Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

“A letter.”

“From whom?”

“From Nadia.”

With a sudden, lightning-like move, she reached out and tore the pages from his grasp. Nino started, as if a giant insect had stung him, but he made no effort to get the letter back, even when Lila began to read it to us in declamatory tones, in a loud voice. It was a rather childish love letter, carrying on from line to line with sentimental variations on the theme of missing. Bruno listened silently, with an embarrassed smile, and I, seeing that Nino showed no sign of taking the thing as a joke, but was staring darkly at his sandaled, suntanned feet, whispered to Lila, “That’s enough, give it back to him.”

As soon as I spoke she stopped reading, but her expression of amusement lingered, and she didn’t give the letter back.

“You’re embarrassed, eh?” she asked. “You’re the one to blame. How can you have a girlfriend who writes like that?”

Nino said nothing, he went on staring at his feet. Bruno interrupted, also lightheartedly: “Maybe, when you fall in love with someone, you don’t make her take an exam to see if she can write a love letter.”

But Lila didn’t even turn to look at him, she spoke to Nino as if they were continuing in front of us one of their secret conversations:

“Do you love her? And why? Explain it to us. Because she lives on Corso Vittorio Emanuele in a house full of books and old paintings? Because she speaks in a simpering little voice? Because she’s the daughter of the professor?”

Finally Nino roused himself and said abruptly, “Give me back those pages.”

“I’ll only give them back if you tear them up immediately, here, in front of us.”

Countering Lila’s tone of amusement Nino uttered grave monosyllables, with obvious aggressive undertones. “And then?”

“Then we’ll all write Nadia a letter together in which you tell her you’re leaving her.”

“And then?”

“We’ll mail it tonight.”

He said nothing for a moment, then he agreed. “Let’s do it.”

Lila pointed to the pages in disbelief.

“You’re really going to tear them up?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll leave her?”

“Yes. But on one condition.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“That you leave your husband. Now. Let’s all of us go together to the phone and you’ll tell him.”

Those words provoked in me a violent emotion. At the time I didn’t know why. As he spoke he raised his voice so unexpectedly that it cracked. And Lila’s eyes, as she listened to him, suddenly narrowed to slits, following a mode of behavior that I knew well. Now she would change her tone. Now, I thought, she’ll turn mean. She said to him, in fact: How dare you. She said to him: To whom do you think you’re speaking. She said to him: “How can you think of putting this letter, your foolishness with that whore from a good family, on the same plane as me, my husband, my marriage and everything that is my life? You really think you’re something, but you don’t get the joke. In fact you don’t understand a thing. Nothing, you heard me, and don’t make that face. Let’s go to bed, Lenù.”

Nino did nothing to restrain us, Bruno said, “See you tomorrow.” We took a mini cab and returned to the house. But during the journey Lila began to tremble, she grabbed my hand and gripped it hard. She began to confess to me in a chaotic way everything that had happened between her and Nino. She had yearned for him to kiss her, she had let herself be kissed. She had wanted to feel his hands on her, she had let him. “I can’t sleep. If I fall asleep I wake with a start, I look at the clock, I hope it’s already day, that we have to go to the beach. But it’s night, I can’t sleep anymore, I have in my head all the words he said, all the ones that I can’t wait to tell him. I resisted. I said: I’m not like Pinuccia, I can do what I like, I can start and stop, it’s a game. I kept my lips pressed together, then I said to myself well, really, what’s a kiss, and I discovered what it was, I didn’t know — I swear to you that I didn’t know — and now I can’t do without it. I gave him my hand, I entwined my fingers with his, tight, and it seemed to me painful to let go. How many things I’ve missed that now are landing on me all at once. I go around like a girlfriend, when I’m married. I’m frantic, my heart is pounding here in my throat and in my temples. And I like everything. I like that he drags me into secluded places, I like the fear that someone might see us, I like the idea that they might see us. Did you do those things with Antonio? Did you suffer when you had to leave him and you couldn’t wait to see him again? Is it normal, Lenù? Was it like that for you? I don’t know how it began and when. At first I didn’t like him: I liked how he talked, what he said, but physically no. I thought: How many things he knows, this man, I should listen, I should learn. Now, when he speaks, I can’t even concentrate. I look at his mouth and I’m ashamed of looking at it, I turn my eyes in another direction. In a short time I’ve come to love everything about him: his hands, the delicate fingernails, that thinness, the ribs under his skin, his slender neck, the beard that he shaves badly so it’s always rough, his nose, the hair on his chest, his long, slender legs, his knees. I want to caress him. And I think of things that disgust me, they really disgust me, Lenù, but I would like to do them to give him pleasure, to make him be happy.”

I listened to her for a good part of the night, in her room, the door closed, the light out. She was lying on the window side and in the moon’s glow the hair on her neck gleamed, and the curve of her hip. I was lying on the door side, Stefano’s side, and I thought: Her husband sleeps here, every weekend, on this side of the bed, and draws her to him, in the afternoon, at night, and embraces her. And yet here, in this bed, she is telling me about Nino. The words for him take away her memory, they erase from these sheets every trace of conjugal love. She speaks of him and in speaking of him she calls him here, she imagines him next to her, and since she has forgotten herself she perceives no violation or guilt. She confides, she tells me things that she would do better to keep to herself. She tells me how much she desires the person I’ve desired forever, and she does so convinced that I — through insensitivity, through a less acute vision, through incapacity to grasp what she, instead, is able to grasp — have never truly understood that same person, never realized his qualities. I don’t know if it’s in bad faith or if she’s really convinced — it’s my fault, my tendency to conceal myself — that since elementary school I’ve been deaf and blind, so that it took her to discover, here on Ischia, the power unleashed by the son of Sarratore. Ah, how I hate this presumption of hers, it poisons my blood. Yet I don’t know how to say to her, That’s enough, I can’t go to my room to cry in silence, but I stay here, and now and then I interrupt her, I try to calm her.

I pretended a detachment I didn’t have. “It’s the sea,” I said to her, “the fresh air, the vacation. And Nino knows how to confuse you; the way he talks he makes everything look easy. But, unfortunately, tomorrow Stefano arrives and you’ll see, Nino will seem like a boy to you. Which he really is, I know him well. To us he seems like somebody, but if you think how Professor Galiani’s son treats him — you remember? — you understand immediately that we overestimate him. Of course, compared to Bruno he seems extraordinary, but after all he’s only the son of a railroad worker who got it in his head to study. Remember that Nino was from the neighborhood, he comes from there. Remember that at school you were smarter, even if he was older. And then you see how he takes advantage of his friend, makes him pay for everything, drinks, ice cream.”