Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“How is it that now you give what you write to Mariarosa and not to me?”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t interest you. It’s just seventy pages, it’s not a novel, I don’t even know what it is.”

“When you don’t know what you’ve written it means you’ve worked well. And anyway let me decide if it interests me or not.”

I sent her a copy. I did it almost casually. The same morning Nino, around midday, called me by surprise from the station, he had just arrived in Florence.

“I’ll be at your house in half an hour, I’ll leave my bag and go to the library.”

“You won’t eat something?” I asked with naturalness. It seemed to me normal that he — arriving after a long journey — should come to sleep at my house, that I should prepare something for him to eat while he took a shower in my bathroom, that we should have lunch together, he and I and the children, while Pietro was giving exams at the university.

Nino stayed for ten days. Nothing of what happened in that time had anything to do with the yearning for seduction I had experienced years earlier. I didn’t joke with him; I didn’t act flirtatious; I didn’t assail him with all sorts of favors; I didn’t play the part of the liberated woman, modeling myself on my sister-in-law; I didn’t tenderly seek his gaze; I didn’t contrive to sit next to him at the table or on the couch, in front of the television; I didn’t go around the house half-dressed; I didn’t try to be alone with him; I didn’t graze his elbow with mine, his arm with my arm or breast, his leg with my leg. I was timid, restrained, spoke concisely, making sure only that he ate well, that the girls didn’t bother him, that he felt comfortable. And it wasn’t a choice, I couldn’t have behaved differently. He joked a lot with Pietro, with Dede, with Elsa, but as soon as he spoke to me he became serious, he seemed to measure his words as if there were not an old friendship between us. And it seemed right to me to do the same. I was very happy to have him in the house, and yet I felt no need for confidential tones and gestures; in fact, I liked staying on the edge and avoiding contact between us. I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down.

We had a single long exchange, focused entirely on my writing. He spoke about it immediately, upon arriving, with precision and acuteness. He had been struck by the story of Ish and Isha’h, he questioned me, he asked: for you, the woman, in the Biblical story, is no different from the man, is the man himself? Yes, I said. Eve can’t, doesn’t know how, doesn’t have the material to be Eve outside of Adam. Her evil and her good are evil and good according to Adam. Eve is Adam as a woman. And the divine work was so successful that she herself, in herself, doesn’t know what she is, she has pliable features, she doesn’t possess her own language, she doesn’t have a spirit or a logic of her own, she loses her shape easily. A terrible condition, Nino commented, and I nervously looked at him out of the corner of my eye to see if he was making fun of me. No, he wasn’t. Rather, he praised me without the slightest sarcasm, he cited some books I didn’t know on relevant subjects, he repeated that he considered the work ready to be published. I listened without showing any satisfaction, I said only, at the end: Mariarosa also liked it. Then he asked about my sister-in-law, he spoke well of her both as a scholar and for her devotion to Franco, and went off to the library.

Otherwise he left every morning with Pietro and returned at night after him. On very rare occasions we all went out together. Once, for example, he wanted to take us to the movies to see a comedy chosen just for the girls. Nino sat next to Pietro, I between my daughters. When I realized that I was laughing hard as soon as he laughed, I stopped laughing completely. I scolded him mildly because during the intermission he wanted to buy ice cream for Dede, Elsa, and naturally for the adults, too. For me no, I said, thank you. He joked a little, said that the ice cream was good and I didn’t know what I was missing, he offered me a taste, I tasted. Small things, in other words. One afternoon we took a long walk, Dede, Elsa, he and I. We didn’t say much, Nino let the children talk. But the walk made a deep impression, I could point out every street, the places where we stopped, every corner. It was hot, the city was crowded. He constantly greeted people, some called to him by his last name, I was introduced to this person and that, with exaggerated praise. I was struck by his notoriety. One man, a well-known historian, complimented him on the children, as if they were our children. Nothing else happened, apart from a sudden, inexplicable change in the relations between him and Pietro.

It all began one evening at dinner. Pietro spoke to him with admiration of a professor from Naples, at the time quite respected, and Nino said: I would have bet that you liked that asshole. My husband was disoriented, he gave an uncertain smile, but Nino piled it on, making fun of him for how easily he had let himself be deceived by appearances. The next morning after breakfast there was another incident. I don’t remember in relation to what, Nino referred to my old clash with the religion professor about the Holy Spirit. Pietro, who didn’t know about that episode, wanted to know, and Nino, addressing not him but the girls, immediately began to tell the story as if it were some grandiose undertaking of their mother as a child.

My husband praised me, he said: You were very courageous. But then he explained to Dede, in the tone he took when stupid things were being said on television and he felt it his duty to explain to his daughter how matters really stood, what had happened to the twelve apostles on the morning of Pentecost: a noise as of wind, flames like fire, the gift of being understood by anyone, in any language. Then he turned to me and Nino speaking with passion of the virtus that had pervaded the disciples, and he quoted the prophet Joel, I will spread my spirit over every flesh , adding that the Holy Spirit was an indispensable symbol for reflecting on how the multitudes find a way of confronting each other and organizing into a community. Nino let him speak, but with an increasingly ironic expression. At the end he exclaimed: I bet there’s a priest hiding in you. And to me, in amusement: Are you a wife or a priest’s housekeeper? Pietro turned red, he was confused. He had always loved those subjects, I felt that he was upset. He stammered: I’m sorry, I’m wasting your time, let’s go to work.

Such moments increased and for no obvious reason. While relations between Nino and me remained the same, attentive to form, courteous and distant, between him and Pietro the dikes broke. At both breakfast and dinner, the guest began to speak to the host in a crescendo of mocking remarks, just bordering on the offensive, humiliating but expressed in a friendly way, offered with a smile, so that you couldn’t object without seeming petulant. I recognized that tone; in the neighborhood the swifter party often used it to dominate the slower one and push him wordlessly into the middle of the joke. Mainly, Pietro appeared disoriented: he liked Nino, he appreciated him, and so he didn’t react, he shook his head, pretending to be amused, while at times he seemed to wonder where he had gone wrong and waited for him to return to the old, affectionate tone. But Nino continued, implacable. He turned to me, to the children, he exaggerated in order to receive our approval. And the girls approved, laughing, and I, too, a little. Yet I thought: Why is he acting like this, if Pietro gets mad their relations will be ruined. But Pietro didn’t get mad, he simply didn’t understand, and as the days passed his old nervousness returned. His face was tired, the strain of those years reappeared in his worried eyes and his lined forehead. I have to do something, I thought, and as soon as possible. But I did nothing; rather, I struggled to expel not the admiration, but the excitement — maybe yes, it was excitement — that gripped me in seeing, in hearing, how an Airota, an extremely well-educated Airota, lost ground, was confused, responded feebly to the swift, brilliant, even cruel aggressions of Nino Sarratore, my schoolmate, my friend, born in the neighborhood, like me.