Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Only of him did she speak with respect, at length, and right afterward she asked about Pietro.

“Everything’s going well with your husband?”

“Very well.”

“And for me with Enzo.”

When she hung up, her voice left a trail of images and sounds of the past that stayed in my mind for hours: the courtyard, the dangerous games, the doll she had thrown into the cellar, the dark stairs we climbed to Don Achille’s to retrieve it, her wedding, her generosity and her meanness, how she had taken Nino. She can’t tolerate my good fortune, I thought fearfully, she wants me with her again, under her, supporting her in her affairs, in her wretched neighborhood wars. Then I said to myself: How stupid I’ve been, what use has my education been, and I pretended everything was under control. To my sister Elisa, who called frequently, I said that being a mother was wonderful. To Carmen Peluso, who told me about her marriage to the gas-pump owner on the stradone , I responded: What good news, I wish you every happiness, say hello to Pasquale, what’s he up to. With my mother, the rare times she called, I pretended I was ecstatic, but once I broke down and asked her: What happened to your leg, why do you limp. She answered: What does it matter to you, mind your own business.

I struggled for months, trying to keep at bay the more opaque parts of myself. Occasionally I surprised myself by praying to the Madonna, even though I considered myself an atheist, and was ashamed. More often, when I was alone in the house with the baby, I let out terrible cries, not words, only breath spilling out along with despair. But that difficult period wouldn’t end; it was a grueling, tormented time. At night, I carried the baby up and down the hall, limping. I no longer whispered sweet nonsense phrases, I ignored her and tried to think of myself. I was always holding a book, a journal, even though I hardly managed to read anything. During the day, when Adele slept peacefully — at first I called her Ade, without realizing how it sounded like Hades, a hell summed up in two syllables, so that when Pietro pointed it out I was embarrassed and began calling her Dede — I tried to write for the newspaper. But I no longer had time — and certainly not the desire — to travel around on behalf of l’Unità . So the things I wrote had no energy, they were merely demonstrations of my formal skill, flourishes lacking substance. Once, having written an article, I had Pietro read it before dictating it to the editorial office. He said: “It’s empty.”

“In what sense?”

“It’s just words.”

I felt offended, and dictated it just the same. It wasn’t published. And from then on, with a certain embarrassment, both the local and the national editorial offices began to reject my texts, citing problems of space. I suffered, I felt that everything that up to a short time earlier I had taken as an unquestioned condition of life and work was rapidly collapsing around me, as if violently jolted from inaccessible depths. I read just to keep my eyes on a book or a newspaper, but it was as if I had stopped at the signs and no longer had access to the meanings. Two or three times I came across articles by Nino, but reading them didn’t give me the usual pleasure of imagining him, of hearing his voice, of enjoying his thoughts. I was happy for him, certainly: if he was writing it meant that he was well, he was living his life who knows where, with who knows whom. But I stared at the signature, I read a few lines, I retreated, as if every one of his sentences, black on white, made my situation even more unbearable. I lost interest in things, I couldn’t even bother with my appearance. And besides, for whom would I bother? I saw no one, only Pietro, who treated me courteously, but I perceived that for him I was a shadow. At times I seemed to think with his mind and I imagined I felt his unhappiness. Marrying me had only complicated his existence as a scholar, and just when his fame was growing, especially in England and the United States. I admired him, and yet he irritated me. I always spoke to him with a mixture of resentment and inferiority.

Stop it, I ordered myself one day, forget l’Unità , it will be enough if I can find the right approach for a new book: as soon as it’s done, everything will be in order. But what book? To my mother-in law, to the publisher, I claimed that I was at a good point, but I was lying, I lied on every occasion in the friendliest tones. In fact all I had was notebooks crammed with idle notes, nothing else. And when I opened them, at night or during the day, according to the schedule that Dede imposed on me, I fell asleep without realizing it. One late afternoon Pietro returned from the university and found me in a condition worse than the one I had surprised him in some time earlier: I was in the kitchen, fast sleep, with my head resting on the table; the baby had missed her feeding and was screaming, off in the bedroom. Her father found her in the crib, half naked, forgotten. When Dede calmed down, greedily attached to the bottle, Pietro said in despair: “Is it possible that you don’t have anyone who could help you?”

“Not in this city, and you know that perfectly well.”

“Have your mother come, your sister.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Then ask your friend in Naples: you did so much for her, she’ll do the same for you.”

I started. For a fraction of a second, part of me had the clear sensation that Lila was in the house already, present: if once she had been hiding inside me, now, with her narrow eyes, her furrowed brow, she had slipped into Dede. I shook my head energetically. Get rid of that image, that possibility, what was I looking onto?

Pietro resigned himself to calling his mother. Reluctantly he asked her if she could come and stay with us for a little while.

I entrusted myself to my mother-in-law with an immediate sense of relief, and here, too, she showed herself to be the woman I would have liked to resemble. In the space of a few days she found a big girl named Clelia, barely twenty, and originally from the Maremma, to whom she gave detailed instructions about taking care of the house, the shopping, the cooking. When Pietro found Clelia in the house without even having been consulted he made a gesture of annoyance.

“I don’t want slaves in my house,” he said.

Adele answered calmly: “She’s not a slave, she’s a salaried employee.”

And I, fortified by the presence of my mother-in-law, stammered: “Do you think I should be a slave?”

“You’re a mother, not a slave.”

“I wash and iron your clothes, I clean the house, I cook for you, I’ve given you a daughter, I bring her up in the midst of endless difficulties, I’m worn out.”

“And who makes you do that, have I ever asked you for anything?”

I couldn’t bear to argue, but Adele did, she crushed her son with a sometimes ferocious sarcasm, and Clelia remained. Then she took the child away from me, carried the crib into the room I had given her, managed with great precision the schedule of bottles both at night and during the day. When she noticed that I was limping, she took me to a doctor, a friend of hers, who prescribed various injections. She herself appeared every morning and every evening with the syringe and the vials, to blithely stick the needle into my buttocks. I felt better right away, the pain in my leg disappeared, my mood improved, I was happier. But Adele didn’t stop there. She politely insisted that I attend to myself, she sent me to the hairdresser, made me go back to the dentist. And above all she talked to me constantly about the theater, the cinema, a book she was translating, another she was editing, what her husband or other famous people whom she called familiarly by name had written in this or that journal. From her I heard for the first time about the new radical feminist tracts. Mariarosa knew the women who were writing them; she was infatuated with them, admired them. Not Adele. She said with her usual ironic attitude that they went on and on about the feminist question as if it could be dealt with separately from the class conflict. Read them anyway, she advised me, and left me a couple of those little volumes with a final cryptic phrase: Don’t miss anything, if you want to be a writer. I put them aside, I didn’t want to waste time with writings that Adele herself disparaged. But I also felt, just then, that in no way did my mother-in-law’s cultivated conversation arise from a true need to exchange ideas with me. Adele intended to systematically pull me out of the desperate state of an incompetent mother, she was rubbing words together to strike a spark and rekindle my frozen mind, my frozen gaze. But the truth was that she liked saving me more than listening to me.