The Story of a New Name

My 15 highlights

• 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.

• She ran into a handsome young man, very well dressed, one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, his name was Fabrizio. He wasn’t a customer, he was a friend of Alfonso’s

• I defended Nino warily. I said in the tone of an expert that when a person studies, when he becomes interested in things, he feels the need to communicate those interests to others, and for Nino it was like that. Lila didn’t seem convinced, she made a remark that sounded offensive to me: “If you removed from Nino’s head the things he’s read, you wouldn’t find anything there.”

• My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.

• “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said, “you mustn’t be afraid. I love you more than my mother and my sister.”

• I joined in with the devotion that I had felt ever since we were children. Those moments were thrilling, it was a pleasure to be beside her, slipping inside her intentions, to the point of anticipating her

• But above all, I have to admit, what pleased me was the importance he attached to me. When in his own words he articulated a suspicion that I myself had always had, that is, that Lila harbored a force that made her capable of anything, even of keeping her body from conceiving children, it seemed that he was attributing to me a beneficent power, one that could win over Lila’s maleficent one, and this flattered me.

• The whole time, even when he spoke of his own brutality, he used a dialect full of feeling, defenseless, like the language of certain songs.

• mother’s sullen words: “If you earn money, send it to me by mail; now who’s going to help your brothers with their homework? They’ll do badly at school because of you. But go, leave, who cares: I’ve always known that you thought you were better than me and everybody else.” And then my father’s hypochondriac words: “I have a pain here, who knows what it is, come to your papa, Lenù, I don’t know if you’ll find me alive when you get back

• I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn’t help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life.

• Pasquale naturally was the last to know, even after Lila, that his fiancée was Stefano’s lover. No one told him, he saw them with his own eyes, late on a Sunday afternoon in September, coming out of a doorway on the Rettifilo embracing. Ada had told him that she had things to do with Melina and couldn’t see him. Besides, he was always out at work or at his political meetings, and took little notice of his fiancée’s distortions and evasions. Seeing them caused him terrible pain, complicated by the fact that, while his immediate impulse would have been to kill them both, his education as a militant Communist prohibited him.

• I looked at his broad hands gripping the steering wheel, his face. With tears in his eyes, he admitted that on their wedding night he had had to beat her, that he had been forced to do it, that every morning, every evening she drew slaps from his hands on purpose to humiliate him, forcing him to act in a way that he never, ever, ever would have wanted.

• The entire time, Gigliola and Pinuccia competed to act like the proprietor, each striving harder than the other, and both worn out by the strain. The panel with Lila’s picture loomed over everything. Some paused to look at it with interest, some gave it a skeptical glance or even laughed. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Lila was no longer recognizable. What remained was a seductive, tremendous form, the image of a one-eyed goddess who thrust her beautifully shod feet into the center of the room.

• Nino had a great need to express himself, to summarize his reading, to give shape to what he had himself observed. It was his way of putting his thoughts in order—talk, talk, talk—but certainly, I thought, also a sign of solitude.

• To cautious questions about her pregnancy she either didn’t respond or dragged me outside the store and said nonsensical things like: “I don’t want to talk about it, it’s a disease, I have an emptiness inside me that weighs me down.”