Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

by Elena Ferrante

  “I’ve got something to leave for you and then I’ll go.”

  She got up, ready to give him the list of demands, a gesture that seemed to her increasingly pointless and yet necessary. She wished to place the piece of paper on the table, next to the ashtray, and leave that room. But Michele’s voice stopped her. Now it was definitely affectionate, almost caressing, as if he had intuited that she was trying to get away from him and wanted to do everything possible to charm her and keep her. He continued speaking to Soccavo:

  “You see, she really has a bad character. I’m speaking, but she doesn’t give a damn, she pulls out a piece of paper, says she wants to leave. But you forgive her, because she has many good qualities that make up for her bad character. You think you hired a worker? It’s not true. This woman is much, much more. If you let her, she’ll change shit into gold for you, she’s capable of reorganizing this whole enterprise, taking it to levels you can’t even imagine. Why? Because she has the type of mind that normally no woman has but also that not even we men have. I’ve had an eye on her since she was a child and it’s true. She designed shoes that I still sell today in Naples and outside, and I make a lot of money. And she renovated a shop in Piazza dei Martiri with such imagination that it became a salon for the rich people from Via Chiaia, from Posillipo, from the Vomero. And there are many—very many—other things she could do. But she has a crazy streak, she thinks she can always do what she wants. Come, go, fix, break. You think I fired her? No, one day, as if it were nothing, she didn’t come to work. Just like that, vanished. And if you catch her again, she’ll slip away again, she’s an eel. This is her problem: even though she’s extremely intelligent, she can’t understand what she can do and what she can’t. That’s because she hasn’t yet found a real man. A real man puts the woman in her place. She’s not capable of cooking? She learns. The house is dirty? She cleans it. A real man can make a woman do everything. For example: I met a woman a while ago who didn’t know how to whistle. Well, we were together for two hours only—hours of fire—and afterward I said to her: Now whistle. She—you won’t believe it—whistled. If you know how to train a woman, good. If you don’t know how to train her, forget about her, you’ll get hurt.” He uttered these last words in a very serious tone, as if they summed up an irrefutable commandment. But even as he was speaking, he must have realized that he hadn’t been able, and was still unable, to respect his own law. So suddenly his expression changed, his voice changed, he felt an urgent need to humiliate her. He turned toward Lila with a jolt of impatience and said emphatically, in a crescendo of obscenities in dialect: “But with her it’s difficult, it’s not so easy to kiss her off. And yet you see what she looks like, she has small eyes, small tits, a small ass, she’s just a broomstick. With someone like that what can you do, you can’t even get it up. But an instant is enough, a single instant: you look at her and you want to fuck her.”

  It was at that point that Lila felt a violent bump inside her head, as if her heart, instead of hammering in her throat, had exploded in her skull. She yelled an insult at him no less obscene than the words he had uttered, she grabbed from the desk the bronze ashtray, spilling out butts and ashes, and tried to hit him. But the gesture, in spite of her fury, was slow, powerless. And even Bruno’s voice—Lina, please, what are you doing—passed through her slowly. So maybe for that reason Solara stopped her easily and easily took away the ashtray, saying to her angrily:

  “You think you work for Dottor Soccavo? You think I’m no one here? You are mistaken. Dottor Soccavo has been in my mother’s red book for quite some time, and that book is a lot more important than Mao’s little book. So you don’t work for him, you work for me, you work for me and only me. And so far I’ve let you, I wanted to see what the fuck you were driving at, you and that shit you sleep with. But from now on remember that I have my eyes on you and if I need you, you better come running, got that?”

  Only then Bruno jumped to his feet nervously and exclaimed:

  “Leave her, Michè, you’re going too far.”

  Solara let go of Lila’s wrist, then he muttered, addressing Soccavo, again in Italian:

  “You’re right, sorry. But Signora Carracci has this ability: one way or another she always compels you to go too far.”

  Lina repressed her fury, she rubbed her wrist carefully, with the tip of her finger she wiped off some ash that had fallen on it. Then she unfolded the piece of paper with the demands, she placed it in front of Bruno, and as she was going to the door she turned to Solara, saying:

  “I’ve known how to whistle since I was five years old.”

  45.

  When she came back down, her face very pale, Edo asked her how it went, but Lila didn’t answer, she pushed him away with one hand and shut herself in the bathroom. She was afraid that Bruno would call her back, she was afraid of being forced to have a confrontation in Michele’s presence, she was afraid of the unaccustomed fragility of her body—she couldn’t get used to it. From the little window she spied on the courtyard and drew a sigh of relief when she saw Michele, tall, in a black leather jacket and dark pants, going bald at the temples, his handsome face carefully shaved, walk nervously to his car, and leave. Then she returned to the gutting room and Edo asked her again:

  “So?”

  “I did it. But from now on the rest of you have to take care of it.”

  “In what sense?”

  She couldn’t answer: Bruno’s secretary had appeared, breathless, the owner wanted her right away. She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off. Bruno, as soon as he saw her, almost screamed:

  “You people want to have coffee in bed in the morning? What is this latest thing, Lina? Do you have any idea? Sit down and explain. I can’t believe it.”

  Lila explained to him, demand by demand, in the tone she used with Gennaro when he refused to understand. She said emphatically that he had better take that piece of paper seriously and deal with the various points in a constructive spirit, because if he behaved unreasonably, the office of the labor inspector would soon come down on him. Finally she asked him what sort of trouble he’d got into, to end up in the hands of dangerous people like the Solaras. At that point Bruno lost control completely. His red complexion turned purple, his eyes grew bloodshot, he yelled that he would ruin her, that a few extra lire for the four dickheads she had set against him would be enough to settle everything. He shouted that for years his father had been bribing the inspector’s office and she was dreaming if she thought he was afraid of an inspection. He cried that the Solaras would eliminate her desire to be a union member, and finally, in a choked voice, he said: Out, get out immediately, out.

  Lila went to the door. On the threshold she said:

  “This is the last time you’ll see me. I’m done working here, starting now.”

  At those words Soccavo abruptly returned to himself. He had an expression of alarm, he must have promised Michele that he wouldn’t fire her. He said: “Now you’re insulted? Now you’re being difficult? What do you say, come here, let’s discuss it, I’ll decide if I should fire you or not. Bitch, I said come here.”

  For a fraction of a second Ischia came to mind, the morning we waited for Nino and his rich friend, the boy who had a house in Forio, who was always so polite and patient, to arrive. She went out and closed the door behind her. Immediately afterward she began to tremble violently, she was covered with sweat. She didn’t go to the gutting room, she didn’t say goodbye to Edo and Teresa, she passed by Filippo, who looked at her in bewilderment and called to her: Cerù, where are you going, come back inside. But she ran along the unpaved road, took the first bus for the Marina, reached the sea. She walked for a long time. There was a cold wind, and she went up to the Vomero in the funicular, walked through Piazza Vanvitelli, along Via Scarlatti, Via Cimarosa, took the funicular again to go down. It w
as late when she realized that she had forgotten about Gennaro. She got home at nine, and asked Enzo and Pasquale, who were anxiously questioning her to find out what had happened to her, to come and look for me in the neighborhood.

  And now here we are, in the middle of the night, in this bare room in San Giovanni a Teduccio. Gennaro is sleeping, Lila talks on and on in a low voice, Enzo and Pasquale are waiting in the kitchen. I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.

  46.

  I was a tranquil listener, and I let her talk. Some moments of the story, especially when the expression of Lila’s face and the pace of her sentences underwent a sudden, painful nervous contraction, disturbed me deeply. I felt a powerful sense of guilt, I thought: this is the life that could have been mine, and if it isn’t it’s partly thanks to her. Sometimes I almost hugged her, more often I wanted to ask questions, comment. But in general I held back, I interrupted two or three times at most.

  For example, I certainly interrupted when she talked about Professor Galiani and her children. I would have liked her to explain better what the professor had said, what precise words she had used, if my name had ever come up with Nadia and Armando. But I realized in time the pettiness of the questions and restrained myself, even though a part of me considered the curiosity legitimate—they were acquaintances of mine, after all, who were important to me.

  “Before I go to Florence for good, I should pay a visit to Professor Galiani. Maybe you’d come with me, do you want to?” and I added: “My relationship with her cooled a little, after Ischia, she blamed me for Nino’s leaving Nadia.” Since Lila looked at me as if she didn’t see me, I said again: “The Galianis are good people, a little stuck up, but this business of the murmur should be checked.”

  This time she reacted.

  “The murmur is there.”

  “All right,” I said, “but even Armando said you’d need a cardiologist.”

  She replied:

  “He heard it, anyway.”

  But I felt involved above all when it came to sexual matters. When she told me about the drying room, I almost said: an old intellectual jumped on me, in Turin, and in Milan a Venezuelan painter I’d known for only a few hours came to my room to get in bed as if it were a favor I owed him. Yet I held back, even with that. What sense was there in speaking of my affairs at that moment? And then really what could I have told her that had any resemblance to what she was telling me?

  That last question presented itself clearly when, from a simple recitation of the facts—years before, when she told me about her wedding night, we had talked only of the most brutal facts—Lila proceeded to talk generally about her sexuality. It was a subject completely new for us. The coarse language of the environment we came from was useful for attack or self-defense, but, precisely because it was the language of violence, it hindered, rather than encouraged, intimate confidences. So I was embarrassed, I stared at the floor, when she said, in the crude vocabulary of the neighborhood, that fucking had never given her the pleasure she had expected as a girl, that in fact she had almost never felt anything, that after Stefano, after Nino, to do it really annoyed her, so that she had been unable to accept inside herself even a man as gentle as Enzo. Not only that: using an even more brutal vocabulary, she added that sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of passion, she had done everything that a man could want from a woman, and that even when she had wanted to conceive a child with Nino, and had become pregnant, the pleasure you were supposed to feel, particularly at that moment of great love, had been missing.

  Before such frankness I understood that I could not be silent, that I had to let her feel how close I was, that I had to react to her confidences with equal confidences. But at the idea of having to speak about myself—the dialect disgusted me, and although I passed for an author of racy pages, the Italian I had acquired seemed to me too precious for the sticky material of sexual experiences—my uneasiness grew, I forgot how difficult her confession had been, that every word, however vulgar, was set in the weariness in her face, in the trembling of her hands, and I was brief.

  “For me it’s not like that,” I said.

  I wasn’t lying, and yet it wasn’t the truth. The truth was more complicated and to give it a form I would have needed practiced words. I would have had to explain that, in the time of Antonio, rubbing against him, letting him touch me had always been very pleasurable, and that I still desired that pleasure. I would have had to admit that being penetrated had disappointed me, too, that the experience was spoiled by the sense of guilt, by the discomfort of the conditions, by the fear of being caught, by the haste arising from that, by the terror of getting pregnant. But I would have had to add that Franco—the little I knew of sex was largely from him—before entering me and afterward let me rub against one of his legs, against his stomach, and that this was nice and sometimes made the penetration nice, too. As a result, I would have had to tell her, I was now waiting for marriage, Pietro was a very gentle man, I hoped that in the tranquility and the legitimacy of marriage I would have the time and the comfort to discover the pleasure of coitus. There, if I had expressed myself like that, I would have been honest. But the two of us, at nearly twenty-five, did not have a tradition of such articulate confidences. There had been only small general allusions when she was engaged to Stefano and I was with Antonio, bashful phrases, hints. As for Donato Sarratore, as for Franco, I had never talked about either one. So I kept to those few words—For me it’s not like that—which must have sounded to her as if I were saying: Maybe you’re not normal. And in fact she looked at me in bewilderment, and said as if to protect herself:

  “In the book you wrote something else.”

  So she had read it. I murmured defensively:

  “I don’t even know anymore what ended up in there.”

  “Dirty stuff ended up in there,” she said, “stuff that men don’t want to hear and women know but are afraid to say. But now what—are you hiding?”

  She used more or less those words, certainly she said dirty. She, too, then, cited the risqué pages and did it like Gigliola, who had used the word dirt. I expected that she would offer an evaluation of the book as a whole, but she didn’t, she used it only as a bridge to go back and repeat what she called several times, insistently, the bother of fucking. That is in your novel, she exclaimed, and if you told it you know it, it’s pointless for you to say: For me it’s not like that. And I mumbled Yes, maybe it’s true, but I don’t know. And while she with a tortured lack of shame went on with her confidences—the great excitement, the lack of satisfaction, the sense of disgust—I thought of Nino, and the questions I had so often turned over and over reappeared. Was that long night full of tales a good moment to tell her I had seen him? Should I warn her that for Gennaro she couldn’t count on Nino, that he already had another child, that he left children behind him heedlessly? Should I take advantage of that moment, of those admissions of his, to let her know that in Milan he had said an unpleasant thing about her: Lila is made badly even when it comes to sex? Should I go so far as to tell her that in those agitated confidences of hers, even in that way of reading the dirty pages of my book, now, while she was speaking I seemed to find confirmation that Nino was, in essence, right? What in fact had Sarratore’s son intended if not what she herself was admitting? Had he realized that for Lila being penetrated was only a duty, that she couldn’t enjoy the union? He, I said to myself, is experienced. He has known many women, he knows what good female sexual behavior is and so he recognizes when it’s bad. To be made badly when it comes to sex means, evidently, not to be able to feel pleasure in the male’s thrusting; it means twisting with desire and rubbing yourself to quiet that desire
, it means grabbing his hands and placing them against your sex as I sometimes did with Franco, ignoring his annoyance, the boredom of the one who has already had his orgasm and now would like to go to sleep. My uneasiness increased, I thought: I wrote that in my novel, is that what Gigliola and Lila recognized, was that what Nino recognized, perhaps, and the reason he wanted to talk about it? I let everything go and whispered somewhat randomly:

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “That your pregnancy was without joy.”

  She responded with a flash of sarcasm:

  “Imagine how I felt.”

  My last interruption came when it had begun to get light, and she had just finished telling me about the encounter with Michele. I said: That’s enough, calm down, take your temperature. It was 101. I hugged her tight, I whispered: now I’ll take care of you, and until you’re better we’ll stay together, and if I have to go to Florence you and the child will come with me. She refused energetically, she made the final confession of that night. She said she had been wrong to follow Enzo to San Giovanni a Teduccio, she wanted to go back to the neighborhood.

  “To the neighborhood?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “As soon as I feel better I’ll do it.”

  I rebuked her, I told her it was a thought induced by the fever, that the neighborhood would exhaust her, that to set foot there was stupid.

  “I can’t wait to leave,” I exclaimed.

  “You’re strong,” she answered, to my astonishment. “I have never been. The better and truer you feel, the farther away you go. If I merely pass through the tunnel of the stradone, I’m scared. Remember when we tried to get to the sea but it started raining? Which of us wanted to keep going and which of us made an about-face, you or me?”