Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Go,” she said finally, “talk to the two of them, they’ve been waiting for hours. They haven’t closed their eyes and they have to go to work.”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Whatever you want.”

I pulled the covers up, I also covered Gennaro, who had been tossing in his sleep all night. I realized that Lila was already falling asleep. I whispered:

“I’ll be back soon.”

She said: “Remember what you promised.”

“What?”

“You’ve already forgotten? If something happens to me, you’ve got to take Gennaro.”

“Nothing will happen to you.”

As I went out of the room Lila started in her half-sleep, she whispered: “Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always, even when you leave Naples. That way I’ll know that you see me and I’m at peace.”

In the time that passed between that night and the day of my wedding — I was married on May 17, 1969, in Florence, and, after a honeymoon of just three days in Venice, enthusiastically began my life as a wife — I tried to do all I could for Lila. At first, in fact, I thought simply that I would help her until she got over the flu. I had things to do about the house in Florence, I had a lot of engagements because of the book — the telephone rang constantly, and my mother grumbled that she had given the number to half the neighborhood but no one called her, to have that thingamajig in the house, she said, is just a bother, since the calls were almost always for me — I wrote notes for hypothetical new novels, I tried to fill the gaps in my literary and political education. But my friend’s general state of weakness soon led me to neglect my own affairs and occupy myself with her. My mother realized right away that we had resumed our friendship: she found it shameful, she flew into a rage, she was full of insults for both of us. She continued to believe that she could tell me what to do and what not to, she limped after me, criticizing me. Sometimes she seemed determined to insert herself into my body, simply to keep me from being my own master. What do you have in common with her anymore, she insisted, think of what you are and of what she is, isn’t that disgusting book you wrote enough, you want to go on being friends with a whore? But I behaved as if I were deaf. I saw Lila every day and from the moment I left her sleeping in her room and went to face the two men who had waited all night in the kitchen I devoted myself to reorganizing her life.

I told Enzo and Pasquale that Lila was ill, she couldn’t work at the Soccavo factory anymore, she had quit. With Enzo I didn’t have to waste words, he had understood for a while that she couldn’t go on at the factory, that she had gotten into a difficult situation, that something inside her was giving in. Pasquale, instead, driving back to the neighborhood on the early-morning streets, still free of traffic, objected. Let’s not overdo it, he said, it’s true that Lila has a hard life, but that’s what happens to all the exploited of the world. Then, following a tendency he had had since he was a boy, he went on to speak about the peasants of the south, the workers of the north, the populations of Latin America, of northeastern Brazil, of Africa, about the Negroes, the Vietnamese, American imperialism. I soon stopped him, saying: Pasquale, if Lina goes on as she has she’ll die. He wouldn’t concede, he continued to object, and not because he didn’t care about Lila but because the struggle at Soccavo seemed to him important, he considered our friend’s role crucial, and deep down he was convinced that all those stories about a little flu came not so much from her as from me, a bourgeois intellectual more worried about a slight fever than about the nasty political consequences of a workers’ defeat. Since he couldn’t make up his mind to say these things to me explicitly but spoke in sentence fragments, I summed it up for him with soothing clarity, to show him I had understood. That made him even more anxious and as he left me at the gate he said: I have to go to work now, Lenù, but we’ll talk about it again. As soon as I returned to the house in San Giovanni a Teduccio I took Enzo aside and said: Keep Pasquale away from Lina if you love her, she mustn’t hear any talk of the factory.

In that period I always carried in my purse a book and a notebook: I read on the bus or when Lila was sleeping. Sometimes I discovered her with her eyes open, staring at me, maybe she was peeking to see what I was reading, but she never asked me the title of the book, and when I tried to read her some passages — from scenes at the Upton Inn, I remember — she closed her eyes as if I were boring her. The fever passed in a few days, but the cough didn’t, so I forced her to stay in bed. I cleaned the house, I cooked, I took care of Gennaro. Maybe because he was already big, somewhat aggressive, willful, he didn’t have the defenseless charm of Mirko, Nino’s other child. But sometimes in the midst of violent games he would turn unexpectedly sad, and fall asleep on the floor; that softened me, and I grew fond of him, and when that became clear to him he attached himself to me, keeping me from doing chores or reading.

Meanwhile I tried to get a better understanding of Lila’s situation. Did she have money? No. I lent her some and she accepted it after swearing endlessly that she would pay me back. How much did Bruno owe her? Two months’ salary. And severance pay? She didn’t know. What was Enzo’s job, how much did he earn? No idea. And that correspondence course in Zurich — what concrete possibilities did it offer? Who knows. She coughed constantly, she had pains in her chest, sweats, a vise in her throat, her heart would suddenly go crazy. I wrote down punctiliously all the symptoms and tried to convince her that another medical examination was necessary, more thorough than the one Armando had done. She didn’t say yes but she didn’t oppose it. One evening before Enzo returned, Pasquale looked in, he said very politely that he, his comrades on the committee, and some workers at the Soccavo factory wanted to know how she was. I replied that she wasn’t well, she needed rest, but he asked to see her just the same, to say hello. I left him in the kitchen, I went to Lila, I advised her not to see him. She made a face that meant: I’ll do as you want. I was moved by the fact that she gave in to me — she who had always commanded, done and undone — without arguing.

At home that same night I made a long call to Pietro, telling him in detail all Lila’s troubles and how important it was to me to help her. He listened patiently. At a certain point he even exhibited a spirit of collaboration: he remembered a young Pisan Greek scholar who was obsessed with computers and imagined that they would revolutionize philology. I was touched by the fact that, although he was a person who was always buried in his work, on this occasion, for love of me, he made an effort to be useful.

“Find him,” I begged him, “tell him about Enzo, you never know, maybe some job prospects might turn up.”

He promised he would and added that, if he remembered correctly, Mariarosa had had a brief romance with a young Neapolitan lawyer: maybe he could find him and ask if he could help.

“To do what?”

“To get your friend’s money back.”

I was excited.

“Call Mariarosa.”

“All right.”

I insisted: “Don’t just promise, call her, please.”

He was silent for a moment, then he said: “Just then you sounded like my mother.”

“In what sense?”

“You sounded like her when something is very important to her.”

“I’m very different, unfortunately.”

He was silent again.

“You’re different, fortunately. But in these types of things there’s no one like her. Tell her about that girl and you’ll see, she’ll help you.”