The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  113.

  Nino traveled at night, he reached Florence around nine in the morning. He called, Pietro answered, he hung up. He called again, I went to answer. He had parked downstairs. Come down. I can’t. Come down immediately, or I’ll come up. We were leaving in a few days for Viareggio, Pietro by now was on vacation. I left the children with him, I said I had some urgent shopping to do for the beach. I rushed to Nino.

  Seeing each other was a terrible idea. We discovered that, instead of waning, desire had flared up and made a thousand demands with brazen urgency. If at a distance, on the telephone, words allowed us to fantasize, constructing glorious prospects but also imposing on us an order, containing us, frightening us, finding ourselves together, in the tiny space of the car, careless of the terrible heat, gave concreteness to our delirium, gave it the cloak of inevitability, made it a tile in the great subversive season under way, made it consistent with the forms of realism of that era, those which asked for the impossible.

  “Don’t go home.”

  “And the children, Pietro?”

  “And us?”

  Before he left again for Naples he said he didn’t know if he could tolerate not seeing me for all of August. We were desperate as we said goodbye. I didn’t have a telephone in the house we had rented in Viareggio, he gave me the number of the house in Capri. He made me promise to call every day.

  “If your wife answers?”

  “Hang up.”

  “If you’re at the beach?”

  “I have to work, I’ll almost never go to the beach.”

  In our fantasy, telephoning was to serve also to set a date, sometime in August, and find a way of seeing each other at least once. He urged me to invent an excuse and return to Florence. He would do the same with Eleonora and would join me. We would see each other at my house, we would have dinner together, we would sleep together. More madness. I kissed him, I caressed him, I bit him, and I tore myself away from him in a state of unhappy happiness. I went to buy, at random, towels, a couple of bathing suits for Pietro, a shovel and pail for Elsa, a blue bathing suit for Dede. At the time blue was her favorite color.

  114.

  We went on vacation. I paid little attention to the children, I left them with their father most of the time. I was constantly running around to find a telephone, if only to tell Nino that I loved him. Eleonora answered a couple of times, and I hung up. But her voice was enough to irritate me, I found it unjust that she should be beside him day and night, what did she have to do with him, with us. That annoyance helped me overcome my fear, the plan of seeing each other in Florence seemed increasingly feasible. I said to Pietro, and it was true, that while the Italian publisher, with all the will in the world, couldn’t bring out my book before January, it would come out in France at the end of October. I therefore had to clarify some urgent questions, a couple of books would be helpful, I needed to go home.

  “I’ll go get them for you,” he offered.

  “Stay with the girls, you’re never with them.”

  “I like to drive, you don’t.”

  “Leave me alone. Can’t I have a day off? Maids get one, why not me?”

  I left early in the morning in the car; the sky was streaked with white, and through the window came a cool breeze that carried the odors of summer. I went into the empty house with my heart pounding. I undressed, I washed, I looked at myself in the mirror, dismayed by the white stain of stomach and breast, I got dressed, I undressed, I dressed again until I felt pretty.

  Nino arrived around three in the afternoon; I don’t know what nonsense he had told his wife. We made love until evening. For the first time he had the luxury of dedicating himself to my body with a devotion, an idolatry that I wasn’t prepared for. I tried to be his equal, I wanted at all costs to seem good to him. But when I saw him exhausted and happy, something suddenly went bad in my mind. For me that was a unique experience, for him a repetition. He loved women, he adored their bodies as if they were fetishes. I didn’t think so much of the other women of his I knew about, Nadia, Silvia, Mariarosa, or his wife, Eleonora. I thought instead of what I knew well, the crazy things he had done for Lila, the frenzy that had brought him close to destroying himself. I recalled how she had believed in that passion and had clung to him, to the complicated books he read, his thoughts, his ambitions, to affirm herself and give herself the chance for change. I remembered how she had collapsed when Nino abandoned her. Did he know how to love and induce one to love only in that excessive way, did he not know others? Was this mad love of ours the repeat of other mad loves? Was he exploiting a prototype: wanting me in this way, without caring about anything, was it the same way he had wanted Lila? Didn’t even his coming to my and Pietro’s house resemble Lila’s taking him to the house where she and Stefano lived? Were we not doing but redoing?

  I pulled back, he asked: what’s wrong? Nothing, I didn’t know what to say, they weren’t thoughts that could be spoken. I pressed against him, I kissed him and I tried to get out of my heart the feeling of his love for Lila. But Nino insisted and finally I couldn’t escape, I seized a relatively recent echo—Here, maybe this I can say to you—and asked him in a tone of feigned amusement:

  “Do I have something wrong when it comes to sex, like Lina?”

  His expression changed. In his eyes, in his face, a different person appeared, a stranger who frightened me. Even before he answered I quickly whispered:

  “I was joking, if you don’t want to answer forget it.”

  “I don’t understand what you said.”

  “I was only quoting your words.”

  “I’ve never said anything like that.”

  “Liar, you did in Milan, when we were going to the restaurant.”

  “It’s not true, and anyway I don’t want to talk about Lina.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer. I felt bitter, I turned away. When he touched my back with his fingers I whispered coldly: Leave me alone. We were motionless for a while, without speaking. Then he began to caress me again, he kissed me lightly on the shoulder, I gave in. Yes, I admitted to myself, he’s right, I should never ask him about Lila.

  In the evening the telephone rang; it must be Pietro, with the girls. I nodded to Nino not to breathe, I left the bed and went to answer. I prepared in my throat an affectionate, reassuring tone, but without realizing it I kept my voice too low, an unnatural murmur, I didn’t want Nino to hear and later make fun of me or even get angry.

  “Why are you whispering like that?” Pietro asked. “Every­thing all right?”

  I raised my voice immediately, and now it was excessively loud. I sought loving words, I made much of Elsa, I urged Dede not to make her father’s life difficult and to brush her teeth before going to bed. Nino said, when I came back to bed:

  “What a good wife, what a good mamma.”

  I answered: “You are no less.”

  I waited for the tension to diminish, for the echo of the voices of my husband and children to fade. We took a shower together. It was a new, enjoyable experience, a pleasure to wash him and be washed. Afterward I got ready to go out. Again I was trying to look nice for him, but this time I was doing it in front of him and suddenly without anxiety. He watched, fascinated, as I tried on dresses in search of the right one, as I put on my makeup, and from time to time—even though I said, joking, don’t you dare, you’re tickling me, you’ll ruin the makeup and I’ll have to start over, careful of the dress, it will tear, leave me alone—he came up behind me, kissed me on the neck, put his hands down the front and under the dress.

  I made him go out alone, I told him to wait for me in the car. Although people were on vacation and the building was half deserted, I was afraid that someone would see us together. We went to dinner, we ate a lot, talked a lot, drank a lot. When we got back we went to bed but didn’t sleep. He said:

  “In October I’ll
be in Montpellier for five days, I have a conference.”

  “Have fun. You’ll go with your wife?”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Dede is six, Elsa three. I have to think of them.”

  We began to discuss our situation, for the first time we uttered words like married, children. We went from despair to sex, from sex to despair. Finally I whispered:

  “We shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

  “If for you it’s possible, fine. For me it’s not.”

  “Nonsense. You’ve known me for decades and yet you’ve had a full life without me. You’ll forget about me before you know it.”

  “Promise that you’ll keep calling me every day.”

  “No, I won’t call you anymore.”

  “If you don’t I’ll go mad.”

  “I’ll go mad if I go on thinking of you.”

  We explored with a sort of masochistic pleasure the dead end we felt ourselves in, and, exasperated by the obstacles we ourselves were piling up, we ended by quarreling. He left, anxiously, at six in the morning. I cleaned up the house, had a cry, drove all the way to Viareggio hoping never to arrive. Halfway there I realized that I hadn’t taken a single book capable of justifying that trip. I thought: better this way.

  115.

  When I returned I was warmly welcomed by Elsa, who said sulkily: Papa isn’t good at playing. Dede defended Pietro, she exclaimed that her sister was small and stupid, and ruined every game. Pietro examined me, in a bad mood.

  “You didn’t sleep.”

  “I slept badly.”

  “Did you find the books?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Where do you think they are? At home. I checked what I had to check and that was it.”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “Because you make me angry.”

  “We called you again last night. Elsa wanted to say good night but you weren’t there.”

  “It was hot, I took a walk.”

  “Alone?”

  “With whom?”

  “Dede says you have a boyfriend.”

  “Dede has a strong bond with you and she’s dying to replace me.”

  “Or she sees and hears things that I don’t see or hear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said.”

  “Pietro, let’s try to be clear: to your many maladies do you want to add jealousy, too?”

  “I’m not jealous.”

  “Let’s hope not. Because if it weren’t so I’m telling you right away: jealousy is too much, I can’t bear it.”

  In the following days clashes like that became more frequent. I kept him at bay, I reproached him, and at the same time I despised myself. But I was also enraged: what did he want from me, what should I do? I loved Nino, I had always loved him: how could I tear him out of my breast, my head, my belly, now that he wanted me, too? Ever since I was a child I had constructed for myself a perfect self-repressive mechanism. Not one of my true desires had ever prevailed, I had always found a way of channeling every yearning. Now enough, I said to myself, let it all explode, me first of all.

  But I wavered. For several days I didn’t call Nino, as I had sagely declared in Florence. Then suddenly I started calling three or four times a day, heedless. I didn’t even care about Dede, standing a few steps from the phone booth. I talked to him in the unbearable heat of that sun-struck cage, and occasionally, soaked with sweat, exasperated by my daughter’s spying look, I opened the glass door and shouted: What are you doing standing there like that, I told you to look after your sister. At the center of my thoughts now was the conference in Montpellier. Nino harassed me; he made it into a sort of definitive proof of the genuineness of my feelings, so that we went from violent quarrels to declarations of how indispensable we were to each other, from long, costly complaints to the urgent spilling of our desire into a river of incandescent words. One afternoon, exhausted, as Dede and Elsa, outside the phone booth, were chanting, Mamma, hurry up, we’re getting bored, I said to him:

  “There’s only one way I could go with you to Montpellier.”

  “What.”

  “Tell Pietro everything.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You’re really ready to do that?”

  “Yes, but on one condition: you tell Eleonora everything.”

  Another long silence. Nino murmured:

  “You want me to hurt Eleonora and the child?”

  “Yes. Won’t I be hurting Pietro and my daughters? To decide means to do harm.”

  “Albertino is very small.”

  “So is Elsa. And for Dede it will be intolerable.”

  “Let’s do it after Montpellier.”

  “Nino, don’t play with me.”

  “I’m not playing.”

  “Then if you’re not playing behave accordingly: you speak to your wife and I’ll speak to my husband. Now. Tonight.”

  “Give me some time, it’s not easy.”

  “For me it is?”

  He hesitated, tried to explain. He said that Eleonora was a very fragile woman. He said she had organized her life around him and the child. He said that as a girl she had twice tried to kill herself. But he didn’t stop there, I felt that he was forcing himself to the most absolute honesty. Step by step, with the lucidity that was customary with him, he reached the point of admitting that breaking up his marriage meant not only hurting his wife and child but also saying goodbye to many comforts—only living comfortably makes life in Naples acceptable—and to a network of relationships that guaranteed he could do what he wanted at the university. Then, overwhelmed by his own decision to be silent about nothing, he concluded: Remember that your father-in-law has great respect for me and that to make our relationship public would cause both for me and for you an irremediable breach with the Airotas. It was this last point of his, I don’t know why, that hurt me.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s end it here.”

  “Wait.”

  “I’ve already waited too long, I should have made up my mind earlier.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Understand that my marriage no longer makes sense and go my way.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll come to Montpellier?”

  “I said my way, not yours. Between you and me it’s over.”

  116.

  I hung up in tears and left the phone booth. Elsa asked: Did you hurt yourself, Mamma? I answered: I’m fine, it’s Grandma who doesn’t feel well. I went on sobbing under the worried gaze of Dede and Elsa.

  During the final part of the vacation I did nothing but weep. I said I was tired, it was too hot, I had a headache, and I sent Pietro and the children to the beach. I stayed in bed, soaking the pillow with tears. I hated that excessive fragility, I hadn’t been like that even as a child. Both Lila and I had trained ourselves never to cry, and if we did it was in exceptional moments, and for a short time: the shame was tremendous, we stifled our sobs. Now, instead, as in Ariosto’s Orlando, in my head a fountain had opened and it flowed from my eyes without ever drying up; it seemed to me that even when Pietro, Dede, Elsa were about to return and with an effort I repressed the tears and hurried to wash my face under the tap, the fountain continued to drip, waiting for the right moment to return to the egress of my eyes. Nino didn’t really want me, Nino pretended a lot and loved little. He had wanted to fuck me—yes, fuck me, as he had done with who knows how many others—but to have me, have me forever by breaking the ties with his wife, well, that was not in his plans. Probably he was still in love with Lila. Probably in the course of his life he would love only her, like so many who had known her. And as a resu
lt he would remain with Eleonora forever. Love for Lila was the guarantee that no woman—no matter how much he wanted her, in his passionate way—would ever put that fragile marriage in trouble, I least of all. That was how things stood. Sometimes I got up in the middle of lunch or dinner and went to cry in the bathroom.

  Pietro treated me cautiously, sensing that I might explode at any moment. At first, a few hours after the break with Nino, I had thought of telling him everything, as if he were not only a husband to whom I had to explain myself but also a confessor. I felt the need of it; and especially when he approached me in bed and I put him off, whispering: No, the children will wake up, I was on the point of pouring out to him every detail. But I always managed to stop myself in time, it wasn’t necessary to tell him about Nino. Now that I no longer called the person I loved, now that I felt truly lost, it seemed to me useless to be cruel to Pietro. It was better to close the subject with a few clear words: I can’t live with you anymore. And yet I was unable to do even that. Just when, in the shadowy light of the bedroom, I felt ready to take that step, I pitied him, I feared for the future of the children, I caressed his shoulder, his cheek, I whispered: Sleep.

  On the last day of the vacation, things changed. It was almost midnight, Dede and Elsa were sleeping. For at least ten days I hadn’t called Nino. I had packed the bags, I was worn out by sadness, by effort, by the heat, and I was sitting with Pietro on the balcony, each in our own lounge chair, in silence. There humidity was debilitating, soaking our hair and clothes, and our smell of the sea and of resin. Pietro suddenly said: