Elena Ferrante: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

When I finished the dedications, the room was empty. Adele took me gently by the hand, she praised the way I had spoken of my book and the way I had responded to the terrible intrusion — so she called it — of the man with the thick eyeglasses. Since I denied having done well (I knew perfectly well that it wasn’t true), she asked Nino and Tarratano to give their opinion, and both were profuse with compliments. Nino went so far as to say, looking at me seriously: You don’t know what that girl was like in high school, extremely intelligent, cultivated, very courageous, very beautiful . And while I felt my face burning, he began to tell with exaggerated courtesy the story of my clash with the religion teacher years earlier. Adele laughed frequently as she listened. In our family, she said, we understood Elena’s virtues right away, and then she said she had made a reservation for dinner at a place nearby. I was alarmed, I said in embarrassment that I was tired and not hungry, I would happily take a short walk with Nino before going to bed. I knew it was rude, the dinner was meant to celebrate me and thank Tarratano for his work on behalf of my book, but I couldn’t stop myself. Adele looked at me for a moment with a sardonic expression, she replied that naturally my friend was invited, and added mysteriously, as if to compensate for the sacrifice I was making: I have a nice surprise in store for you. I looked at Nino anxiously: would he accept the invitation? He said he didn’t want to be a bother, he looked at his watch, he accepted.

We left the bookstore. Adele, tactfully, went ahead with Tarratano, Nino and I followed. But I immediately found that I didn’t know what to say to him, I was afraid that every word would be wrong. He made sure there were no silences. He praised my book again, he went on to speak with great respect of the Airotas (he called them “the most civilized of the families who count for something in Italy”), he said he knew Mariarosa (“She’s always on the front lines: two weeks ago we had a big argument”), he congratulated me because he had learned from Adele that I was engaged to Pietro, whose book on Bacchic rites he seemed to know, amazing me; but he spoke with respect especially of the father, Professor Guido Airota, “a truly exceptional man.” I was a little annoyed that he already knew of my engagement, and it made me uneasy that the praise of my book had served as an introduction to the far more insistent praise of Pietro’s entire family, Pietro’s book. I interrupted him, I asked him about himself, but he was vague, with only a few allusions to a small volume coming out that he called boring but obligatory. I pressed him, I asked if he had had a hard time during his early days in Milan. He answered with a few generic remarks about the problems of coming from the South without a cent in your pocket. Then out of the blue he asked me:

“Are you living in Naples again?”

“For now, yes.”

“In the neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve broken conclusively with my father, and I don’t see anyone in my family.”

“Too bad.”

“It’s better that way. I’m just sorry not to have any news of Lina.”

For a moment I thought I’d been wrong, that Lila had never gone out of his life, that he had come to the bookstore not for me but only to find out about her. Then I said to myself: if he had really wanted to find out about Lila, in so many years he would have found a way, and I reacted violently, in the sharp tone of someone who wants to end the subject quickly:

“She left her husband and lives with someone else.”

“Did she have a boy or a girl?”

“A boy.”

He made a grimace of displeasure and said: “Lina is brave, even too brave. But she doesn’t know how to submit to reality, she’s incapable of accepting others and herself. Loving her was a difficult experience.”

“In what sense?”

“She doesn’t know what dedication is.”

“Maybe you’re exaggerating.”

“No, she’s really made badly: in her mind and in everything, even when it comes to sex.”

Those last words— even when it comes to sex —struck me more than the others. So Nino’s judgment on his relationship with Lila was negative? So he had just said to me, disturbingly, that that opinion included even the sexual arena? I stared for some seconds at the dark outlines of Adele and her friend walking ahead of us. The disturbance became anxiety, I sensed that even when it comes to sex was a preamble, that he wished to become still more explicit. Years earlier, Stefano, after his marriage, had confided in me, had told me about his problems with Lila, but he had done so without ever mentioning sex — no one in the neighborhood would have in speaking of the woman he loved. It was unthinkable, for example, that Pasquale would talk to me about Ada’s sexuality, or, worse, that Antonio would speak to Carmen or Gigliola about my sexuality. Boys might talk among themselves — and in a vulgar way, when they didn’t like us girls or no longer liked us — but among boys and girls no. I guessed instead that Nino, the new Nino, considered it completely normal to discuss with me his sexual relations with my friend. I was embarrassed, I pulled back. Of this, too, I thought, I must never speak to Lila, and meanwhile I said with feigned indifference: water under the bridge, let’s not be sad, let’s go back to you, what are you working on, what are your prospects at the university, where do you live, by yourself? But I certainly overdid it; he must have felt that I had made a quick escape. He smiled ironically, and was about to answer. But we had arrived at the restaurant, and we went in.

Adele assigned us places: I was next to Nino and opposite Tarratano, she next to Tarratano and opposite Nino. We ordered, and meanwhile the conversation had shifted to the man with the thick glasses, a professor of Italian literature — I learned — a Christian Democrat, and a regular contributor to the Corriere della Sera . Adele and her friend now lost all restraint. Outside of the bookstore ritual, they couldn’t say enough bad things about the man, and they congratulated Nino for the way he had confronted and routed him. They especially enjoyed recalling what Nino had said as the man was leaving the room, remarks they had heard and I hadn’t. They asked him what his exact words were, and Nino retreated, saying that he didn’t remember. But then the words emerged, maybe reinvented for the occasion, something like: In order to safeguard authority in all of its manifestations, you suspend democracy . And from there the three of them took off, talking, with increasing ardor, about the secret services, about Greece, about torture in the Greek prisons, about Vietnam, about the unexpected uprising of the student movement not only in Italy but in Europe and the world, about an article in Il Ponte by Professor Airota — which Nino said that he agreed with, word for word — about the conditions of research and teaching in the universities.

“I’ll tell my daughter that you liked it,” Adele said. “Mariarosa thought it was terrible.”

“Mariarosa gets passionate only about what the world can’t give.”

“Very good, that really is what she’s like.”

I knew nothing of that article by my future father-in-law. The subject made me uneasy, and I listened in silence. First my exams, then my thesis, then the book and its rapid publication had absorbed much of my time. I was informed about world events only superficially, and I had picked up almost nothing about students, demonstrations, clashes, the wounded, arrests, blood. Since I was now outside the university, all I really knew about that chaos was Pietro’s grumblings, his complaints about what he called literally “the Pisan nonsense.” As a result I felt around me a scene with confusing features: features that, however, my companions seemed able to decipher with great precision, Nino even more than the others. I sat beside him, I listened, I touched his arm with mine, a contact merely of fabrics which nevertheless agitated me. He had kept his fondness for figures: he was giving a list of numbers, of students enrolled in the university, a crowd by now, and of the capacity of the buildings; of the hours the tenured professors actually worked, and how many of them, rather than doing research and teaching, sat in parliament or on administrative committees or devoted themselves to lucrative consulting jobs and private practice. Adele agreed, and so did her friend; occasionally they interrupted, mentioning people I had never heard of. I felt excluded. The celebration for my book was no longer at the top of their thoughts, my mother-in-law seemed to have forgotten even the surprise she had announced for me. I said that I had to get up for a moment; Adele nodded absently, Nino continued to speak passionately. Tarratano must have thought that I was getting bored and said kindly, almost in a whisper: