Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

by Elena Ferrante

  8.

  From that moment life began to pound me without respite, the months were rapidly grafted onto one another, there was no day when something good or bad didn’t happen. I returned to Naples, thinking about Nino, and that encounter without consequences, and at times the wish to see Lila was strong, to go and wait for her to come home from work, tell her what could be told without hurting her. Then I convinced myself that merely mentioning Nino would wound her, and I gave it up. Lila had gone her way, he his. I had urgent things to deal with. For example, the evening of my return from Milan I told my parents that Pietro was coming to meet them, that probably we would be married within the year, that I was going to live in Florence.

  They showed no joy, or even satisfaction. I thought that they had finally grown used to my coming and going as I liked, increasingly estranged from the family, indifferent to their problems of survival. And it seemed to me normal that only my father became somewhat agitated, always nervous at the prospect of situations he didn’t feel prepared for.

  “Does the university professor have to come to our house?” he asked, in irritation.

  “Where else?” my mother said angrily. “How can he ask you for Lenuccia’s hand if he doesn’t come here?”

  Usually she seemed more prepared than he, concrete, resolute to the point of indifference. But once she had silenced him, once her husband had gone to bed and Elisa and Peppe and Gianni had set up their beds in the dining room, I had to change my mind. She attacked me in very low but shrill tones, hissing with reddened eyes: We are nothing to you, you tell us nothing until the last minute, the young lady thinks she’s somebody because she has an education, because she writes books, because she’s marrying a professor, but my dear, you came out of this belly and you are made of this substance, so don’t act superior and don’t ever forget that if you are intelligent, I who carried you in here am just as intelligent, if not more, and if I had had the chance I would have done the same as you, understand? Then, on the crest of her rage, she first reproached me saying that because I had left, and thought only of myself, my siblings hadn’t done well in school, and then asked me for money, or, rather, demanded it: she needed it to buy a decent dress for Elisa and to fix up the house a bit, since I was forcing her to receive my fiancé.

  I passed over my siblings’ lack of success in school. The money, on the other hand, I gave her right away, even if it wasn’t true that she needed it for the house—she continually asked for money, any excuse would do. Although she had never said so explicitly, she still couldn’t accept the fact that I kept my money in a post-office savings account, that I hadn’t handed it over to her as I always had, ever since I first took the stationer’s daughters to the beach, or worked in the bookstore on Via Mezzocannone. Maybe, I thought, by acting as if my money belonged to her she wants to convince me that I myself belong to her, and that, even if I get married, I will belong to her forever.

  I remained calm, I told her as a sort of compensation that I would have a telephone put in, that I would buy a television on the installment plan. She looked at me uncertainly, with a sudden admiration that clashed with what she had just been saying.

  “A television and telephone in this house here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll pay for it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Always, even after you’re married?”

  “Yes.”

  “The professor knows that there’s not a cent for a dowry, and not even for a reception?”

  “He knows, and we’re not having a reception.”

  Again her mood changed, her eyes became inflamed.

  “What do you mean, no reception? Make him pay.”

  “No, we’re doing without.”

  My mother became furious again, she provoked me in every way she could think of, she wanted me to respond so that she could get angrier.

  “You remember Lila’s wedding, you remember the reception she had?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you, who are much better than she is, don’t want to do anything?”

  “No.”

  We went on like that until I decided that, rather than taking her rage in doses, it would be better to have it all at once, one grand fury:

  “Ma,” I said, “not only are we not having a party but I’m not even getting married in church, I’m getting married at city hall.”

  At that point it was as if doors and windows had been blown open by a strong wind. Although she wasn’t religious, my mother lost control and, leaning toward me, red in the face, began yelling insults at me. She shouted that the marriage was worthless if the priest didn’t say that it was valid. She shouted that if I didn’t get married before God I would never be a wife but only a whore, and, despite her lame leg, she almost flew as she went to wake my father, my siblings, to let them know what she had always feared, that too much education had ruined my brain, that I had had all the luck and yet I was treated like a whore, that she would never be able to go out of the house because of the shame of having a godless daughter.

  My father, stunned, in his underwear, and my siblings sought to understand what other trouble they had to deal with because of me, and tried to calm her, but in vain. She shouted that she wanted to throw me out of the house immediately, before I exposed her, too, her, too, to the shame of having a concubine daughter like Lila and Ada. Meanwhile, although she wasn’t actually hitting me, she struck the air as if I were a shadow and she had grabbed a real me, whom she was beating ferociously. It was some time before she quieted down, which she did thanks to Elisa. My sister asked cautiously:

  “But is it you who want to get married at city hall or is it your fiancé?”

  I explained to her, but as if I were explaining the matter to all of them, that for me the Church hadn’t counted for a long time, but that whether I got married at city hall or at the altar was the same to me; while for my fiancé it was very important to have only a civil ceremony, he knew all about religious matters and believed that religion, however valuable, was ruined precisely when it interfered in the affairs of the state. In other words, I concluded, if we don’t get married at city hall, he won’t marry me.

  At that point my father, who had immediately sided with my mother, suddenly stopped echoing her insults and laments.

  “He won’t marry you?”

  “No.”

  “And what will he do, leave you?”

  “We’ll go and live together in Florence without getting married.”

  That information my mother considered the most intolerable of all. She completely lost control, vowing that in that case she would take a knife and cut my throat. My father instead nervously ruffled his hair, and said to her:

  “Be quiet, don’t get me mad, let’s be reasonable. We know very well that someone can get married by the priest, have a fancy celebration, and still come to a bad end.”

  He, too, was obviously alluding to Lila, the ever-vivid scandal of the neighborhood, and my mother finally understood. The priest wasn’t a guarantee, nothing was a guarantee in the brutal world we lived in. So she stopped shouting and left to my father the task of examining the situation and, if necessary, letting me have my way. But she didn’t stop pacing, with her limp, shaking her head, insulting my future husband. What was he, the professor? Was he a Communist? Communist and professor? Professor of that shit, she shouted. What kind of professor is he, one who thinks like that? A shit thinks like that. No, replied my father, what do you mean shit, he’s a man who’s educated and knows better than anyone what disgusting things the priests do, that’s why he wants to go and say “I do” only at city hall. Yes, you’re right, a lot of Communists do that. Yes, you’re right, like this our daughter doesn’t seem married. But I would trust this university professor: he loves her. I can’t believe that he would put Lenuccia in a situation where she seems like a whore. And anyway if we don’t want
to trust him—but I do trust him, even if I don’t know him yet: he’s an important person, the girls here dream of a match like that—at least we can trust the city hall. I work there, at the city hall, and a marriage there, I can assure you, is as valid as the one in church and maybe even more.

  He went on for hours. My siblings at a certain point collapsed and went back to sleep. I stayed to soothe my parents and persuade them to accept something that for me, at that moment, was an important sign of my entrance into Pietro’s world. Besides, it made me feel bolder than Lila. And most of all, if I met Nino again, I would have liked to be able to say to him, in an allusive way: See where that argument with the religion teacher led, every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. But I would have been exaggerating, in reality it was much simpler. For at least ten years the God of childhood, already fairly weak, had been pushed aside like an old sick person, and I felt no need for the sanctity of marriage. The essential thing was to get out of Naples.

  9.

  My family’s horror at the idea of a civil union alone certainly was not exhausted that night, but it diminished. The next day my mother treated me as if anything she touched—the coffee pot, the cup with the milk, the sugar bowl, the fresh loaf of bread—were there only to lead her into the temptation to throw it in my face. Yet she didn’t start yelling again. As for me I ignored her; I left early in the morning, and went to start the paperwork for the installation of the telephone. Having taken care of that business I went to Port’Alba and wandered through the bookstores. I was determined, within a short time, to enable myself to speak with confidence when situations like the one in Milan arose. I chose journals and books more or less at random, and spent a lot of money. After many hesitations, influenced by that remark of Nino’s that kept coming to mind, I ended up getting Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—I knew almost nothing of Freud and the little I knew irritated me—along with a couple of small books devoted to sex. I intended to do what I had done in the past with schoolwork, with exams, with my thesis, what I had done with the newspapers that Professor Galiani passed on to me or the Marxist texts that Franco had given me. I wanted to study the contemporary world. Hard to say what I had already taken in at that time. There had been the discussions with Pasquale, and also with Nino. There had been some attention paid to Cuba and Latin America. There was the incurable poverty of the neighborhood, the lost battle of Lila. There was school, which defeated my siblings because they were less stubborn than I was, less dedicated to sacrifice. There were the long conversations with Franco and occasional ones with Mariarosa, now jumbled together in a wisp of smoke. (The world is profoundly unjust and must be changed, but both the peaceful coexistence between American imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies, on the one hand, and the reformist politics of the European, and especially the Italian, workers’ parties, on the other, are directed at keeping the proletariat in a subordinate wait-and-see situation that throws water on the fire of revolution, with the result that if the global stalemate wins, if social democracy wins, it will be capital that triumphs through the centuries and the working class will fall victim to enforced consumerism.) These stimuli had functioned, certainly they had been working in me for a long time, occasionally they excited me. But driving that decision to bring myself up to date by forced marches was, at least at first, I think, the old urgency to succeed. I had long ago convinced myself that one can train oneself to anything, even to political passion.

  As I was paying, I glimpsed my novel on a shelf, and immediately looked in another direction. Whenever I saw the book in a window, among other novels that had just come out, I felt inside a mixture of pride and fear, a dart of pleasure that ended in anguish. Certainly, the story had come into being by chance, in twenty days, without struggle, as a sedative against depression. Moreover, I knew what great literature was, I had done a lot of work in the classics, and it never occurred to me, while I was writing, that I was making something of value. But the effort of finding a form had absorbed me. And the absorption had become that book, an object that contained me. Now I was there, exposed, and seeing myself caused a violent pounding in my chest. I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart, the same that had burst out of my chest in that distant moment when Lila had proposed that we write a story together. It had fallen to me to do it seriously. But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts, which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had had the opportunity?

  I came out of the bookshop, I stopped in Piazza Cavour. The day was fine, Via Foria seemed unnaturally clean and solid in spite of the scaffolding that shored up the Galleria. I imposed on myself the usual discipline. I took out a notebook that I had bought recently, I wished to start acting like a real writer, putting down thoughts, observations, useful information. I read l’Unità from beginning to end, I took notes on the things I didn’t know. I found the article by Pietro’s father in Il Ponte and skimmed it with curiosity, but it didn’t seem as important as Nino had claimed. Rather, it put me off for two reasons: first, Guido Airota used the same professorial language as the man with the thick eyeglasses but even more rigorously; second, in a passage in which he spoke about women students (“It’s a new crowd,” he wrote, “and by all the evidence they are not from well-off families, young ladies in modest dresses and of modest upbringing who justly expect from the immense labor of their studies a future not of domestic rituals alone”), it seemed to me that I saw an allusion to myself, whether deliberate or completely unconscious. I made a note of that in my notebook as well (What am I to the Airotas, a jewel in the crown of their broad-mindedness?) and, not exactly in a good mood, in fact with some irritation, I began to leaf through the Corriere della Sera.

  I remember that the air was warm, and I’ve preserved an olfactory memory—invented or real—a mixture of printed paper and fried pizza. Page after page I looked at the headlines, until one took my breath away. There was a photograph of me, set amid four dense columns of type. In the background was a view of the neighborhood, with the tunnel. The headline said: Salacious Memoirs of an Ambitious Girl: Elena Greco’s Début Novel. The byline was that of the man with the thick eyeglasses.

  10.

  I was covered in a cold sweat while I read; I had the impression that I was close to fainting. My book was treated as an occasion to assert that in the past decade, in all areas of productive, social, and cultural life, from factories to offices, to the university, publishing, and cinema, an entire world had collapsed under the pressure of a spoiled youth, without values. Occasionally he cited some phrase of mine, in quotation marks, to demonstrate that I was a fitting exponent of my badly brought-up generation. In conclusion he called me “a girl concerned with hiding her lack of talent behind titillating pages of mediocre triviality.”

  I burst into tears. It was the harshest thing I had read since the book came out, and not in a daily with a small circulation but in the most widely read newspaper in Italy. Most of all, the image of my smiling face seemed to me intolerable in the middle of a text so offensive. I walked home, not before getting rid of the Corriere. I was afraid my mother might read the review and use it against me. I imagined that she would have liked to put it, too, in her album, to throw in my face whenever I upset her.

  I found the table set only for me. My father was at work, my mother had gone to ask a neighbor for something or other, and my siblings had already eaten. As I ate pasta and potatoes I reread at random some passages of my book. I thought desperately: Maybe it really is worthless, maybe it was published only as a favor to Adele. How could I have come up with such pallid sentences, such
banal observations? And how sloppy, how many useless commas; I won’t write anymore. Between disgust with the food and disgust with the book I was depressed, when Elisa arrived with a piece of paper. It came from Signora Spagnuolo, who had kindly agreed to let her telephone number be used by anyone who urgently needed to communicate with me. The piece of paper said that there had been three phone calls, one from Gina Medotti, who ran the press office at the publisher’s, one from Adele, and one from Pietro.

  The three names, written in Signora Spagnuolo’s labored handwriting, had the effect of giving concreteness to a thought that until a moment before had remained in the background: the terrible words of the man with the thick eyeglasses were spreading rapidly, and in the course of the day they would be everywhere. They had already been read by Pietro, by his family, by the directors of the publishing house. Maybe they had reached Nino. Maybe they were before the eyes of my professors in Pisa. Certainly they had come to the attention of Professor Galiani and her children. And who knows, even Lila might have read them. I burst into tears again, frightening Elisa.

  “What’s wrong, Lenù?”

  “I don’t feel well.”

  “Shall I make you some chamomile tea?”

  “Yes.”

  But there wasn’t time. Someone was knocking at the door, it was Rosa Spagnuolo. Cheerful, slightly out of breath from hurrying up the stairs, she said that my fiancé was again looking for me, he was on the telephone, what a lovely voice, what a lovely northern accent. I ran to answer, apologizing repeatedly for bothering her. Pietro tried to console me, he said that his mother urged me not to be upset, the main thing was that it talked about the book. But, surprising Signora Spagnuolo, who knew me as a meek girl, I practically screamed, What do I care if it talks about it if it says such terrible things? He urged me again to be calm and added: Tomorrow an article is coming out in l’Unità. I ended the call coldly, I said: It would be better if no one worried about me anymore.