Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I made him go out alone, I told him to wait for me in the car. Although people were on vacation and the building was half deserted, I was afraid that someone would see us together. We went to dinner, we ate a lot, talked a lot, drank a lot. When we got back we went to bed but didn’t sleep. He said:

“In October I’ll be in Montpellier for five days, I have a conference.”

“Have fun. You’ll go with your wife?”

“I want to go with you.”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“Dede is six, Elsa three. I have to think of them.”

We began to discuss our situation, for the first time we uttered words like married, children . We went from despair to sex, from sex to despair. Finally I whispered:

“We shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

“If for you it’s possible, fine. For me it’s not.”

“Nonsense. You’ve known me for decades and yet you’ve had a full life without me. You’ll forget about me before you know it.”

“Promise that you’ll keep calling me every day.”

“No, I won’t call you anymore.”

“If you don’t I’ll go mad.”

“I’ll go mad if I go on thinking of you.”

We explored with a sort of masochistic pleasure the dead end we felt ourselves in, and, exasperated by the obstacles we ourselves were piling up, we ended by quarreling. He left, anxiously, at six in the morning. I cleaned up the house, had a cry, drove all the way to Viareggio hoping never to arrive. Halfway there I realized that I hadn’t taken a single book capable of justifying that trip. I thought: better this way.

When I returned I was warmly welcomed by Elsa, who said sulkily: Papa isn’t good at playing. Dede defended Pietro, she exclaimed that her sister was small and stupid, and ruined every game. Pietro examined me, in a bad mood.

“You didn’t sleep.”

“I slept badly.”

“Did you find the books?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“Where do you think they are? At home. I checked what I had to check and that was it.”

“Why are you angry?”

“Because you make me angry.”

“We called you again last night. Elsa wanted to say good night but you weren’t there.”

“It was hot, I took a walk.”

“Alone?”

“With whom?”

“Dede says you have a boyfriend.”

“Dede has a strong bond with you and she’s dying to replace me.”

“Or she sees and hears things that I don’t see or hear.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said.”

“Pietro, let’s try to be clear: to your many maladies do you want to add jealousy, too?”

“I’m not jealous.”

“Let’s hope not. Because if it weren’t so I’m telling you right away: jealousy is too much, I can’t bear it.”

In the following days clashes like that became more frequent. I kept him at bay, I reproached him, and at the same time I despised myself. But I was also enraged: what did he want from me, what should I do? I loved Nino, I had always loved him: how could I tear him out of my breast, my head, my belly, now that he wanted me, too? Ever since I was a child I had constructed for myself a perfect self-repressive mechanism. Not one of my true desires had ever prevailed, I had always found a way of channeling every yearning. Now enough, I said to myself, let it all explode, me first of all.

But I wavered. For several days I didn’t call Nino, as I had sagely declared in Florence. Then suddenly I started calling three or four times a day, heedless. I didn’t even care about Dede, standing a few steps from the phone booth. I talked to him in the unbearable heat of that sun-struck cage, and occasionally, soaked with sweat, exasperated by my daughter’s spying look, I opened the glass door and shouted: What are you doing standing there like that, I told you to look after your sister. At the center of my thoughts now was the conference in Montpellier. Nino harassed me; he made it into a sort of definitive proof of the genuineness of my feelings, so that we went from violent quarrels to declarations of how indispensable we were to each other, from long, costly complaints to the urgent spilling of our desire into a river of incandescent words. One afternoon, exhausted, as Dede and Elsa, outside the phone booth, were chanting, Mamma, hurry up, we’re getting bored, I said to him:

“There’s only one way I could go with you to Montpellier.”

“What.”

“Tell Pietro everything.”

There was a long silence.

“You’re really ready to do that?”

“Yes, but on one condition: you tell Eleonora everything.”

Another long silence. Nino murmured:

“You want me to hurt Eleonora and the child?”

“Yes. Won’t I be hurting Pietro and my daughters? To decide means to do harm.”

“Albertino is very small.”

“So is Elsa. And for Dede it will be intolerable.”

“Let’s do it after Montpellier.”

“Nino, don’t play with me.”

“I’m not playing.”

“Then if you’re not playing behave accordingly: you speak to your wife and I’ll speak to my husband. Now. Tonight.”

“Give me some time, it’s not easy.”

“For me it is?”

He hesitated, tried to explain. He said that Eleonora was a very fragile woman. He said she had organized her life around him and the child. He said that as a girl she had twice tried to kill herself. But he didn’t stop there, I felt that he was forcing himself to the most absolute honesty. Step by step, with the lucidity that was customary with him, he reached the point of admitting that breaking up his marriage meant not only hurting his wife and child but also saying goodbye to many comforts— only living comfortably makes life in Naples acceptable— and to a network of relationships that guaranteed he could do what he wanted at the university. Then, overwhelmed by his own decision to be silent about nothing, he concluded: Remember that your father-in-law has great respect for me and that to make our relationship public would cause both for me and for you an irremediable breach with the Airotas. It was this last point of his, I don’t know why, that hurt me.

“All right,” I said, “let’s end it here.”

“Wait.”

“I’ve already waited too long, I should have made up my mind earlier.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Understand that my marriage no longer makes sense and go my way.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll come to Montpellier?”

“I said my way, not yours. Between you and me it’s over.”

I hung up in tears and left the phone booth. Elsa asked: Did you hurt yourself, Mamma? I answered: I’m fine, it’s Grandma who doesn’t feel well. I went on sobbing under the worried gaze of Dede and Elsa.

During the final part of the vacation I did nothing but weep. I said I was tired, it was too hot, I had a headache, and I sent Pietro and the children to the beach. I stayed in bed, soaking the pillow with tears. I hated that excessive fragility, I hadn’t been like that even as a child. Both Lila and I had trained ourselves never to cry, and if we did it was in exceptional moments, and for a short time: the shame was tremendous, we stifled our sobs. Now, instead, as in Ariosto’s Orlando, in my head a fountain had opened and it flowed from my eyes without ever drying up; it seemed to me that even when Pietro, Dede, Elsa were about to return and with an effort I repressed the tears and hurried to wash my face under the tap, the fountain continued to drip, waiting for the right moment to return to the egress of my eyes. Nino didn’t really want me, Nino pretended a lot and loved little. He had wanted to fuck me — yes, fuck me, as he had done with who knows how many others — but to have me, have me forever by breaking the ties with his wife, well, that was not in his plans. Probably he was still in love with Lila. Probably in the course of his life he would love only her, like so many who had known her. And as a result he would remain with Eleonora forever. Love for Lila was the guarantee that no woman — no matter how much he wanted her, in his passionate way — would ever put that fragile marriage in trouble, I least of all. That was how things stood. Sometimes I got up in the middle of lunch or dinner and went to cry in the bathroom.