Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

It wasn’t only that. The political and cultural climate was changing, other readings were emerging. We had all stopped making extreme speeches, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with positions that years earlier I had opposed in Pietro, out of a wish to contradict him, out of the need to quarrel. But Nino went too far, he now found ridiculous not only every subversive statement but also every ethical declaration, every display of purity. He said, making fun of me:

“There are too many sensitive souls around.”

“Meaning?”

“People who are outraged, as if they didn’t know that either the parties do their job or you get armed gangs and Masonic lodges.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that a party can’t be anything other than a distributor of favors in exchange for support, ideals are part of the furniture.”

“Well, then I’m a sensitive soul.”

“I know that.”

I began to find his craving to be politically surprising unpleasant. When he organized dinners at my house he embarrassed his own guests by defending from the left positions of the right. The fascists — he maintained — aren’t always wrong and we should learn to talk to each other. Or: You can’t simply condemn, you have to get your hands dirty if you want to change things. Or even: Justice should as soon as possible be subordinated to the rights of those who have the task of governing, otherwise the judges become loose cannons, dangerous for the preservation of the democratic system. Or again: Wages have to be frozen, the mechanism of the wage index scale is ruinous for Italy. If someone disagreed with him he became contemptuous, he sneered, he let it be understood that it wasn’t worth the trouble to argue with people wearing blinders, whose heads were full of old slogans.

I retreated into an uneasy silence, in order not to take sides against him. He loved the shifting sands of the present, the future for him was decided there. He knew about everything that happened in the parties and in parliament, about the internal movements of capital and of the organization of labor. I, on the other hand, persisted in reading only what had to do with the dark conspiracies, the kidnappings and bloody last-ditch efforts of the armed red gangs, the debate on the decline of the centrality of workers, the identification of new opposition subjects. As a result I felt more comfortable with the language of the other diners than with his. One evening he quarreled with a friend who taught in the school of architecture. He became inflamed by passion, disheveled, handsome.

“You can’t distinguish between a step forward, a step back, and standing still.”

“What’s a step forward?” the friend asked.

“A prime minister who isn’t the same old Christian Demo-crat.”

“And standing still?”

“A demonstration by steelworkers.”

“And a step back?”

“Asking who’s cleaner, the socialists or the Communists.”

“You’re turning cynical.”

“You, on the other hand, have always been a shit.”

No, Nino no longer persuaded me the way he used to. He expressed himself, I don’t know how to say it, in a provocative and yet opaque way, as if precisely he, who extolled the long view, were able to follow only the daily moves and counter-moves of a system that to me, to his own friends, seemed rotten to the core. Enough, he would insist, let’s end the childish aversion to power: one has to be on the inside in the places where things are born and die: the parties, the banks, television. And I listened, but when he turned to me I lowered my gaze. I no longer concealed from myself that his conversation partly bored me, and partly seemed to point to a brittleness that dragged him down.

One time he was lecturing Dede, who had to do some sort of crazy research for her teacher, and to soften his pragmatism I said:

“The people, Dede, always have the possibility of turning everything upside down.”

Good-humoredly he replied, “Mamma likes to make up stories, which is a great job. But she doesn’t know much about how the world we live in functions, and so whenever there’s something she doesn’t like she resorts to a magic word: let’s turn everything upside down. You tell your teacher that we have to make the world that exists function.”

“How?” I asked.

“With laws.”

“But if you say that the judges should be controlled.”

Displeased with me, he shook his head, just as Pietro used to do.

“Go and write your book,” he said, “otherwise you’ll complain it’s our fault that you can’t work.”

He started a lesson with Dede on the division of powers, which I listened to in silence and agreed with from A to Z.

When Nino was home he staged a comic ritual with Dede and Elsa. They dragged me into the little room where I had my desk, ordered me peremptorily to get to work, and shut the door behind them, scolding me in chorus if I dared to open it.

In general, if he had time, he was very available to the children: to Dede, whom he judged very intelligent but too rigid, and to Elsa, whose feigned acquiescence, behind which lurked malice and cunning, amused him. But what I hoped would happen never did: he didn’t become attached to little Imma. He played with her, of course, and sometimes he really seemed to enjoy himself. For example, with Dede and Elsa he would bark at her, to get her to say the word “dog.” I heard them howling through the house as I sought in vain to make some notes, and if Imma by pure chance emitted from the depths of her throat an indistinct sound that resembled d , Nino shrieked in unison with the children: she said it, hooray, d . But nothing more. In fact he used the infant as a doll to entertain Dede and Elsa. The increasingly rare times when he spent a Sunday with us and the weather was fine, he went with them and Imma to the Floridiana, encouraging them to push their sister’s stroller along the paths of the park. When they returned they were all pleased. But a few words were enough for me to guess that Nino had abandoned Dede and Elsa to play mamma to Imma, while he went off to converse with the real mothers of the Vomero who were taking their children out for air and sun.

Over time I had become used to his penchant for seductive behavior, I considered it a sort of tic. I was used above all to the way women immediately liked him. But at a certain point something was spoiled there, too. I began to notice that he had an impressive number of women friends, and that they all seemed to brighten in his vicinity. I knew that light well, I wasn’t surprised. Being close to him gave you the impression of being visible, especially to yourself, and you were content. It was natural, therefore, that all those girls, and older women, too, were fond of him, and if I didn’t exclude sexual desire I also didn’t consider it essential. I stood confused on the edge of the remark made long ago by Lila, In my opinion he’s not your friend, either , and tried as infrequently as possible to transmute it into the question: Are these women his lovers? So it wasn’t the hypothesis that he was betraying me that disturbed me but something else. I was convinced that Nino encouraged in those people a sort of maternal impulse to do, within the limits of the possible, what could be useful to him.

Shortly after Imma’s birth, things began to go better for him. When he appeared he told me proudly of his successes, and I was quickly forced to register that, just as in the past his career had had a boost thanks to his wife’s family, so, too, behind every new responsibility he got was the mediation of a woman. One had obtained for him a biweekly column in Il Mattino . One had recommended him for the keynote speech at an important conference in Ferrara. One had put him on the managing editorial board of a Turinese journal. Another — originally from Philadelphia and married to a NATO officer stationed in Naples — had recently added his name as a consultant for an American foundation. The list of favors was continuously lengthening. Besides, hadn’t I myself helped him publish a book with an important publishing house? And, if I thought about it, hadn’t Professor Galiani been the source of his reputation as a high-school student?