The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels) by Elena Ferrante Read Free Book Online

engaged to Michele and so was making claims. The family reunion became livelier and full of hope.
    Lila remained standing most of the time, it hurt to sit down. No one, not even her mother, who was silent during the entire visit, seemed to notice her swollen, black right eye, the cut on her lower lip, the bruises on her arms.

9.
    She was still in that state when, there on the stairs that led to the house of her mother-in-law, I took off her glasses, unwound her scarf. The skin around her eye had a yellowish color, and her lower lip was a purple stain with fiery red stripes.
    To her friends and relatives she said that she had fallen on the rocks in Amalfi on a beautiful sunny morning, when she and her husband had taken a boat to a beach just at the foot of a yellow wall. During the engagement lunch for her brother and Pinuccia she had used, in telling that lie, a sarcastic tone and they had all sarcastically believed her, especially the women, who knew what had to be said when the men who loved them and whom they loved beat them severely. Besides, there was no one in the neighborhood, especially of the female sex, who did not think that she had needed a good thrashing for a long time. So the beatings did not cause outrage, and in fact sympathy and respect for Stefano increased—there was someone who knew how to be a man.
    But when I saw her so battered, my heart leaped to my throat, I embraced her. And when she said she hadn’t come to visit because she didn’t want me to see her in that state, tears came to my eyes. The story of her honeymoon, as the photonovels put it, although stripped down, almost cold, made me angry, pained me. And yet, I have to admit, I also felt a tenuous pleasure. I was content to discover that Lila now needed help, maybe protection, and that admission of fragility not toward the neighborhood but toward me moved me. I felt that the distances had unexpectedly gotten shorter again and I was tempted to tell her right away that I had decided to quit school, that school was useless, that I didn’t have the right qualities. It seemed to me that the news would comfort her.
    But her mother-in-law looked out over the banister on the top floor and called her. Lila ended her story with a few hurried sentences, she said that Stefano had tricked her, that he was just like his father.
    “You remember that Don Achille gave us money instead of the dolls?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “We shouldn’t have taken it.”
    “We bought
Little Women
.”
    “We were wrong: ever since that moment I’ve been wrong about everything.”
    She wasn’t upset, she was sad. She put her dark glasses back on, she reknotted the scarf. I was pleased about that
we
(
we
shouldn’t have taken it,
we
were wrong), but the abrupt transition to the
I
annoyed me:
I
have been wrong about everything.
We
, I would have liked to correct her,
always we
, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that she was trying to comprehend her new condition, and that she urgently needed to know what she could hold on to in order to confront it. Before starting up the flight of stairs she asked, “Would you like to come and study at my house?”
    “When?”
    “This afternoon, tomorrow, every day.”
    “Stefano will be annoyed.”
    “If he is the master, I am the master’s wife.”
    “I don’t know, Lila.”
    “I’ll give you a room, I’ll shut you in.”
    “What’s the point?”
    She shrugged.
    “To know that you’re there.”
    I didn’t say yes or no. I went off, and wandered through the city as usual. Lila was sure that I would never quit school. She had assigned me the role of the friend with glasses and pimples, always bent over her books, smart in school, and she couldn’t even imagine that I might change. But I didn’t want that role anymore. It seemed to me that, thanks to the humiliation of the unpublished article, I had thoroughly understood my inadequacy. Even though Nino was born and had grown up like Lila and me in that wretched