Elena Ferrante: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Assunta Scanno , wife of Nicola, died of cancer.

Enzo Scanno , son of Nicola and Assunta, also a fruit-and-vegetable seller. Lila has felt a liking for him since childhood. Enzo was for a long time the boyfriend of Carmen Peluso, whom he leaves without explanation upon his return from military service. During his military service he started to study again, and he earns an engineering diploma. When Lila finally decides to leave Stefano, he takes responsibility for her and her son, Gennaro, and the three of them go to live in San Giovanni a Teduccio.

Other children.

The Solara family (the family of the owner of the Solara bar-pastry shop):

Silvio Solara , owner of the bar-pastry shop, Monarchist-fascist and Camorrist tied to the illegal trafficking in the neighborhood. He opposed the Cerullo shoe factory.

Manuela Solara , wife of Silvio, moneylender: her red book is much feared in the neighborhood.

Marcello and Michele Solara , sons of Silvio and Manuela. Braggarts, arrogant, they are nevertheless loved by the neighborhood girls, except Lila and Elena. Marcello is in love with Lila but she rejects him. Michele, a little younger than Marcello, is colder, more intelligent, more violent. He is engaged to Gigliola, the daughter of the pastry maker, but over the years develops a morbid obsession with Lila.

The Spagnuolo family (the baker’s family):

Signor Spagnuolo , pastry maker at the Solaras’ bar-pastry shop.

Rosa Spagnuolo , wife of the pastry maker.

Gigliola Spagnuolo , daughter of the pastry maker, engaged to Michele Solara.

Other children.

The Airota family:

Guido Airota , professor of Greek literature.

Adele Airota , his wife. She works for the Milanese publishing house that publishes Elena’s novel.

Mariarosa Airota , the older daughter, professor of art history in Milan.

Pietro Airota , university colleague of Elena’s and her fiancé, destined for a brilliant academic career.

The teachers:

Maestro Ferraro , teacher and librarian. He gave both Lila and Elena prizes when they were young, because they were diligent readers.

Maestra Oliviero , teacher. She is the first to notice the potential of Lila and Elena. At the age of ten, Lila writes a story titled The Blue Fairy. Elena, who likes the story a lot, gives it to Maestra Oliviero to read. But the teacher, angry because Lila’s parents wouldn’t send their daughter beyond elementary school, never says anything about it. In fact, she stops concerning herself with Lila and concentrates only on the success of Elena. She dies after a long illness soon after Elena graduates from the university.

Professor Gerace , high-school teacher.

Professor Galiani , high-school teacher. She is a very cultured woman and a Communist. She is immediately charmed by Elena’s intelligence. She lends her books, protects her in the clash with the religion teacher, invites her to a party at her house given by her children. Their relations cool when Nino, overwhelmed by his passion for Lila, leaves her daughter Nadia.

Other characters:

Gino , son of the pharmacist. Elena’s first boyfriend.

Nella Incardo , the cousin of Maestra Oliviero. She lives in Barano, on Ischia, and rents rooms during the summer to the Sarratore family. Elena stays with her for a vacation at the beach.

Armando , medical student, son of Professor Galiani.

Nadia , student, daughter of Professor Galiani, and girlfriend of Nino, who leaves her, sending her a letter from Ischia when he falls in love with Lila.

Bruno Soccavo , friend of Nino Sarratore and son of a rich industrialist in San Giovanni a Teduccio, near Naples. He gives Lila a job in his family’s sausage factory.

Franco Mari , student and Elena’s boyfriend during her first years at the university.

I saw Lila for the last time five years ago, in the winter of 2005. We were walking along the stradone, early in the morning and, as had been true for years now, were unable to feel at ease. I was the only one talking, I remember: she was humming, she greeted people who didn’t respond, the rare times she interrupted me she uttered only exclamations, without any evident relation to what I was saying. Too many bad things, and some terrible, had happened over the years, and to regain our old intimacy we would have had to speak our secret thoughts, but I didn’t have the strength to find the words and she, who perhaps had the strength, didn’t have the desire, didn’t see the use.

Yet I loved her, and when I came to Naples I always tried to see her, even though, I have to say, I was a little afraid of her. She had changed a great deal. Age had had the better of us both by then, but while I fought a tendency to gain weight she was permanently skin and bones. She had short hair that she cut herself; it was completely white, not by choice but from neglect. Her face was deeply lined, and increasingly recalled her father’s. She laughed nervously, almost a shriek, and spoke too loudly. She was constantly gesturing, giving to each gesture such fierce determination that she seemed to want to slice in half the houses, the street, the passersby, me.

We had gone as far as the elementary school when a young man I didn’t know overtook us, out of breath, and shouted to her that the body of a woman had been found in a flowerbed next to the church. We hurried to the gardens, and Lila dragged me into the knot of curious bystanders, rudely opening a path. The woman was lying on one side; she was extraordinarily fat, and was wearing an unfashionable dark-green raincoat. Lila recognized her immediately, but I did not: it was our childhood friend Gigliola Spagnuolo, the ex-wife of Michele Solara.

I hadn’t seen her for several decades. Her beautiful face was ruined, and her ankles had become enormous. Her hair, once brown, was now fiery red, and long, the way she’d had it as a girl, but thin, and spread out on the loose dirt. One foot was shod in a worn, low-heeled shoe; the other was encased in a gray wool stocking, with a hole at the big toe, and the shoe was a few feet beyond, as if she had lost it kicking against some pain or fear. I burst into tears; Lila looked at me in annoyance.

Sitting on a bench nearby, we waited in silence until Gigliola was taken away. What had happened to her, how she had died, for the moment no one knew. We went to Lila’s house, her parents’ old, small apartment, where she now lived with her son Rino. We talked about our friend; Lila criticized her, the life she had led, her pretensions, her betrayals. But now it was I who couldn’t listen. I thought of that face in profile on the dirt, of how thin the long hair was, of the whitish patches of skull. How many who had been girls with us were no longer alive, had disappeared from the face of the earth because of illness, because their nervous systems had been unable to endure the sandpaper of torments, because their blood had been spilled. For a while we sat in the kitchen listlessly, neither of us decisive enough to clear the table. Then we went out again.

The sun of the fine winter day gave things a serene aspect. The old neighborhood, unlike us, had remained the same. The low gray houses endured, the courtyard of our games, the dark mouths of the tunnel, and the violence. But the landscape around it had changed. The greenish stretch of the ponds was no longer there, the old canning factory had vanished. In their place was the gleam of glass skyscrapers, once signs of a radiant future that no one had ever believed in. I had registered the changes, all of them, over the years, at times with curiosity, more often carelessly. As a child I had imagined that, beyond the neighborhood, Naples was full of marvels. The skyscraper at the central station, for example, had made a great impression, decades earlier, as it rose, story by story, the skeleton of a building that seemed to us extremely tall, beside the ambitious railroad station. How surprised I was when I passed through Piazza Garibaldi: look how high it is, I said to Lila, to Carmen, to Pasquale, to Ada, to Antonio, to all the companions of those days, as we made our way to the sea, to the edges of the wealthy neighborhoods. At the top, I thought, live the angels, and surely they delight in the whole city. To climb up there, to ascend — how I would have liked that. It was our skyscraper, even if it was outside the neighborhood, a thing that we saw growing day by day. But the work had stopped. When I came back from Pisa, the station skyscraper no longer seemed the symbol of a community that was reviving but, rather, another nest of inefficiency.