Ferrante-1

We didn’t know the origin of that fear-rancor-hatred-meekness that our parents displayed toward the Carraccis and transmitted to us, but it was there, it was a fact, like the neighborhood, its dirty-white houses, the fetid odor of the landings, the dust of the streets.

That stammer, the pallor, the purple that had suddenly swallowed his eyes: how handsome he was, so languid, and yet how much I disliked his languor.

But she didn’t seem to care as much about what had happened before us — events that were in general obscure, and about which the adults either were silent or spoke with great reticence — as about the fact that there really had been a before.

A little time passed and one Sunday, after Mass, Fernando Cerullo the shoemaker, the father of Lila and Rino, a small, thin man, timidly accosted Don Achille and apologized, without ever saying what he was apologizing for.

We made a space wide enough for our slender, supple bodies to slip through into the cellar.

That stammer, the pallor, the purple that had suddenly swallowed his eyes: how handsome he was, so languid, and yet how much I disliked his languor.

On the outside she remained the same, a gaunt woman with a large nose, her hair already gray, a shrill voice that at night called her children from the window, by name, the syllables drawn out by an angry despair: Aaa-daaa, Miii-chè.

It seemed to me that, though I was barely six, she did her best to make me understand that I was superfluous in her life.

Then she read in a sullen tone: “Sun.”

Besides, the teacher acted very shrewdly.

They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.

Her body repulsed me, something she probably intuited.

How was it possible that someone like Enzo, who was lazy, incapable, and delinquent, could do complicated calculations in his head better than me, than Alfonso Carracci, than Nino Sarratore?

I groped my way forward.

When Lila stopped misbehaving and effortlessly outdid me, the teacher praised me first, with moderation, and then went on to exalt her prowess.

Not too long before — ten days, a month, who can say, we knew nothing about time, in those days — she had treacherously taken my doll and thrown her down into a cellar.

We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died.

Marisa pointed to her, calling her “the whore,” without rancor, but because she was repeating the phrase that her mother used at home.

The first is that little Alfonso Carracci defeated me immediately, he was calm and precise, but he had the quality of not gloating.

If, however, I came in second after Lila, I wore a meek expression of acquiescence.

The hatred was therefore tangible; I was aware of it.

My mother’s father had been killed when he fell from a scaffolding at a building site.

But when she decided to vanquish both Alfonso and Enzo, she had lighted up like a holy warrior.

She urged me on with encouraging words, she praised my blond curls, and thus reinforced in me the wish to do well: completely the opposite of my mother, who, at home, so often rebuked me, sometimes abusively, that I wanted to hide in a dark corner and hope that she wouldn’t find me.

While I was shrieking in fear and Lila got up with the blood dripping from under her hair, Enzo, who was also bleeding, climbed down the embankment, and, seeing Lila in that state, he, utterly unpredictably and to our eyes incomprehensibly, began to cry.

She was disheveled, dirty, on her knees and elbows she always had scabs from cuts and scrapes that never had time to heal.

What a good son: a large man, forty years old, who hadn’t worked in his life, just a small-time crook and spendthrift.

7 According to Rino, Lila’s older brother, she had learned to read at the age of around three by looking at the letters and pictures in his primer.

He charged him with having taken by stealth, as if his shadowy body were a magnet, all the tools for his carpentry work, which made the shop useless.

He rambled incoherently.

At least twice, when Lila didn’t answer or Alfonso made a mistake, the voice of Enzo Scanno, filled with contempt, was heard, from a desk at the back, giving the right answer.

Lila was deeply affected by what had happened to Melina Cappuccio, a relative of her mother’s.

True that she was compelled to punish her constantly with the wooden rod or by sending her to kneel on the hard floor behind the blackboard.

When Lila stopped misbehaving and effortlessly outdid me, the teacher praised me first, with moderation, and then went on to exalt her prowess.

Then I abandoned Tina to her fate, and ran away, in order not to lose Lila, who was already twisting nimbly between the panels of the broken door.

But I was exaggerating: maybe it was just a way of giving vent to old grudges or allowing the principal to keep the less good or less obedient teachers under his control.

Melina was so grateful that her gratitude became, in her desolate woman’s heart, love, passion.

For obscure reasons he attributed his ruin to Don Achille.

I knew that Lila was mean, but I had never expected her to do something so spiteful to me.

As their vindictiveness increased, the two women began to insult each other if they met on the street or the stairs: harsh, fierce sounds.

The stone slid over Enzo’s skin like a razor, leaving a red stain that immediately gushed blood.

The second is that Nino Sarratore, surprisingly, almost never answered the questions, but appeared dazed, as if he didn’t understand what the teachers were asking him.

Our adversaries, in matters of intelligence, were Nino and — we discovered just then — Alfonso Carracci, the third child of Don Achille, a very neat boy, who was in second grade, like us, but looked younger than his seven years.

We showed off our dolls to each other but without appearing to, one in the other’s vicinity, as if each of us were alone.

If, however, I came in second after Lila, I wore a meek expression of acquiescence.

Because it was broken — one of the panels was hanging on just one hinge — the entrance was blocked by a chain that crudely held the two panels together.

For years I saw his body — a coarse body, heavy with a mixture of materials — emitting in a swarm salami, provolone, mortadella, lard, and prosciutto.

In general it came from wounds only after horrible curses and disgusting obscenities had been exchanged.

Maybe that’s why I became focused on Lila, who had slender, agile legs, and was always moving them, kicking even when she was sitting next to the teacher, so that the teacher became irritated and soon sent her back to her desk.

I paid attention to the lessons, I carried out with the greatest diligence everything that I was told to carry out, I learned.

One night he came out of the house as usual and died, perhaps murdered, perhaps of weariness.

She, who, like the majority of the neighborhood women, lived untidily in slippers and shabby old dresses, appeared in her formal black dress (wedding, communion, christening, funeral), with a shiny black purse and low-heeled shoes that tortured her swollen feet, and handed the teacher two paper bags, one containing sugar and the other coffee.

On the outside she remained the same, a gaunt woman with a large nose, her hair already gray, a shrill voice that at night called her children from the window, by name, the syllables drawn out by an angry despair: Aaa-daaa, Miii-chè.

Through those openings the darkness might suddenly seize the dolls, who sometimes were safe in our arms, but more often were placed deliberately next to the twisted grating and thus exposed to the cellar’s cold breath, to its threatening noises, rustling, squeaking, scraping.

I felt the poison of defeat more acutely when it was Sarratore or Peluso who did better than me.

Don Achille, for example, was not only in his apartment on the top floor but also down below, a spider among spiders, a rat among rats, a shape that assumed all shapes.

And then we liked the bars with their spiderwebs, the darkness, and the tight mesh of the grating that, reddish with rust, curled up both on my side and on Lila’s, creating two parallel holes through which we could drop rocks into obscurity and hear the sound when they hit bottom.

He rambled incoherently.

Lidia would hang out the sheets fresh from the laundry and Melina climbed up on the windowsill and dirtied them with a reed whose tip she had charred in the fire; Lidia passed under her windows and she spit on her head or emptied buckets of dirty water on her; Lidia made noise during the day walking above her, with her unruly children, and she banged the floor mop against the ceiling all night.

Through those openings the darkness might suddenly seize the dolls, who sometimes were safe in our arms, but more often were placed deliberately next to the twisted grating and thus exposed to the cellar’s cold breath, to its threatening noises, rustling, squeaking, scraping.

Or because Melina’s children were ragged and dirty, while Lidia’s were washed, well groomed, and the oldest, Nino, who was a few years older than us, was handsome, and we liked him.

My father, though he seemed to me a good man, hurled continuous insults and threats if someone didn’t deserve, as he said, to be on the face of the earth.

He worked on a train crew for the state railroad, and had a decent salary on which he supported his wife, Lidia, and five children; the oldest was called Nino.

She was disheveled, dirty, on her knees and elbows she always had scabs from cuts and scrapes that never had time to heal.

Once we hit him in the right calf, and I say we because I had handed Lila a flat stone with jagged edges.

Donato was diligent in his attendance at the Church of the Holy Family and as a good Christian he did a lot for her, collecting money, used clothes, and shoes, settling Antonio, the oldest son, in the auto-repair shop of Gorresio, an acquaintance of his.

When he was scarcely ten his father, Fernando, had begun to take him every day to his tiny shoemaker’s shop, in a narrow side street that ran off the stradone, to teach him the craft of resoling shoes.

I saw it hanging, with its desolate expression, on a rickety wooden stand, and I cried out to Lila, pointing to it.

She was very good at studying the trajectory of the stones and dodging them with an easy move that today I would call elegant.

Alfonso was quickly out of the running and, with the proud consent of Ferraro, who quickly exchanged champions, a duel began between Lila and Enzo.

For years I saw his body — a coarse body, heavy with a mixture of materials — emitting in a swarm salami, provolone, mortadella, lard, and prosciutto.

For a hidden motive of her own, in fact, Maestra Oliviero especially enjoyed taking us to the classes where the girl students and women teachers could not be humiliated so much as the males.

Lila did really complicated calculations in her head, in her dictations there was not a single mistake, she spoke in dialect like the rest of us but, when necessary, came out with a bookish Italian, using words like “accustomed,” “luxuriant,” “willingly.”

There was some tension between Oliviero and Ferraro because of that unexpected summoning of Carracci, then the competition began, in front of the two classes, assembled in one classroom.

The war that followed at first seemed funny; it was discussed in my house and elsewhere with malicious laughter.

And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details.

Handsome, slender, and nervous, with long lashes, hair neatly combed, he had stammered only a few words and had finally been silent.

He began to cry and I let him act out his desperation, sobs that began fake and became real.

But that day I learned a skill at which I later excelled.

...to our door, opening it, and looking out, followed by us children; and ends with the image, for me still unbearable, of the two neighbors rolling down the stairs, entwined, and Melina’s head hitting the floor of the landing, a few inches from my shoes, like a white melon that has slipped from your hand.

But I was exaggerating: maybe it was just a way of giving vent to old grudges or allowing the principal to keep the less good or less obedient teachers under his control.

A little time passed and one Sunday, after Mass, Fernando Cerullo the shoemaker, the father of Lila and Rino, a small, thin man, timidly accosted Don Achille and apologized, without ever saying what he was apologizing for.

When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to.

Now we were climbing toward fear; then we had felt obliged to descend, quickly, into the unknown.

Then, since she wouldn’t budge, I forced myself to rejoin her; I handed her stones, and even threw some myself.

Lila, although she was shorter and very thin, immediately slapped her so hard that she knocked her down: ruthless, as she usually was on occasions of violence, no yelling before or after, no word of warning, cold and determined, not even widening her eyes.

They quarreled.

We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

In general it came from wounds only after horrible curses and disgusting obscenities had been exchanged.

I devoted myself to studying and to many things that were difficult, alien to me, just so I could keep pace with that terrible, dazzling girl.

For years I imagined the pliers, the saw, the tongs, the hammer, the vise, and thousands and thousands of nails sucked up like a swarm of metal into the matter that made up Don Achille.

Lila would thrust her hand and then her whole arm into the black mouth of a manhole, and I, in turn, immediately did the same, my heart pounding, hoping that the cockroaches wouldn’t run over my skin, that the rats wouldn’t bite me.

His brother Stefano, who was fourteen, an apprentice in the grocery store (the former workshop of the carpenter Peluso) owned by his father — who, however, never set foot in it — showed up outside school the next day and said very nasty things to Lila, to the point of threatening her.

Of course, I would have liked the nice manners that the teacher and the priest preached, but I felt that those ways were not suited to our neighborhood, even if you were a girl.

He always had something to accuse him of, and sometimes I put my hands over my ears in order not to be too disturbed by his brutal words.

Through those openings the darkness might suddenly seize the dolls, who sometimes were safe in our arms, but more often were placed deliberately next to the twisted grating and thus exposed to the cellar’s cold breath, to its threatening noises, rustling, squeaking, scraping.

She urged me on with encouraging words, she praised my blond curls, and thus reinforced in me the wish to do well: completely the opposite of my mother, who, at home, so often rebuked me, sometimes abusively, that I wanted to hide in a dark corner and hope that she wouldn’t find me.

She limped, and her step agitated me, especially at night, when she couldn’t sleep and walked along the hall to the kitchen, returned, started again.

We were in second grade, perhaps, and still hadn’t spoken to each other, when the rumor spread that right in front of the Church of the Holy Family, right after Mass, Signor Peluso had started screaming furiously at Don Achille.

While I was shrieking in fear and Lila got up with the blood dripping from under her hair, Enzo, who was also bleeding, climbed down the embankment, and, seeing Lila in that state, he, utterly unpredictably and to our eyes incomprehensibly, began to cry.