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Authors: Elena Ferrante,Ann Goldstein

Tags: #Historical, #(¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)

My Brilliant Friend (6 page)

BOOK: My Brilliant Friend
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It came to mind again when, some time later, the entire Sarratore family moved. One morning the cart and horse that belonged to Assunta’s husband, Nicola, appeared in the courtyard: with that same cart and that same old horse he sold fruit and vegetables with his wife, going up and down the streets of the neighborhood. Nicola had a broad handsome face and the same blue eyes, the same blond hair as his son Enzo. Besides selling fruit and vegetables, he was the mover. And in fact he, Donato Sarratore, Nino himself, and Lidia, too, began to carry things downstairs, all sorts of odds and ends, mattresses, furniture, and piled it on the cart.

As soon as the women heard the sound of wheels in the courtyard, they looked out, including my mother, including me. There was a great curiosity. It seemed that Donato had got a new house directly from the state railroad, in the neighborhood of a square called Piazza Nazionale. Or—said my mother—his wife had obliged him to move to escape the persecutions of Melina, who wanted to take away her husband. Likely. My mother always saw evil where, to my great annoyance, it was sooner or later discovered that evil really was, and her crossed eye seemed made purposely to identify the secret motives of the neighborhood. How would Melina react? Was it true, as I had heard whispered, that she had had a child with Sarratore and then killed it? And was it possible that she would start shouting terrible things, including that? All the females, big and small, were at the windows, perhaps to wave goodbye to the family that was leaving, perhaps to witness the spectacle of rage of that ugly, lean, and widowed woman. I saw that Lila and her mother, Nunzia, were also watching.

I sought Nino’s gaze, but he seemed to have other things to do. I was then seized, as usual for no precise reason, by a weariness that made everything around me faint. I thought that perhaps he had made that declaration because he already knew that he would be leaving and wanted to tell me first what he felt for me. I looked at him as he struggled to carry boxes filled to overflowing, and I felt the guilt, the sorrow of having said no. Now he was fleeing like a bird.

Finally the procession of furniture and household goods stopped. Nicola and Donato began to tie everything to the cart with ropes. Lidia Sarratore appeared dressed as if to go to a party, she had even put on a summer hat, of blue straw. She pushed the carriage with her youngest boy in it and beside her she had the two girls, Marisa, who was my age, eight or nine, and Clelia, six. Suddenly there was a noise of things breaking on the second floor. Almost at the same moment Melina began screaming. Her cries were so tortured that Lila, I saw, put her hands over her ears. The pained voice of Ada, Melina’s second child, echoed as she cried, Mamma, no, Mamma. After a moment of uncertainty I, too, covered my ears. But meanwhile objects began to fly out the window and curiosity became so strong that I freed my eardrums, as if I needed clear sounds to understand. Melina, however, wasn’t uttering words but only aaah, aaah, as if she were wounded. She couldn’t be seen, not even an arm or a hand that was throwing things could be seen. Copper pots, glasses, bottles, plates appeared to fly out the window of their own volition, and in the street Lidia Sarratore walked with her head down, leaning over the baby carriage, her daughters behind, while Donato climbed up on the cart amid his property, and Don Nicola guided the horse by the bridle and meanwhile objects hit the asphalt, bounced, shattered, sending splinters between the nervous hooves of the beast.

I looked at Lila. Now I saw another face, a face of bewilderment. She must have realized that I was looking at her, and she immediately disappeared from the window. Meanwhile the cart started off. Keeping to the wall, without a goodbye to anyone, Lidia and the four youngest children slunk toward the gate, while Nino seemed unwilling to leave, as if hypnotized by the waste of fragile objects against the asphalt.

Last I saw flying out the window a sort of black spot. It was an iron, pure steel. When I still had Tina and played in the house, I used my mother’s, which was identical, prow-shaped, pretending it was a ship in a storm. The object plummeted down and with a sharp thud made a hole in the ground, a few inches from Nino. It nearly—very nearly—killed him.

12.

No boy ever declared to Lila that he loved her, and she never told me if it grieved her. Gigliola Spagnuolo received proposals to be someone’s girlfriend continuously and I, too, was much in demand. Lila, on the other hand, wasn’t popular, mostly because she was skinny, dirty, and always had a cut or bruise of some sort, but also because she had a sharp tongue. She invented humiliating nicknames and although in front of the teacher she showed off Italian words that no one knew, with us she spoke a scathing dialect, full of swear words, which cut off at its origin any feeling of love. Only Enzo did a thing that, if it wasn’t exactly a request to be her boyfriend, was nevertheless a sign of admiration and respect. Some time after he had cut her head with the rock and before, it seems to me, he was rejected by Gigliola Spagnuolo, he ran into us on the
stradone
and, before my incredulous eyes, held out to Lila a garland of sorb apples.

“What do I do with it?”

“You eat them.”

“Bitter?”

“Let them ripen.”

“I don’t want them.”

“Throw them away.”

That was it. Enzo turned his back and hurried off to work. Lila and I started laughing. We didn’t talk much, but we had a laugh at everything that happened to us. I said only, in a tone of amusement:

“I like sorb apples.”

I was lying, it was a fruit I didn’t like. I was attracted by their reddish-yellow color when they were unripe, their compactness that gleamed on sunny days. But when they ripened on the balconies and became brown and soft like small wrinkled pears, and the skin came off easily, displaying a grainy pulp not with a bad taste but spongy in a way that reminded me of the corpses of rats along the
stradone
, then I wouldn’t even touch them. I made that statement almost as a test, hoping that Lila would offer them to me: here, take them, you have them. I felt that if she had given me the gift that Enzo had given her I would be happier than if she had given me something of hers. But she didn’t, and I still recall the feeling of betrayal when she brought them home. She herself put a nail at the window. I saw her hang the garland on it.

13.

Enzo didn’t give her any other gifts. After the fight with Gigliola, who had told everyone about the declaration he had made to her, we saw him less and less. Although he had proved to be extremely good at doing sums in his head, he was lazy, so the teacher didn’t suggest that he take the admissions test for the middle school, and he wasn’t sorry about it, in fact he was pleased. He enrolled in the trade school, but in fact he was already working with his parents. He got up very early to go with his father to the fruit-and-vegetable market or to drive the cart through the neighborhood, selling produce from the countryside, and so he soon quit school.

We, instead, toward the end of fifth grade, were told that it would be suitable for us to continue in school. The teacher summoned in turn my parents and those of Gigliola and Lila to tell them that we absolutely had to take not only the test for the elementary school diploma but also the one for admission to middle school. I did all I could so that my father would not send my mother, with her limp, her wandering eye, and her stubborn anger, but would go himself, since he was a porter and knew how to be polite. I didn’t succeed. She went, she talked to the teacher, and returned home in a sullen mood.

“The teacher wants money. She says she has to give some extra lessons because the test is difficult.”

“But what’s the point of this test?” my father asked.

“To let her study Latin.”

“Why?”

“Because they say she’s clever.”

“But if she’s clever, why does the teacher have to give her lessons that cost money?”

“So she’ll be better off and we’ll be worse.”

They discussed it at length. At first my mother was against it and my father uncertain; then my father became cautiously in favor and my mother resigned herself to being a little less against it; finally they decided to let me take the test, but always provided that if I did not do well they would immediately take me out of school.

Lila’s parents on the other hand said no. Nunzia Cerullo made a few somewhat hesitant attempts, but her father wouldn’t even talk about it, and in fact hit Rino when he told him that he was wrong. Her parents were inclined not to go and see the teacher, but Maestra Oliviero had the principal summon them, and then Nunzia had to go. Faced with the timid but flat refusal of that frightened woman, Maestra Oliviero, stern but calm, displayed Lila’s marvelous compositions, the brilliant solutions to difficult problems, and even the beautifully colored drawings that in class, when she applied herself, enchanted us all, because, pilfering Giotto’s pastels, she portrayed in a realistic style princesses with hairdos, jewels, clothes, shoes that had never been seen in any book or even at the parish cinema. When the refusal persisted, the teacher lost her composure and dragged Lila’s mother to the principal as if she were a student to be disciplined. But Nunzia couldn’t yield, she didn’t have permission from her husband. As a result she kept saying no until she, the teacher, and the principal were overcome by exhaustion.

The next day, as we were going to school, Lila said to me in her usual tone: I’m going to take the test anyway. I believed her, to forbid her to do something was pointless, everyone knew it. She seemed the strongest of us girls, stronger than Enzo, than Alfonso, than Stefano, stronger than her brother Rino, stronger than our parents, stronger than all the adults including the teacher and the carabinieri, who could put you in jail. Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences. In the end people gave in, and were even, however unwillingly, compelled to praise her.

14.

We were also forbidden to go to Don Achille’s, but she decided to go anyway and I followed. In fact, that was when I became convinced that nothing could stop her, and that every disobedient act contained breathtaking opportunities.

We wanted Don Achille to give us back our dolls. So we climbed the stairs: at every step I was on the point of turning around and going back to the courtyard. I still feel Lila’s hand grasping mine, and I like to think that she decided to take it not only because she intuited that I wouldn’t have the courage to get to the top floor but also because with that gesture she herself sought the force to continue. So, one beside the other, I on the wall side and she on the banister side, sweaty palms clasped, we climbed the last flights. At Don Achille’s door my heart was pounding, I could hear it in my ears, but I was consoled by thinking that it was also the sound of Lila’s heart. From the apartment came voices, perhaps of Alfonso or Stefano or Pinuccia. After a very long, silent pause before the door, Lila rang the bell. There was silence, then a shuffling. Donna Maria opened the door, wearing a faded green housedress. When she spoke, I saw a brilliant gold tooth in her mouth. She thought we were looking for Alfonso, and was a bit bewildered. Lila said to her in dialect:

“No, we want Don Achille.”

“Tell me.”

“We have to speak to him.”

The woman shouted, “Achì!”

More shuffling. A thickset figure emerged from the shadows. He had a long torso, short legs, arms that hung to his knees, and a cigarette in his mouth; you could see the embers. He asked hoarsely:

“Who is it?”

“The daughter of the shoemaker with Greco’s oldest daughter.”

Don Achille came into the light, and, for the first time, we saw him clearly. No minerals, no sparkle of glass. His long face was of flesh, and the hair bristled only around his ears; the top of his head was shiny. His eyes were bright, the white veined with small red streams, his mouth wide and thin, his chin heavy, with a crease in the middle. He seemed to me ugly but not the way I imagined.

“Well?”

“The dolls,” said Lila.

“What dolls?”

“Ours.”

“Your dolls are of no use here.”

“You took them down in the cellar.”

Don Achille turned and shouted into the apartment:

“Pinù, did you take the doll belonging to the shoemaker’s daughter?”

“Me, no.”

“Alfò, did you take it?”

Laughter.

Lila said firmly, I don’t know where she got all that courage:

“You took them, we saw you.”

There was a moment of silence.

“ ‘You’ me?”

“Yes, and you put them in your black bag.”

The man, hearing those words, wrinkled his forehead in annoyance.

I couldn’t believe that we were there, in front of Don Achille, and Lila was speaking to him like that and he was staring at her in bewilderment, and in the background could be seen Alfonso and Stefano and Pinuccia and Donna Maria, who was setting the table for dinner. I couldn’t believe that he was an ordinary person, a little short, a little bald, a little out of proportion, but ordinary. So I waited for him to be abruptly transformed.

Don Achille repeated, as if to understand clearly the meaning of the words:

“I took your dolls and put them in a black bag?”

I felt that he was not angry but unexpectedly pained, as if he were receiving confirmation of something he already knew. He said something in dialect that I didn’t understand, Maria cried, “Achì, it’s ready.”

“I’m coming.”

Don Achille stuck a large, broad hand in the back pocket of his pants. We clutched each other’s hand tightly, waiting for him to bring out a knife. Instead he took out his wallet, opened it, looked inside, and handed Lila some money, I don’t remember how much.

“Go buy yourselves dolls,” he said.

Lila grabbed the money and dragged me down the stairs. He muttered, leaning over the banister:

“And remember that they were a gift from me.”

I said, in Italian, careful not to trip on the stairs:

BOOK: My Brilliant Friend
8.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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