The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels #2)

by Elena Ferrante

She used all her strength, and I who knew her thoroughly felt that if she could she would have wrenched it from his body, crossed the room holding it high above her head, blood dripping in her train, and she would have used it as a club or a donkey’s jawbone to crush Marcello’s face with a solid blow. Ah yes, she would have done it, and at the idea my heart pounded furiously, my throat became dry. Then she would have dug out the eyes of both men, she would have torn the flesh from the bones of their faces, she would have bitten them.

Its what they deserve

If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.

I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I’m incapable of violent reactions, I fear them, I prefer to be still, cultivating resentment. Not Lila.

In other words, no one except me seemed to realize that the marriage that had just been celebrated—and that would probably last until the death of the spouses, among the births of many children, many more grandchildren, joys and sorrows, silver and gold wedding anniversaries—that for Lila, no matter what her husband did in his attempt to be forgiven, that marriage was already over.

For her whole life she would sacrifice to him every quality of her own, and he wouldn’t even be aware of the sacrifice, he would be surrounded by the wealth of feeling, intelligence, imagination that were hers, without knowing what to do with them, he would ruin them.

What I could become outside of Lila’s shadow counted for nothing. What was I compared with her in her wedding dress, with her in the convertible, the blue hat and the pastel suit?

Afterward, as we were leaving the ponds, he said uneasily that he respected me and didn’t want to make me do something that I would later regret, not in that place, not in that dirty and careless way. He spoke as if it were he who had gone too far, and maybe he believed that.

It’s Lila’s fault, I thought, if I started down this path, I have to forget her, too: Lila always knew what she wanted and got it; I don’t want anything, I’m made of nothing. I hoped to wake in the morning without desires.

The screws holding together her new condition of wife, the restaurant, Amalfi, seemed to her so loose that at the end of dinner Stefano’s voice no longer reached her, in her ears there was only a clamor of objects, living beings, and thoughts, without definition.

Lila didn’t doubt that he would have been capable of it—the stranger who waited for her outside was capable of anything. I, too, she thought, am capable of anything.

Is it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?

But the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea.

Although I imposed on myself an appearance of self-assurance and an iron discipline, I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness. Everything seemed to be against me.

“And what do you say?” “What should I say?” “Like father like son, you should say.”

truer words have never been spoken

“I always have to prove that I can be better,”

“Even if you’re better than me, even if you know more things, don’t leave me.”

With Nino it was different. I felt that I had to pay attention to say what he wanted me to say, hiding from him both my ignorance and the few things that I knew and he didn’t. I did this, and felt proud that he was trusting me with his convictions.

So Nino had kept his promise. So he had felt, already, the next day, the need to see me again. So he had come purposely from Forio, dragging along his mute companion, and since he had nothing in common with Lila and Pinuccia, it was obvious that he had taken that walk just for me, who alone was not married, or even engaged.

Delusion

I proudly felt that I was like him, with the same desire to give myself an educated identity, to impose it, to say: Here’s what I know, here’s what I’m going to be. But Nino didn’t leave me space to do it, even if occasionally, I have to say, I tried.

girl stand up

She claimed that they were neither particularly friendly nor particularly close. In her view it was a relationship that was sustained completely by the patience of Bruno, who was good-natured and so accepted without complaint the fact that Nino talked his head off from morning till night with all that nonsense that was constantly coming out of his mouth.

I hoped that he would ask me to join him at the Maronti. But he was distracted, maybe his mind was still on Dan Rooney, who, not content with being blind, wished to become deaf and mute, too. He didn’t ask me anything.

“For your whole life you love people and you never really know who they are.”

We preferred to listen attentively to the list of wrongs that Nino suffered at the hands of his father. A cheater, he called him, a malingerer.

As for Nino, now he often took my hand, put an arm around my shoulders, and then put an arm around Lila’s, too, he took her index finger, her thumb.

“But my husband didn’t want it,” she added, “and I didn’t know how to oppose him: there wasn’t the money then, and yet she could have done as you did; instead she got married, she chose a different path and one can’t go back, life takes us where it wants.” She wished me happiness, “with a fine young man who has studied like you.”

Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?

I wished that they would drown and that death would take from them the joys of the next day.

period

And then I said to myself: men are all made of the same clay, only Nino is different. And I sighed, while my resentment grew stronger: now it’s absolutely clear that Lila will have him, even if she’s married, and together they’ll get out of this filth, while I will be here forever.

I felt stupid, I had neglected the things I liked to conform to what Nino liked.

I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone.

I was used to being liked by everyone, to wrapping that liking around me like shining armor; I was disappointed,

I, Elena Greco, the daughter of the porter, at nineteen years old was about to pull myself out of the neighborhood, I was about to leave Naples. By myself.

it takes time for people to understand what’s good and what’s bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren’t capable of doing.

January 3, 1965,

She thought: I have to remove from my face every sign that makes her right, I don’t want her to preach to me how I’m wasted.

She is discovering that I am stupid, she said to herself, her heart pounding harder, she is discovering that my whole family is stupid, that my forebears were stupid and my descendants will be stupid, that Gennaro will be stupid.

As soon as the train entered the station I became nervous. I feared that some accident would prevent me from returning to the Normale at the end of the vacation:

I went out carrying the metal box. I stopped on the Solferino bridge and threw it into the Arno.

This breaks me

I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.

I was also glad that no one in that nice little family had asked me, as happened frequently, where I came from, what my father did, and my mother. I was I, I, I.

I also wanted to tell her: you’re right, Lila, if they teach you properly from childhood, as an adult you have less trouble with everything, you are someone who seems to have been born already knowing.

Just now that I was becoming a writer, there was no one in the entire neighborhood capable of saying: What an extraordinary thing you’ve done.

But most of all I felt the need to have her sit beside me, to tell her, you see how connected we are, one in two, two in one, and prove to her with the rigor that it seemed to me I had learned in the Normale, with the philological persistence I had learned from Pietro, how her child’s book had put down deep roots in my mind and had, in the course of the years, produced another book, different, adult, mine, and yet inseparable from hers, from the fantasies that we had elaborated together in the courtyard of our games, she and I continuously formed, deformed, reformed. I wanted to embrace her, kiss her, and tell her, Lila, from now on, whatever happens to me or you, we mustn’t lose each other anymore.

why am i crying in the club rn