“If there’s a fee to pay, he’ll pay it for me,” she explained.
She was sure that her brother would also give her money for the school books and even for pens, pen case, pastels, globe, the smock and the ribbon. She adored him. She said that, after she went to school, she wanted to earn a lot of money for the sole purpose of making her brother the wealthiest person in the neighborhood.
In that last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession. We talked about it the way characters in novels talk about searching for treasure. We said, when we’re rich we’ll do this, we’ll do that. To listen to us, you might think that the wealth was hidden somewhere in the neighborhood, in treasure chests that, when opened, would be gleaming with gold, and were waiting only for us to find them. Then, I don’t know why, things changed and we began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich. Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book.
“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.