Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

There was only one event that distressed me. I was in my seventh month and my belly was heavy. I was outside the Nuovo Pignone factory when scuffles broke out, and I hurried away. Maybe I made a wrong movement, I don’t know, I felt a painful spasm in the center of my right buttock that extended along my leg like a hot wire. I limped home, went to bed, and it passed. But every so often the pain reappeared, radiating through my thigh toward my groin. I learned to respond by finding positions that alleviated it, but when I realized that I was starting to limp all the time I was terrified, and I went to the gynecologist. He reassured me, saying that everything was in order, the weight I was carrying in my womb tired me out, causing this slight sciatica. Why are you so worried, he asked in an affectionate tone, you’re such a serene person. I lied, I said I didn’t know. In reality I knew perfectly well: I was afraid that my mother’s gait had caught up with me, that she had settled in my body, that I would limp forever, like her.

I was soothed by the reassurances of the gynecologist; the pain lasted for a while longer, then disappeared. Pietro forbade me to do other foolish things, no more running around. I admitted that he was right, and spent the last weeks of my pregnancy reading; I wrote almost nothing. Our daughter was born on February 12, 1970, at five-twenty in the morning. We called her Adele, even though my mother-in-law kept repeating, poor child, Adele is a terrible name, give her any other name, but not that. I had atrocious labor pains, but they didn’t last long. When the baby emerged and I saw her, black-haired, a violet organism that, full of energy, writhed and wailed, I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it. We didn’t baptize her; my mother screamed terrible things on the telephone, she swore she would never come to see her. She’ll calm down, I thought, sadly, and anyway if she doesn’t it’s her loss.

As soon as I was back on my feet I telephoned Lila, I didn’t want her to be angry that I hadn’t told her anything.

“It was a wonderful experience,” I told her.

“What?”

“The pregnancy, the birth. Adele is beautiful, and very good.”

She answered: “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

What a tangle of threads with untraceable origins I discovered in myself in that period. They were old and faded, very new, sometimes bright-colored, sometimes colorless, extremely thin, almost invisible. That state of well-being ended suddenly, just when it seemed to me that I had escaped Lila’s prophecies. The baby became troublesome, and the oldest parts of that jumble surfaced as if stirred by a distracted gesture. At first, when we were still in the clinic, she attached herself easily to my breast, but once we were home something went wrong and she didn’t want me anymore. She sucked for a few seconds, then shrieked like a furious little animal. I felt weak, vulnerable to old superstitions. What was happening to her? Were my nipples too small, did they slip out? Did she not like my milk? Or was it an aversion toward me, her mother, had she been inoculated remotely with an evil spell?

An ordeal began, as we went from doctor to doctor, she and I alone; Pietro was always busy at the university. My bosom, swollen uselessly, hurt; I had burning stones in my breasts; I imagined infections, amputations. To empty them, to get enough milk to nourish the baby with a bottle, to alleviate the pain, I tortured myself with a breast pump. I whispered, coaxing her: come on, sweetie, suck, such a good baby, so sweet, what a dear little mouth, what dear little eyes, what’s the matter. In vain. First I decided, regretfully, to try mixed feeding, then I gave up on that, too. I tried artificial milk, which required lengthy preparations night and day, a tiresome system of sterilizing nipples and bottles, an obsessive check of her weight before and after feeding, a sense of guilt every time she had diarrhea. Sometimes I thought of Silvia, who, in the turbulent atmosphere of the student gathering in Milan, breast-fed Nino’s child, Mirko, so easily. Why not me? I suffered long secret crying spells.

For a few days the baby settled down. I was relieved, hoping the moment had arrived to get my life back in order. But the reprieve lasted less than a week. In her first year of life the baby barely closed her eyes; her tiny body writhed and screamed for hours, with an unsuspected energy and endurance. She was quiet only if I carried her around the house, holding her tight in my arms, speaking to her: Now mamma’s splendid creature is good, now she’s quiet, now she’s resting, now she’s sleeping. But the splendid creature wouldn’t sleep, she seemed to fear sleep, like her father. What was wrong: a stomach ache, hunger, fear of abandonment because I hadn’t breast-fed her, the evil eye, a demon that had entered her body? And what was wrong with me? What poison had polluted my milk? And the leg? Was it imagination or was the pain returning? My mother’s fault? Did she want to punish me because I had been trying all my life not to be like her? Or was there something else?

One night I seemed to hear the sound of Gigliola’s voice, faint, repeating throughout the neighborhood that Lila had a tremendous power, that she could cast an evil spell by fire, that she smothered the creatures in her belly. I was ashamed of myself, I tried to resist, I needed rest. So I tried leaving the baby to Pietro, who thanks to his habit of studying at night wasn’t so tired. I said: I’m exhausted, call me in a couple of hours, and I went to bed and fell asleep as if I had lost consciousness. But once I was wakened by the baby’s desperate wailing, I waited; it didn’t stop. I got up. I discovered that Pietro had dragged the crib into his study and, paying no attention to his daughter’s cries, was bent over his books, taking notes as if he were deaf. I lost all my manners, and regressed, insulting him in my dialect. You don’t give a damn about anything, that stuff is more important than your daughter? My husband, distant, cool, asked me to leave the room, take away the crib. He had an important article to finish for an English journal, the deadline was very near. From then on I stopped asking him for help and if he offered I said: Go on, thanks, I know you have things to do. After dinner he hung around me uncertain, awkward, then he closed himself in his study and worked until late at night.

I felt abandoned but with the impression that I deserved it: I wasn’t capable of providing tranquility for my daughter. Yet I kept going, doggedly, even though I was more and more frightened. My organism was rejecting the role of mother. And no matter how I denied the pain in my leg by doing everything possible to ignore it, it had returned, and was getting worse. But I persisted, I wore myself out taking charge of everything. Since the building had no elevator, I carried the stroller with the baby in it up and down, I did the shopping, came home loaded down with bags, I cleaned the house, I cooked, I thought: I’m becoming ugly and old before my time, like the women of the neighborhood. And naturally, just when I was particularly desperate, Lila telephoned.

As soon as I heard her voice I felt like yelling at her: What have you done to me, everything was going smoothly and now, suddenly, what you said is happening, the baby is sick, I’m limping, it’s impossible, I can’t bear it anymore. But I managed to restrain myself in time, I said quietly, everything’s fine, the baby’s a little fussy and right now she’s not growing much, but she’s wonderful, I’m happy. Then, with feigned interest, I asked about Enzo, Gennaro, her relations with Stefano, her brother, the neighborhood, if she had had other problems with Bruno Soccavo and Michele. She answered in an ugly, obscene, aggressive dialect, but mostly without rage. Soccavo, she said, has to bleed. And when I run into Michele I spit in his face. As for Gennaro, she now referred to him explicitly as Stefano’s son, saying, he’s stocky like his father, and she laughed when I said he’s such a nice little boy. She said: You’re such a good little mamma, you take him. In those phrases I heard the sarcasm of someone who knew, thanks to some mysterious secret power, what was really happening to me, and I felt rancor, but I became even more insistent with my charade — listen to what a sweet voice Dede has, it’s really pleasant here in Florence, I’m reading an interesting book by Baran — and I kept going until she forced me to end it by telling me about the IBM course that Enzo had started.