My Brilliant Friend Read online

  “Let’s write one together,” Lila said once, and that filled me with joy.

  Maybe the idea took root when she discovered that the author of Little Women had made so much money that she had given some of it to her family. But I wouldn’t promise. We argued about it, I said we could start right after the admission test. She agreed, but then she couldn’t wait. While I had a lot to study because of the afternoon lessons with Spagnuolo and the teacher, she was freer, she set to work and wrote a novel without me.

  I was hurt when she brought it to me to read, but I didn’t say anything, in fact I held in check my disappointment and was full of congratulations. There were ten sheets of graph paper, folded and held together with a dressmaker’s pin. It had a cover drawn in pastels, and the title, I remember, was The Blue Fairy. How exciting it was, how many difficult words there were. I told her to let the teacher read it. She didn’t want to. I begged her, I offered to give it to her. Although she wasn’t sure, she agreed.

  One day when I was at Maestra Oliviero’s house for our lesson, I took advantage of Gigliola being in the bathroom to take out The Blue Fairy. I said it was a wonderful novel written by Lila and that Lila wanted her to read it. But the teacher, who for five years had been enthusiastic about everything Lila did, except when she was bad, replied coldly:

  “Tell Cerullo that she would do well to study for the diploma, instead of wasting time.” And although she kept Lila’s novel, she left it on the table without even giving it a glance.

  That attitude confused me. What had happened? Was she angry with Lila’s mother? Had her rage extended to Lila herself? Was she upset about the money that the parents of my friend wouldn’t give her? I didn’t understand. A few days later I cautiously asked her if she had read The Blue Fairy. She answered in an unusual tone, obscurely, as if only she and I could truly understand.

  “Do you know what the plebs are, Greco?”

  “Yes, the people, the tribunes of the plebs are the Gracchi.”

  “The plebs are quite a nasty thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if one wishes to remain a plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children deserve nothing. Forget Cerullo and think of yourself.”

  Maestra Oliviero never said anything about The Blue Fairy. Lila asked about it a couple of times, then she let it go. She said grimly:

  “As soon as I have time I’ll write another, that one wasn’t good.”

  “It was wonderful.”

  “It was terrible.”

  But she became less lively, especially in class, probably because she realized that the teacher had stopped praising her, and sometimes seemed irritated by her excesses of virtuosity. When it came time for the competition at the end of the year she was still the best, but without her old impudence. At the end of the day, the principal presented to those remaining in competition—Lila, Gigliola, and me—an extremely difficult problem that he had invented himself. Gigliola and I struggled in vain. Lila, narrowing her eyes to cracks, applied herself. She was the last to give up. She said, with a timidity unusual for her, that the problem couldn’t be solved, because there was a mistake in the premise, but she didn’t know what it was. Maestra Oliviero scolded her harshly. I saw Lila standing at the blackboard, chalk in hand, very small and pale, assaulted by volleys of cruel phrases. I felt her suffering, I couldn’t bear the trembling of her lower lip and nearly burst into tears.

  “When one cannot solve a problem,” the teacher concluded coldly, “one does not say, There is a mistake in the problem, one says, I am not capable of solving it.”

  The principal was silent. As far as I remember, the day ended there.

  16.

  Shortly before the final test in elementary school Lila pushed me to do another of the many things that I would never have had the courage to do by myself. We decided to skip school, and cross the boundaries of the neighborhood.

  It had never happened before. As far back as I could remember, I had never left the four-story white apartment buildings, the courtyard, the parish church, the public gardens, I had never felt the urge to. Trains passed continuously on the other side of the scrubland, trucks and cars passed up and down along the stradone, and yet I can’t remember a single occasion when I asked myself, my father, my teacher: where are the cars going, the trucks, the trains, to what city, to what world?

  Nor had Lila appeared particularly interested, but this time she organized everything. She told me to tell my mother that after school we were all going to the teacher’s house for a party to mark the end of the school year, and although I tried to remind her that the teachers had never invited all us girls to their houses for a party, she said that that was the very reason we should say it. The event would seem so exceptional that none of our parents would be bold enough to go to school and ask if it was true or not. As usual, I trusted her, and things went just as she had said. At my house everyone believed it, not only my father and my sister and brothers but even my mother.

  The night before, I couldn’t sleep. What was beyond the neighborhood, beyond its well-known perimeter? Behind us rose a thickly wooded hill and a few structures in the shelter of the gleaming railroad tracks. In front of us, beyond the stradone, stretched a pitted road that skirted the ponds. To the right was a strip of treeless countryside, under an enormous sky. To the left was a tunnel with three entrances, but if you climbed up to the railroad tracks, on clear days you could see, beyond some low houses and walls of tufa and patches of thick vegetation, a blue mountain with one low peak and one a little higher, which was called Vesuvius and was a volcano.

  But nothing that we had before our eyes every day, or that could be seen if we clambered up the hill, impressed us. Trained by our schoolbooks to speak with great skill about what we had never seen, we were excited by the invisible. Lila said that in the direction of Vesuvius was the sea. Rino, who had been there, had told her that the water was blue and sparkling, a marvelous sight. On Sundays, especially in summer, but often, too, in winter, he went with friends to swim, and he had promised to take her there. He wasn’t the only one, naturally, who had seen the sea, others we knew had also seen it. Once Nino Sarratore and his sister Marisa had talked about it, in the tone of those who found it normal to go every so often to eat taralli and seafood. Gigliola Spagnuolo had also been there. She, Nino, and Marisa had, lucky for them, parents who took their children on outings far away, not just around the corner to the public gardens in front of the parish church. Ours weren’t like that, they didn’t have time, they didn’t have money, they didn’t have the desire. It was true that I seemed to have a vague bluish memory of the sea, my mother claimed she had taken me as a small child, when she had to have sand treatments for her injured leg. But I didn’t much believe my mother, and to Lila, who didn’t know anything about it, I admitted that I didn’t know anything, either. So she planned to do as Rino had, to set off on the road and get there by herself. She persuaded me to go with her. Tomorrow.

  I got up early, I did everything as if I were going to school—my bread and milk, my schoolbag, my smock. I waited for Lila as usual in front of the gate, only instead of going to the right we crossed the stradone and turned left, toward the tunnel.

  It was early morning and already hot. There was a strong odor of earth and grass drying in the sun. We climbed among tall shrubs, on indistinct paths that led toward the tracks. When we reached an electrical pylon we took off our smocks and put them in the schoolbags, which we hid in the bushes. Then we raced through the scrubland, which we knew well, and flew excitedly down the slope that led to the tunnel. The entrance on the right was very dark: we had never been inside that obscurity. We held each other by the hand and entered. It was a long passage, and the luminous circle of the exit seemed far away. Once we got accustomed to the shadowy light, we saw lines of silvery water that slid along the walls, large puddles. Apprehensively, dazed by the echo of our steps, we kept goin
g. Then Lila let out a shout and laughed at the violent explosion of sound. Immediately I shouted and laughed in turn. From that moment all we did was shout, together and separately: laughter and cries, cries and laughter, for the pleasure of hearing them amplified. The tension diminished, the journey began.

  Ahead of us were many hours when no one in our families would look for us. When I think of the pleasure of being free, I think of the start of that day, of coming out of the tunnel and finding ourselves on a road that went straight as far as the eye could see, the road that, according to what Rino had told Lila, if you got to the end arrived at the sea. I felt joyfully open to the unknown. It was entirely different from going down into the cellar or up to Don Achille’s house. There was a hazy sun, a strong smell of burning. We walked for a long time between crumbling walls invaded by weeds, low structures from which came voices in dialect, sometimes a clamor. We saw a horse make its way slowly down an embankment and cross the street, whinnying. We saw a young woman looking out from a balcony, combing her hair with a flea comb. We saw a lot of small snotty children who stopped playing and looked at us threateningly. We also saw a fat man in an undershirt who emerged from a tumbledown house, opened his pants, and showed us his penis. But we weren’t scared of anything: Don Nicola, Enzo’s father, sometimes let us pat his horse, the children were threatening in our courtyard, too, and there was old Don Mimì who showed us his disgusting thing when we were coming home from school. For at least three hours, the road we were walking on did not seem different from the segment that we looked out on every day. And I felt no responsibility for the right road. We held each other by the hand, we walked side by side, but for me, as usual, it was as if Lila were ten steps ahead and knew precisely what to do, where to go. I was used to feeling second in everything, and so I was sure that to her, who had always been first, everything was clear: the pace, the calculation of the time available for going and coming back, the route that would take us to the sea. I felt as if she had everything in her head ordered in such a way that the world around us would never be able to create disorder. I abandoned myself happily. I remember a soft light that seemed to come not from the sky but from the depths of the earth, even though, on the surface, it was poor, and ugly.

  Then we began to get tired, to get thirsty and hungry. We hadn’t thought of that. Lila slowed down, I slowed down, too. Two or three times I caught her looking at me, as if she had done something mean to me and was sorry. What was happening? I realized that she kept turning around and I started turning around, too. Her hand began to sweat. The tunnel, which was the boundary of the neighborhood, had been out of sight for a long time. By now the road we had just traveled was unfamiliar to us, like the one that stretched ahead. People appeared completely indifferent to our fate. Around us was a landscape of ruin: dented tanks, burned wood, wrecks of cars, cartwheels with broken spokes, damaged furniture, rusting scrap iron. Why was Lila looking back? Why had she stopped talking? What was wrong?

  I looked more carefully. The sky, which at first had been very high, was as if lowered. Behind us everything was becoming black, large heavy clouds lay over the trees, the light poles. In front of us, the light was still dazzling, but as if pressed on the sides by a purplish grayness that would suffocate it. In the distance thunder could be heard. I was afraid, but what frightened me more was Lila’s expression, new to me. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide, she was looking nervously ahead, back, to the side, and she was squeezing my hand hard. Is it possible, I wondered, that she’s afraid? What was happening to her?

  The first fat drops arrived, leaving small brown stains as they hit the dusty road.

  “Let’s go back,” Lila said.

  “And the sea?”

  “It’s too far.”

  “And home?”

  “Also.”

  “Then let’s go to the sea.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  I had never seen her so agitated. There was something—something she had on the tip of her tongue but couldn’t make up her mind to tell me—that suddenly impelled her to drag me home in a hurry. I didn’t understand: why didn’t we keep going? There was time, the sea couldn’t be too far, and whether we went back home or continued to go on, we’d get wet just the same, if it rained. It was a type of reasoning I had learned from her and I was bewildered when she didn’t apply it.

  A violet light cracked the black sky, the thunder was louder. Lila gave me a tug, I found myself running, unwillingly, back toward our own neighborhood. The wind rose, the drops fell more thickly, in a few seconds they were transformed into a cascade of water. It occurred to neither of us to seek shelter. We ran blinded by the rain, our clothes soaked, our bare feet in worn sandals that had no purchase on the now muddy ground. We ran until we were out of breath.

  We couldn’t keep it up, we slowed down. Lightning, thunder, a lava of rainwater ran along the sides of the road; noisy trucks sped by, raising waves of mud. We walked quickly, our hearts in a tumult, first in a heavy downpour, then in a fine rain, finally under a gray sky. We were soaked, our hair pasted to our heads, our lips livid, eyes frightened. We went back through the tunnel, we crossed the scrubland. The bushes dripping with rain grazed us, making us shiver. We found our schoolbags, we put over our wet clothes the dry smocks, we set out toward home. Tense, her eyes lowered, Lila had let go of my hand.

  We quickly understood that things had not happened as we expected. The sky had turned black over the neighborhood just when school was over. My mother had gone to school with an umbrella to take me to the party at the teacher’s. She had discovered that I wasn’t there, that there was no party. For hours she had been looking for me. When I saw from a distance her painfully limping figure I immediately left Lila, so that she wouldn’t get angry with her, and ran toward my mother. She slapped me and hit me with the umbrella, yelling that she would kill me if I did something like that again.

  Lila took off. At her house no one had noticed anything.

  At night my mother reported everything to my father and compelled him to beat me. He was irritated; he didn’t want to, and they ended up fighting. First he hit her, then, angry at himself, he gave me a beating. All night I tried to understand what had really happened. We were supposed to go to the sea and we hadn’t gone, I had been punished for nothing. A mysterious inversion of attitudes had occurred: I, despite the rain, would have continued on the road, I felt far from everything and everyone, and distance—I discovered for the first time—extinguished in me every tie and every worry; Lila had abruptly repented of her own plan, she had given up the sea, she had wanted to return to the confines of the neighborhood. I couldn’t figure it out.

  The next day I didn’t wait for her at the gate, I went alone to school. We met in the public gardens. She discovered the bruises on my arms and asked what had happened. I shrugged, that was how things had turned out.

  “All they did was beat you?”

  “What should they have done?”

  “They’re still sending you to study Latin?”

  I looked at her in bewilderment.

  Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid that punishment? Or—I wonder today—did she want at different moments both things?

  17.

  We took the final test in elementary school together. When she realized that I was also taking the admission test for middle school, she lost energy. Something happened that surprised everyone: I passed both tests with all tens, the highest marks; Lila got her diploma with nines and an eight in arithmetic.

  She never said a word to me of anger or discontent. She began instead to go around with Carmela Peluso, the daughter of the carpenter-gambler, as if I were no longer enough. Within a few days we became a trio, in which, however, I, who had been first in school, was almost always the third. The
y talked and joked continuously with each other, or, rather, Lila talked and joked, Carmela listened and was amused. When we went for a walk between the church and the stradone, Lila was always in the middle and the two of us on the sides. If I noticed that she tended to be closer to Carmela I suffered and wanted to go home.

  In this phase she seemed dazed, like the victim of sunstroke. It was very hot and we often bathed our heads in the fountain. I remember her with her hair and face dripping as she talked constantly about going to school the next year. It had become her favorite subject and she tackled it as if it were one of the stories she intended to write in order to become rich. Now when she talked she preferred to address Carmela Peluso, who had got her diploma with all sevens and had not taken the admission test for middle school, either.

  Lila was very skillful at telling stories—they all seemed true—about the school where we were going, and the teachers, and she made me laugh, she made me worry. One morning, though, I interrupted her.

  “Lila,” I said, “you can’t go to middle school, you didn’t take the admission test. Not you and not Carmela.”

  She got angry. She said she would go just the same, test or no test.

  “And Carmela?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “You’ll see.”

  But I must have rattled her. She stopped telling stories about our scholastic future and became silent. Then, with a sudden determination, she started tormenting her family, insisting that she wanted to study Latin, like Gigliola Spa­gn­uolo and me. She was especially hard on Rino, who had promised to help her but hadn’t. It was pointless to explain to her that there was now nothing to do about it; she became even more unreasonable and mean.