Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Relative of Guido Airota?”

“He’s his son.”

She smiled with explicit malice.

“Good marriage.”

“We love each other.”

“Have you already started another book?”

“I’m trying.”

“I saw that you’re writing for l’Unità .”

“A bit.”

“I don’t write for it anymore, it’s a newspaper of bureaucrats.”

She turned again to Lila, she seemed to want to let her know how much she liked her. She said to her:

“It’s remarkable what you did in the factory.”

Lila grimaced in annoyance.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s not true.”

The professor got up, rummaged through the papers on the desk, and showed her some pages as if they were an incontrovertible truth.

“Nadia left this around the house and I took the liberty of reading it. It’s a courageous, new work, very well written. I wanted to see you so that I could tell you that.”

She was holding in her hand the pages that Lila had written, and from which I had taken my first article for l’Unità .

Oh yes, it was really time to get out. I left the Galiani house embittered, my mouth dry, without the courage to say to the professor that she didn’t have the right to treat me like that. She hadn’t said anything about my book, although she’d had it for some time and surely had read it or at least skimmed it. She hadn’t asked for a dedication in the copy I had brought for that reason and when, before leaving — out of weakness, out of a need to end that relationship affectionately — I had offered anyway, she hadn’t answered, she had smiled, and continued to talk to Lila. Above all, she had said nothing about my articles, rather she had mentioned them only to include them in her negative opinion of l’Unità , and then pulled out Lila’s pages and began to talk to her as if my opinion on the subject didn’t count, as if I were no longer in the room. I would have liked to yell: Yes, it’s true, Lila has a tremendous intelligence, an intelligence that I’ve always recognized, that I love, that’s influenced everything I’ve done; but I’ve worked hard to develop mine and I’ve been successful, I’m valued everywhere, I’m not a pretentious nobody like your daughter. Instead, I listened silently while they talked about work and the factory and the workers demands. They kept talking, even on the landing, until Professor Galiani absently said goodbye to me, while to Lila she said, now using the familiar tu , Stay in touch, and embraced her. I felt humiliated. Moreover, Pasquale and Nadia hadn’t returned, I hadn’t had a chance to refute them and my anger at them was still raging inside me: why was it wrong to help a friend, to do it I had taken a risk, how could they dare to criticize what I’d done. Now, on the stairs, in the lobby, on the sidewalk of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, it was only Lila and me. I was ready to shout at her: Do you really think I’m ashamed of you, what were you thinking, why did you say those two were right, you’re ungrateful, I did all I could to stay close to you, to be useful to you, and you treat me like that, you really have a sick mind. But as soon as we were outside, even before I could open my mouth (and on the other hand what would have changed if I had?), she took me by the arm and began to defend me against Professor Galiani.

I couldn’t find a single opening in order to reproach her for aligning herself with Pasquale and Nadia, or for the senseless accusation that I didn’t want her at my wedding. She behaved as if it had been another Lila who said those things, a Lila of whom she herself knew nothing and whom it was pointless to ask for explanations. What terrible people — she began, and spoke without stopping all the way to the subway at Piazza Amedeo — did you see how the old woman treated you, she wanted to get revenge, she can’t bear that you write books and articles, she can’t bear that you’re about to marry well, she especially can’t bear that Nadia, brought up precisely to be the best of all, Nadia who was to give her so much satisfaction, isn’t up to anything good, is sleeping with a construction worker and acting like a whore right in front of her: no, she can’t bear it, but you’re wrong to be upset, forget about it, you shouldn’t have left her your book, you shouldn’t have asked if she wanted it inscribed, you especially shouldn’t have done that, those are people who should be treated with a kick in the ass, your weakness is that you’re too good, you swallow everything that educated people say as if they’re the only ones who had a mind, but it’s not true, relax, go, get married, have a honeymoon, you were too worried about me, write another novel, you know that I expect great things from you, I love you.

I simply listened, overwhelmed. With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me. I couldn’t understand if those words were in fact intended to apologize to me, or if she was lying, concealing feelings that she had no intention of confiding to me, or if she was aiming at a final farewell. Certainly she was false, and she was ungrateful, and I, in spite of all that had changed for me, continued to feel inferior. I felt that I would never free myself from that inferiority, and that seemed to me intolerable. I wished — and I couldn’t keep the wish at bay — that the cardiologist had been wrong, that Armando had been right, that she really was ill and would die.

For years after that, we didn’t see each other, we only talked on the phone. We became for each other fragments of a voice, without any visual corroboration. But the wish that she would die remained in a far corner, I tried to get rid of it but it wouldn’t go away.

The night before I left for Florence I couldn’t sleep. Of all the painful thoughts the most persistent had to do with Pasquale. His criticisms burned me. At first I had rejected them altogether, now I was wavering between the conviction that they were undeserved and the idea that if Lila said he was right maybe I really had been mistaken. Finally I did something I had never done: I got out of bed at four in the morning and left the house by myself, before dawn. I felt very unhappy; I wished something terrible would happen to me, an event that, punishing me for my mistaken actions and my wicked thoughts, would as a result punish Lila, too. But nothing happened. I walked for a long time on the deserted streets, which were much safer than when they were crowded. The sky turned violet. I reached the sea, a gray sheet under a pale sky with scattered pink-edged clouds. The mass of Castel dell’Ovo was cut sharply in two by the light, a shining ochre shape on the Vesuvius side, a brown stain on the Mergellina and Posillipo side. The road along the cliff was empty, the sea made no sound but gave off an intense odor. Who knows what feeling I would have had about Naples, about myself, if I had waked every morning not in my neighborhood but in one of those buildings along the shore. What am I seeking? To change my origins? To change, along with myself, others, too? Repopulate this now deserted city with citizens not assailed by poverty or greed, not bitter or angry, who could delight in the splendor of the landscape like the divinities who once inhabited it? Indulge my demon, give him a good life and feel happy? I had used the power of the Airotas, people who for generations had been fighting for socialism, people who were on the side of men and women like Pasquale and Lila, not because I thought I would be fixing all the broken things of the world but because I was in a position to help a person I loved, and it seemed wrong not to do so. Had I acted badly? Should I have left Lila in trouble? Never again, never again would I lift a finger for anyone. I departed, I went to get married.