Elena Ferrante: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I thanked Adele and her friend for all the trouble they had taken for me and for my book. They both praised Nino at length, sincerely, speaking to me as if it were I who had contributed to making him so likable, so intelligent. Pietro said nothing, he merely nodded a bit nervously when his mother told him to return soon, they were both guests of Mariarosa. I said immediately: you don’t have to come with me, go with your mother. It didn’t occur to anyone that I was serious, that I was unhappy and would rather be alone.

All the way back I was impossible. I exclaimed that I didn’t like Florence, and it wasn’t true. I exclaimed that I didn’t want to write anymore, I wanted to teach, and it wasn’t true. I exclaimed that I was tired, I was very sleepy, and it wasn’t true. Not only that. When, suddenly, Pietro declared that he wanted to meet my parents, I yelled at him: you’re crazy, forget my parents, you’re not suitable for them and they aren’t suitable for you. Then he was frightened, and asked:

“Do you not want to marry me anymore?”

I was about to say: No, I don’t want to , but I restrained myself in time, I knew that that wasn’t true, either. I said weakly, I’m sorry, I’m depressed, of course I want to marry you, and I took his hand, I interlaced my fingers in his. He was an intelligent man, extraordinarily cultured, and good. I loved him, I didn’t mean to make him suffer. And yet, even as I was holding his hand, even as I was affirming that I wanted to marry him, I knew clearly that if he hadn’t appeared that night at the restaurant I would have tried to sleep with Nino.

I had a hard time admitting it to myself. Certainly it would have been an offense that Pietro didn’t deserve, and yet I would have committed it willingly and perhaps without remorse. I would have found a way to draw Nino to me, with all the years that had passed, from elementary school to high school, up to the time of Ischia and Piazza dei Martiri. I would have made love with him, even though I hadn’t liked that remark about Lila, and was distressed by it. I would have slept with him and to Pietro I would have said nothing. Maybe I could have told Lila, but who knows when, maybe as an old woman, when I imagined that nothing would matter anymore to her or to me. Time, as in all things, was decisive. Nino would last a single night, he would leave me in the morning. Even though I had known him forever, he was made of dreams, and holding on to him forever would have been impossible: he came from childhood, he was constructed out of childish desires, he had no concreteness, he didn’t face the future. Pietro, on the other hand, was of the present, massive, a boundary stone. He marked a land new to me, a land of good reasons, governed by rules that originated in his family and endowed everything with meaning. Grand ideals flourished, the cult of the reputation, matters of principle. Nothing in the sphere of the Airotas was perfunctory. Marriage, for example, was a contribution to a secular battle. Pietro’s parents had had only a civil wedding, and Pietro, although as far as I knew he had a vast religious knowledge, would never get married in a church; rather, he would give me up. The same went for baptism. Pietro hadn’t been baptized, nor had Mariarosa, so any children that might come wouldn’t be baptized, either. Everything about him had that tendency, seemed always to be guided by a superior order that, although its origin was not divine but came from his family, gave him, just the same, the certainty of being on the side of truth and justice. As for sex, I don’t know, he was wary. He knew enough of my affair with Franco Mari to deduce that I wasn’t a virgin, and yet he had never mentioned the subject, not even an accusatory phrase, a vulgar comment, a laugh. I didn’t think he’d had other girlfriends; it was hard to imagine him with a prostitute, I was sure he hadn’t spent even a minute of his life talking about women with other men. He hated salacious remarks. He hated gossip, raised voices, parties, every form of waste. Although his circumstances were comfortable, he tended — in this unlike his parents and his sister — to a sort of asceticism amid the abundance. And he had a conspicuous sense of duty, he would never fail in his commitments to me, he would never betray me.

No, I did not want to lose him. Never mind if my nature, coarse in spite of the education I had had, was far from his rigor, if I honestly didn’t know how I would stand up to all that geometry. He gave me the certainty that I was escaping the opportunistic malleability of my father and the crudeness of my mother. So I forced myself to repress the thought of Nino, I took Pietro by the arm, I murmured, yes, let’s get married as soon as possible, I want to leave home, I want to get a driver’s license, I want to travel, I want to have a telephone, a television, I’ve never had anything. And he at that point became cheerful, he laughed, he said yes to everything I randomly asked for. A few steps from the hotel he stopped, he whispered hoarsely: Can I sleep with you? That was the last surprise of the evening. I looked at him bewildered: I had been ready so many times to make love, he had always avoided it; but having him in the bed there, in Milan, in the hotel, after the traumatic discussion in the bookstore, after Nino, I didn’t feel like it. I answered: We’ve waited so long, we can wait a little longer. I kissed him in a dark corner, I watched him from the hotel entrance as he walked away along Corso Garibaldi, and every so often turned and waved timidly. His clumsy gait, his flat feet, the tangle of his hair moved me.

From that moment life began to pound me without respite, the months were rapidly grafted onto one another, there was no day when something good or bad didn’t happen. I returned to Naples, thinking about Nino, and that encounter without consequences, and at times the wish to see Lila was strong, to go and wait for her to come home from work, tell her what could be told without hurting her. Then I convinced myself that merely mentioning Nino would wound her, and I gave it up. Lila had gone her way, he his. I had urgent things to deal with. For example, the evening of my return from Milan I told my parents that Pietro was coming to meet them, that probably we would be married within the year, that I was going to live in Florence.

They showed no joy, or even satisfaction. I thought that they had finally grown used to my coming and going as I liked, increasingly estranged from the family, indifferent to their problems of survival. And it seemed to me normal that only my father became somewhat agitated, always nervous at the prospect of situations he didn’t feel prepared for.

“Does the university professor have to come to our house?” he asked, in irritation.

“Where else?” my mother said angrily. “How can he ask you for Lenuccia’s hand if he doesn’t come here?”

Usually she seemed more prepared than he, concrete, resolute to the point of indifference. But once she had silenced him, once her husband had gone to bed and Elisa and Peppe and Gianni had set up their beds in the dining room, I had to change my mind. She attacked me in very low but shrill tones, hissing with reddened eyes: We are nothing to you, you tell us nothing until the last minute, the young lady thinks she’s somebody because she has an education, because she writes books, because she’s marrying a professor, but my dear, you came out of this belly and you are made of this substance, so don’t act superior and don’t ever forget that if you are intelligent, I who carried you in here am just as intelligent, if not more, and if I had had the chance I would have done the same as you, understand? Then, on the crest of her rage, she first reproached me saying that because I had left, and thought only of myself, my siblings hadn’t done well in school, and then asked me for money, or, rather, demanded it: she needed it to buy a decent dress for Elisa and to fix up the house a bit, since I was forcing her to receive my fiancé.