Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“She didn’t even tell you that?” Enzo asked me warily.

“No.”

“You see she didn’t want to bother you, you have your life. but you understand that for her personally it would be a significant step up, and for the two of us it would be a fortune: we’d have seven hundred and fifty thousand lire a month altogether, I don’t know if that’s clear.”

“But Lina?”

“She has to answer by September.”

“And what will she do?”

“I don’t know. Have you ever been able to figure out what’s in her mind ahead of time?”

“No. But what do you think she should do?”

“I think what she thinks.”

“Even if you don’t agree?”

“Even then.”

I went out to the car with him. On the stairs it occurred to me that maybe I should tell him what he surely didn’t know, that Michele harbored for Lila a love like a spiderweb, a dangerous love that had nothing to do with physical possession or even with a loyal subservience. And I was about to do it, I was fond of him, I didn’t want him to believe that he was merely dealing with a quasi-camorrist who had been planning for a long time to buy the intelligence of this woman. When he was already behind the wheel I asked him:

“And if Michele wants to sleep with her?”

He was impassive.

“I’ll kill him. But anyway he doesn’t want her, he already has a lover and everybody knows it.”

“Who’s that?”

“Marisa, he’s got her pregnant again.”

For a moment it seemed to me that I hadn’t understood.

“Marisa Sarratore?”

“Marisa, the wife of Alfonso.”

I recalled my conversation with my schoolmate. He had tried to tell me how complicated his life was and I had retreated, struck more by the surface of his revelation than by the substance. And to me his uneasiness seemed confused — to get things straight I would have had to talk to him again, and maybe not even then would I have understood — and yet it pierced me unpleasantly, painfully. I asked:

“And Alfonso?”

“He doesn’t give a damn, they say he’s a fag.”

“Who says?”

“Everyone.”

“Everyone is very general, Enzo. What else does everyone say?”

He looked at me with a flash of conspiratorial irony:

“A lot of things, the neighborhood is always gossiping.”

“Like?”

“Old stories have come back to the surface. They say it was the mother of the Solaras who murdered Don Achille.”

He left, and I hoped he would take away his words, too. But what I had learned stayed with me, worried me, made me angry. In an attempt to get rid of it I went to the telephone and talked to Lila, mixing anxieties and reproaches: Why didn’t you say anything about Michele’s job offers, especially the last one; why did you tell Alfonso’s secret; why did you start that story about the mother of the Solaras, it was a game of ours; why did you send me Gennaro, are you worried about him, tell me plainly, I have the right to know; why, once and for all, don’t you tell me what’s really in your mind? It was an outburst, but, sentence by sentence, deep inside myself, I hoped that we wouldn’t stop there, that the old desire to confront our entire relationship and re-examine it, to elucidate and have full consciousness of it, would be realized. I hoped to provoke her and draw her in to other, increasingly personal questions. But Lila was annoyed, she treated me coldly, she wasn’t in a good mood. She answered that I had been gone for years, that I now had a life in which the Solaras, Stefano, Marisa, Alfonso meant nothing, counted for less than zero. Go on vacation, she said, abruptly, write, act the intellectual, here we’ve remained too crude for you, stay away; and please, make Gennaro get some sun, otherwise he’ll come home stunted like his father.

The sarcasm in her voice, the belittling, almost rude tone, removed any weight from Enzo’s story and eliminated any possibility of drawing her into the books I was reading, the vocabulary I had learned from Mariarosa and the Florentine women, the questions that I was trying to ask myself and that, once I had provided her with the basic concepts, she would surely know how to take on better than all of us. But yes, I thought, I’ll mind my own business and you mind yours: if you like, don’t grow up, go on playing in the courtyard even now that you’re about to turn thirty; I’ve had enough, I’m going to the beach. And so I did.

Pietro took the three children and me in the car to an ugly house in Viareggio that we had rented, then he returned to Florence to try to finish his book. Look, I said to myself, now I’m a vacationer, a well-off lady with three children and a pile of toys, a beach umbrella in the front row, soft towels, plenty to eat, five bikinis in different colors, menthol cigarettes, the sun that darkens my skin and makes me even blonder. I called Pietro and Lila every night. Pietro reported on people who had called for me, remnants of a distant time, and, more rarely, talked about some hypothesis having to do with his work that had just come to mind. I handed Lila to Gennaro, who reluctantly recounted what he considered important events of his day and said good night. I said almost nothing to either one or the other. Lila especially seemed reduced to voice alone.

But I realized after a while that it wasn’t exactly so: part of her existed in flesh and blood in Gennaro. The boy was certainly very like Stefano and didn’t resemble Lila at all. Yet his gestures, the way he talked, some words, certain interjections, a kind of aggressiveness were those of Lila as a child. So sometimes if I was distracted I jumped at hearing his voice, or was spellbound as I observed him gesticulating, explaining a game to Dede.

Unlike his mother, however, Gennaro was devious. Lila’s meanness when she was a child had always been explicit, no punishment ever drove her to hide it. Gennaro, on the other hand, played the role of the well-brought-up, even timid child, but as soon as I turned my back he teased Dede, he hid her doll, he hit her. When I threatened him, saying that as a punishment we wouldn’t call his mamma to say good night he assumed a contrite expression. In reality, that possible punishment didn’t worry him at all; the ritual of the evening phone call had been established by me, and he could easily do without it. What worried him, rather, was the threat that I wouldn’t buy him ice cream. Then he began to cry; between his sobs he said he wanted to go back to Naples, and I immediately gave in. But that didn’t soothe him. He took revenge on me by secretly being mean to Dede.

I was sure that she feared him, hated him. But no. As time passed, she responded less and less to Gennaro’s harassments: she fell in love with him. She called him Rino or Rinuccio, because he had told her that was what his friends called him, and she followed him, paying no attention to my commands, in fact it was she who urged him to wander away from our umbrella. My day was made up of shouting: Dede where are you going, Gennaro come here, Elsa what are you doing, don’t put sand in your mouth, Gennaro stop it, Dede if you don’t stop it I’m coming over and we’ll see. A pointless struggle: Elsa ate sand no matter what and, no matter what, Dede and Gennaro disappeared.

Their refuge was a nearby expanse of reeds. Once I went with Elsa to see what they were up to and discovered that they had taken off their bathing suits and Dede was touching, with fascination, the erect penis that Gennaro was showing her. I stopped a short distance away, I didn’t know what to do. Dede — I knew, I had seen her — often masturbated lying on her stomach. But I had read a lot about infant sexuality — I had even bought for my daughter a little book of colored illustrations that explained in very short sentences what happened between man and woman, words I had read her but which aroused no interest — and, although I felt uneasy, I had not only forced myself not to stop her, not to reproach her, but, assuming that her father would, I had been careful to keep him from surprising her.