Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

Marcello and Michele Solara, sons of Silvio and Manuela. Rejected by Lila, Marcello , after many years, goes to live with Elisa, Elena’s younger sister. Michele , married to Gigliola, the daughter of the pastry maker, takes Marisa Sarratore as his lover, and has two more children with her. Yet he continues to be obsessed with Lila.

The Spagnuolo family (the baker’s family):

Signor Spagnuolo, pastry maker at the Solaras’ bar-pastry shop.

Rosa Spagnuolo, wife of the pastry maker.

Gigliola Spagnuolo, daughter of the pastry maker, wife of Michele Solara and mother of two of his children.

Other children.

The Airota family:

Guido Airota, professor of Greek literature.

Adele Airota, his wife.

Mariarosa Airota, their daughter, professor of art history in Milan.

Pietro Airota, a very young university professor, Elena’s husband and the father of Dede and Elsa.

The teachers:

Ferraro, teacher and librarian.

Maestra Oliviero, teacher.

Professor Gerace, high-school teacher.

Professor Galiani, high-school teacher.

Other characters:

Gino, son of the pharmacist; Elena’s first boyfriend.

Nella Incardo, the cousin of Maestra Oliviero.

Armando, doctor, son of Professor Galiani. Married to Isabella, with whom he has a son named Marco.

Nadia, student, daughter of Professor Galiani, was Nino’s girlfriend. During a period of militant political activity, she becomes attached to Pasquale Peluso.

Bruno Soccavo, friend of Nino Sarratore and the heir to a sausage factory. He is killed in his factory.

Franco Mari, Elena’s boyfriend during her first years at the university, has devoted himself to political activism. He loses an eye in a Fascist attack.

Silvia , a university student and political activist. She has a son, Mirko, from a brief relationship with Nino Sarratore.

From October 1976 until 1979, when I returned to Naples to live, I avoided resuming a steady relationship with Lila. But it wasn’t easy. She almost immediately tried to reenter my life by force, and I ignored her, tolerated her, endured her. Even if she acted as if there were nothing she wanted more than to be close to me at a difficult moment, I couldn’t forget the contempt with which she had treated me.

Today I think that if it had been only the insult that wounded me — You’re an idiot, she had shouted on the telephone when I told her about Nino, and she had never, ever spoken to me like that before — I would have soon calmed down. In reality, what mattered more than that offense was the mention of Dede and Elsa. Think of the harm you’re doing to your daughters, she had warned me, and at the moment I had paid no attention. But over time those words acquired greater weight, and I returned to them often. Lila had never displayed the slightest interest in Dede and Elsa; almost certainly she didn’t even remember their names. If, on the phone, I mentioned some intelligent remark they had made, she cut me off, changed the subject. And when she met them for the first time, at the house of Marcello Solara, she had confined herself to an absentminded glance and a few pat phrases — she hadn’t paid the least attention to how nicely they were dressed, how neatly their hair was combed, how well both were able to express themselves, although they were still small. And yet I had given birth to them, I had brought them up, they were part of me, who had been her friend forever: she should have taken this into account — I won’t say out of affection but at least out of politeness — for my maternal pride. Yet she hadn’t even attempted a little good-natured sarcasm; she had displayed indifference and nothing more. Only now — out of jealousy, surely, because I had taken Nino — did she remember the girls, and wanted to emphasize that I was a terrible mother, that although I was happy, I was causing them unhappiness. The minute I thought about it I became anxious. Had Lila worried about Gennaro when she left Stefano, when she abandoned the child to the neighbor because of her work in the factory, when she sent him to me as if to get him out of the way? Ah, I had my faults, but I was certainly more a mother than she was.

Such thoughts became a habit in those years. It was as if Lila, who, after all, had uttered only that one malicious remark about Dede and Elsa, had become the defense lawyer for their needs as daughters, and, every time I neglected them to devote myself to myself, I felt obliged to prove to her that she was wrong. But it was a voice invented by ill feeling; what she really thought of my behavior as a mother I don’t know. Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I’m able to say. I wish for this intrusion, I’ve hoped for it ever since I began to write our story, but I have to get to the end in order to check all the pages. If I tried now, I would certainly get stuck. I’ve been writing for too long, and I’m tired; it’s more and more difficult to keep the thread of the story taut within the chaos of the years, of events large and small, of moods. So either I tend to pass over my own affairs to recapture Lila and all the complications she brings with her or, worse, I let myself be carried away by the events of my life, only because it’s easier to write them. But I have to avoid this choice. I mustn’t take the first path, on which, if I set myself aside, I would end up finding ever fewer traces of Lila — since the very nature of our relationship dictates that I can reach her only by passing through myself. But I shouldn’t take the second, either. That, in fact, I speak of my experience in increasingly greater detail is just what she would certainly favor. Come on — she would say — tell us what turn your life took, who cares about mine, admit that it doesn’t even interest you. And she would conclude: I’m a scribble on a scribble, completely unsuitable for one of your books; forget it, Lenù, one doesn’t tell the story of an erasure.

What to do, then? Admit yet again that she’s right? Accept that to be adult is to disappear, is to learn to hide to the point of vanishing? Admit that, as the years pass, the less I know of Lila?

This morning I keep weariness at bay and sit down again at the desk. Now that I’m close to the most painful part of our story, I want to seek on the page a balance between her and me that in life I couldn’t find even between myself and me.

Of the days in Montpellier I remember everything except the city; it’s as if I’d never been there. Outside the hotel, outside the vast assembly hall where the academic conference that Nino was attending took place, today I see only a windy autumn and a blue sky resting on white clouds. And yet in my memory that place-name, Montpellier, has for many reasons remained a symbol of escape. I had been out of Italy once, in Paris, with Franco, and I had felt exhilarated by my own audacity. But then it seemed to me that my world was and would forever remain the neighborhood, Naples, while the rest was like a brief outing in whose special climate I could imagine myself as I would never in fact be. Montpellier, on the other hand, although it was far less exciting than Paris, gave me the impression that my boundaries had burst and I was expanding. The pure and simple fact of being in that place constituted in my eyes the proof that the neighborhood, Naples, Pisa, Florence, Milan, Italy itself were only tiny fragments of the world and that I would do well not to be satisfied with those fragments any longer. In Montpellier I felt the limitations of my outlook, of the language in which I expressed myself and in which I had written. In Montpellier it seemed to me evident how restrictive, at thirty-two, being a wife and mother might be. And in all those days charged with love I felt, for the first time, freed from the chains I had accumulated over the years — those of my origins, those I had acquired through academic success, those derived from the choices I had made in life, especially marriage. There I also understood the reasons for the pleasure I had felt, in the past, on seeing my first book translated into other languages and, at the same time, the reasons for my disappointment at finding few readers outside Italy. It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute. The fact that Lila had never been out of Naples, that she was afraid even of San Giovanni a Teduccio — if in the past I had judged it an arguable choice that she was nevertheless able, as usual, to turn into an advantage — now seemed to me simply a sign of mental limitation. I reacted the way you do to someone who insults you by using the same formulations that offended you. You were wrong about me? No, my dear, it’s I, I who was wrong about you: you will spend the rest of your life looking out at the trucks passing on the stradone.