Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I looked at my notes again. I was absolutely convinced that I had to change course. I wanted to leave behind me what Franco had called petty love affairs and write something suited to a time of demonstrations, violent deaths, police repression, fears of a coup d’état. I couldn’t get beyond a dozen inert pages. What was missing, then? It was hard to say. Naples, maybe, the neighborhood. Or an image like the Blue Fairy. Or a passion. Or an authoritative voice that would direct me. I sat at the desk for hours, in vain, I leafed through novels, I never went out of the room for fear of being captured by Dede. How unhappy I was. I heard the voice of the child in the hall, Clelia’s, my mother’s limping step. I lifted my skirt, I looked at the belly that was already starting to grow, spreading an undesired well-being through my whole organism. I was for the second time pregnant and yet empty.

It was then that I began telephoning Lila, not sporadically, as I had until then, but almost every day. I made the expensive intercity calls with the sole purpose of crouching in her shadow, letting my pregnancy run its course, hoping that, in line with an old habit, she would set my imagination in motion. Naturally I was careful not to say the wrong things, and I hoped that she wouldn’t, either. I knew clearly, now, that our friendship was possible only if we controlled our tongues. For example, I couldn’t confess to her that a dark part of me feared that she was casting an evil spell on me from afar, that that part still hoped that she was really sick and would die. For example, she couldn’t tell me the real reasons that motivated the rough, often offensive, tone in which she treated me. So we confined ourselves to talking about Gennaro, who was one of the smartest children in the elementary school, about Dede, who already knew how to read, and we did it like two mothers doing the normal boasting of mothers. Or I mentioned my attempt to write, but without making a big deal of it, I said only: I’m working, it’s not easy, being pregnant makes me tired. Or I tried to find out if Michele was still hanging around her, to somehow capture her and keep her. Or, sometimes, I would ask if she liked certain movie or television actors, and urge her to tell me if men unlike Enzo attracted her, and perhaps confide to her that it happened to me, too, that I was attracted to men unlike Pietro. But this last subject didn’t seem to interest her. When I mentioned an actor she always said: Who’s he, I’ve never seen him in the movies or on television. And if I merely uttered the name of Enzo she began updating me on the computer story, bewildering me with an incomprehensible jargon.

Her accounts were enthusiastic, and occasionally, on the hypothesis that they might be useful to me in the future, I took notes while she spoke. Enzo had made it, now he worked in an underwear factory fifty kilometers from Naples. The company had rented an IBM machine and he was the systems engineer. You know what kind of work that is? He diagrams manual processes by transforming them into flow charts. The central unit of the machine is as big as a wardrobe with three doors and it has a memory of 8 kilobytes. You can’t imagine how hot it is, Lenù: the computer is worse than a stove. Maximum abstraction along with sweat and a terrible stink. She talked to me about ferrite cores, rings traversed by an electrical cable whose tension determined the rotation, 0 or 1, and a ring was a bit, and the total of eight rings could represent a byte, that is a character. Enzo was the singular protagonist of Lila’s monologues. He dominated all that material like a god, he manipulated the vocabulary and the substance inside a large room with big air-conditioners, a hero who could make the machine do everything that people did. Is that clear? she asked me every so often. I answered yes, weakly, but I didn’t know what she was talking about. I perceived only that she noticed that nothing was clear to me, and I was ashamed of this.

Her enthusiasm grew with every phone call. Enzo was now earning a hundred and forty-eight thousand lire a month, exactly, a hundred and forty-eight . Because he was so smart, the most intelligent man she had ever met. So smart, so clever, that he had soon become indispensable and had managed to get her hired, as an assistant. Here, this was the news: Lila was working again, and this time she liked it. He’s the boss, Lenù, and I’m the deputy. I leave Gennaro with my mother — sometimes even with Stefano — and I go to the factory every morning. Enzo and I study the company point by point. We do everything the employees do so we know what we have to put into the computer. We check off, I don’t know, the transactions, we attach the stamps to the invoices, we check the trainees’ cards, the time cards, and then we transform everything into diagrams and holes in cards. Yes, yes, I’m also a punch-card operator: I’m there with three other women, and I’m getting eighty thousand lire. A hundred and forty-eight plus eighty is two hundred and twenty-eight, Lenù. Enzo and I are rich, and it will be even better in a few months, because the owner realized that I’m very capable and wants me to take a course. You see what sort of life I have, are you pleased?

One night she was the one who telephoned, she said she had just had some bad news: Dario, the student she had told me about some time earlier, the kid from the committee who handed out leaflets in front of the Soccavo factory, had been beaten to death, right outside of school, in Piazza del Gesù.

She seemed worried. She spoke of a black cloud that lay oppressively on the neighborhood and the whole city, attacks and more attacks. Behind many of these beatings, she said, were Gino’s fascists, and behind Gino was Michele Solara, names that, in uttering, she charged with old disgust, new rage, as if beneath what she said there was much else about which she was silent. I thought: How can she be so sure that they’re the ones responsible? Maybe she’s stayed in touch with the students of Via dei Tribunali, maybe Enzo’s computers are not the only thing in her life. I listened without interrupting while she let the words flow in her usual gripping way. She told me in great detail about a number of expeditions by the fascists, who started at the party headquarters opposite the elementary school, spread up the Rettifilo, through Piazza Municipio, up the Vomero, and attacked comrades with iron bars and knives. Even Pasquale had been beaten a couple of times, his front teeth had been broken. And Enzo, one night, had fought with Gino himself right in front of their house.

Then she stopped, she changed her tone. Do you remember, she asked, the atmosphere of the neighborhood when we were little? It’s worse, or rather no, it’s the same. And she mentioned her father-in-law, Don Achille Carracci, the loan shark, the Fascist, and Peluso, the carpenter, the Communist, and the war taking place right before our eyes. We slipped slowly back into those times, I remembered one detail, she another. Until Lila accentuated the visionary quality of her phrases and began to tell the story of the murder of Don Achille the way she had as a girl, with many fragments of reality and many of imagination. The knife to the neck, the spurting blood that had stained a copper pot. She ruled out, as she had at the time, that it was the carpenter who killed him. She said, with adult conviction: justice then, and today, for that matter, settled for the most obvious trail, the one that led to the Communist. Then she exclaimed: Who says it was really Carmen and Pasquale’s father? And who says it was a man and not a woman? As in one of our childhood games, when it seemed to us that we were in all ways complementary, I followed her step by step, adding my voice excitedly to hers, and I had the impression that together — the girls of the past and the adults of the present — we were arriving at a truth that for two decades had been unspeakable. Think about it , she said, who really gained from that murder, who ended up with the money-lending market that Don Achille controlled ? Yes, who? We found the answer in unison: the person who had gotten something out of it was the woman with the red book, Manuela Solara, the mother of Marcello and Michele. She killed Don Achille, we said excitedly, and then, turning melancholy, said softly, first I, then she: but what are we talking about, that’s enough, we’re still children, we’ll never grow up.