The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  But in that phase things were still going well for me. A full life, a still youthful appearance, the obligations of work, a reassuring fame didn’t leave much room for those thoughts, reduced them to a vague uneasiness. Then came the bad years. My books sold less. I no longer had my position in the publishing house. I gained weight, I lost my figure, I felt old and frightened by the possibility of an old age of poverty, without fame. I had to acknowledge that, while I was working according to the mental approach I had imposed decades earlier, everything was different now, including me.

  In 2005 I went to Naples, I saw Lila. It was a difficult day. She was further changed, she tried to be sociable, she neurotically greeted everyone, she talked too much. Seeing Africans, Asians in every corner of the neighborhood, smelling the odors of unknown cuisines, she became excited, she said: I haven’t traveled around the world like you, but, look, the world has come to me. In Turin by now it was the same, and I liked the invasion of the exotic, how it had been reduced to the everyday. Yet only in the neighborhood did I realize how the anthropological landscape had altered. The old dialect had immediately taken in, according to an established tradition, mysterious languages, and meanwhile it was dealing with different phonic abilities, with syntaxes and sentiments that had once been very distant. The gray stone of the buildings had unexpected signs, old trafficking, legal and illegal, was mixed with new, the practice of violence opened up to new cultures.

  That was when the news spread of Gigliola’s corpse in the gardens. At the time we still didn’t know that she had died of a heart attack, I thought she had been murdered. Her body, supine on the ground, was enormous. How she must have suffered from that transformation, she who had been beautiful and had caught the handsome Michele Solara. I am still alive—I thought—and yet I can’t feel any different from that big body lying lifeless in that sordid place, in that sordid way. It was so. Although I paid excessive attention to my appearance, I no longer recognized myself, either: I moved more hesitantly, my physical expression was not what I had been used to for decades. As a girl I had felt so different and now I realized that I was like Gigliola.

  Lila, on the other hand, seemed not to notice old age. She moved with energy, she shouted, she greeted people with expansive gestures. I didn’t ask her, yet again, about her possible text. Whatever she said I was certain that it wouldn’t reassure me. I didn’t know how to get out of this depression, what to hold on to. The problem was no longer Lila’s work, or its quality, or at least I didn’t need to be aware of that threat to feel that everything I had written, since the end of the sixties, had lost weight and force, no longer spoke to an audience as it seemed to me it had done for decades, had no readers. Rather, on that melancholy occasion of death, I realized that the very nature of my anguish had changed. Now I was distressed that nothing of me would endure through time. My books had come out quickly and with their minor success had for decades given me the illusion of being engaged in meaningful work. But suddenly the illusion faded, I could no longer believe in the importance of my work. On the other hand, for Lila, too, everything had passed by: she led an obscure life; shut up in her parents’ small apartment, she filled the computer with impressions and thoughts. And yet, I imagined, there was the possibility that her name—whether it was just a ribbon or not—now that she was an old woman, or even after her death, would be bound to a single work of great significance: not the thousands of pages that I had written, but a book whose success she would never enjoy, as I instead had done with mine, yet that nevertheless would endure through time and would be read and reread for hundreds of years. Lila had that possibility, I had squandered it. My fate was no different from Gigliola’s, hers might be.

  51.

  For a while I let myself go. I did very little work, but then again, neither the publisher nor anyone else asked me to work more. I saw no one, I only made long phone calls to my daughters, insisting that they put the children on, and I spoke to them in baby talk. Now Elsa, too, had a boy, named Conrad, and Dede had given Hamid a sister, whom she had called Elena.

  Those childish voices which expressed themselves with such precision made me think of Tina again. In the moments of greatest darkness I was sure that Lila had written the detailed story of her daughter, sure that she had mixed it into the history of Naples with the arrogant naïveté of the uneducated person who, perhaps for that very reason, obtains tremendous results. Then I understood that it was a fantasy of mine. Without wanting to, I was adding apprehension to envy, bitterness, and affection. Lila didn’t have that type of ambition, she had never had ambitions. To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself, and she had told me, she didn’t love herself, she loved nothing about herself. On the evenings of greatest depression I went so far as to imagine that she had lost her daughter in order not to see herself reproduced, in all her antipathy, in all her malicious reactivity, in all her intelligence without purpose. She wanted to eliminate herself, cancel all the traces, because she couldn’t tolerate herself. She had done it continuously, for her entire existence, ever since she had shut herself off within a suffocating perimeter, confining herself at a time when the planet wanted to eliminate borders. She had never gotten on a train, not even to go to Rome. She had never taken a plane. Her experience was extremely limited, and when I thought about it I felt sorry for her, I laughed, I got up with a groan, I went to the computer, I wrote yet another e-mail saying: Come and see me, we’ll be together for a while. At those moments I took it for granted that there was not and never would be a manuscript of Lila’s. I had always overestimated her, nothing memorable would emerge from her—something that reassured me and yet truly upset me. I loved Lila. I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last. I thought it was my task. I was convinced that she herself, as a girl, had assigned it to me.

  52.

  The story that I later called A Friendship originated in that mildly depressive state, in Naples, during a week of rain. Of course I knew that I was violating an unwritten agreement between Lila and me, I also knew that she wouldn’t tolerate it. But I thought that if the result was good, in the end she would say: I’m grateful to you, these were things I didn’t have the courage to say even to myself, and you said them in my name. There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has ever invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors and yet we are resentful if others say: This little thing you did doesn’t interest me, in fact it bores me, who gave you the right. Within a few days I wrote a story that over the years, hoping and fearing that Lila was writing it, I had imagined in every detail. I did it because everything that came from her, or that I ascribed to her, had seemed to me, since we were children, more meaningful, more promising, than what came from me.

  When I finished the first draft I was in a hotel room with a balcony that had a beautiful view of Vesuvius and the gray semicircle of the city. I could have called Lila on the cell phone, said to her: I’ve written about me, about you, about Tina, about Imma, do you want to read it, it’s only eighty pages, I’ll come by your house, I’ll read it aloud. I didn’t do that out of fear. She had explicitly forbidden me not only to write about her but also to use persons and episodes of the neighborhood. When I had, she always found a way of telling me—even if painfully—that the book was bad, that either one is capable of telling things just as they happened, in teeming chaos, or one works from imagination, inventing a thread, and I had been able to do neither the first thing nor the second. So I let it go, I calmed myself, saying: it will happen as it always does, she won’t like the story, she’ll pretend it doesn’t matter, in a few years she’ll make it known to me, or tell me clearly, that I have to try to achieve more. In truth, I thought, if it were up to her I would never publish a line.

  The book came out, I was swept up by a success I hadn’t felt for a lon
g time, and since I needed it I was happy. A Friendship kept me from joining the list of writers whom everyone considers dead even when they’re still alive. The old books began to sell again, interest in me was rekindled, in spite of approaching old age life became full again. But that book, which at first I considered the best I had written, I later did not love. It’s Lila who made me hate it, by refusing in every possible way to see me, to discuss it with me, even to insult me and hit me. I called her constantly, I wrote endless e-mails, I went to the neighborhood, I talked to Rino. She was never there. And on the other hand her son never said: My mother is acting like this because she doesn’t want to see you. As usual he was vague, he stammered: You know how she is, she’s always out, she either turns off the cell phone or forgets it at home, sometimes she doesn’t even come home to sleep. So I had to acknowledge that our friendship was over.

  53.

  In fact I don’t know what offended her, a detail, or the whole story. A Friendship had the quality, in my opinion, of being linear. It told concisely, with the necessary disguises, the story of our lives, from the loss of the dolls to the loss of Tina. Where had I gone wrong? I thought for a long time that she was angry because, in the final part, although resorting to imagination more than at other points of the story, I related what in fact had happened in reality: Lila had given Imma more importance in Nino’s eyes, in doing so had been distracted, and as a result lost Tina. But evidently what in the fiction of the story serves in all innocence to reach the heart of the reader becomes an abomination for one who feels the echo of the facts she has really lived. In other words I thought for a long time that what had assured the book’s success was also what had hurt Lila most.

  Later, however, I changed my mind. I’m convinced that the reason for her repudiation lay elsewhere, in the way I recounted the episode of the dolls. I had deliberately exaggerated the moment when they disappeared into the darkness of the cellar, I had accentuated the trauma of the loss, and to intensify the emotional effects I had used the fact that one of the dolls and the lost child had the same name. The whole led the reader, step by step, to connect the childhood loss of the pretend daughters to the adult loss of the real daughter. Lila must have found it cynical, dishonest, that I had resorted to an important moment of our childhood, to her child, to her sorrow, to satisfy my audience.

  But I am merely piecing together hypotheses, I would have to confront her, hear her protests, explain myself. Sometimes I feel guilty, and I understand her. Sometimes I hate her for this decision to cut me off so sharply right now, in old age, when we are in need of closeness and solidarity. She has always acted like that: when I don’t submit, see how she excludes me, punishes me, ruins even my pleasure in having written a good book. I’m exasperated. Even this staging of her own disappearance, besides worrying me, irritates me. Maybe little Tina has nothing to do with it, maybe not even her ghost, which continues to obsess Lila both in the more enduring form of the child of nearly four, and in the labile form of the woman who today, like Imma, would be thirty. It’s only and always the two of us who are involved: she who wants me to give what her nature and circumstances kept her from giving, I who can’t give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself.

  EPILOGUE

  Restitution

  1.

  I can’t believe it myself. I’ve finished this story that I thought would never end. I finished it and patiently reread it not so much to improve the quality of the writing as to find out if there are even a few lines where it’s possible to trace the evidence that Lila entered my text and decided to contribute to writing it. But I have had to acknowledge that all these pages are mine alone. What Lila often threatened to do—enter my computer—she hasn’t done, maybe she wasn’t even capable of doing, it was long a fantasy I had as an old woman inexperienced in networks, cables, connections, electronic spirits. Lila is not in these words. There is only what I’ve been able to put down. Unless, by imagining what she would write and how, I am no longer able to distinguish what’s mine and what’s hers.

  Often, during this work, I telephoned Rino, I asked about his mother. He doesn’t know anything, the police limited themselves to summoning him three or four times to show him the bodies of nameless old women—so many of them disappear. A couple of times I had to go to Naples, and I met him in the old apartment in the neighborhood, a space darker, more run-down than it had been. There really wasn’t anything of Lila anymore, everything that had been hers was gone. As for the son, he seemed more distracted than usual, as if his mother had definitively gone out of his head.

  I returned to the city for two funerals, first my father’s, then Lidia’s, Nino’s mother. I missed the funeral of Donato, not out of bitterness, only because I was abroad. When I came to the neighborhood for my father there was a great uproar because a young man had just been murdered at the entrance to the library. That made me think that this story would continue forever, recounting now the efforts of children without privileges to improve themselves by getting books from the old shelves, as Lila and I had done as girls, and now the thread of seductive chatter, promises, deceptions, of blood that prevents any true improvement in my city or in the world.

  The day of Lidia’s funeral was overcast, the city seemed tranquil, I felt tranquil, too. Then Nino arrived and all he did was talk loudly, joke, even laugh, as if we were not at his mother’s funeral. I found him large, bloated, a big ruddy man with thinning hair who was constantly celebrating himself. Getting rid of him, after the funeral, was difficult. I didn’t want to listen to him or even look at him. He gave me an impression of wasted time, of useless labor, that I feared would stay in my mind, extending into me, into everything.

  On the occasion of both funerals I made plans ahead of time to visit Pasquale. In those years I did that whenever I could. In prison he had studied a lot, had received his high school diploma, and, recently, a degree in astronomical geography.

  “If I’d known that to get a diploma and a degree all you needed to have was free time, to be shut up in a place without worrying about earning a living, and, with discipline, learning by heart pages and pages of some books, I would have done it before,” he said once, in a teasing tone.

  Today he’s an old man, he speaks serenely, he is much better preserved than Nino. With me he rarely resorts to dialect. But he hasn’t moved even a hairsbreadth out of the space of generous ideas in which his father enclosed him as a boy. When I saw him after Lidia’s funeral and told him about Lila he burst out laughing. She must be doing her intelligent and imaginative things somewhere, he muttered. And it moved him to remember the time in the neighborhood library when the teacher assigned prizes to the most diligent readers, and the most diligent was Lila, who took out books illegally with her relatives’ cards. Ah, Lila the shoemaker, Lila who imitated Kennedy’s wife, Lila the artist and designer, Lila the worker, Lila the programmer, Lila always in the same place and always out of place.

  “Who took Tina from her?” I asked.

  “The Solaras.”

  “Sure?”

  He smiled, showing his bad teeth. I understood that he wasn’t telling the truth—maybe he didn’t know it and it didn’t even interest him—but was proclaiming the unshakable faith, based on the primary experience of injustice, the experience of the neighborhood, that—in spite of the reading he had done, the degree he had taken, the clandestine journeys, the crimes he had committed or been accused of—remained the currency of every certainty he had. He answered:

  “Do you also want me to tell you who murdered those two pieces of shit?”

  Suddenly I read in his gaze something that horrified me—an inextinguishable rancor—and I said no. He shook his head, and continued to smile. He said:
r />   “You’ll see that when Lila decides to, she’ll show up.”

  But there was not a trace of her. On those two occasions for mourning I walked through the neighborhood, I asked around out of curiosity: no one remembered her, or maybe they were pretending. I couldn’t even talk about her with Carmen. Roberto died, she left the gas pump, went to live with one of her sons, in Formia.

  What is the point of all these pages, then? I intended to capture her, to have her beside me again, and I will die without knowing if I succeeded. Sometimes I wonder where she vanished. At the bottom of the sea. Through a fissure or down some subterranean tunnel whose existence she alone knows. In an old bathtub filled with a powerful acid. In an ancient garbage pit, one of those she devoted so many words to. In the crypt of an abandoned church in the mountains. In one of the many dimensions that we don’t know yet but Lila does, and now she’s there with her daughter.

  Will she return?

  Will they return together, Lila old, Tina a grown woman?

  This morning, sitting on the balcony that looks out over the Po, I’m waiting.