The danger Lila refuses to acknowledge is clearer. Everything is the same but also, obviously, different. Twenty-some years after the girls climbed the stairs, they’re back in the old slum. It’s a testament to Ferrante’s skill as a storyteller that, three volumes later, she circles back to the key elements of this primal scene without our having quite seen where she was headed. He’s the sort of man parents warn children to stay away from, so the girls figure he must be “created out of some unidentifiable material, iron, glass, nettles, but alive, alive, the hot breath streaming from his nose and mouth.” Monster that he is, he has stolen their two beloved dolls, or so they imagine, and Lila, the bold one, wants to confront him. The girls are 8 and fearfully climbing the stairs to the apartment of Don Achille, the local loan shark. The story of Lila and Elena begins in that flashback, in a slum in Naples in the early 1950s.
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