said things that I could never have thought, or at least said, with the same assurance, and he said them in a strong, engaging Italian.

Marisa sometimes threw balls of sand at us, and sometimes burst in, shouting “Stop it, who cares about this Dostoyevsky, who gives a damn about the Karamazovs.” Then Nino abruptly broke off and walked along the shore, head lowered, until he became a tiny speck. I spent some time with Marisa talking about her boyfriend, who couldn’t come to see her, which made her cry. Meanwhile I felt better and better, I couldn’t believe that life could be like this. Maybe, I thought, the girls of Via dei Mille — the one dressed all in green, for example — had a life like this.

Every three or four days Donato Sarratore returned, but stayed at most for twenty-four hours, then left. He said that all he could think of was the thirteenth of August, when he would settle in Barano for two full weeks. As soon as his father appeared, Nino became a shadow. He ate, disappeared, reappeared late at night, and didn’t say a single word. He listened to him with a compliant sort of half smile, and whatever his father uttered he gave no sign of agreement but neither did he oppose it. The only time he said something definite and explicit was when Donato mentioned the longed-for thirteenth of August. Then, a moment later, he reminded his mother — his mother, not Donato — that right after the mid-August holiday he had to return to Naples because he had arranged with some school friends to meet — they planned to get together in a country house in the Avellinese — and begin their summer homework. “It’s a lie,” Marisa whispered to me, “he has no homework.” But his mother praised him, and even his father. In fact, Donato started off right away on one of his favorite topics: Nino was fortunate to be able to study; he himself had barely finished the second year of vocational school when he had had to go to work, but if he had been able to study as his son was doing, who knows where he might have gone. And he concluded, “Study, Ninù, go on, make Papa proud, and do what I was unable to do.”

That tone bothered Nino more than anything else. Sometimes, just to get away, he went so far as to invite Marisa and me to go out with him. He would say gloomily to his parents, as if we had been tormenting him, “They want to get an ice cream, they want to go for a little walk, I’ll take them.”

Marisa hurried eagerly to get ready and I regretted that I always had the same shabby old dress. But it seemed to me that he didn’t much care if I was pretty or ugly. As soon as we left the house he started talking, which made Marisa uncomfortable, she said it would have been better for her to stay home. I, however, hung on Nino’s every word. It greatly astonished me that, in the tumult of the Port, among the young and not so young men who looked at Marisa and me purposefully, he showed not a trace of that disposition to violence that Pasquale, Rino, Antonio, Enzo showed when they went out with us and someone gave us one glance too many. As an intimidating guardian of our bodies he had little value. Maybe because he was engrossed in the things that were going on in his head, by an eagerness to talk to me about them, he would let anything happen to us.

That was how Marisa made friends with some boys from Forio, they came to see her at Barano, and she brought them with us to the beach at the Maronti. And so the three of us began to go out every evening. We all went to the Port, but once we arrived she went off with her new friends (when in the world would Pasquale have been so free with Carmela, Antonio with Ada?) and we walked along the sea. Then we met her around ten and returned home.

One evening, as soon as we were alone, Nino said suddenly that as a boy he had greatly envied the relationship between Lila and me. He saw us from a distance, always together, always talking, and he would have liked to be friends with us, but never had the courage. Then he smiled and said, “You remember the declaration I made to you?”

“Yes.”

“I liked you a lot.”

I blushed, I whispered stupidly, “Thank you.”

“I thought we would become engaged and we would all three be together forever, you, me, and your friend.”

“Together?”

He smiled at himself as a child.

“I didn’t understand anything about engagements.”