Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

“I’ll do it.”

“No, let me do it.”

It took a while to recopy. When she gave me back the notebook, she said, “You’re very clever, of course they always give you ten.”

I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness:

“I don’t want to read anything else that you write.”

“Why?”

She thought about it.

“Because it hurts me,” and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.

I went home happy. I shut myself in the toilet so that I wouldn’t disturb the rest of the family and studied until three in the morning, when finally I went to sleep. I dragged myself up at six-thirty to recopy the text. But first I read it over in Lila’s beautiful round handwriting, a handwriting that had remained the same as in elementary school, very different now from mine, which had become smaller and plainer. On the page was exactly what I had written, but it was clearer, more immediate. The erasures, the transpositions, the small additions, and, in some way, her handwriting itself gave me the impression that I had escaped from myself and now was running a hundred paces ahead with an energy and also a harmony that the person left behind didn’t know she had.

I decided to leave the text in Lila’s handwriting. I brought it to Nino like that in order to keep the visible trace of her presence in my words. He read it, blinking his long eyelashes. At the end he said, with sudden, unexpected sadness, “Professor Galiani is right.”

“About what?”

“You write better than I do.”

And although I protested, embarrassed, he repeated that phrase again, then turned his back and went off without saying goodbye. He didn’t even say when the journal would come out or how I could get a copy, nor did I have the courage to ask him. That behavior bothered me. And even more because, as he walked away, I recognized for a few moments his father’s gait.

This was how our new encounter ended. We got everything wrong again. For days Nino continued to behave as if writing better than him was a sin that had to be expiated. I became irritated. When suddenly he reassigned me body, life, presence, and asked me to walk a little way with him, I answered coldly that I was busy, my boyfriend was supposed to pick me up.

For a while he must have thought that the boyfriend was Alfonso, but any doubt was resolved when, one day, after school, his sister Marisa appeared, to tell him something or other. We hadn’t seen each other since the days on Ischia. She ran over to me, she greeted me warmly, she said how sorry she was that I hadn’t returned to Barano that summer. Since I was with Alfonso I introduced him. She insisted, as her brother had already left, on going part of the way with us. First she told us all her sufferings in love. Then, when she realized that Alfonso and I were not boyfriend and girlfriend, she stopped talking to me and began to chat with him in her charming way. She must have told her brother that between Alfonso and me there was nothing, because right away, the next day, he began hovering around me again. But now the mere sight of him made me nervous. Was he vain like his father, even if he detested him? Did he think that others couldn’t help liking him, loving him? Was he so full of himself that he couldn’t tolerate good qualities other than his own?

I asked Antonio to come and pick me up at school. He obeyed immediately, confused and at the same time pleased by that request. What surely surprised him most was that there in public, in front of everyone, I took his hand and entwined my fingers with his. I had always refused to walk like that, either in the neighborhood or outside it, because it made me feel that I was still a child, going for a walk with my father. That day I did it. I knew that Nino was watching us and I wanted him to understand who I was. I wrote better than he did, I would publish in the magazine where he published, I was as good at school and better than he was, I had a man, look at him: and so I would not run after him like a faithful beast.

I also asked Antonio to go with me to Lila’s wedding, not to leave me alone, and maybe always to dance with me. I dreaded that day, I felt it as a definitive break, and I wanted someone there who would support me.

This request was to complicate life further. Lila had sent invitations to everyone. In the houses of the neighborhood the mothers, the grandmothers had been working for months to make dresses, to get hats and purses, to shop for a wedding present, I don’t know, a set of glasses, of plates, of silverware. It wasn’t so much for Lila that they made that effort; it was for Stefano, who was very decent, and allowed you to pay at the end of the month. But a wedding was, above all, an occasion where no one should make a bad showing, especially girls without fiancés, who there would have a chance of finding one and getting settled, marrying, in their turn, within a few years.

It was really for that last reason that I wanted Antonio to go with me. I had no intention of making the thing official — we were careful to keep our relationship absolutely hidden — but I wished to keep under control my anxiety about being attractive. I wanted, that day, to feel calm, tranquil, despite my glasses, the modest dress made by my mother, my old shoes, and at the same time think: I have everything a sixteen-year-old girl should have, I don’t need anything or anyone.

But Antonio didn’t take it like that. He loved me, he considered me the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him. He often asked aloud, with a hint of anguish straining under an appearance of amusement, how in the world I had chosen him, who was stupid and couldn’t put two words together. In fact, he couldn’t wait to appear at my parents’ house and make our relationship official. And so at that request of mine he must have thought that I had finally decided to let him come out of hiding, and he went into debt to buy a suit, in addition to what he was spending for the wedding gift, clothes for Ada and the other children, a presentable appearance for Melina.

I didn’t notice anything. I struggled on, between school, the urgent consultations whenever things got tangled up between Lila and her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, the pleasant nervousness about the article that I might see published at any time. I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print, and as I waited for that day I didn’t pay much attention to Antonio, who had got the idea of completing his wedding outfit with a pair of Cerullo shoes. Every so often he asked me, “Do you know what point they’ve reached?” I answered, “Ask Rino, Lila doesn’t know anything.”

It was true. In November the Cerullos summoned Stefano without bothering to show the shoes to Lila first, even though she was still living at home with them. Instead, Stefano showed up for the occasion with his fiancée and Pinuccia, all three looking as if they had emerged from the television screen. Lila told me that, on seeing the shoes she had designed years earlier made real, she had felt a very violent emotion, as if a fairy had appeared and fulfilled a wish. The shoes really were as she had imagined them at the time. Even Pinuccia was amazed. She wanted to try on a pair she liked and she complimented Rino effusively, letting him understand that she considered him the true craftsman of those masterpieces of sturdy lightness, of dissonant harmony. The only one who seemed displeased was Stefano. He interrupted the warm greetings Lila was giving her father and brother and the workers, silenced the sugary voice of Pinuccia, who was congratulating Rino, raising an ankle to show him her extraordinarily shod foot, and, style after style, he criticized the modifications made to the original designs. He was especially persistent in the comparison between the man’s shoe as it had been made by Rino and Lila in secret from Fernando, and the same shoe as the father and son had refined it. “What’s this fringe, what are these stitches, what is this gilded pin?” he asked in annoyance. And no matter how Fernando explained all the modifications, for reasons of durability or to disguise some defect in the idea, Stefano was adamant. He said he had invested too much money to obtain ordinary shoes and not — precisely identical — Lila’s shoes.