Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

We were silent, the sea returned, the tremendous sky, I felt stunned. That impelled Sarratore again toward his coarse lyricism, he thought he had to lead me back to myself with tender words. But I managed to tolerate at most a couple of phrases. I got up abruptly, shook the sand out of my hair, off my whole body, straightened myself. When he ventured, “Where can we meet tomorrow?” I answered in Italian, in a calm voice, self-assured, that he was mistaken, he must never look for me again, not at Cetara or in the neighborhood. And when he smiled skeptically, I told him that what Antonio Cappuccio, Melina’s son, could do to him was nothing in comparison to what Michele Solara, a person I knew well, would do. I need only say a word and Solara would make things very hard for him. I told him that Michele was eager to bash his face in, because he had taken money to write about the shop on Piazza dei Martiri but hadn’t done his job well.

All the way back I continued to threaten him, partly because he had returned to his sugary-sweet little phrases and I wanted him to understand clearly my feelings, partly because I was amazed at how the tonality of threat, which since I was a child I had used only in dialect, came easily to me also in the Italian language.

I was afraid I would find the two women awake but they were both asleep. They weren’t so worried that they would lose sleep, they considered me sensible, they trusted me. I slept deeply.

The next day I woke up cheerful and even when Nino, Lila, and what had happened at the Maronti came back to me, in fragments, I still felt good. I chatted a long time with Nella, had breakfast with the Sarratores, didn’t mind the falsely paternal kindness with which Donato treated me. Not for a moment did I think that sex with that rather conceited, vain, garrulous man had been a mistake. Yet to see him there at the table, to listen to him, and recognize that it was he who had deflowered me, disgusted me. I went to the beach with the whole family, I went swimming with the children, I left behind me a wake of fondness. I arrived punctually at Forio.

I called Nino, he appeared immediately. I refused to go in, partly because we had to leave as soon as possible, partly because I did not want to preserve images of rooms that Nino and Lila had inhabited by themselves for almost two days. I waited, Lila didn’t come. Suddenly my anxiety returned, I imagined that Stefano had been able to leave in the morning, that he was disembarking several hours earlier than expected, and in fact was already on his way to the house. I called again, Nino returned, he indicated that I had to wait just another minute. They came down a quarter of an hour later, they embraced and kissed for a long time in the entrance. Lila ran toward me, but she stopped suddenly, as if she had forgotten something, and went back and kissed him again. I looked away uneasily and the idea that there was something wrong with me, that I lacked a true capacity for involvement, regained strength. Yet the two of them again seemed to me so handsome, perfect in every movement, that to cry, “Lina, hurry up,” was almost to disfigure a fantastical image. She seemed drawn away by a cruel force, her hand ran slowly from his shoulder, along the arm, to the fingers, as if in the movement of a dance. Finally she joined me.

We hardly spoke during the ride in the mini cab.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes. And you?”

“Fine.”

I said nothing about myself, nor did she about herself. But the reasons for that reticence were very different. I had no intention of putting into words what had happened to me: it was a bare fact, it had to do with my body, its physiological reactivity. That for the first time a tiny part of another body had entered it seemed to me irrelevant: the nighttime mass of Sarratore communicated to me nothing except a sensation of alienness, and it was a relief that it had vanished like a storm that never arrives. It seemed to me clear, instead, that Lila was silent because she didn’t have words. I felt she was in a state without thoughts or images, as if in detaching herself from Nino she had forgotten in him everything of herself, even the capacity to say what had happened to her, what was happening. This difference between us made me sad. I tried to search in my experience on the beach for something equivalent to her sorrowful-happy disorientation. I also realized that at the Maronti, in Barano, I had left nothing, not even that new self that had been revealed. I had taken everything with me, and so I didn’t feel the urgency, which I read in Lila’s eyes, in her half-closed mouth, in her clenched fists, to go back, to be reunited with the person I had had to leave. And if on the surface my condition might seem more solid, more compact, here instead, beside Lila, I felt sodden, earth too soaked with water.

Fortunately I didn’t read her notebooks until later. There were pages and pages about that day and night with Nino, and what those pages said was exactly what I hadn’t had and couldn’t say. Lila wrote not even a word about sexual pleasures, nothing that might be useful in comparing her experience with mine. She talked instead about love and she did so in a surprising way. She said that from the day of her marriage until those days on Ischia she had been, without realizing it, on the point of dying. She described minutely a sensation of imminent death: lack of energy, lethargy, a strong pressure in the middle of her head, as if between the brain and the skull there was an air bubble that was continually expanding, the impression that everything was moving in a hurry to leave, that the speed of every movement of persons and things was excessive and hit her, wounded her, caused her physical pain in her stomach and in her eyes. She said that all this was accompanied by a dulling of the senses, as if they had been wrapped in cotton wool, and her wounds came not from the real world but from a hollow space between her body and the mass of cotton wool in which she felt she was wrapped. She admitted on the other hand that imminent death seemed to her so assured that it took away her respect for everything, above all for herself, as if nothing counted anymore and everything deserved to be ruined. At times she was overwhelmed by a mania to express herself with no mediation: express herself for the last time, before becoming like Melina, before crossing the stradone just as a truck was coming, and be hit, dragged away. Nino had changed that state, he had snatched her away from death. And he had done it when he had asked her to dance, at Professor Galiani’s house, and she had refused, frightened by that offer of salvation. Then, on Ischia, day by day, he had assumed the power of the savior. He had restored to her the capacity to feel. He had above all brought back to life her sense of herself. Yes, brought to life. Lines and lines and lines had at their center the concept of resurrection: an ecstatic rising, the end of every bond and yet the inexpressible pleasure of a new bond, a revival that was also a revolt: he and she, she and he together learned life again, banished its poison, reinvented it as the pure joy of thinking and living.

This, more or less. Her words were very beautiful, mine are only a summary. If she had confided it to me then, in the taxi, I would have suffered even more, because I would have recognized in her fulfillment the reverse of my emptiness. I would have understood that she had come to something that I thought I knew, that I had believed I felt for Nino, and that, instead, I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, except in a weak, muted form. I would have understood that she wasn’t playing a summer game for fun but that a violent feeling was growing inside her and would overwhelm her. Instead, as we were returning to Nunzia after our violations, I couldn’t get away from the usual confused sense of disparity, the impression — recurrent in our story — that I was losing something and she was gaining. So occasionally I felt the need to even the score, to tell her how I had lost my virginity between sea and sky, at night, on the beach at the Maronti. I couldn’t tell her the name of Nino’s father, I thought, I could invent a sailor, a smuggler of American cigarettes, and tell her what had happened to me, tell her how good it had been. But I realized that to tell her about me and my pleasure didn’t matter to me, I would tell my story only to induce her to tell hers and find out how much pleasure she had had with Nino and compare it with mine and feel — I hoped — in the lead. Luckily I sensed that she would never do it and that I would only have stupidly exposed myself. I remained silent, as she did.