Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Why are you talking like that? What’s wrong? If you don’t explain I can’t understand.”

“First promise.”

“All right.”

She became agitated again, alarming me.

“No, you mustn’t say all right; you must say here, now, that you’ll take the child. And if you need money, find Nino, tell him he has to help you. But promise: I will bring up the child .”

I looked at her uncertainly. But I promised. I promised and I sat and listened to her all night long.

This may be the last time I’ll talk about Lila with a wealth of detail. Later on she became more evasive, and the material at my disposal was diminished. It’s the fault of our lives diverging, the fault of distance. And yet even when I lived in other cities and we almost never met, and she as usual didn’t give me any news and I made an effort not to ask for it, her shadow goaded me, depressed me, filled me with pride, deflated me, giving me no rest.

Today, as I’m writing, that goad is even more essential. I wish she were here, that’s why I’m writing. I want her to erase, add, collaborate in our story by spilling into it, according to her whim, the things she knows, what she said or thought: the time she confronted Gino, the fascist; the time she met Nadia, Professor Galiani’s daughter; the time she returned to the apartment on Corso Vittorio Emanuele where long ago she had felt out of place; the time she looked frankly at her experience of sex. As for my own embarrassments as I listened, my sufferings, the few things I said during her long story, I’ll think about them later.

As soon as The Blue Fairy turned to ash in the bonfire of the courtyard, Lila went back to work. I don’t know how strong an effect our meeting had on her — certainly she felt unhappy for days but managed not to ask herself why. She had learned that it hurt to look for reasons, and she waited for the unhappiness to become first a general discontent, then a kind of melancholy, and finally the normal labor of every day: taking care of Gennaro, making the beds, keeping the house clean, washing and ironing the baby’s clothes, Enzo’s, and her own, making lunch for the three of them, leaving little Rino at the neighbor’s with a thousand instructions, hurrying to the factory and enduring the work and the abuses, coming home to devote herself to her son, and also to the children Gennaro played with, making dinner, the three of them eating again, putting Gennaro to bed while Enzo cleared up and washed the dishes, returning to the kitchen to help him study, something that was very important to him, and that, despite her weariness, she didn’t want to deny him.

What did she see in Enzo? In essence, I think, the same thing she had wanted to see in Stefano and in Nino: a way of finally putting everything back on its feet in the proper way. But while Stefano, once the screen of money vanished, had turned out to be a person without substance and dangerous; while Nino, once the screen of intelligence vanished, had been transformed into a black smoke of pain, Enzo for now seemed incapable of nasty surprises. He was the boy whom, for obscure reasons, she had always respected in elementary school, and now he was a man so deeply compact in every gesture, so resolute toward the world, and so gentle with her that she could be sure he wouldn’t abruptly change shape.

Of course, they didn’t sleep together. Lila couldn’t do it. They shut themselves in their rooms, and she heard him moving on the other side of the wall until every noise stopped and there remained only the sounds of the apartment, the building, the street. She had trouble falling asleep, in spite of her exhaustion. In the dark all the reasons for unhappiness that she had prudently left nameless got mixed up and were concentrated on Gennaro, little Rino. She thought: What will this child become? She thought: I mustn’t call him Rinuccio, that would drive him to regress into dialect. She thought: I also have to help the children he plays with if I don’t want him to be ruined by being with them. She thought: I don’t have time, I myself am not what I once was, I never pick up a pen, I no longer read books.

Sometimes she felt a weight on her chest. She became alarmed and turned on the light in the middle of the night, looked at her sleeping child. She saw almost nothing of Nino; Gennaro reminded her, rather, of her brother. When he was younger, the child had followed her around, now instead he was bored, he yelled, he wanted to run off and play, he said bad words to her. I love him — Lila reflected — but do I love him just as he is? An ugly question. The more she observed her son, the more she felt that, even if the neighbor found him very intelligent, he wasn’t growing up as she would have liked. She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain, now it seemed to her wrong that the quality of a person depends on the quality of his early childhood. You had to be constant, and Gennaro had no constancy, nor did she. My mind is always scattering, she said to herself, I’m made badly and he’s made badly. Then she was ashamed of thinking like that, she whispered to the sleeping child: you’re clever, you already know how to read, you already know how to write, you can do addition and subtraction, your mother is stupid, she’s never satisfied. She kissed the little boy on the forehead and turned out the light.

But still she couldn’t sleep, especially when Enzo came home late and went to bed without asking her to study. On these occasions, Lila imagined that he had met some prostitute or had a lover, a colleague in the factory where he worked, an activist from the Communist cell he had immediately joined. Males are like that, she thought, at least the ones I’ve known: they have to have sex constantly, otherwise they’re unhappy. I don’t think Enzo is any different, why should he be. And besides I’ve rejected him, I’ve left him in the bed by himself, I can’t make any demands. She was afraid only that he would fall in love and send her away. She wasn’t worried about finding no roof over her head, she had a job at the sausage factory and felt strong, surprisingly, much stronger than when she had married Stefano and found herself with a lot of money but was subjugated by him. Rather, she was afraid of losing Enzo’s kindness, the attention he gave to all her anxieties, the tranquil strength he emanated and thanks to which he had saved her first from Nino’s absence, then from Stefano’s presence. All the more because, in her present situation, he was the only one who gave her any gratification, who continued to ascribe to her extraordinary capabilities.

“You know what that means?”

“No.”

“Look closely.”

“It’s German, Enzo, I don’t know German.”

“But if you concentrate, after a while you’ll know it,” he said to her, partly joking, partly serious.

Enzo had worked hard to get a diploma and had succeeded, but, even though she had stopped going to school in fifth grade, he believed that she had a much brighter intelligence than he did and attributed to her the miraculous quality of rapidly mastering any material. In fact, when, with very little to go on, he nevertheless became convinced that the languages of computer programming held the future of the human race, and that the élite who first mastered them would have a resounding part in the history of the world, he immediately turned to her.

“Help me.”

“I’m tired.”

“The life we lead is disgusting, Lina, we have to change.”

“For me it’s fine like this.”

“The child is with strangers all day.”

“He’s big, he can’t live in a bell jar.”

“Look what bad shape your hands are in.”