Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Raffaella Cerullo, nicknamed Lina or Lila, has been Elena’s closest friend and greatest competitor since childhood. Lila is a brilliant woman, one whom Elena feels perpetually inferior to, despite Elena’s higher education and academic achievements. Lila is ambitious and capricious, but she can also be surprisingly vulnerable, and Elena is one of the only people to whom Lila reveals her true feelings. While Elena tends to idealize both Lila and their friendship, characters like Pietro comment on how Lila harshly criticizes and even humiliates Elena to position herself as socially superior. Lila often acts or speaks in ways contradictory to her feelings in order to protect herself and hide her insecurities. In Chapter 37, Lila disparages education as a whole because she ardently wishes that she could give better educational opportunities to her son, Gennaro, and to mitigate her disappointment over her own limited education. Likewise, Lila appears to disdain upper-class life, but she tells Elena in Chapter 122 that she imagined that Elena could live a wonderful life for the both of them (417).

Elena ascribes powers to Lila that make her seem superhuman, like the “siren power” of her words (138). When Elena half-convinces herself that Lila had a hand in Soccavo’s murder, she imagines Lila saying, “You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality” (313). Elena pictures Lila as able to manipulate people and events according to her will. Soccavo’s mysterious death parallels Manuela’s murder at the end of the novel, which reinforces this notion: After Lila and Elena concoct the story of Manuela killing Don Achille, Lila circulates the rumor in the neighborhood so that when Manuela Solara is murdered in turn, it feels like the natural conclusion to a well-crafted story.

Lila is portrayed as a potential cycle-breaker in her Neapolitan neighborhood. She can accomplish nearly anything she puts her mind to; she is capable of transforming any place she sets foot in and affecting significant change. When Elena learns what Lila accomplished at the salami factory, she feels that Lila has achieved significantly more without the education and opportunity Elena has pursued. Lila has no love for the violence of the neighborhood. In Chapter 30, when Pasquale is talking about the neighborhood, Lila suddenly realizes “the violence, the blood” that permeated her childhood (117). As a child, her vivid imagination had masked those things. When Lila reads the second draft of Elena’s second book in Chapter 75, she is distraught by the stark depiction of violence and crudeness in the neighborhood and says that imagination is necessary to transform these things into something meaningful. While success is Elena’s escape, imagination is Lila’s.

Once Lila returns to the neighborhood, she attains a greater position than when she lived there previously, enabling her to affect change there just as she did at the factory. Lila’s new position at Michele’s factory affords her a significant income, which she uses to take care of her impoverished family; she also tells Elena in Chapter 95 that she plans to use Michele for some scheme. Gigliola admires Lila because she’s the only one who can “make Michele shit blood” (209), reinforcing Lila’s power to resist the historic forces of power in the neighborhood. With Manuela’s death at the end of the novel and the neighborhood in chaos, there is tentative potential for the structure of the Solaras’ power to be broken; Lila is positioned to be that cycle-breaker, just as she was at Soccavo’s factory.

Pietro is Elena’s husband, a successful young professor and son of the prominent Airota family. While the rest of the Airotas are outspoken and active in supporting the class struggle and workers movement, Pietro values order and does not wish to cause tensions on either side. His political aversion leads to conflict with his colleagues at the university, who consider his inaction as complicity with the Fascists. Even Pietro’s own family feels that he is dull and weak; when Elena confides in Mariarosa that she feels that Pietro imposes his own ideas on her, Mariarosa dismisses the complaint because “Pietro has trouble keeping together his own virility” (352). Elena has the distinct impression that Pietro does not fit in with his family, and that his success may only be due to his family name. 

While Pietro is polite and mild-mannered, he is also a distant husband, absorbed in his work and dismissive of Elena’s need for support after their daughters are born. Pietro is jealous of Elena’s intellect; he feels threatened by it. Elena notes, how “even though I had an education [Pietro] did not want me to be capable of independent thought, he demeaned me by demeaning what I read, what interested me, what I said, and he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness” (298). While Pietro is not as physically violent as the men that populated Elena’s childhood, he nevertheless upholds traditional patriarchal structures, teaching Elena that, even within the framework of upper-class society, women are expected to be subordinate to men. The violence in Pietro’s character lies in the way he views Elena: He relegates her to the roles of mother and wife and dismisses her work and her intellect. The similarities between his notion of gender roles and those in Elena’s childhood neighborhood become obvious when Pietro strikes Elena during an argument. By enacting a kind of domestic violence that Elena is already familiar with, Pietro signals to Elena that his wealth and education do not necessarily make him more fair or open-minded than other men, even if his methods of intimidation and control are different. Elena’s marriage to Pietro is a joyless and unfulfilling one; his character reinforces the cycles of oppression in women’s roles and embodies Elena’s disillusionment with upper-class life. 

Nino has been an object of fascination for Elena since childhood; she idealizes him as among the smartest people she knows and chases his approval as validation of her own intellect. Nino comes from the same Neapolitan neighborhood as Elena, and like Elena, became successful in the intellectual and political worlds through his access to higher education. Her infatuation with Nino leaves her unable to recognize his faults: Nino is arrogant and self-centered. He treats the feelings of others as secondary to his own desires. He has been with many different women and fathered several children but takes no responsibility once his affairs end. Nino’s infidelity and selfishness mirrors that of his father, Donato Sarratore, whom Nino both hates and emulates.

During the final act of the novel, Nino’s validation of Elena’s intellect and encouragement of her writing re-ignites her attraction to him. Nino is a stark contrast to Pietro, who feels threatened by his wife’s intelligence. However, even Nino’s praise of Elena is motivated by selfishness. Nino creates tension in his friendship with Pietro in order to open Elena’s eyes to her husband’s hypocrisy and “[propose] himself as an alternate model of virility” (385), hoping to seduce Elena into an affair. Although Elena is angry with him for upsetting the balance of her home life at first, her desire for him wins out and she disregards this thought. Nino’s affair with Elena is marked by extremes of passion. Although Elena acknowledges that rapid, intense relationships are a pattern for Nino, she dismisses the thought that he might have similarly selfish intentions toward her. Nino remains self-centered; in Chapter 121, he is unsympathetic to Elena’s plight at home after she discloses their affair to Pietro and says only that he has it worse at his place. Elena’s idealization makes reluctant to admit Nino’s faults, just as she is hesitant to criticize Lila.

Bruno Soccavo is the owner of the salami factory where Lila works at the beginning of the novel, a role which has been passed down through the Soccavo family line. Elena and Lila first encountered Soccavo in the previous novel in the series, The Story of a New Name, when they spent time with him and Nino on Ischia. While he seemed little more than a flirtatious, carefree young man to Elena during that time, in this novel Soccavo is cruel and exploitative. His workers are subjected to extremely unsafe conditions, and the women are subjected to unwanted sexual advances from the men. Soccavo ignores all of this and even participates in harassing the women at his factory, including Lila. When Lila rejects his advances, Soccavo retaliates by making life at the factory miserable for her.

Soccavo is aligned with the Fascists. He calls upon them to deal with the union students at the gates of his factory and allows them to beat his workers. Soccavo is an oppressor in the class struggle, and a perpetuator of the cycle of violence against women. He reinforces the theme of cycles of abuse; in addition, he provides another example in that novel that the prestige that the upper class is not always warranted or just. While Elena discovers the influence of the Airota name and uses it to help Lila, Soccavo’s family name enables him to continue the abuse and oppression that have characterized his factory for generations.

Michele is one of the Solaras, a family that controls a wide criminal network in Naples; it’s implied that they are linked to illegal trafficking in the neighborhood. The Solaras are open supporters of Fascism and the source of much violence.

Michele is the epitome of the abusive patriarch within the traditional power structures, and a symbol of systemic cycles of abuse and violence. Michele is cruel to his wife, Gigliola, verbally demeaning her and humiliating her with his public infidelity. Michele sees women as objects subjugated to his sexual desires, things whose only purpose is “to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them” (208). Despite this, there is one woman who is an exception to his sadistic lust: Lila. Michele is portrayed as a uniquely dangerous figure among the violent, possessive men of the novel because the nature of his obsession with Lila transcends sexual desire: He wants to possess “the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas” (208). He feels that he is the only one who truly understands Lila, and persistently attempts to possess her in some way, finally succeeding at the end of the novel when Lila agrees to work at his data processing center.

Although at first they are not romantically involved, Enzo is Lila’s loyal companion who cares for Gennaro as if he were Enzo’s own son. Unlike the other men Lila has had relationships with, Enzo is gentle and respectful towards her. Enzo counters Lila’s chaotic and capricious nature; where her previous relationships with both Stefano and Nino included violence and emotional extremes, Lila’s relationship with Enzo is stable and secure. According to Lila, Enzo is “a man so deeply compact in every gesture, so resolute toward the world, and so gentle with her that she could be sure he wouldn’t abruptly change shape” (106). Like Lila, Enzo is intelligent and driven. His commitment to his programming course provides a refuge for both him and Lila during the turbulent times at San Giovanni a Teduccio. Enzo is also “the only one who continued to ascribe to Lila extraordinary capabilities” (108), and Elena notes in Chapter 83 during Enzo’s visit that he is able to admire Lila without jealousy. Enzo’s admiration of Lila without desiring to quash or possess her intelligence sets him apart from the other men of the neighborhood, particularly Michele Solara, and even from Elena’s own husband. Enzo deviates from the traditional structures that sanction abuse and suppression of women.