Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I passed over my siblings’ lack of success in school. The money, on the other hand, I gave her right away, even if it wasn’t true that she needed it for the house — she continually asked for money, any excuse would do. Although she had never said so explicitly, she still couldn’t accept the fact that I kept my money in a post-office savings account, that I hadn’t handed it over to her as I always had, ever since I first took the stationer’s daughters to the beach, or worked in the bookstore on Via Mezzocannone. Maybe, I thought, by acting as if my money belonged to her she wants to convince me that I myself belong to her, and that, even if I get married, I will belong to her forever.

I remained calm, I told her as a sort of compensation that I would have a telephone put in, that I would buy a television on the installment plan. She looked at me uncertainly, with a sudden admiration that clashed with what she had just been saying.

“A television and telephone in this house here?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll pay for it?”

“Yes.”

“Always, even after you’re married?”

“Yes.”

“The professor knows that there’s not a cent for a dowry, and not even for a reception?”

“He knows, and we’re not having a reception.”

Again her mood changed, her eyes became inflamed.

“What do you mean, no reception? Make him pay.”

“No, we’re doing without.”

My mother became furious again, she provoked me in every way she could think of, she wanted me to respond so that she could get angrier.

“You remember Lila’s wedding, you remember the reception she had?”

“Yes.”

“And you, who are much better than she is, don’t want to do anything?”

“No.”

We went on like that until I decided that, rather than taking her rage in doses, it would be better to have it all at once, one grand fury:

“Ma,” I said, “not only are we not having a party but I’m not even getting married in church, I’m getting married at city hall.”

At that point it was as if doors and windows had been blown open by a strong wind. Although she wasn’t religious, my mother lost control and, leaning toward me, red in the face, began yelling insults at me. She shouted that the marriage was worthless if the priest didn’t say that it was valid. She shouted that if I didn’t get married before God I would never be a wife but only a whore, and, despite her lame leg, she almost flew as she went to wake my father, my siblings, to let them know what she had always feared, that too much education had ruined my brain, that I had had all the luck and yet I was treated like a whore, that she would never be able to go out of the house because of the shame of having a godless daughter.

My father, stunned, in his underwear, and my siblings sought to understand what other trouble they had to deal with because of me, and tried to calm her, but in vain. She shouted that she wanted to throw me out of the house immediately, before I exposed her, too, her, too, to the shame of having a concubine daughter like Lila and Ada. Meanwhile, although she wasn’t actually hitting me, she struck the air as if I were a shadow and she had grabbed a real me, whom she was beating ferociously. It was some time before she quieted down, which she did thanks to Elisa. My sister asked cautiously:

“But is it you who want to get married at city hall or is it your fiancé?”

I explained to her, but as if I were explaining the matter to all of them, that for me the Church hadn’t counted for a long time, but that whether I got married at city hall or at the altar was the same to me; while for my fiancé it was very important to have only a civil ceremony, he knew all about religious matters and believed that religion, however valuable, was ruined precisely when it interfered in the affairs of the state. In other words, I concluded, if we don’t get married at city hall, he won’t marry me.

At that point my father, who had immediately sided with my mother, suddenly stopped echoing her insults and laments.

“He won’t marry you?”

“No.”

“And what will he do, leave you?”

“We’ll go and live together in Florence without getting married.”

That information my mother considered the most intolerable of all. She completely lost control, vowing that in that case she would take a knife and cut my throat. My father instead nervously ruffled his hair, and said to her:

“Be quiet, don’t get me mad, let’s be reasonable. We know very well that someone can get married by the priest, have a fancy celebration, and still come to a bad end.”

He, too, was obviously alluding to Lila, the ever-vivid scandal of the neighborhood, and my mother finally understood. The priest wasn’t a guarantee, nothing was a guarantee in the brutal world we lived in. So she stopped shouting and left to my father the task of examining the situation and, if necessary, letting me have my way. But she didn’t stop pacing, with her limp, shaking her head, insulting my future husband. What was he, the professor? Was he a Communist? Communist and professor? Professor of that shit, she shouted. What kind of professor is he, one who thinks like that? A shit thinks like that. No, replied my father, what do you mean shit, he’s a man who’s educated and knows better than anyone what disgusting things the priests do, that’s why he wants to go and say “I do” only at city hall. Yes, you’re right, a lot of Communists do that. Yes, you’re right, like this our daughter doesn’t seem married. But I would trust this university professor: he loves her. I can’t believe that he would put Lenuccia in a situation where she seems like a whore. And anyway if we don’t want to trust him — but I do trust him, even if I don’t know him yet: he’s an important person, the girls here dream of a match like that — at least we can trust the city hall. I work there, at the city hall, and a marriage there, I can assure you, is as valid as the one in church and maybe even more.

He went on for hours. My siblings at a certain point collapsed and went back to sleep. I stayed to soothe my parents and persuade them to accept something that for me, at that moment, was an important sign of my entrance into Pietro’s world. Besides, it made me feel bolder than Lila. And most of all, if I met Nino again, I would have liked to be able to say to him, in an allusive way: See where that argument with the religion teacher led, every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. But I would have been exaggerating, in reality it was much simpler. For at least ten years the God of childhood, already fairly weak, had been pushed aside like an old sick person, and I felt no need for the sanctity of marriage. The essential thing was to get out of Naples.

My family’s horror at the idea of a civil union alone certainly was not exhausted that night, but it diminished. The next day my mother treated me as if anything she touched — the coffee pot, the cup with the milk, the sugar bowl, the fresh loaf of bread — were there only to lead her into the temptation to throw it in my face. Yet she didn’t start yelling again. As for me I ignored her; I left early in the morning, and went to start the paperwork for the installation of the telephone. Having taken care of that business I went to Port’Alba and wandered through the bookstores. I was determined, within a short time, to enable myself to speak with confidence when situations like the one in Milan arose. I chose journals and books more or less at random, and spent a lot of money. After many hesitations, influenced by that remark of Nino’s that kept coming to mind, I ended up getting Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality —I knew almost nothing of Freud and the little I knew irritated me — along with a couple of small books devoted to sex. I intended to do what I had done in the past with schoolwork, with exams, with my thesis, what I had done with the newspapers that Professor Galiani passed on to me or the Marxist texts that Franco had given me. I wanted to study the contemporary world. Hard to say what I had already taken in at that time. There had been the discussions with Pasquale, and also with Nino. There had been some attention paid to Cuba and Latin America. There was the incurable poverty of the neighborhood, the lost battle of Lila. There was school, which defeated my siblings because they were less stubborn than I was, less dedicated to sacrifice. There were the long conversations with Franco and occasional ones with Mariarosa, now jumbled together in a wisp of smoke. ( The world is profoundly unjust and must be changed, but both the peaceful coexistence between American imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies, on the one hand, and the reformist politics of the European, and especially the Italian, workers’ parties, on the other, are directed at keeping the proletariat in a subordinate wait-and-see situation that throws water on the fire of revolution, with the result that if the global stalemate wins, if social democracy wins, it will be capital that triumphs through the centuries and the working class will fall victim to enforced consumerism .) These stimuli had functioned, certainly they had been working in me for a long time, occasionally they excited me. But driving that decision to bring myself up to date by forced marches was, at least at first, I think, the old urgency to succeed. I had long ago convinced myself that one can train oneself to anything, even to political passion.