Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

My father at that news immediately fell apart, he couldn’t tolerate the situation, and became depressed. My brothers, their expressions vaguely dazed, their complexions pasty, hovered for a while with an air of wanting to help, and then, absorbed day and night by their mysterious jobs, disappeared, leaving money, which was needed for doctors and medicines. As for my sister, she stayed in her house, frightened, untidy, in her nightgown, ready to stick a nipple in Silvio’s mouth if he merely hinted at a wail. Thus, in the fourth month of my pregnancy, the full weight of my mother’s illness fell on me.

I wasn’t sorry, I wanted my mother to understand, even if she had always tormented me, that I loved her. I became very active: I involved both Nino and Pietro, asking them to direct me to the best doctors; I took her to the various luminaries; I stayed with her in the hospital when she had an urgent operation, when she was discharged. I took care of everything once I brought her home.

The heat was unbearable, and I was constantly worried. While my stomach began to swell happily and in it grew a heart different from the one in my breast, I daily observed, with sorrow, my mother’s decline. I was moved by her clinging to me in order not to get lost, the way I, a small child, had clung to her hand. The frailer and more frightened she became, the prouder I was of keeping her alive.

At first she was as ill-tempered as usual. Whatever I said, she always objected with rude refusals, there was nothing she didn’t claim to be able to do without me. The doctor? She wanted to see him alone. The hospital? She wanted to go alone. The treatments? She wanted to take care of them alone. I don’t need anything, she grumbled, get out, you only bother me. Yet she got angry if I was just a minute late ( Since you had other things to do it was pointless to tell me you were coming ); she insulted me if I wasn’t ready to bring her immediately what she asked for and she would set off with her limping gait to show me that I was worse than Sleeping Beauty, that she was much more energetic than I ( There, there, who are you thinking about, your head’s not there, Lenù, if I wait for you I’ll get cold ); she criticized me fiercely for being polite to doctors and nurses, hissing, If you don’t spit in their faces, those pieces of shit don’t give a damn about you, they only help if they’re scared of you . But meanwhile inside her something was changing. Often she was frightened by her own agitation. She moved as if she feared that the floor might open beneath her feet. Once when I surprised her in front of the mirror — she looked at herself often, with a curiosity she had never had — she asked me, in embarrassment, do you remember when I was young? Then, as if there were a connection, she insisted — returning to her old violence — that I swear I wouldn’t take her to the hospital again, that I wouldn’t let her die alone in a ward. Her eyes filled with tears.

What worried me most was that she became emotional easily: she had never been that way. She was moved if I mentioned Dede, if she suspected that my father had no clean socks, if she spoke of Elisa struggling with her baby, if she looked at my growing stomach, if she remembered the countryside that had once extended all around the houses of the neighborhood. With the illness there came, in other words, a weakness she hadn’t had before, and that weakness lessened her anxiety, transformed it into a capricious suffering that frequently brought tears to her eyes. One afternoon she burst out crying because she had thought of Maestra Oliviero, although she had always detested her. You remember, she said, how she insisted that you take the test for admission to middle school? And the tears poured down without restraint. Ma, I said, calm down, what’s there to cry about? It shocked me seeing her so desperate for nothing, I wasn’t used to it. She, too, shook her head, incredulous, she laughed and cried, she laughed to let me know that she didn’t know what there was to cry about.

It was this frailty that slowly opened the way to an intimacy we had never shared. At first she was ashamed of being ill. If my father or my brothers or Elisa and Silvio were present at a moment of weakness she hid in the bathroom, and when they urged her tactfully ( Ma, how do you feel, open the door) she wouldn’t open it, she answered inevitably: I’m fine, what do you want, why don’t you leave me in peace in the bathroom, at least. With me, on the other hand, out of the blue, she let go, she decided to show me her sufferings unashamedly.

It began one morning, at her house, when she told me why she was lame. She did it spontaneously, with no preamble. The angel of death, she said proudly, touched me when I was a child, with the exact same illness as now, but I screwed him, even though I was just a girl. And you’ll see, I’ll screw him again, because I know how to suffer — I learned at the age of ten, I haven’t stopped since — and if you know how to suffer the angel respects you, after a while he goes away. As she spoke she pulled up her dress and showed me the injured leg like the relic of an old battle. She smacked it, observing me with a fixed half-smile on her lips and terrified eyes.

From then on her periods of bitter silence diminished and those of uninhibited confidences increased. Sometimes she said embarrassing things. She revealed that she had never been with any man but my father. She revealed with coarse obscenities that my father was perfunctory, she couldn’t remember if sleeping with him had ever truly given her pleasure. She revealed that she had always loved him and that she still did, but as a brother. She revealed that the only good thing in her life was the moment I came out of her belly, I, her first child. She revealed that the worst sin she had committed — a sin for which she would go to Hell — was that she had never felt attached to her other children, she had considered them a punishment, and still did so. She revealed finally, without circumlocutions, that her only true child was me. When she said this — I remember that we were at the hospital for an examination — her distress was such that she wept even more than usual. She whispered: I worried only about you, always, the others for me were stepchildren; so I deserve the disappointment you’ve given me, what a blow, Lenù, what a blow, you shouldn’t have left Pietro, you shouldn’t have gone with Sarratore’s son, he’s worse than the father, an honest man who is married, who has two children, doesn’t take someone else’s wife.

I defended Nino. I tried to reassure her, I told her that there was divorce now, that we would both get divorced and then would marry. She listened without interrupting me. She had almost completely used up the energy with which she once rebelled, and insisted on being right, and now she confined herself to shaking her head. She was skin and bones, pale, if she contradicted me she did it with the slow voice of despair.

“When? Where? Must I watch you become worse than me?”

“No, Ma, don’t worry, I’ll move forward.”

“I don’t believe it anymore, Lenù, you’ve come to a halt.”

“You’ll see, I’ll make you happy, we’ll all make you happy, my siblings and I.”

“I abandoned your brothers and sister and I’m ashamed.”

“It’s not true. Elisa has everything she wants, and Peppe and Gianni work, have money, what more do you want?”

“I want to fix things. I gave all three of them to Marcello and I was wrong.”

Like that, in a low voice. She was inconsolable, she sketched a picture that surprised me. Marcello is more criminal than Michele, she said, he pulled my children into the mud, he seems the better of the two but it’s not true. He had changed Elisa, who now felt more Solara than Greco and was on his side in everything. She talked for hours, whispering, as if we were waiting our turn not in the ugly, crowded waiting room of one of the best hospitals in the city but in some place where Marcello lurked nearby. I tried to make light of it, to calm her, illness and old age were making her exaggerate. You worry too much, I said. She answered: I worry because I know and you don’t, ask Lina if you don’t believe me.