“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:
“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.
2.
I have breakfast every day at seven, I go to the newsstand with the Labrador I got recently, I spend a good part of the morning in the Valentino playing with the dog, leafing through the papers. Yesterday, when I got back, I found on top of my mailbox a package roughly wrapped in newspaper. I took it, perplexed. Nothing indicated that it had been left for me or for any other tenant. There was no note with it and it didn’t even have my last name written in pen somewhere.
I cautiously opened one edge of the wrapping, and that was enough. Tina and Nu leaped out of memory even before I got them completely out of the newspaper. I immediately recognized the dolls that one after the other, almost six decades earlier, had been thrown—mine by Lila, Lila’s by me—into a cellar in the neighborhood. They were the dolls we had never found, although we had descended underground to look for them. They were the ones that Lila had pushed me to go and retrieve from the house of Don Achille, ogre and thief, and Don Achille had claimed that he hadn’t taken them, and maybe he had imagined that it was his son Alfonso who stole them, and so had compensated us with money to buy new ones. But we hadn’t bought dolls with that money—how could we have replaced Tina and Nu?—instead we bought Little Women, the novel that had led Lila to write The Blue Fairy and me to become what I was today, the author of many books and, most important, of a remarkably successful story entitled A Friendship.
The lobby of the building was silent, no voices or other sounds came from the apartments. I looked around anxiously. I wanted Lila to emerge from stairway A or B or from the deserted porter’s room, thin, gray, her back bent. I wished it more than any other thing, I wished it more than an unexpected visit from my daughters with their children. I expected that she would say in her usual mocking way: Do you like this gift? But it didn’t happen and I burst into tears. Here’s what she had done: she had deceived me, she had dragged me wherever she wanted, from the beginning of our friendship. All our lives she had told a story of redemption that was hers, using my living body and my existence.
Or maybe not. Maybe those two dolls that had crossed more than half a century and had come all the way to Turin meant only that she was well and loved me, that she had broken her confines and finally intended to travel the world by now no less small than hers, living in old age, according to a new truth, the life that in youth had been forbidden to her and that she had forbidden herself.
I went up in the elevator, I shut myself in my apartment. I examined the two dolls carefully, I smelled the odor of mold, I arranged them against the spines of my books. Seeing how cheap and ugly they were I felt confused. Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. I thought: now that Lila has let herself be seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter. Her Neapolitan Novels include My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and the fourth and final book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child.
THE NEAPOLITAN NOVELS
BY ELENA FERRANTE
BOOK 1
“Ferrante’s novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
$ 17.00 - £ 11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60945-078-6 SEPTEMBER 2012
Read more on Europa Editions website.
BOOK 2
“Stunning . . . cinematic in the density of its detail.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
$ 18.00 - £ 11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60945-134-9 SEPTEMBER 2013
Read more on Europa Editions website.
BOOK 3
“Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.”
—Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe
$ 18.00 - £ 11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60945-134-9 SEPTEMBER 2014
Read more on Europa Editions website.
BOOK 4
“One of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.”
—John Powers, NPR’s Fresh Air
$ 18.00 - £ 11.95 ISBN: 978-1-60945-286-5 SEPTEMBER 2015
Read more on Europa Editions website.
“Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea how explosive these works are.”
—John Freeman, critic and author of How to Read a Novelist
The Story of the Lost Child Page 46