Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

In the late afternoon Signora Spagnuolo reappeared, I was wanted again on the telephone. In response to my embarrassment, my apologies, she said she was very happy to be able to be useful to a girl like me, she was full of compliments. Gigliola had been unlucky, she sighed on the stairs, her father had taken her to work in the Solaras’ pastry shop when she was thirteen, and good thing she was engaged to Michele, otherwise she’d be slaving away her whole life. She opened the door and led me along the hall to the telephone that was attached to the wall. I saw that she had put a chair there so that I would be comfortable: what deference was shown to someone who is educated. Studying was considered a ploy used by the smartest kids to avoid hard work. How can I explain to this woman — I thought — that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?

“Did you read it?” Adele asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you pleased?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll give you another piece of good news: the book is starting to sell, if it keeps on like this we’ll reprint it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that our friend in the Corriere thought he was destroying us and instead he worked for us. Bye, Elena, enjoy your success.”

The book was selling really well, I realized in the following days. The most conspicuous sign was the increasing number of phone calls from Gina, who reported a notice in such-and-such a newspaper, or announced some invitation from a bookstore or cultural group, without ever forgetting to greet me with the kind words: The book is taking off, Dottoressa Greco, congratulations. Thank you, I said, but I wasn’t happy. The articles in the newspapers seemed superficial, they confined themselves to applying either the enthusiastic matrix of l’Unità or the ruinous one of the Corriere . And although Gina repeated on every occasion that even negative reviews were good for sales, those reviews nevertheless wounded me and I would wait anxiously for a handful of favorable comments to offset the unfavorable ones and feel better. In any case, I stopped hiding the malicious reviews from my mother; I handed them all over, good and bad. She tried to read them, spelling them out with a stern expression, but she never managed to get beyond four or five lines before she either found a point to quarrel with or, out of boredom, took refuge in her mania for collecting. Her aim was to fill the entire album and, afraid of being left with empty pages, she complained when I had nothing to give her.

The review that at the time wounded me most deeply appeared in Roma . Paragraph by paragraph, it retraced the one in the Corriere , but in a florid style that at the end fanatically hammered at a single concept: women are losing all restraint, one has only to read Elena Greco’s indecent novel to understand it, a novel that is a cheap version of the already vulgar Bonjour Tristesse . What hurt me, though, was not the content but the byline. The article was by Nino’s father, Donato Sarratore. I thought of how impressed I had been as a girl by the fact that that man was the author of a book of poems; I thought of the glorious halo I had enveloped him in when I discovered that he wrote for the newspapers. Why that review? Did he wish to get revenge because he recognized himself in the obscene family man who seduces the protagonist? I was tempted to call him and insult him atrociously in dialect. I gave it up only because I thought of Nino, and made what seemed an important discovery: his experience and mine were similar. We had both refused to model ourselves on our families: I had been struggling forever to get away from my mother, he had burned his bridges with his father. This similarity consoled me, and my rage slowly diminished.

But I hadn’t taken into account that, in the neighborhood, Roma was read more than any other newspaper. I found out that evening. Gino, the pharmacist’s son, who lifted weights and had become a muscular young man, looked out from the doorway of his father’s shop just as I was passing, in a white pharmacist’s smock even though he hadn’t yet taken his degree. He called to me, holding out the paper, and said, in a fairly serious tone, because he had recently moved up a little in the local section of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party: Did you see what they’re writing about you? In order not to give him the satisfaction, I answered, they write all sorts of things, and went on with a wave. He was flustered, and stammered something, then he said, with explicit malice: I’ll have to read that book of yours, I understand it’s very interesting.

That was only the start. The next day Michele Solara came up to me on the street and insisted on buying me a coffee. We went into his bar and while Gigliola served us, without saying a word, in fact obviously annoyed by my presence and perhaps also by her boyfriend’s, he began: Lenù, Gino gave me an article to read where it says you wrote a book that’s banned for those under eighteen. Imagine that, who would have expected it. Is that what you studied in Pisa? Is that what they taught you at the university? I can’t believe it. In my opinion you and Lina made a secret agreement: she does nasty things and you write them. Is that right? Tell me the truth. I turned red, I didn’t wait for the coffee, I waved to Gigliola and left. He called after me, laughing: What’s the matter, you’re offended, come here, I was joking.

Soon afterward I had an encounter with Carmen Peluso. My mother had obliged me to go to the Carraccis’ new grocery, because oil was cheaper there. It was afternoon, there were no customers, Carmen was full of compliments. How well you look, she said, it’s an honor to be your friend, the only good luck I’ve had in my whole life. Then she said that she had read Sarratore’s article, but only because a supplier had left Roma behind in the shop. She described it as spiteful, and her indignation seemed genuine. On the other hand, her brother, Pasquale, had given her the article in l’Unità —really, really good, such a nice picture. You’re beautiful, she said, in everything you do. She had heard from my mother that I was going to marry a university professor and that I was going to live in Florence in a luxurious house. She, too, was getting married, to the owner of the gas pump on the stradone , but who could say when, they had no money. Then, without a break, she began complaining about Ada. Ever since Ada had taken Lila’s place with Stefano, things had gone from bad to worse. She acted like the boss in the grocery stores, too, and had it in for her, accused her of stealing, ordered her around, watched her closely. She couldn’t take it anymore, she wanted to quit and go to work at her future husband’s gas pump.

I listened closely, I remembered when Antonio and I wanted to get married and, similarly, have a gas pump. I told her about it, to amuse her, but she muttered, darkening: Yes, why not, just imagine it, you at a gas pump, lucky you who got yourself out of this wretchedness. Then she made some obscure comments: there’s too much injustice, Lenù, too much, it has to end, we can’t go on like this. And as she was talking she pulled out of a drawer my book, with the cover all creased and dirty. It was the first copy I’d seen in the hands of anyone in the neighborhood, and I was struck by how bulging and grimy the early pages were, how flat and white the others. I read a little at night, she said, or when there aren’t any customers. But I’m still on page 32, I don’t have time, I have to do everything, the Carraccis keep me shut up here from six in the morning to nine in the evening. Then suddenly she asked, slyly, how long does it take to get to the dirty pages? How much do I still have to read?