Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

From Via Tasso the old neighborhood was a dim, distant rockpile, indistinguishable urban debris at the foot of Vesuvius. I wanted it to stay that way: I was another person now, I would make sure that it did not recapture me. But in that case, too, the purpose I tended to attribute to myself was fragile. A mere three or four days after the first harried arrangement of the apartment I gave in. I dressed the children carefully, dressed up myself, and said: Now let’s go see Grandmother Immacolata and Grandfather Vittorio and the uncles.

We left early in the morning and at Piazza Amedeo took the metro; the children were excited by the violent wind produced by the train’s arrival, which ruffled their hair, pasted their dresses to their bodies, took away their breath. I hadn’t seen or talked to my mother since the scene in Florence. I was afraid she would refuse to see me and maybe for that reason I didn’t telephone to announce my visit. But I have to be honest, there was another, more obscure reason. I was reluctant to say to myself: I am here for this or that other reason, I want to go here or I want to go there. The neighborhood for me, even more than my family, was Lila: to plan that visit would also mean asking myself how I wanted to arrange things with her. And I still didn’t have definite answers, and so leaving it to chance was better. In any case, since it was possible that I would run into her, I had devoted the greatest attention to the children’s appearance and to my own. If it happened, I wanted her to realize that I was a lady of refinement and that my daughters weren’t suffering, weren’t falling apart, were doing very well.

It turned out to be an emotionally charged day. I went through the tunnel, I avoided the gas pump where Carmen worked with her husband, Roberto, and crossed the courtyard. My heart pounding, I climbed the crumbling stairs of the old building where I was born. Dede and Elsa were very excited, as if they were heading into some unknown adventure; I arrayed them in front of me and rang the bell. I heard the limping gait of my mother, she opened the door, she widened her eyes as if we were ghosts. I, too, in spite of myself, showed astonishment. The person I expected to see had come unglued from the one who was in fact before me. My mother was very changed. For a fraction of a second she seemed to be a cousin of hers whom I had seen a few times as a child, and who resembled her, although she was six or seven years older. She was much thinner, the bones of her face, her nose, her ears seemed enormous.

I tried to hug her, she drew back. My father wasn’t there, nor were Peppe and Gianni. To find out anything about them was impossible, for a good hour she barely spoke a word to me. With the children she was affectionate. She praised them mightily and then, enveloping them in large aprons, she began making sugar candies with them. For me it was very awkward; the whole time she acted as if I weren’t there. When I tried to say to the children that they were eating too many candies, Dede quickly turned to her grandmother:

“Can we have some more?”

“Eat as many as you want,” my mother said, without looking at me.

The same scene was repeated when she told her grandchildren that they could go play in the courtyard. In Florence, in Genoa, in Milan I had never let them go out alone. I said:

“No, girls, you can’t, stay here.”

“Grandma, can we go?” my daughters asked, almost in unison.

“I told you yes.”

We remained alone. I said to her anxiously, as if I were still a child: “I moved. I’ve taken an apartment on Via Tasso.”

“Good.”

“Three days ago.”

“Good.”

“I’ve written another book.”

“What do I care?”

I was silent. With an expression of disgust, she cut a lemon in two and squeezed the juice into a glass.

“Why are you having a lemonade?” I asked.

“Because seeing you turns my stomach.”

She added water to the lemon, put in some bicarbonate of soda, drank the foamy effervescence in one gulp.

“Are you not well?”

“I’m very well.”

“It’s not true. Have you been to the doctor?”

“Imagine if I’ll throw away money on doctors and medicine.”

“Elisa knows you don’t feel well?”

“Elisa is pregnant.”

“Why didn’t you or she tell me anything?”

She didn’t answer. She placed the glass on the sink with a long, tired sigh, wiped her lips with the back of her hand. I said:

“I’ll take you to the doctor. What else do you feel?”

“Everything that you brought on. Because of you a vein in my stomach ruptured.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yes, you’ve killed this body.”

“I love you very much, Mamma.”

“Not me. You’ve come to stay in Naples with the children?”

“Yes.”

“And your husband’s not coming?”

“No.”

“Then don’t ever show up in this house again.”

“Ma, today it’s not like it used to be. You can be a respectable person even if you leave your husband, even if you go with someone else. Why do you get so angry with me when you don’t say anything about Elisa, who’s pregnant and not married?”

“Because you’re not Elisa. Did Elisa study the way you did? From Elisa did I expect what I expected from you?”

“I’m doing things you should be happy about. Greco is becoming an important name. I even have a little reputation abroad.”

“Don’t boast to me, you’re nobody. What you think you are means nothing to normal people. I’m respected here not because I had you but because I had Elisa. She didn’t study, she didn’t even graduate from middle school, but she’s a lady. And you who have a university degree — where did you end up? I’m just sorry for the two children, so pretty and they speak so well. Didn’t you think of them? With that father they were growing up like children on television, and you, what do you do, you bring them to Naples?”

“I’m the one who brought them up, Ma, not their father. And wherever I take them they’ll still grow up like that.”

“You are presumptuous. Madonna , how many mistakes I made with you. I thought Lina was the presumptuous one, but it’s you. Your friend bought a house for her parents, did you do that? Your friend orders everyone around, even Michele Solara, and who do you order around, that piece of shit son of Sarratore?”

At that point she began to sing Lila’s praises: Ah, how pretty Lina is, how generous, now she’s got her own business, no less, she and Enzo — they’ve known how to get ahead. I understood that the greatest sin she charged to me was forcing her to admit, with no way out, that I was worth less than Lila. When she said she wanted to cook something for Dede and Elsa, deliberately excluding me, I realized that it would pain her to invite me to lunch and, taking the children, I went away bitterly.

Once on the stradone I hesitated: wait at the gate for my father’s return, wander the streets in search of my brothers, see if my sister was home? I found a telephone booth, I called Elisa, I dragged the girls to her big apartment, from which you could see Vesuvius. My sister showed no signs yet of pregnancy, and yet I found her very changed. The simple fact of being pregnant must have made her expand suddenly, but distorting her. She was as if coarsened in her body, in her words, in her voice. She had an ashy complexion and was so poisoned by animosity that she welcomed us reluctantly. Not for a moment did I find any trace of the affection nor the slightly childish admiration she had always had for me. And when I mentioned our mother’s health she took an aggressive tone that I wouldn’t have thought her capable of, at least with me. She exclaimed: