Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

Here she stopped suddenly, confused, and said in a low voice, “You have to go, Lina, because if you don’t I’ll kill the child.”

Lila managed to respond only, “You’re behaving like your mother, Ada.”

Those were the words. I imagine her voice now: she wasn’t capable of emotional tones, she must have spoken as usual with cold malice, or with detachment. And yet years later she told me that, seeing Ada in the house in that state, she had remembered the cries of Melina, the abandoned lover, when the Sarratore family left the neighborhood, and she had seen again the iron that flew out the window and almost killed Nino. The long flame of suffering, which then had much impressed her, was flickering again in Ada; only now it wasn’t the wife of Sarratore feeding it but her, Lila. A cruel game of mirrors that at the time escaped us all. But not her, and so it’s likely that instead of resentment, instead of her usual determination to do harm, bitterness was triggered in her, and pity. Certainly she tried to take her hand, she said, “Sit down, I’ll make you a cup of chamomile tea.”

But Ada, in all Lila’s words, from first to last, and above all in that gesture, saw an insult. She withdrew abruptly, she rolled her eyes in a striking way, showing the white, and when the pupils reappeared she shouted, “Are you saying that I’m mad? That I’m mad like my mother? Then you had better pay attention, Lina. Don’t touch me, get out of the way, make yourself a chamomile. I’m going to clean up this disgusting house.”

She swept, she washed the floors, she remade the bed, and she didn’t say another word.

Lila followed her with her gaze, afraid that she would break, like an artificial body subjected to excessive acceleration. Then she took the child and went out, she walked around the new neighborhood for a long time, talking to Rinuccio, pointing out things, naming them, inventing stories. But she did it more to keep her anguish under control than to entertain the child. She went back to the house only when, from a distance, she saw Ada go out the front door and hurry off as if she were late.

When Ada returned to work, out of breath and extremely agitated, Stefano, menacing but calm, asked her, “Where have you been?” She answered, in the presence of the customers waiting to be served, “To clean up your house, it was disgusting.” And addressing the audience on the other side of the counter: “There was so much dust on the night table you could write in it.”

Stefano said nothing, disappointing the customers. When the shop emptied and it was time to close, Ada cleaned, swept, always watching her lover out of the corner of her eye. Nothing happened, he did the accounts sitting at the cash register, smoking heavily aromatic American cigarettes. Once the last butt was out, he grabbed the handle to lower the shutter, but he lowered it from the inside.

“What are you doing?” Ada asked, alarmed.

“We’ll go out on the courtyard side.”

After that, he struck her in the face so many times, first with the palm of his hand, then the back, that she leaned against the counter in order not to faint. “How dare you go to my house?” he said in a voice strangled by the will not to scream. “How dare you disturb my wife and my son?” Finally he realized that his heart was nearly bursting and he tried to calm down. It was the first time he had hit her. He stammered, trembling, “Don’t ever do it again.” And he went out, leaving her bleeding in the shop.

The next day Ada didn’t go to work. Battered as she was, she appeared at Lila’s house, and Lila, when she saw the bruises on her face, told her to come in.

“Make me the chamomile,” said Melina’s daughter.

Lila made it for her.

“The baby is cute.”

“Yes.”

“Just like Stefano.”

“No.”

“He has the same eyes and the same mouth.”

“No.”

“If you have to read your books, go ahead, I’ll take care of the house and Rinuccio.”

Lila stared at her, this time almost amused, then she said, “Do what you like, but don’t go near the baby.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t do anything to him.”

Ada set to work: she straightened, washed the clothes, hung them in the sun, cooked lunch, prepared dinner. At one point she stopped, charmed by the way Lila was playing with Rinuccio.

“How old is he?”

“Two years and four months.”

“He’s little, you push him too much.”

“No, he does what he can do.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“What?”

“It’s true.”

“With Stefano?”

“Of course.”

“Does he know?”

“No.”

Lila then understood that her marriage really was almost over, but, as usual when she became aware that change was imminent, she felt neither resentment nor anguish nor worry. When Stefano arrived, he found his wife reading in the living room, Ada playing with the baby in the kitchen, the apartment full of good smells and shining like a large, single precious object. He realized that the beating had been of no use, he turned white, he couldn’t breathe.

“Go,” he said to Ada in a low voice.

“No.”

“What’s got into your head?”

“I’m staying here.”

“You want me to go mad?”

“Yes, that makes two of us.”

Lila closed the book, took the baby without saying anything and withdrew into the room where, a long time earlier, I had studied, and where Rinuccio now slept. Stefano whispered to his lover, “You’ll ruin me, like this. It’s not true that you love me, Ada, you want me to lose all my customers, you want to reduce me to a pauper, and you know that circumstances are already not good. Please, tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”

“I want to be with you always.”

“Yes, but not here.”

“Here.”

“This is my house, there’s Lina, there’s Rinuccio.”

“From now on I’m here, too: I’m pregnant.”

Stefano sat down. In silence he gazed at Ada’s stomach as she stood before him, as if he were seeing through her dress, her underpants, her skin, as if he were seeing the baby already formed, a living being, all ready, about to jump out. Then there was a knock at the door.

It was a waiter from the Bar Solara, a boy of sixteen who had just been hired. He told Stefano that Michele and Marcello wanted to see him right away. Stefano roused himself, at that moment he considered the demand a salvation, given the storm he had in the house. He said to Ada, “Don’t move.” She smiled, she nodded yes. He went out, got in the Solaras’ car. What a mess I’ve got myself into, he thought. What should I do? If my father were alive he would break my legs with an iron bar. Women, debts, Signora Solara’s red book. Something hadn’t worked. Lina. She had ruined him. What the fuck do Marcello and Michele want, at this hour, so urgently?

They wanted, he discovered, the old grocery. They didn’t say it but they let him understand it. Marcello spoke merely of another loan that they were willing to give him. But, he said, the Cerullo shoes have to come definitively to us, we’re finished with that lazy brother-in-law of yours, he’s not reliable. And we need a guarantee, an activity, a property, you think about it. That said, he left, he said he had things to do. At that point Stefano was alone with Michele. They talked for a long time to see if Rino and Fernando’s factory could be saved, if he could do without what Marcello had called the guarantee.

But Michele shook his head, he said, “We need guarantees, scandals aren’t good for business.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“ I know what I mean. Who do you love more, Lina or Ada?”