Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I said ironically: “Great, an almost religious experience.”

He remained serious: “No, only an admission of inferiority. But when she helped me study, that was great, yes. She would read the textbook and immediately understand it, then she’d summarize it for me in a simple way. There have been, and still are today, moments when I think: If I had been born a woman I would have wanted to be like her. In fact, in the Carracci family we were both alien bodies, neither she nor I could endure. So her faults never mattered to me, I always felt on her side.”

“Is Stefano still angry with her?”

“I don’t know. Even if he hates her, he has too many problems to be aware of it. Lina is the least of his troubles at the moment.”

The statement seemed sincere and, above all, well founded. I put Lina aside. I went back instead to asking him about Marisa, the Sarratore family, finally Nino. He was vague about all of them, especially Nino, whom no one — by Donato’s wishes, he said — had dared to invite to the intolerable wedding that was in store for him.

“You’re not happy to be getting married?” I ventured.

He looked out the window: there was lightning and thunder but still no rain. He said: “I was fine the way I was.”

“And Marisa?”

“No, she wasn’t fine.”

“You wanted her to be your fiancée for life?”

“I don’t know.”

“So finally you’ve satisfied her.”

“She went to Michele.”

I looked at him uncertainly. “In what sense?”

He laughed, a nervous laugh.

“She went to him, she set him against me.”

I was sitting on a pouf, he was standing, against the light. He had a tense, compact figure, like the toreador in a bullfighting film.

“I don’t understand: you’re marrying Marisa because she asked Solara to tell you that you had to do it?”

“I’m marrying Marisa in order not to upset Michele. He put me in here, he trusted my abilities, I’m fond of him.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You say that because you all have the wrong idea about Michele, you don’t know what he’s like.” His face contracted, he tried vainly to hold back tears. He added, “Marisa is pregnant.”

“Ah.”

So that was the real reason. I took his hand, in great embarrassment I tried to soothe him. He became quiet with a great effort, and said:

“Life is a very ugly business, Lenù.”

“It’s not true: Marisa will be a good wife and a fine mother.”

“I don’t give a damn about Marisa.”

“Now don’t overdo it.”

He fixed his eyes on me, I felt he was examining me as if to understand something about me that left him bewildered. He asked: “Lina never said anything even to you?”

“What should she have said?”

He shook his head, suddenly amused.

“You see I’m right? She is an unusual person. Once I told her a secret. I was afraid and I needed to tell someone the reason for my fear. I told her and she listened attentively, and I calmed down. It was important for me to talk to her, it seemed to me that she listened not with her ears but with an organ that she alone had and that made the words acceptable. At the end I didn’t ask her, as one usually does: swear, please, not to betray me. But it’s clear that if she hasn’t told you she hasn’t told anyone, not even out of spite, not even in the period that was hardest for her, when my brother hated her and beat her.”

I didn’t interrupt him. I felt only that I was sorry because he had confided something to Lila and not to me, although I had been his friend forever. He must have realized that and he decided to make up for it. He hugged me tight, and whispered in my ear:

“Lenù, I’m a queer, I don’t like girls.”

When I was about to leave, he said softly, embarrassed: I’m sure you already knew. This increased my unhappiness; in fact it had never occurred to me.

The long day passed in that way, without rain but dark. And then began a reversal that rapidly changed a phase of apparent growth in the relationship between Lila and me into a desire to cut it off and return to taking care of my own life. Or maybe it had begun before that, in tiny details that I scarcely noticed as they struck me, and now instead were starting to add up. The trip had been useful, and yet I came home unhappy. What sort of friendship was mine and Lila’s, if she had been silent about Alfonso for years, though she knew I had a close relationship with him? Was it possible that she hadn’t realized Michele’s absolute dependence on her, or for her own reasons had she decided not to say anything? On the other hand, I — how many things had I kept hidden from her?

For the rest of the day I inhabited a chaos of places, times, various people: the haunted Signora Manuela, the vacuous Rino, Gigliola in elementary school, Gigliola in middle school, Gigliola seduced by the potent good looks of the Solara boys, Gigliola dazzled by the Fiat 1100, and Michele who attracted women like Nino but, unlike him, was capable of an absolute passion, and Lila, Lila who had aroused that passion, a rapture that was fed not only by a craving for possession, by thuggish bragging, by revenge, by low-level desire, as she might say, but was an obsessive form of appreciation of a woman, not devotion, not subservience, but rather a sought-after form of male love, a complex feeling that was capable — with determination, with a kind of ferocity — of making a woman the chosen among women. I felt close to Gigliola, I understood her humiliation.

That night I went to see Lila and Enzo. I didn’t say anything about that exploration I had made for love of her and also to protect the man she lived with. I took advantage instead of a moment when Lila was in the kitchen feeding the child to tell Enzo that she wanted to go back to the neighborhood. I decided not to hide my opinion. I said it didn’t seem like a good idea to me, but that anything that could help stabilize her — she was healthy, she had only to regain some equilibrium — or that she considered such, should be encouraged. All the more since time had passed and, as far as I knew, in the neighborhood they wouldn’t be worse off than in San Giovanni a Teduccio. Enzo shrugged.

“I have nothing against it. I’ll have to get up earlier in the morning, return a little later in the evening.”

“I saw that Don Carlo’s old apartment is for rent. The children have gone to Caserta and the widow wants to join them.”

“What’s the rent?”

I told him: in the neighborhood the rents were lower than in San Giovanni a Teduccio.

“All right,” Enzo agreed.

“You realize you’ll have some problems anyway.”

“There are problems here, too.”

“The irritations will increase, and also the claims.”

“We’ll see.”

“You’ll stay with her?”

“As long as she wants, yes.”

We joined Lila in the kitchen. She had just had a fight with Gennaro. Now that the child spent more time with his mother and less with the neighbor he was disoriented. He had less freedom, he was forced to give up a set of habits, and he rebelled by insisting, at the age of five, on being fed with a spoon. Lila had started yelling, he had thrown the plate, which shattered on the floor. When we went into the kitchen she had just slapped him. She said to me aggressively:

“Was it you who pretended the spoon was an airplane?”

“Just once.”

“You shouldn’t.”

I said: “It won’t happen again.”

“No, never again, because you’re going to be a writer and I have to waste my time like this.”

Slowly she grew calmer, I wiped up the floor. Enzo told her that looking for a place in the neighborhood was fine with him, and I told her about Don Carlo’s apartment, smothering my resentment. She listened unwillingly as she comforted the child, then she reacted as if it were Enzo who wanted to move, as if I were the one encouraging that choice. She said: All right, I’ll do as you like.