My Brilliant Friend

A “terrible, dazzling girl,” Lila Cerullo has none of Elena’s proclivity for pleasing others and does as she wishes, regardless of the hatred she inspires (47). She also displays a courage that Elena finds astonishing, for instance when she confronts Don Achille about their missing dolls. An exceptional student, “even by first grade [Lila] was beyond any possible competition” (48). However, she “lost energy” for her formal scholastic endeavors when her father refuses to let her study Latin for the middle school exam, leading her to under-perform in the elementary school exam (79). Even when her formal schooling ends, Lila becomes a prodigious autodidact, not merely keeping up but also anticipating Elena’s learnings of Latin and Greek. Her insights on life, religion, and culture are indispensable to Elena.

While Lila suffers at the hands of her father and brother, the person who makes her feel inferior is Maestra Oliviero, the teacher who scolds her at the blackboard when she cannot solve a problem and causes her “suffering” (72). Oliviero deals another blow when she refuses to attend Lila’s wedding, stating that she does not recognize her. This incident, in addition to the New Year’s Eve party where she almost has a breakdown at the bestiality she sees in all humans, indicate Lila’s depth, fragility, and sensitivity.

As a child, Lila is physically “skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness, she had a long face, narrow at the temples, framed by two bands of smooth black hair” (52). She reaches puberty later than the other girls in the neighborhood, but when she does her beauty surpasses all of theirs in its refinement. Elena describes her slender, shapely form, how “when she combed her hair in a ponytail, her long neck was revealed with a touching clarity” (142). However, Lila’s unique beauty is her downfall when she becomes a prize to be fought over by the most powerful men in the neighborhood and a negotiating chip for her impoverished family.

While Lila enjoys male admiration, she is self-possessed and displays no real desire for any of the men who court her. Displaying none of Elena’s romanticism, Lila marries Stefano Carracci because he promises a life where she will have higher status and more money. She sees her chasteness— “she yielded nothing to Stefano” even during their engagement— as a point of refinement and strength, especially given the beauty of her body (290). However, there is also the implicit allusion that Lila will enter her marriage without desiring to have sexual relations with her husband. 

Rino Cerullo, Lila’s older brother, is “a very excitable boy” who feels underpaid and underappreciated by his domineering father and so stages numerous rebellious campaigns (68). The first of these campaigns is to insist that Lila continue her schooling even when her parents refuse to pay for Latin lessons. However, as time passes and circumstances change, Rino applies his energy to other campaigns, such as to show up his father with the shoes he and Lila make behind his back—and later to set his sights on becoming rich through contact with Lila’s powerful suitors, Marcello Solara and Stefano Carracci.

On the night of the New Year’s Eve party, Rino shouts obscenities and encourages the Carraccis’ violent firework competition with the Solaras. Lila’s prior adoration of her brother turns to disgust. His behavior that night is a harbinger of how he will use Lila as a pawn when the Solaras and Carraccis show interest in her. 

Fernando Cerullo is the neighborhood shoemaker and Lila’s father. He resembles the actor Randolph Scott and, according to Lila, “was full of kindnesses” praising her intelligence and bringing her warm chocolate in bed on her name-day (69). Lila adores her father and looks up to him; when her scholastic endeavors repulse rather than impress him, she seeks to please him on his own terms by making a perfect pair of men’s shoes. Fernando is arguably intimidated by his daughter’s ability and unable to see why a girl should go to school; he refuses to pay for the Latin lessons that will enable her to enter middle school. Violent and controlling, Fernando does not hesitate to throw Lila out of the window “like a thing” when she challenges him (82). He also reacts violently to the shoes Lila and Rino make, seeing their secret project as a betrayal of his authority.

As Lila develops into a beautiful young woman, prized by the most influential and dangerous men in the neighborhood, Fernando relinquishes his authority over her to collaborate and benefit from a tie with a wealthier family. His desire for influence is such that he ignores Lila’s feelings and insists that she marry a man she hates, Marcello Solara. Lila instead brings a wealthier competitor, Stefano Carracci, into the fray. Stefano introduces plans to expand the Cerullos’ business, and Fernando becomes increasingly stressed, as he himself is used as a pawn in the schemes of more powerful men. 

Elena’s mother is an overworked housewife, who is critical of her oldest daughter. She is unnamed in the novel. Elena fears her and fears becoming like her: “Her body repulsed me, something she probably intuited. She was a dark blonde, blue-eyed, voluptuous. But you never knew where her right eye was looking. Nor did her right leg work properly […] She limped, and her step agitated me, especially at night, when she couldn’t sleep” (44-5). Although Elena considers that her mother is overly corporeal, the sound of her limp at night is a ghostly intimation of what may be in store for Elena. As a child, Elena thinks that if she keeps up with Lila, “at her pace, my mother’s limp, which had entered my brain and wouldn’t come out, would stop threatening me” (46).

Elena’s mother appears jealous of her daughter’s opportunities; she humorously mocks that “the signorina must go and rest on Ischia, the signorina is too exhausted,” when Maestra Oliviero invites Elena to stay with a relative for the summer (208). The epithet “signorina,” Italian for Miss, is Elena’s mother’s way of showing her bitterness towards the elevated status that Elena’s education has given her. Elena’s mother also reminds Elena that she is the one who took her to the sea as a young girl, indicating that she has not always been tied to the house—and that Elena’s opportunities for viewing the world beyond the neighborhood have not always come from middle-class strangers.

While Elena’s mother is sneering towards her daughter’s educational achievements, almost anticipating the exam failure that will see Elena thrown out of school and relegated to the house like her, she sometimes behaves in ways that contradict this belief. For example, she forbids Elena from consorting with Antonio, lest she “ruin” not only her reputation, but the advantages her schooling have given her (321). 

An unnamed porter at the city hall, Elena’s father is gentle in comparison with her mother, but he does not fail to exert his authority as the man of the house. He “never raised his voice” although “he sometimes beat” Elena’s mother and threatens Elena that if she is not the best at school, she will not be allowed to continue going there (45). He is also bound by codes of honor, that would force him to “beat me to death” if he found that she had gone in the Solaras’ car (113).

Elena is her father’s favorite child. She enjoys the only day they spend alone together, when he takes her around Naples in order to show her the transportation that she will have to take when she goes to high school. He dedicates himself to her “as if he wanted to communicate in a few hours everything useful he had learned in the course of his existence” (136). She notices how in town “he behaved with a sociability, a relaxed courtesy, that at home he almost never had” (136). Unlike Fernando Cerullo, Elena’s father accepts that his daughter is going to be more educated than he and he has the humility to defer his daughter’s fate to other authorities when he cannot help her himself. 

Don Achille Carracci is a powerful and terrifying figure in the neighborhood, the “ogre of fairytales.” Elena and Lila are forbidden to even look at him or his family (27). As children, they know that their parents loathe Don Achille and have fantasies of killing him, but they do not know exactly what he has done to merit this censure. Later, they learn from Pasquale Peluso that Don Achille was involved in the black market and also exhorted the already impoverished families in the neighborhood, including the Pelusos.

When Elena and Lila go against their parents’ wishes and approach Don Achille to ask him to return their dolls, they are surprised by his “ordinary” appearance (66). With his “long torso, short legs, arms that hung to his knees”, Elena thinks that he is ugly but is surprised that he is a human being (65). He even makes the surprise gesture of giving the girls money to buy new dolls.

Don Achille’s murder enshrines him in myth, as it is not clear, at least to the girls, who the assassin is. But while Lila enjoys elaborating on the story of the murder, describing the “wavering black line” of Don Achille’s blood against a copper pot, the Communist Alfredo Peluso is the one charged with the crime, regardless of whether he actually committed it (84). This arrest, along with other references to the persecution of Communists throughout the narrative, presents the idea that whoever opposes the status quo will be punished. 

Stefano Carracci, Don Achille’s son, is a grocer and quickly becomes the wealthiest and most influential young man in the neighborhood. Unlike his father, who was universally feared and loathed, Stefano has “the manners of a prince,” and Elena initially thinks him very handsome and elegant (173). However, next to tall slender Lila at their wedding, he seems a “faded little man”, who has inherited his father’s short legs and long torso (316). 

Stefano seems suave and from a world other than the violent neighborhood. But when he ignores Marcello Solara’s slights on his fiancée’s (Lila) honor, he reveals himself to be a practical man who puts his business interests first. During his courtship with Lila, he makes the grand gesture of paying to expand the Cerullos’ shoe store and executing Lila’s childhood shoe designs. He later berates the overworked Cerullos when they are not making any money. He also goes against Lila’s wishes and recruits Silvio Solara to be speech master at their wedding because doing so will be good for business. The final insult comes when Lila sees, at the wedding, that Stefano has sold Lila’s handmade shoes to Marcello Solara.

Pasquale Peluso is the construction-worker son of the Communist Alfredo Peluso (who is jailed for allegedly murdering Don Achille). Pasquale shares his father’s political convictions and is scathing about the Fascist and Camorrist associations of the Solaras and the Carraccis. Lacking schooling, Pasquale speaks “generically, in sorrowful accents” about poverty and does not think, like Lila, to embellish his knowledge with a book from the library (323).

Physically, Pasquale has “curly black hair, he was dark-skinned, and sunburned, he had a wide mouth” (124). He is in love with Lila and the first to propose to her. He is devastated when she refuses him and does not pursue any other girls for the rest of the book. He feels especially betrayed, when, regardless of her intelligence, Lila turns a blind eye to the Carracci family’s history of extortion and aligns herself with Stefano.

A mother of six children and a widow (her husband, a fruit and vegetable seller, dies suddenly), Melina Cappuccio is known throughout the neighborhood for her loss of reason. She has “wild eyes and a long nose” and generally leaves her grey hair uncombed (173). When Donato Sarratore begins to help her and her family, she is so “grateful that her gratitude became, in her desolate woman’s heart, love, passion” (38). She enters into a fierce exchange of insults and even physically fights with Lidia Sarratore, Donato’s wife. Later, their battle becomes a spectacle for the whole neighborhood, which, with the exception of Lila, takes Lidia’s side over Melina’s. Elena and Lila learn only much later, from Nino, that Donato did more than just help Melina; “he was her lover” and took advantage of her to satisfy his own vanity (221). 

Melina regains something of her reason when the Sarratores leave the neighborhood, and she dutifully cleans the steps of buildings, wearing her black widow’s dress. Nevertheless, the slightest hint of Donato Sarratore sends her into a bout of mania. For example, the book of poetry that Donato sends her, accompanied by a dedication, makes her exuberant: “laughing, jumping on the bed, and pulling up her skirt, displaying her fleshless thighs and her underpants to her frightened children” (126). Donato’s presence in the old neighborhood is dangerous for Melina, not only because it procures her mania, but also because her behavior could land her in an insane asylum. Her vulnerability makes her dependent on the tolerance of her neighbors and positions her at the lowest, most precarious status in the neighborhood. 

Antonio Cappuccio is Melina’s son and an auto-mechanic who works at Gorresio’s shop—in a job Donato Sarratore procured for him. Antonio is a “hard worker, disciplined, very shy, obviously wounded by both the untimely death of his father and the unbalanced behavior of his mother” (113). He lacks the violent impulses of the other men in the neighborhood, only fighting when it is a matter of honor—such as when his sister, Ada, is pulled into the Solaras’ car or when Elena persuades him that Donato Sarratore’s presence in the neighborhood is threatening to his mother. In the latter case, he follows Elena’s entreaty to confront Sarratore, but all the while “trembling,” given his gratitude to the man and his distaste for confrontation (287).

Elena considers Antonio attractive but not handsome because “his face was shiny and full of blackheads, his teeth here and there were bluish; he had broad hands and strong fingers […] but he had black wavy hair that made you want to caress it” (266). Antonio’s earthy masculinity satisfies Elena’s sexual curiosity, and they engage in a mutually fulfilling exploration of each other’s bodies. Still, Antonio’s interest in Elena is not just sexual; he longs for the day when he can introduce himself to her parents and goes into debt to wear a suit that will make a good impression at Lila’s wedding. Tragically, for Antonio, a sympathetic character, Elena views him as a stand-in for Nino—as well as the kind of relationship she imagines Lila is having with Stefano.

The fatherless daughter of an unbalanced mother, whom she helps wash stairs, Ada Cappuccio is more vulnerable than the other neighborhood girls. She wears lipstick in secret from her mother and, at age 14, “with her long straight legs, and breasts even larger than (Elena’s), she looked grown-up and pretty” (113). After making vulgar remarks to her, Michele Solara grabs her by the arm and pulls her inside his car. When the Solara brothers bring Ada back an hour later to the same spot where they abducted her, Ada is “a little angry, but also laughing” (113). What the Solaras did to Ada is unclear, but it is likely that they forced her into non-consensual sexual activity. Lila is incensed by the incident, noting that according to the neighborhood code males with money can do what they want, especially with impoverished, low status young women. This is also the incident that turns Lila against the Solaras.

At the end of the novel, Stefano Carracci gives Ada a job in his grocery. She is extremely grateful. At this stage in the Neapolitan novels, the gesture seems like a simple act of generosity on Stefano’s part. However, given that Ada is Melina’s daughter, there is an implication that she could in the future develop feelings for this more powerful man. 

Charming and extroverted, Donato Sarratore is a conductor who also writes poetry. He “is of average height, his features are pronounced, he has a receding hairline, his mouth is compact, almost without lips” (223). He ostensibly seems like a good man, both “diligent in his attendance at the Church of the Holy Family and as a good Christian collected clothes for the (Cappuccio) family and settled Antonio in Gorresio’s auto repair shop” (38).

However, Donato’s selfish hedonism causes him to take advantage of Melina Cappuccio in her fragile mental state and, even after he’s left the neighborhood, to recklessly play with her emotions by sending her his published book of poems. He also sexually assaults 15-year-old Elena in the most sinister way, sneaking into the kitchen where she is sleeping and causing her unspeakable trauma—as well as ruinously complicating her romantic feelings toward Donato’s son, Nino.

As a child, Nino Sarratore is “handsome, slender and nervous, with long lashes.” Elena loves him and never forgets his childish proposal of marriage to her (51). He remains tall and slender as a teenager, but his forehead is “buried under black hair” and “brooding eyes that see beyond things and persons and seem to be frightened” (223). For Elena, Nino resembles Lila in having something “that’s eating him inside” (223). He even expresses admiration for Lila’s intelligence and envy over the friendship Lila and Elena have. A serious student and thinker, Nino says he will “devote my life […] to trying not to resemble” his father (220).

While Elena idolizes Nino, elements of his vanity become apparent, especially when he grumbles about Professor Galiani preferring Elena’s writing to his own. Nino also makes himself the custodian of Elena’s religion article, not informing her about when the next edition of Naples, Home of the Poor is to come out and waiting until Lila’s wedding to tell her that her piece was not published. While Elena is unquestioning, believing the article was rejected because it was not good enough, but Nino’s vagueness surrounding the matter leaves the reader wondering whether Nino actually submitted Elena’s article in the first place.

Often appearing as a pair, with his brother, Michele, Marcello Solara is “handsome, with glossy black hair, white teeth” (112). The white teeth are a luxury in an impoverished neighborhood, and Elena even considers that he resembled “Hector as he was depicted in the school copy of the Iliad” (112). “A Camorrist, used [...] to taking the women he wanted,” for whatever purposes, Marcello feels entitled to Ada Cappuccio’s body. The brothers’ status is such that they “beat Antonio bloody” after he proceeds to defend his sister’s honor, none of the passersby dare to intervene (113). And, owing to his power, Marcello is seen as a “promotion” for Lila when he asks her to marry him (184). Marcello is a violent figure throughout the book; he shoots a gun at the Carraccis on New Year’s Eve for failing to match him and his brother in the lighting of fireworks.

Marcello preys on Lila, essentially bribing her family to make her marry him though she loathes him. Lila responds by staging a vicious campaign to get rid of him. When she goes to bed without sitting beside him at dinner, his ego is already becoming bruised. However, when she says that she will never marry him because she loves Stefano, he is truly broken. Though he vows to kill both Lila and her fiancé, this time he turns his violence on himself: “he bit his clenched right fist until it bled” (252). Later, embittered and humiliated, Marcello spreads vulgar rumors about Lila.

The Fiat 1100, which Marcello and Michele drive around the neighborhood, is also a marker of their status and resilience. When Antonio Cappuccio, Pasquale Peluso, and Enzo Scanno smash it up, Marcello obtains a green Giulietta instead. He may not get Lila in the end, but he manages to intimidate her on her wedding day by turning up wearing her precious handmade shoes.