Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Is it true that Mirko is his son?”

“Yes.” She repressed a yawn, she smiled. “Nino is fascinating, the girls fight over him, they drag him this way and that. And these, luckily, are happy times, you take what you want, all the more since he has a power that conveys joy and the desire to act.”

She said that the movement needed people like him. She said that it was necessary, however, to look after him, let him grow, direct him. The very capable people, she said, should be guided: in them the bourgeois democrat, the technical manager, the modernizer is always lying in wait. We both regretted that we had spent so little time together and vowed to do better on the next occasion. I picked up my bag at the hotel, and left.

Only on the train, during the long journey to Naples, did I take in that second paternity of Nino’s. A squalid desolation extended from Silvia to Lila, from Mirko to Gennaro. It seemed to me that the passion of Ischia, the night of love in Forio, the secret relationship of Piazza dei Martiri, and the pregnancy — all faded, were reduced to a mechanical device that Nino, upon leaving Naples, had activated with Silvia and who knows how many others. The thing offended me, as if Lila were squatting in a corner of my mind and I felt her feelings. I was bitter as she would have been if she had known, I was furious as if I had suffered the same wrong. Nino had betrayed Lila and me. We were, she and I, similarly humiliated, we loved him without ever being truly loved in return. And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies. I remembered when he had come to see me in the neighborhood, years earlier, and we had stayed talking in the courtyard, and Melina had seen him from the window and had taken him for his father. Donato’s former lover had caught resemblances that had seemed nonexistent to me. But now it was clear, she was right and I was wrong. Nino was not fleeing his father out of fear of becoming like him: Nino already was his father and didn’t want to admit it.

Yet I couldn’t hate him. In the burning-hot train I not only reflected on the time I had seen him in the bookstore but inserted him into events, words, remarks of those days. Sex had pursued me, clawed me, foul and attractive, obsessively present in gestures, in conversations, in books. The dividing walls were crumbling, the shackles of good manners were breaking. And Nino was living that period intensely. He was part of the rowdy gathering at the university, with its intense odor, he was fit for the disorder of Mariarosa’s house, surely he had been her lover. With his intelligence, with his desires, with his capacity for seduction, he moved confident, curious within those times. Maybe I was wrong to connect him to the obscene desires of his father; his behavior belonged to another culture, as Silvia and Mariarosa had pointed out; girls wanted him, he took them, there was no abuse of power, there was no guilt, only the rights of desire. Who knows, maybe Nino in telling me that Lila was made badly even when it comes to sex, wished to convey that the time for pretenses was over, that to load pleasure with responsibility was an error. Even if he had his father’s nature, surely his passion for women told a different story.

With astonishment, with disappointment, I arrived in Naples at the moment when a part of me, at the thought of how much Nino was loved and how much he loved, had yielded and reached the point of admitting: what’s wrong with it, he enjoys life with those who know how to enjoy it. And as I was returning to the neighborhood, I realized that precisely because all women wanted him and he took them all, I who had wanted him forever wanted him even more. So I decided that I would at all costs avoid meeting him again. As for Lila, I didn’t know how to behave. Be silent, tell her everything? Whenever I see her, I would decide then.

At home I didn’t have, or didn’t want to have, time to go back to the subject. Pietro telephoned, he said that he was coming to meet my parents the following week. I accepted it as an inevitable misfortune, I struggled to find a hotel, clean the house, lessen my family’s anxiety. That last task was in vain, the situation had grown worse. In the neighborhood the malicious gossip had increased: about my book, about me, about my constant traveling alone. My mother had put up a defense by boasting that I was about to get married, but, to keep my decisions against God from complicating things further, she pretended that I was getting married not in Naples but in Genoa. As a result the gossip increased, which exasperated her.

One night she confronted me harshly, saying that people were reading my book, were outraged, and talking behind her back. My brothers — she cried — had had to beat up the butcher’s sons, who had called me a whore, and not only that: they had punched in the face a classmate of Elisa’s who had asked her to do nasty things like her older sister.

“What did you write?” she yelled.

“Nothing, Ma.”

“Did you write the disgusting things that you go around doing?”

“What disgusting things. Read it.”

“I can’t waste time with your nonsense.”

“Then leave me alone.”

“If your father finds out what people are saying about you, he’ll throw you out of the house.”

“He won’t have to, I’ll go myself.”

It was evening, and I went for a walk so as not to reproach her with things I would later regret. On the street, in the gardens, along the stradone , I had the impression that people stared at me insistently, spiteful shadows of a world I no longer inhabited. I ran into Gigliola, who was returning from work. We lived in the same building, we walked together, but I was afraid that sooner or later she would find a way of saying something irritating. Instead, to my surprise, she spoke timidly, she who was always aggressive if not malicious:

“I read your book, it’s wonderful, how brave you were to write those things.”

I stiffened.

“What things?”

“The things you do on the beach.”

“I don’t do them, the character does.”

“Yes, but you wrote them really well, Lenù, just the way it happens, with the same filthiness. They are secrets that you know only if you’re a woman.” Then she took me by the arm, made me stop, said softly, “Tell Lina, if you see her, that she was right, I admit it to her. She was right not to give a shit about her husband, her mamma, her father, her brother, Marcello, Michele, all that shit. I should have escaped from here, too, following the example of you two, who are intelligent. But I was born stupid and I can’t do anything about it.”

We said nothing else important, she stopped on her landing, I went to my house. But those comments stayed with me. It struck me that she had arbitrarily put together Lila’s fall and my rise, as if, compared with her situation, they had the same degree of positivity. But what was most clearly impressed in my mind was how she had recognized in the filthiness of my story her own experience of filthiness. It was a new fact, I didn’t know how to evaluate it. Especially since Pietro arrived and for a while I forgot about it.

I went to meet him at the station, and took him to Via Firenze, where there was a hotel that my father had recommended and which I had finally decided on. Pietro seemed even more anxious than my family. He got off the train, as unkempt as usual, his tired face red in the heat, dragging a large suitcase. He wanted to buy a bouquet for my mother, and contrary to his habits he was satisfied only when it seemed to him big enough, expensive enough. At the hotel he left me in the lobby with the flowers, swearing that he would return immediately, and reappeared half an hour later in a blue suit, white shirt, blue tie, and polished shoes. I burst out laughing, he asked: I don’t look good? I reassured him, he looked very good. But on the street I felt men’s gazes, their mocking laughter, maybe even more insistent than if I had been alone, as if to emphasize that my escort did not deserve respect. Pietro, with that big bunch of flowers that he wouldn’t let me carry, so respectable in every detail, was not suited to my city. Although he put his free arm around my shoulders, I had the impression that it was I who had to protect him.