Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

She had always known that Michele would sooner or later reappear in her life, but finding him in Bruno’s office frightened her like the spirits in the dark corners of the house of her childhood. What is he doing here, I have to get out of here. But Solara, seeing her, stood up, spread his arms wide, seemed genuinely moved. He said in Italian: Lina, what a pleasure, how happy I am. He wanted to embrace her, and would have if she hadn’t stopped him with an unconscious gesture of revulsion. Michele stood for some instants with his arms outstretched, therefore, in confusion, with one hand he caressed his cheekbone, his neck, with the other he pointed to Lila, this time speaking in an artificial tone:

“But really, I can’t believe it: right in the middle of the salamis, you were hiding Signora Carracci?”

Lila turned to Bruno abruptly: “I’ll come back later.”

“Sit down,” he said, darkly.

“I prefer to stand.”

“Sit, you’ll get tired.”

She shook her head, remained standing, and Michele gave Bruno a smile of understanding:

“She’s made like that, resign yourself, she never obeys.”

To Lila it seemed that Solara’s voice had more power than in the past, he stressed the end of every word as if he had been practicing his pronunciation. Maybe to save her strength, maybe just to contradict him, she changed her mind and sat down. Michele also changed position, but so that he was turned completely toward her, as if Bruno were no longer in the room. He observed her carefully, affectionately, and said, in a tone of regret: your hands are ruined, too bad, as a girl you had such nice ones. Then he began to talk about the shop in Piazza dei Martiri in the manner of one imparting information, as if Lila were still his employee and they were having a work meeting. He mentioned new shelves, new light fixtures, and how he had had the bathroom door that opened onto the courtyard walled up again. Lila remembered that door and said softly, in dialect:

“I don’t give a fuck about your shop.”

“You mean our: we invented it together.”

“Together with you I never invented anything.”

Michele smiled again, shaking his head in a sign of mild dissent. Those who put in the money, he said, do and undo just the way those who work with their hands and their head do. Money invents scenarios, situations, people’s lives. You don’t know how many people I can make happy or ruin just by signing a check. And then he began chatting again, placidly; he seemed eager to tell her the latest news, as if they were two friends catching up. He began with Alfonso, who had done his job in Piazza dei Martiri well and now earned enough to start a family. But he had no wish to marry, he preferred to keep poor Marisa in the condition of fiancée for life and continued to do as he liked. So he, as his employer, had encouraged him, a regular life is good for one’s employees, and had offered to pay for the wedding celebration; thus, finally, in June the marriage would take place. You see, he said, if you had continued to work for me, rather than Alfonso, I would have given you everything you asked for, you would have been a queen. Then, without giving her time to answer, he tapped the ashes of his cigarette into an old bronze ashtray and announced that he, too, was getting married, also in June, and to Gigliola, naturally, the great love of his life. Too bad I can’t invite you, he complained, I would have liked to, but I don’t want to embarrass your husband. And he began to talk about Stefano, Ada, and their child, first saying nice things about all three, then pointing out that the two grocery stores weren’t doing as well as they used to. As long as his father’s money lasted, he explained, Carracci kept afloat, but commerce is a rough sea now, Stefano’s been shipping water for quite some time, he can’t manage things anymore. Competition, he said, had increased, new stores were constantly opening. Marcello himself, for example, had got it into his head to expand the late Don Carlo’s old store and transform it into one of those places where you can get anything, from soap to light bulbs, mortadella, and candy. And he had done it, the business was booming, it was called Everything for Everyone.

“You’re saying that you and your brother have managed to ruin Stefano, too?”

“What do you mean ruin, Lina, we do our job and that’s all, in fact, when we can help our friends we help them happily. Guess who Marcello has working in the new store?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your brother.”

“You’ve reduced Rino to being your clerk?”

“Well, you abandoned him, and that fellow is carrying all of them on his shoulders: your father, your mother, a child, Pinuccia, who’s pregnant again. What could he do? He turned to Marcello for help and Marcello helped him. Doesn’t that please you?”

Lila responded coldly:

“No, it doesn’t please me, nothing you do pleases me.”

Michele appeared dissatisfied, and he remembered Bruno:

“You see, as I was telling you, her problem is that she has a bad character.”

Bruno gave an embarrassed smile that was meant to be conspiratorial.

“It’s true.”

“Did she hurt you, too?”

“A little.”

“You know that she was still a child when she held a shoemaker’s knife to my brother’s throat, and he was twice her size? And not as a joke, it was clear that she was ready to use it.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. That girl has courage, she’s determined.”

Lila clenched her fists tightly. She detested the weakness she felt in her body. The room was undulating, the bodies of the dead objects and the living people were expanding. She looked at Michele, who was extinguishing the cigarette in the ashtray. He was putting too much energy into it, as if he, too, in spite of his placid tone, were giving vent to an uneasiness. Lila stared at his fingers, which went on squashing the butt, the nails were white. Once, she thought, he asked me to become his lover. But that’s not what he really wants, there’s something else, something that doesn’t have to do with sex and that not even he can explain. He’s obsessed, it’s like a superstition. Maybe he thinks that I have a power and that that power is indispensable to him. He wants it but he can’t get it, and it makes him suffer, it’s a thing he can’t take from me by force. Yes, maybe that’s it. Otherwise he would have crushed me by now. But why me? What has he recognized in me that’s useful to him? I mustn’t stay here, under his eyes, I mustn’t listen to him, what he sees and what he wants scares me. Lila said to Soccavo:

“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.”