Photo: Eduardo Castaldo/HBO
The earthquake that struck Southern Italy on November 23, 1980, was so severe — a 6.9 on the Richter scale — it resulted in more than 2,700 casualties. The damage to one town, Conza della Campania, was so intense it uncovered the remains of an ancient Roman city. Lenù and Lila endure the tremor together, without their kids or “husbands” for once. For Lila, in particular, the earthquake is shattering both physically and spiritually: It breaks something open in her. It’s a striking metaphor and a pivotal moment in the relationship of the two women, whose reliance on each other deepens in the absence of their families.
Lila, so often implacable and invulnerable, is scared and uncertain. It’s so rare for Lila to seem out of control that Lenù keeps a mental tally of the times when she is, as when she supposedly exploded a copper pot as if by telekinesis or when a poster of her at the shoe store combusted maybe or maybe not because of her fury. There was New Year’s Eve 1958 when the Solaras shot fireworks at their group and Lila lost her balance. More recently, her body nearly collapsed under hard labor at the Soccavo factory. Whatever the interval between them, Lila’s meltdowns are always seismic, one with their environment. Though people insist the real trouble resides in her head, a breaking point is always coupled with an environmental shift.
But I’m getting ahead of myself — the earthquake doesn’t happen until about halfway through the episode. When “The Earthquake” opens, Lenù and Lila are shopping for maternity clothes in the company of Alfonso, with whom Lila has an easy rapport that makes Lenù feel left out. That sense deepens when Lila suggestively tells Alfonso she needs to be sure her dress suits her well. Eagerly standing up, Alfonso tries the dress on himself, mesmerized by his own image. It gradually becomes clear to Lenù that Lila and Alfonso are engaged in a role-playing game in which their physical resemblance — harder to buy on television than in prose — signifies a “union of intent” between them in reality, too. When Alfonso gushes that Michele will “go nuts” when he sees him in the dress, the object of the game becomes clear: Michele’s obsession with Lila is getting transferred onto Alfonso, who will gladly stand in for his friend. It would be kind of like a Tom Ripley situation if everyone in the room wanted to kill and have sex with one another.
Walking home arm in arm, Lenù and Lila giggle like schoolgirls, giddy with their proximity to transgression. Lenù spoils the moment when she tells Lila she can’t keep hanging out because her kids are waiting for her at home. Lila is wounded; she thinks Lenù is scared to muddle her two identities, consciously separating her private life as a mother from her experience of the neighborhood. Before they can part, they run into Gigliola, who is traumatized by the atrocious way Michele treated her, to put it mildly. Over coffee, she tells Lila and Lenù that he encouraged her to throw herself off the balcony and tried to buy her forgiveness with money. Hearing herself relate the indignities of being his wife, she becomes more and more incensed and finally tells Lila she should try and keep her baby in for as long as she can — the sight of her pregnancy makes Michele suffer, and besides, Lila has a talent for keeping her babies inside forever. Gigliola is alluding to Lila’s near-supernatural ability to will events into reality, but it’s also clear she is upset and maybe drunk. Nevertheless, what she says bothers Lila. By the end of their conversation, she has bent a teaspoon almost in half.
The relationship between Lila’s mind and her pregnancies has been uneasy at least since her neighbors perceived an early miscarriage as a display of her unusually strong power of will. Now, years later at the gynecologist, she agonizes. Her belly is too big; it makes her feel weak and annoys her. The doctor tells her there is nothing wrong with her pregnancy, only with her head, which is tormented in the way only geniuses’ minds are. The doctor learned this from their mutual friend, Nino, who recommended they come to this practice. Finding out about this connection angers Lila. “Your lover is certainly not my friend,” she tells Lenù. “And in my view, he’s not your friend, either.” Lila storms off before she can explain more, leaving Lenù to wonder what, beyond the obvious, she is suggesting.
When Nino gets home (again late and again already fed), Lenù is pissed. She wants to know why the gynecologist knows so much about her and Lila’s business and whether Nino would have spoken in such intimate terms with a doctor if she weren’t a woman. Calling out Nino’s apparently uncontrollable tendency to flirt leads Lenù to wonder out loud why she endures their relationship. “Who am I to you?” she asks. “Why do I put up with this situation?” Neither of them can answer these questions. Though we all know Nino is a liar and a cheater, I think Lenù is being slightly paranoid. When Lila says, that guy is not your friend, she could just be expressing her distrust and encouraging her friend to open her eyes to the way she is being treated. But Lenù is convinced there’s something more behind it, as if there needs to be something more — the guy has two families! Lenù won’t be deterred, so she goes to Lila’s office to ask her directly what’s going on.
In the waiting room is a gruff Rino, whom Lenù hasn’t seen in ages. He is coarse, paranoid, and squirmy, with scabs up and down his arms. He cusses Lila out for making him wait so long and then leaves, trading places with Antonio, who emerges from Lila’s office. Antonio is friendly but somewhat cryptic — he tells Lenù they all respect her in the neighborhood, as if he needed to show reverence. It’s all enough to signal to Lenù that something is up. Whatever it is, Lila tells her not to worry about it; it doesn’t have anything to do with her. As they make their way back to Lila’s house, things slowly start to come together, sort of as they did the more Lenù observed Lila and Alfonso. Everyone in the neighborhood treats Lila as if she were the pope, the mayor, or the head of the dominant Mafia family. They greet her and ask for jobs; the man behind the counter at Solara’s pastry shop doesn’t want her to pay, and she intimidates him gangster-style: If she wanted something from someone, she would simply take it.
At Lila’s apartment, Lenù prods until Lila explains: Marcello has never forgotten what she did to him when they were kids — she held a knife to his throat after he made an unwanted, crude pass at Lenù — and Michele is so in love with her that he chases after “the shadow of her shadow,” meaning Alfonso. Besides, Marcello has brought drugs into the neighborhood, the drugs Rino is using — and, by association, the drugs with which Peppe and Gianni, Lenù’s brothers, are involved. When, earlier, Lenù asked Lila to give her brothers jobs at her office, Lila declined, saying she already has her hands full with Rino. Despite its being November, a humidity hangs over the two women, who sweat with their babies’ movements and struggle to find a comfortable position. The instant Lenù finally asks, point blank, what Lila knows about Nino, the world begins to shake.
Lila is paralyzed with fear by the earthquake; Lenù has to half-carry her downstairs and out of the building. The tremors are over in a few seconds, but the anticipation of an aftershock sends the neighborhood’s inhabitants outside. The two women take shelter in Lila’s car, and her vision becomes blurry; she is there in body but elsewhere in her mind, incapable of moving through the practical necessities of an emergency. Out the window, Lenù spots familiar faces — Alfonso rushes by, carrying his children; Antonio holds his wife; her mother and father sit in the back seat of Marcello and Elisa’s car. As they begin to move, Lila gets the impression that Marcello’s car is literally hurtling toward them, which launches her into the dissolving-boundaries monologue.
This is one of Lila’s central moments as a character in all of the tetralogy. We get to hear an expression of her interiority from Lila herself, rather than Lenù’s speculation on what her friend’s mind may be like. It also gives context to Lila’s volatility and her oscillation between certainty and doubt. Breathlessly spilling it all out at once, she tells Lenù that, in her view, the outlines of things are made of feeble cotton thread; the boundaries that separate people and things often break and merge into each other. Lila lives in constant fear of this dissolution. This is why she is always so focused — so she can hold everything together. The men with whom she becomes intensely involved are used as shields to protect her from these shattering moments. She thinks she is bad and wicked, as their former elementary-school teacher Maestra Oliviero had always maintained, and because this brittleness is all in her head, it is always inescapable. Too powerful and intense, she destroys things that are delicate, like love and friendship.
Lenù muses that Lila’s self, her center, is always unstable and vulnerable to the kind of tremor that just shook their world to its foundations. It’s such a striking moment because, while keeping it tethered to historical context, Elena Ferrante finds a perfect expression of Lila’s chaotic inner life: always at one with her surroundings, when the earthquake breaks open Southern Italy, it breaks Lila open, too, and she lets everything out, becoming finally clearer to Lenù, who, in her orderliness, is her friend’s opposite.
Sadly, the show fails to capture the intensity of the prose in this moment or the impact of the event on the relationship between the two protagonists. To be privy to the workings of Lila’s brain is something Lenù has always wanted. Though its breathlessness is apt, there is a clarity of purpose to Irene Maiorino’s speech that undermines the spontaneous, almost involuntary nature of Lila’s sudden confession, which is born out of the earth itself splitting nearly in half. Besides coloring the scenes gray, the show doesn’t go as far as it could in depicting how scary the earthquake is. Keeping the camera trained on Lila and Lenù does a disservice to the large-scale implications of the moment for them. For a show that, so far, has deftly handled the sweeping nature of its source material, the depiction of the earthquake was disappointingly narrow. The visual medium has the advantage of being able to attack various senses at once, and the show missed an opportunity to evoke the enormousness of the event.
When Lenù wakes up in the car, Lila isn’t there. The whole neighborhood is camping out, waiting until it feels safe to go inside. Lenù finds Lila standing in the middle of the street like an apparition, and she apologizes for her outburst but is grateful they were together. From a pay phone, Lila calls Enzo, hoping to reach him and Gennaro in Avellino, where they had gone to visit Enzo’s family. She gets no response, and Lenù tries her own house, hoping to get Nino, who obviously isn’t there. With a classic mischievous glint in her eye, Lila tells Lenù to try Eleonora — but nothing either. Lila suggests they drive to Nino’s house, but Lenù is reluctant. She calls Pietro first, who is an absolute sweetie. He will stay with the girls for a little longer, and he reports the news that Avellino was struck particularly badly. Lila overhears Lenù’s mention of Avellino, but Lenù lies that it’s nothing. They go look for Nino instead.
At Nino and Eleonora’s building, some men tell the women that the Sarratore family has left, like everyone else. “The world has returned to its place,” Lenù mumbles to herself. I was thinking of this as Nino’s Force Majeure moment — another failure to rise to the occasion. His lack of consideration for Lenù comes into sharp relief when, driving back to the neighborhood, Lenù and Lila see Enzo and Gennaro, who look beyond relieved to see Lila. In their own way, they are a wholesome family, living in a kind of union inaccessible to Lenù by virtue of the person with whom she has chosen to spend her life. Ultimately, though, perhaps because of the closeness that has reemerged between the two women, it moves Lenù that Lila has this support. She gives the three of them a moment before she joins them, and they spend the rest of the day camping out together. Lila once again returns to her post in control.
When Lenù finally gets home, the apartment is eerily quiet in its state of disorder. Everything is broken or on the ground; she picks up some things here and there but is too tired so she lies down. Just then, the phone rings, and she stands over it as she once did when Nino first came back into her life. Will it be him? It is. He says he has been trying to contact her from Eleonora’s family’s villa in Minturno. When the earthquake struck, he freaked out and left with his kids. As Lenù listens to this, she sheds a quiet, single tear. She tells Nino she will speak to him later, and as she is returning the phone to its receiver, she notices a huge crack in the wall and up the ceiling. It’s obvious that something has cracked in the structure of her life. The question is whether it’s possible to patch it up.
In Più
• Though I wasn’t very impressed with the way director Laura Bispuri captured the earthquake, I thought she crafted one inspired frame early in the episode when Lenù and Lila are leaving the gynecologist’s office. The camera frames them in bird’s-eye view as they descend the stairs out of sync so they don’t meet on every landing.
