The Story of the Lost Child

by Elena Ferrante

  So I remained alone with Antonio. I seemed to have before me two people present in the same body and yet very distinct. He was the boy who long ago had held me tight at the ponds, who had idolized me, and whose intense odor had remained in my memory like a desire that is never truly satisfied. And he was the man of now, without an ounce of fat, all big bones and taut skin that went from his hard blank face to his feet, in enormous shoes. I said, embarrassed, that I didn’t know anyone who could help Pasquale, that Carmen overestimated me. But I realized right away that if Pasquale’s sister had an exaggerated idea of my prestige, his was even more exaggerated. Antonio said that I was modest as usual, that he had read my book, in German no less, that I was known all over the world. Although he had lived for a long time abroad, and had certainly seen and done terrible things for the Solaras, he had remained someone from the neighborhood and continued to imagine—or maybe he was pretending, who knows, to please me—that I had power, the power of respectable people, because I had a degree, because I spoke in Italian, I wrote books. I said, laughing: you’re the only person in Germany who bought that book. And I asked about his wife, his children. He answered in monosyllables, but meanwhile he drew me outside, into the square. There he said kindly:

  “Now you have to admit that I was right.”

  “In what.”

  “You wanted him, and you lied to me.”

  “I was a girl.”

  “No, you were grown up. And you were more intelligent than me. You don’t know the harm you did letting me believe I was crazy.”

  “Stop it.”

  He was silent, I retreated toward the shop. He followed me, and held me back on the threshold. For a few seconds he stared at Nino, who had sat down in a corner. He murmured:

  “If he hurts you, too, tell me.”

  I laughed: “Of course.”

  “Don’t laugh, I talked to Lina. She knows him well, she says you shouldn’t trust him. We respect you, he doesn’t.”

  Lila. Here she was using Antonio, making him her messenger of possible misfortunes. Where had she gone? I saw that she was off in a corner, playing with Marisa’s children, but in fact she was observing each one of us, with her eyes narrowed. And in her usual way she was ruling over everyone: Carmen, Alfonso, Marisa, Enzo, Antonio, her son and the children of others, perhaps even the owners of the shop. I told myself again that she would no longer exercise any authority over me, that that long phase was over. I said goodbye, she hugged me tight, as if she wanted to pull me into herself. As I said goodbye to them all, one by one, I was again struck by Alfonso, but this time I understood what had disturbed me. The little that had marked him as the son of Don Achille and Maria, as the brother of Stefano and Pinuccia, had disappeared from his face. Now, mysteriously, with that long hair in a ponytail, he resembled Lila.

  11.

  I returned to Florence, I talked to Pietro about our separation. We quarreled violently while Adele tried to protect the children and perhaps herself, shutting herself up with them in her room. At a certain point we realized not that we were overdoing it but that the presence of our daughters did not allow us to overdo it as we felt the need to do. So we went out, continuing to fight in the street. When Pietro walked off, I don’t know where—I was furious, I didn’t want to see or hear him anymore—I went home. The children were sleeping. I found Adele sitting in the kitchen reading.

  I said: “You see how he treats me?”

  “And you?”

  “I?”

  “Yes, you: do you see how you treat him, how you’ve treated him?”

  I turned away and shut myself in the bedroom, slamming the door. The contempt she had put into those words surprised me, wounded me. It was the first time she had turned against me so explicitly.

  I left the next day for France, full of guilt because of the children’s crying and the books I had to study on the trip. But as I concentrated on the reading, the pages became more and more mixed up with Nino, Pietro, my daughters, the defense of Pasquale made by his sister, Antonio’s words, Alfonso’s mutation. I arrived in Paris after an exhausting train trip, more confused than ever. Yet at the station, when I recognized the younger of the two women publishers on the platform, I became cheerful, I found again the pleasure of extending myself that I had had with Nino in Montpellier. This time there were no hotels and monumental lecture halls; everything was more modest. The two women took me around to big cities and small towns, every day a journey, every evening a debate in a bookstore or even in a private apartment. As for meals and sleep, there was home cooking, a cot, or, occasionally, a couch.

  I was very tired, and paid less and less attention to my appearance; I lost weight. And yet my editors and the audiences I encountered night after night liked me. Moving here and there, discussing with this and that person in a language that wasn’t mine but that I rapidly learned to manage, I gradually rediscovered an aptitude that I had displayed years before, with my previous book: I had a natural ability to transform small private events into public reflection. Every night I improvised successfully, starting from my own experience. I talked about the world I came from, about the poverty and squalor, male and also female rages, about Carmen and her bond with her brother, her justifications for violent actions that she would surely never commit. I talked about how, since I was a girl, I had observed in my mother and other women the most humiliating aspects of family life, of motherhood, of subjection to males. I talked about how, for love of a man, one could be driven to be guilty of every possible infamy toward other women, toward children. I talked about my difficult relationship with the feminist groups in Florence and Milan, and, as I did, an experience that I had underestimated suddenly became important: I discovered in public what I had learned by watching that painful effort of excavation. I talked about how, to assert myself, I had always sought to be male in intelligence—I started off every evening saying I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination—and I told how I had recently seen a male childhood friend of mine make every effort possible to subvert himself, extracting from himself a female.

  I drew often on that half hour spent in the Solaras’ shop, but I only realized it later, maybe because Lila never came to my mind. I don’t know why I didn’t at any point allude to our friendship. Probably it seemed to me that, although she had dragged me into the swelling sea of her desires and those of our childhood friends, she didn’t have the capacity to decipher what she had put before my eyes. Did she see, for example, what in a flash I had seen in Alfonso? Did she reflect on it? I ruled that out. She was mired in the lota, the filth, of the neighborhood, she was satisfied with it. I, on the other hand, in those French days, felt that I was at the center of chaos and yet had tools with which to distinguish its laws. That conviction, reinforced by the small success of my book, helped me to be somewhat less anxious about the future, as if, truly, everything that I was capable of adding up with words written and spoken were destined to add up in reality as well. Look, I said to myself, the couple collapses, the family collapses, every cultural cage collapses, every possible social-democratic accommodation collapses, and meanwhile everything tries violently to assume another form that up to now would have been unthinkable: Nino and me, the sum of my children and his, the hegemony of the working class, socialism and Communism, and above all the unforeseen subject, the woman, I. Night after night, I went around recognizing myself in an idea that suggested general disintegration and, at the same time, new composition.

  Meanwhile, always somewhat breathlessly, I telephoned Adele and talked to the children, who answered in monosyllables, or asked, over and over, like a refrain: When are you coming home? Around Christmas, I tried to take leave of my publishers, but by now they had taken my fate to heart, and didn’t want to let me go. They had read my first book, they wanted to republish it, and to this purpose they dragged me to the offices of the French publishing house that had printed it years earlie
r, unsuccessfully. I timidly got involved in discussions and negotiations, sustained by the two women, who, unlike me, were very combative, and knew how to cajole and threaten. Finally, in part thanks to the mediation of the Milan publisher, they came to an agreement: my text would be reissued the following year under the imprint of my new publishers.

  I told Nino on the phone, and he seemed very excited. But then, sentence by sentence, his displeasure emerged.

  “Maybe you don’t need me anymore,” he said.

  “What are you talkin about? I can’t wait to hold you.”

  “You’re so involved in your own affairs that there’s not even a tiny spot left for me.”

  “You’re wrong. It’s thanks to you that I wrote this book, that I seem to have everything clear in my mind.”

  “Then let’s see each other in Naples, or even in Rome, now, before Christmas.”

  But by this point a meeting was impossible, the editorial matters had taken up my time, I had to get back to the children. Yet I couldn’t resist, and we decided to meet in Rome at least for a few hours. I traveled in a sleeping car, and arrived in the capital exhausted on the morning of December 23rd. I spent pointless hours in the station: Nino wasn’t there. I was worried, I was desolate. I was about to take a train for Florence when he appeared, sweating despite the cold. He had had endless difficulties, and had come by car, by train he would never have made it. We ate something quickly, we found a hotel in Via Nazionale, close to the station, and shut ourselves in the room. I wanted to go in the afternoon, but I didn’t have the strength to leave him, and I delayed my departure until the next day. We woke up happy to have slept together: ah, it was wonderful to stretch out a foot and discover, after the unconsciousness of sleep, that he was there in the bed, beside me. It was Christmas Eve, and we went out to get each other presents. My departure was postponed hour by hour and so was his. Not until the late afternoon did I drag myself with my suitcase to his car, I couldn’t leave him. Finally he started the engine, drove off, disappeared in the traffic. Laboriously I trudged from Piazza della Repubblica to the station, but I had delayed too long, and I missed the train by a few minutes. I was desperate: I would arrive in Florence in the middle of the night. And yet it had happened that way. I resigned myself to telephoning home. Pietro answered.

  “Where are you?”

  “In Rome, the train is stuck here in the station and I don’t know when it’s leaving.”

  “Ah, these trains. Shall I tell the girls that you won’t be here for Christmas Eve dinner?”

  “Yes, I probably won’t arrive in time.”

  He burst into laughter, he hung up.

  I traveled in a totally empty, frigid train. Not even the conductor came by. I felt as if I had lost everything and was heading toward nothingness, prisoner of a bleakness that accentuated my guilt. I arrived in Florence in the middle of the night, and couldn’t find a taxi. I carried my suitcase through the cold, on the deserted streets; even the Christmas bells had long since vanished into the night. I used my keys to enter. The apartment was dark and there was an anguished silence. I went through the rooms, no trace of the children, or of Adele. Tired, terrified, but also exasperated, I looked for at least a note that would tell me where they had gone. Nothing.

  The house was in perfect order.

  12.

  I had ugly thoughts. Maybe Dede or Elsa or both had got sick and Pietro and his mother had taken them to the hospital. Or my husband had ended up in the hospital, because he had done some mad thing, and Adele and the children were with him.

  I wandered through the house consumed by anxiety, I didn’t know what to do. At some point I thought that, whatever had happened, it was likely that my mother-in-law had told Mariarosa, and although it was three in the morning I decided to call her. My sister-in-law answered eventually; I had a hard time waking her. But finally I found out from her that Adele had decided to take the children to Genoa—they had left two days earlier—to allow me and Pietro to confront our situation freely, and Dede and Elsa to enjoy Christmas vacation in peace.

  On the one hand, the news calmed me, on the other it made me furious. Pietro had lied to me: when I telephoned he already knew there would be no Christmas Eve dinner, that the children weren’t expecting me, that they had left with their grandmother. And Adele? How dare she take away my daughters! I vented on the telephone while Mariarosa listened to me in silence. I asked: Am I wrong about everything, do I deserve what is happening to me? She took a serious tone, but she was encouraging. She said that I had the right to have my life and the duty to continue to study and write. Then she offered to let me stay with her, along with the children, any time I found myself in trouble.

  Her words soothed me, yet I couldn’t sleep. I turned things over and over in my breast: anguish, rage, desire for Nino, unhappiness because he would spend the holiday with his family, with Albertino, and I was reduced to a woman alone, without affection, in an empty house. At nine in the morning I heard the door open, it was Pietro. I confronted him immediately, I yelled at him: Why did you hand over the children to your mother without my permission? He was disheveled, unshaven, he stank of wine, but he didn’t seem drunk. He let me scream without reacting, he merely repeated over and over, in a depressed tone: I have work to do, I can’t take care of them, and you have your lover, you don’t have time for them.

  I forced him to sit down, in the kitchen. I tried to calm myself, I said:

  “We have to come to an agreement.”

  “Explain yourself, what type of agreement.”

  “The children will live with me, and you’ll see them on the weekend.”

  “On the weekend where?”

  “At my house.”

  “And where is your house?”

  “I don’t know, I’ll decide later: here, in Milan, in Naples.”

  That word was enough: Naples. As soon as he heard it he jumped to his feet, opened his eyes wide, opened his mouth as if to bite me, raised his fist with such a ferocious expression that I was terrified. It was an endless moment. The faucet was dripping, the refrigerator humming, someone laughed in the courtyard. Pietro was large, he had big white knuckles. He had already hit me once, I knew that he would hit me now so violently that he would kill me, and I raised my arms abruptly to protect myself. But suddenly he changed his mind, turned, and once, twice, three times punched the metal closet where I kept the brooms. He would have continued if I hadn’t clung to his arm crying: Stop it, enough, you’ll hurt yourself.

  The result of that rage was that what I had feared on my return really happened: we ended up in the hospital. His arm was put in a cast, and on the way home he seemed almost cheerful. I remembered that it was Christmas and I made something to eat. We sat down at the table, and he said, point-blank:

  “Yesterday I called your mother.”

  I jumped.

  “How did that occur to you?”

  “Well, someone had to tell her. I told her what you did to me.”

  “It was my job to talk to her.”

  “Why? To lie to her the way you lied to me?”

  I became agitated again, but I tried to contain myself; I was afraid that he would start breaking his bones again to avoid breaking mine. Instead I saw that he smiled calmly, looking at his arm in the cast.

  “So I can’t drive,” he muttered.

  “Where do you have to go?”

  “To the station.”

  I discovered that my mother had set out by train on Christ­mas Day—the day she normally assumed domestic centrality, the highest of her responsibilities—and was about to arrive.

  13.

  I was tempted to flee. I thought of going to Naples—escaping to my mother’s city just as she was arriving in mine—and seeking some tranquility with Nino. But I didn’t move. Although I felt that I was changed, I had remained the disciplined person who had never avoided
anything. And besides, I said to myself, what can she do to me? I’m a woman, not a child. At most she’ll bring something good to eat, like that Christmas ten years ago, when I was sick and she came to see me in the dormitory at the Normale.

  I went with Pietro to get my mother at the station; I drove. She got off the train proudly, she had new clothes, a new purse, new shoes, even a little powder on her cheeks. You look well, I said, you’re very stylish. She hissed: No thanks to you, and didn’t say another word to me. To make up for it she was very affectionate toward Pietro. She asked about his cast, and since he was vague—he said he had bumped into a door—she began to mumble in hesitant Italian: Bumped, I know who made you bump it. I imagine, bumped.