My Brilliant Friend

“The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.”

She had felt the joy of love for that so far from ordinary man—a conductor on the railroad but also a poet, a journalist—and her fragile mind had been unable to readjust to the rough normality of life without him.

didn’t my passion grow in the warmth of hers?

I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them. My father held tight to my hand

there are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.

Instead, in her absence, after a slight hesitation I put myself in her place. Or, rather, I had made a place for her in

“What you do, I do,” I recited immediately, aloud, very frightened.

people often reached the point of disperazione—a word that in dialect meant having lost all hope but also being broke—and

Firm in what her mother’s relative was doing, firm in the pain, firm in silence as a statue is firm. A follower.