The Story of a New Name

Lila and Nino become recklessly affectionate with each other in public and behave as though they are truly in love. Elena feels she is “watching a performance without substance: they were playing at being together, both knowing well that they were not and couldn’t be” (251).

Later, they have a fight when Nino is reading a love letter from Nadia. Lila grabs the letter, mocks it, and demands that Nino tear it up. Lila instructs Nino to write to Nadia and tell her he is leaving her. Nino then says they should all accompany Lila to the phone box, where they will tell her husband that she is leaving him. Lila becomes furious and tells him how dare he put this “‘foolishness with that whore from a good family”’ on a par with her marriage (254). She then insists that she and Elena go home.

Lila confesses to Elena that she is physically infatuated with Nino, in a way she has never felt before. She feels that she cannot “do without” his touch (255). Elena listens, half wanting to go to her room and cry. But she stays and reminds Lila that Stefano is coming and that next to him, Nino will seem like a boy. Lila refuses to go to the beach and declares that she’s going back to Naples with Stefano the next day.

When Stefano arrives, Lila turns the evening into “relentless conflict” (258). Elena, who thinks she is leaving Ischia, goes to the Maronti to say goodbye to Nella. There she finds Donato Sarratore, who apologizes for assaulting her when she stayed with them. He was overcome by her beauty, he says. He tells her that Nino is also overcome by her beauty. At first, Elena thinks he is lying, but then considers that his words may hold truth. After all, Nino had taken her hand and kissed her, but “Lila had taken him from me” (261). Elena decides to go to Forio and find him. When she does, he hands her an envelope to give to Lila. He says “a moment is enough to change the direction of your life completely” (263) He wants to quit university and find a job.

When Elena arrives at the house, Stefano is furious that Lila is bored by Ischia and wants to go to Amalfi. He demands to know what is going on. Elena claims not to know and goes to Lila, who is napping in her slip. When she hands her the letter, Lila becomes “radiant” because it is Nino’s breakup letter to Nadia (264). She tells Stefano she was joking about Amalfi and cheerfully kisses him goodbye. 

Lila and Elena mail Nino’s breakup letter to Nadia. Elena again confronts Lila, asking if she intends to “‘ruin”’ both herself and Nino (266). Lila spitefully gloats that the smartest boy in the world, according to what Elena has said, is leaving a girl from a good family for her. Lila says that she’s prepared to do “anything” for him (267).

As Lila and Nino increasingly pair off, Bruno begins to make bold physical advances towards Elena. She tells him in no uncertain terms that she does not like him. She insists that she and Lila should go home.

Lila and Elena go to Bruno’s house and Lila disappears for a while with Nino. Later, she tells Elena that she wants to spend the night with Nino and that Elena must help her tell her mother that she and Elena have been invited to stay with Nella at the Maronti. Elena is at first reluctant, but Lila insists that she loves Nino and wishes to devote the time to him before Stefano returns. After much back and forth, Elena gives into Lila’s wishes. 

In order to facilitate Lila’s escape, the girls tell Nunzia that Maestra Oliviero, their elementary school teacher, is convalescing at Nella’s and that the girls have been invited to a party for her. Nunzia at first refuses, saying Lila has obligations to her husband, but they finally twist her arm and persuade her not to tell Stefano.

At the beach the next day, Nino is thrilled to hear the news and swims off with Lila, “full of their own romance” (277). Elena becomes bitter and wishes they would both drown.

Elena is surprised by the sight of Gigliola and Michele, who have come to the beach—the latter with the purpose of talking to Lila about business matters. Lila is in the sea with Nino, and the two are so “entranced with themselves” that when they emerge hand in hand, they do not immediately register Michele and Gigliola’s presence (280). Michele proceeds to demand that Lila come and work at the store in Piazza dei Martiri. She says that she is fine where she is and begins to insult Michele in “skillful and fearless” dialect (281). Michele, who has identified Nino as the son of Donato Sarratore, “the guy who writes for Roma and Napoli Notte” tells Nino that he should tell his father that he was wrong to criticize the store’s appearance when he took money for the job (281).

Even though Elena points out the risk that Michele will tell Stefano about seeing Lila and Nino together, Lila still wants to go ahead with the plan of staying the night at Nino’s. The girls take cab. Lila is dropped off at Nino’s and Elena is taken to Barano. Elena feels that “their passion invaded me, disturbed me. I loved them both and so I couldn’t love myself, feel myself, affirm myself with a need for life of my own, one that had the same blind, mute force as theirs” (284). She finds her own emotional life is eclipsed by that of her two friends.

Elena is greeted warmly by Nella and the Sarratores. Donato invites Elena to the beach, but she stays behind with Nella. Nella describes a conversation she has had with Maestra Oliviero. The teacher praised Elena, but said that Lila was the best student she ever had, Nella reports. Nella, however, does not like Lila and considers Elena much better and prettier than her friend. When Nella laughingly remarks that Donato has said she has “an almost ugly beauty” that provokes men’s castration anxieties, Elena is anxious that she too might become an aging virgin, like Nella (286).

Elena makes the Sarratore children a kite and with Donato’s assistance, helps them launch it.

At night, she walks on the beach and concludes that Lila deserves Nino “because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her”, as Elena herself has done (289). Elena wills something “devastating” to happen and turns around to feel the touch of Donato’s “cold fingers” on her shoulder (289-290). 

Donato begins his “sleazy lyricizing” about the beauty of the sky and sea, a foil for his desire to touch Elena (290). When Elena puts her head on his shoulder, he begins his sexual advances and she allows him. She loses her virginity to Donato. When they are finished, Donato begins to be lyrical and asks when they shall meet again. Elena turns on him and says they must never meet again and that if he tries to approach her, she will set Michele Solara on him. Michele is already eager to punish him for his bad review of the Piazza dei Martiri store’s decoration in the newspaper.

Elena leaves the Sarratores to pick up Lila from Nino’s house. Lila drags out the goodbye. The girls are silent during the mini cab ride home and neither relates her experience. Elena feels that unlike her, Lila strongly desires to be reunited with her lover.

When Elena, the narrator, later reads Lila’s notebooks, she discovers how Lila, prior to her affair with Nino, was steeped in “a sensation of imminent death” and unable to feel anything (295). In her notebooks, Lila casts Nino as her savior, who “brought back to life her sense of herself” (296).

If Lila had confided in Elena in the taxi, Elena would have “suffered even more, because I would have recognised in her fulfillment the reverse of my emptiness” (296).

Back at the house, Lila has “taken possession of” Elena’s “old feeling” that Nino is her savior. Lila feels she needs to study enough to learn what he knows and be his equal. Elena reminds Lila about her husband and encourages her to leave Nino alone. Wanting to wound Lila, Elena says that Nadia is the right girl for Nino. Lila retorts that Nino left Nadia for her. 

When Stefano returns to the house, he makes it clear that he knows that Gigliola saw Lila holding hands with Nino. Lila at first denies it, telling Stefano how stupid he is. This provokes him to force her into the bedroom, lock the door, and start cursing and beating her. Elena is terrified, knowing how violent Stefano can be. She leaves the house to look for someone to break down the door. She cannot find anyone, so she tries to break down the door herself. Then she hears Lila coldly tell Stefano the full scale of her adultery with Nino. Stefano is quiet and Elena surmises that “Lila’s confession must have seemed so unbearable that he ended by taking it as a lie” (302). Elena, on the other hand is wounded by Lila’s “audacious impudence” and figures out that Lila will have Nino even if she is already married and that the two of them will “get out of this filth, while I will be here forever” (303).

Stefano tells them all to pack their bags and makes them leave. At home, Elena’s parents lecture her about “having gone to play the lady on Ischia” (304). Elena resumes her job in the bookshop and intends to continue working there when school begins so that she will have enough money to pay for her schoolbooks. She lives through “one week of pure anguish” when her period does not come, fearing that she is pregnant with Donato’s child, but it is a false alarm (305).

While Elena is occasionally tormented by thoughts of Nino and Lila, she vows to live for herself alone. 

Alfonso mentions to Elena that he will not be allowed to work in the store in Piazza dei Martiri because Lila is determined to work there herself. Elena wonders why Lila wants to suddenly work in the city.

While Professor Galiani continues to promote Elena in school, Elena notices that “she blamed me for some offence that kept her from being as friendly as she had been in the past” (309). Professor Galiani later says that her daughter, Nadia, is convinced that Nino has left her for Elena. Elena says that she would happily see Nino with Nadia. She denies both her own involvement and his relationship with Nina.

Professor Galiani reports that circulating rumors about Nino claim he has stopped studying and has been seen completely drunk and alone in the street.

Elena wonders what happened between Nino and Lila after Ischia, but she determines to go her own way, because neither of them has shown an interest in her.

Elena goes to visit Pinuccia, who is lying in with her new baby and complaining about Lila and the Solaras. First, Lila transformed the shop in Piazza dei Martiri, filling it with abstract paintings and books, “as if she were there not to notice the stink of the customers’ feet but to play the great lady in her castle” (312). Then, the Solaras took Lila’s shoe prototype (of the shoes that Marcello wore to her wedding), had it made, and went into competition with the Cerullo shoes, beating them at their own game. Lila only laughed at the result, Pinuccia relates. Lila has called Rino and Stefano idiots for going into business with the Solaras in the first place. 

When Elena has pizza with Alfonso and Marisa Sarratore, she asks Marisa about Nino. Apparently, Nino has been behaving erratically, returning to studying and coming home only to quarrel with his father.

It is Elena’s last year of high school and the months are going by quickly. Meanwhile, Antonio has been dismissed from military service owing to a mental breakdown over a repressed memory about his father and the terror that an illness would invade his hand. Elena begins to go for walks with him.

Additionally, on learning that her husband, Alfredo Peluso died of a heart attack in prison, Giuseppina hangs herself from a clothesline. Antonio, who is already fragile, cannot get the disturbing image of her body out of his head. Elena glimpses Lila at Giuseppina’s funeral, where she is standing at Stefano’s side.

Elena fears that Antonio has lost his senses when he agrees to accept work from the Solaras, even though he has hated them in the past. They offer him a fixed amount monthly to be “available” when they need him (322).

Meanwhile, Elena flourishes in her end-of-year exams, passing with an A average. A professor present at the exams tells Elena that if she passes an exam in Pisa, she will be able to study there for free. Elena applies and does everything she can to earn the money to get there.

She goes to Pisa, where the exam is astonishingly difficult and the professors hector her. Nevertheless she passes and so at the age of nineteen, she is able to “pull myself out of the neighborhood […] by myself” (327).

Elena says her goodbyes to the people in the neighborhood, who are unsure and sad about her departure. She has not seen Lila in a year, but when she goes to the store in Piazza dei Martiri, Lila greets her warmly. Nino emerges too and it turns out that the two have being meeting in secret for almost a year. Lila is two months pregnant and about to “confess everything” to Stefano and leave him (330). 

From the moment Lila discovers she is pregnant, she is determined to find a place where she and Nino can move into. She has been negotiating for a small apartment in Campi Flegrei, where she and Nino can live together. Elena challenges her, asking why she does not continue to deceive Stefano, good as she is at telling lies. While Nino contains himself, wishing to avoid an argument, Lila says she “‘would prefer to be killed”’ than live apart from Nino (331). Elena hopes for her own sake that she never sees either of them again.

“The years at the Normale were important, but not for the story” of Lila and Elena’s friendship, the narrator Elena relates (332). After an awkward beginning, Elena learns to “subdue my voice and gestures,” keeping her Neapolitan accent to a minimum (332). As a result, she is generally well liked by her fellow students and does exceptionally in her exams, passing with As. At a dance, she meets Franco Mari, a militant Communist, who comes from a wealthy family. She becomes Franco’s girlfriend. Despite the couple’s many shared experiences, Elena finds that she does not love him. When Franco fails an exam and is not allowed back into university, the two lose touch.

Elena considers that it is easy for her to tell the story of herself without Lila. However, “my life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what she would use of my luck” (337).

As for Lila, from the moment she left Nino on the beach in Ischia, she realizes that he is the only part of her life that is “concrete and true” (338). Her dealings as Signora Carracci seem horribly false to her.

After Nino turns up at the Carracci’s grocery swaying drunk, Lila takes him to her house. As soon as they are there, they immediately begin to make love. After this episode, she begins making excuses to see Nino secretly, all the while being affectionate with her husband.

At first, Lila’s problem is Nino’s clinginess: “nothing mattered to him except to clutch her, kiss her, bite her, penetrate her” (340). He has given up studying and drinks and smokes all day. Stefano, following the outburst at Ischia, becomes cautious, telephoning Lila at the grocery and complaining that she has not yet become pregnant.

Eventually, the lovers decide that their stolen meetings are too risky and not enough: they must find a safe space.

Later, the narrator Elena learns that Lila’s notebooks from that time are filled with fantasies of massacres and blood, provoked by her fears of Stefano’s rage.

In her controversial decision to leave the grocery and be present at the Piazza dei Martiri store, Lila cares little for the feelings of her husband or brother, who have lost out to the Solaras. Instead, “her capacity for affection had taken a single path, every thought, every feeling had Nino at its centre” (344).

Taking over the store isolates her further from the sympathies of the neighborhood. Gigliola and Pinuccia, who have been removed from the Piazza dei Martiri store, “threw on Lila all the mud they were capable of” (346). Even Lila’s once-ardent admirer, Pasquale Peluso, seeing Lila in Michele Solara’s Giulietta, dressed to the nines, feels that she has sold out to the Solaras

Lila does not care about the neighborhood and is happy to run the Piazza dei Martiri store like an eccentric salon. Michele admires her and tells her she has the wrong husband and tries to kiss her. Lila pushes him away, but meanwhile entertains Nino at the store every day.

While Nino is there, Lila reads, studies and reflects for him. Later, Elena reflects that when Nino publishes an acclaimed article for Il Mattino, all the parts that did not require a particular expertise were Lila’s. 

When Lila discovers she is pregnant, one Sunday in the Autumn of 1963, she cooks lunch for Stefano, her suitcase already packed. She tells Stefano she wants to leave him. His reaction is to burst out laughing and hit her. She threatens him with a knife that she has kept hidden under a dishcloth and says that if he hits her again, she will kill him the way they killed his father, Don Achille. He protests that he loves her, but has fallen asleep “as if wrapped in a magic cape” (352). Lila tells him about Nino and the child and decides to leave then and there. 

Stefano reacts to Lila’s disappearance as though it has not happened. It is only when Nunzia anxiously inquires about her that he has to admit that she has left him. The Carraccis and Cerullos wonder where she can be and conclude that she must have gone to see Elena. Elena receives a letter asking in a very “roundabout” way whether Lila is with her (354). Furious at both Lila and Nino, Elena refuses to answer.

“Intractable” because he does not know Lila’s whereabouts, Michele threatens Antonio. He says Antonio must find her and tell no one or Michele will have him committed to the insane asylum (355). He tells him bring Nino along with him on the search.

Lila leaves Stefano for a life with Nino. She takes the metro to Campi Flegrei and she feels a sense of security. Because Nino has had to study, she has procured the apartment “all herself” (356). When Nino arrives, Lila feels that “she had come from a world of shadows and had arrived in a place where finally life was real” (357). 

Nino and Lila live together for 23 days. Once, after a lecture, there is a disturbance and Lila notices Antonio, but says nothing about him to Nino. While she is blissfully content, he begins to feel that her presence distracts him from study. Nino regrets “the long exciting period of the furtive meetings in the shop […and…] perceived something about Lila that disturbed him” (359). He begins to feel that she will ruin him and tells her not to meddle in his affairs. Lila tells him to get out. He obliges and does not return.