Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

A few days before he returned to Naples, there were two especially unpleasant episodes. One afternoon Adele telephoned; she, too, was very pleased with my work. She told me to send the manuscript right away to the publisher — they could make a small volume to publish simultaneously with the publication in France or, if it couldn’t be done in time, right afterward. I spoke of it at dinner in a tone of detachment and Nino was full of compliments, he said to the girls:

“You have an exceptional mamma.” Then he turned to Pietro: “Have you read it?”

“I haven’t had time.”

“Better for you not to read it.”

“Why?”

“It’s not stuff for you.”

“That is?”

“It’s too intelligent.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you’re less intelligent than Elena.”

And he laughed. Pietro said nothing, Nino pressed him:

“Are you offended?”

He wanted him to react, in order to humiliate him again. But Pietro got up from the table, he said:

“Excuse me, I have work to do.”

I murmured:

“Finish eating.”

He didn’t answer. We were eating in the living room, it was a big room. For a few seconds it seemed that he wished to cross it and go to his study. Instead he made a half turn, sat down on the couch, and turned on the television, raising the volume. The atmosphere was intolerable. In the space of a few days it had all become complicated. I felt very unhappy.

“Lower it a bit?” I asked him.

He answered simply:

“No.”

Nino gave a little laugh, finished eating, helped me clear. In the kitchen I said to him:

“Excuse him, Pietro works a lot and doesn’t sleep much.”

He answered with a burst of rage:

“How can you stand him?”

I looked at the door in alarm, luckily the volume of the television was still loud.

“I love him,” I answered. And since he insisted on helping me wash the dishes I added: “Go, please, otherwise you’re in the way.”

The other episode was even uglier, but decisive. I no longer knew what I truly wanted: now I hoped that this period would be over quickly, I wished to return to familiar habits, watch over my little book. Yet I liked going into Nino’s room in the morning, tidying up the mess he left, making the bed, thinking as I cooked that he would have dinner with us that evening. And it distressed me that it was all about to end. At certain hours of the afternoon I felt mad. I had the impression that the house was empty in spite of the girls, I myself was emptied, I felt no interest in what I had written, I perceived its superficiality, I lost faith in the enthusiasm of Mariarosa, of Adele, of the French publisher, the Italian. I thought: As soon as he goes, nothing will make sense.

I was in that state — life was slipping away with an unbearable sensation of loss — when Pietro returned from the university with a grim look. We were waiting for him for dinner, Nino had been back for half an hour but had immediately been kidnapped by the children. I asked him kindly:

“Did something happen?”

He muttered:

“Don’t ever again bring to this house people from your home.”

I froze, I thought he was referring to Nino. And Nino, too, who had come in trailed by Dede and Elsa, must have thought the same thing, because he looked at him with a provocative smile, as if he expected a scene. But Pietro had something else in mind. He said in his contemptuous tone, the tone he used well when he was convinced that basic principles were at stake and he was called to defend them:

“Today the police returned and they named some names, they showed me some photographs.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. I knew that, after he refused to withdraw the charges against the student who had pointed a gun at him, the visits of the police — even more than the scorn of many militant youths and not a few professors — weighed on him, as they treated him as an informer. I was sure that was why he was angry and I interrupted him, bitterly:

“Your fault. You shouldn’t have acted like that, I told you. Now you’ll never get rid of them.”

Nino intervened, he asked Pietro, mockingly:

“Who did you report?”

Pietro didn’t even turn to look at him. He was angry with me, it was with me he wanted to quarrel. He said:

“I did what was necessary then and I should have done what was necessary today. But I was silent because you were in the middle of it.”

At that point I realized that the problem was not the police but what he had learned from them. I said:

“What do I have to do with it?”

His voice changed:

“Aren’t Pasquale and Nadia your friends?”

I repeated obtusely:

“Pasquale and Nadia?”

“The police showed me photographs of terrorists and they were among them.”

I didn’t react, words failed. What I had imagined was true, then; Pietro in fact was confirming it. For a few seconds the images returned, of Pasquale firing the gun at Gino, kneecapping Filippo, while Nadia — Nadia, not Lila — went up the stairs, knocked on Bruno’s door, went in and shot him in the face. Terrible. And yet at that moment Pietro’s tone seemed out of place, as if he were using the information to make trouble for me in Nino’s eyes, to start a discussion that I had no wish to have. In fact Nino immediately interrupted again, continuing to make fun of him:

“So are you an informer for the police? What are you doing? Informing on comrades? Does your father know? Your mother? Your sister?”

I said weakly: Let’s go and eat. But right afterward I said to Nino, politely making light of it, and to get him to stop goading Pietro by bringing up his family: Stop it, what do you mean, informer. Then I alluded vaguely to the fact that some time ago Pasquale Peluso, maybe he remembered him, from the neighborhood, a good kid who had ended up getting together with Nadia, he remembered her, naturally, Professor Galiani’s daughter. And there I stopped because Nino was already laughing. He exclaimed: Nadia, oh good Lord, Nadia, and he turned again to Pietro, even more mockingly: only you and a couple of idiot police could think that Nadia Galiani is part of the armed struggle, it’s madness. Nadia, the best and nicest person I’ve ever known, what have we come to in Italy, let’s go and eat, come on, the defense of the established order can do without you for now. And he went to the table, calling Dede and Elsa, as I began to serve, sure that Pietro was about to join us.

But he didn’t. I thought he had gone to wash his hands, that he was delaying in order to calm down, and I sat in my place. I was agitated, I would have liked a nice calm evening, a quiet ending to that shared life. But he didn’t come, the children were already eating. Now even Nino seemed bewildered.

“Start,” I said, “it’s getting cold.”

“Only if you eat, too.”

I hesitated. Maybe I should go and see how my husband was, what he was doing, if he had calmed down. But I didn’t want to, I was annoyed by his behavior. Why hadn’t he kept to himself that visit from the police, usually he did with everything of his, he never told me anything. Why had he spoken like that in Nino’s presence: Don’t ever again bring to this house people from your home . What urgency was there to make that subject public, he could wait, he could have an outburst later, once we were in the bedroom. He was angry with me, that was the point. He wanted to ruin the evening for me, he didn’t care what I did or what I wanted.

I began to eat. The four of us ate, first course, second, and even the dessert I had made. Pietro didn’t appear. At that point I became furious. Pietro didn’t want to eat? All right, he didn’t have to eat, evidently he wasn’t hungry. He wanted to mind his own business? Very well, the house was big, without him there would be no tension. Anyway, now it was clear that the problem was not simply that two people who had once showed up at our house were suspected of being part of an armed gang. The problem was that he didn’t have a sufficiently quick intelligence, that he didn’t know how to sustain the skirmishes of men, that he suffered from it and was angry with me. But what do I care about you and your pettiness. I’ll clean up later, I said aloud, as if I were issuing an order to myself, to my confusion. Then I turned on the television and sat on the sofa with Nino and the girls.