My Brilliant Friend

I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.

“I’ll kill you both.”

“With me you can try right now.”

Marcello left the lamppost in a rush, but, with a kind of death rattle, he bit his clenched right fist until it bled.

“I love you too much, I can’t do it.”

“Then get your brother, your father to do it, some friend, maybe they’re capable. But make it clear to all of them that you had better kill me first. Because if you touch anyone else while I’m alive, I will kill you, and you know I will, starting with you.”

I kept on day after day, committed to asserting, with increasing thoroughness, to the teachers, to my classmates, to myself my application and diligence. But inside I felt a growing sense of solitude, I felt I was learning without energy.

I, despite the rain, would have continued on the road, I felt far from everything and everyone, and distance—I discovered for the first time—extinguished in me every tie and every worry

I believed her, to forbid her to do something was pointless, everyone knew it. She seemed the strongest of us girls, stronger than Enzo, than Alfonso, than Stefano, stronger than her brother Rino, stronger than our parents, stronger than all the adults including the teacher and the carabinieri, who could put you in jail. Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences.