Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

I began to study him while he was engaged in that work of seduction. He often invited young and not so young women to dinner at my house, alone or with their husbands or companions. I observed with some anxiety that he knew how to give them space: he ignored the male guests almost completely, making the women the center of his attention, and at times focusing on one in particular. Many evenings I witnessed conversations that, although they took place in the presence of other people, he was able to conduct as if he were alone, in private, with the only woman who at that moment appeared to interest him. He said nothing allusive, or compromising, he merely asked questions.

“And then what happened?”

“I left home. I left Lecce at eighteen and Naples wasn’t an easy city.”

“Where did you live?”

“In a run-down apartment in the Tribunali, with two other girls. There wasn’t even a quiet corner where I could study.”

“And men?”

“Certainly not.”

“There must have been someone.”

“There was one, and, just my luck, he’s here, I’m married to him.”

Although the woman had brought up her husband as if to include him in the conversation, Nino ignored him and continued to talk to her in his warm voice. He had a curiosity about the world of women that was genuine. But — this I knew very well by now — he didn’t in the least resemble the men who in those years made a show of giving up at least a few of their privileges. I thought not only of professors, architects, artists who came to our house and displayed a sort of feminization of behaviors, feelings, opinions; but also of Carmen’s husband, Roberto, who was really helpful, and Enzo, who with no hesitation would have sacrificed all his time to Lila’s needs. Nino was sincerely interested in how women found themselves. There was no dinner at which he did not repeat that to think along with them was now the only way to a true thought. But he held tight to his spaces and his numerous activities, he put first of all, always and only, himself, he didn’t give up an instant of his time.

On one occasion I tried, with affectionate irony, to show him up as a liar in front of everyone:

“Don’t believe him. At first he helped me clear, he washed the dishes: today he doesn’t even pick his socks up off the floor.”

“That’s not true,” he protested.

“Yes, it is. He wants to liberate the women of others but not his.”

“Well, your liberation shouldn’t necessarily signify the loss of my freedom.”

In remarks like this, too, uttered playfully, I soon recognized, uneasily, echoes of my conflicts with Pietro. Why had I gotten so angry at my ex-husband while with Nino I let it go? I thought: maybe every relationship with men can only reproduce the same contradictions and, in certain environments, even the same smug responses. But then I said to myself: I mustn’t exaggerate, there’s a difference, with Nino it’s certainly going better.

But was it really? I was less and less sure. I remembered how, when he was our guest in Florence, he had supported me against Pietro, I thought again with pleasure of how he had encouraged me to write. But now? Now that it was crucial for me to seriously get to work, he seemed unable to instill in me the same confidence as before. Things had changed over the years. Nino always had his own urgent needs, and even if he wanted to he couldn’t devote himself to me. To mollify me he had hurried to get, through his mother, a certain Silvana, a massive woman of around fifty, with three children, always cheerful, very lively, and good with the three girls. Generously he had glossed over what he paid her, and after a week had asked: Everything in order, it’s working? But it was evident that he felt that the expense authorized him not to be concerned with me. Of course he was attentive, he regularly asked: Are you writing? But that was it. The central place that my effort to write had had at the start of our relationship had vanished. And it wasn’t only that. I myself, with a certain embarrassment, no longer recognized him as the authority he had once been. I discovered, in other words, that the part of me that confessed I could not really depend on Nino also no longer saw around his every word the flaming halo I had seemed to perceive since childhood. I gave him a still shapeless paragraph to read and he exclaimed: Perfect. I summarized a plot and characters that I was sketching out and he said: Great, very intelligent. But he didn’t convince me, I didn’t believe him, he expressed enthusiastic opinions about the work of too many women. His recurring phrase after an evening with other couples was almost always: What a boring man, she is certainly better than he is. His women friends, inasmuch as they were his friends, were always judged extraordinary. And his judgment of women in general was, as a rule, tolerant. Nino could justify even the sadistic obtuseness of the employees of the post office, the ignorant narrow-mindedness of Dede and Elsa’s teachers. In other words I no longer felt unique, I was a form that was valid for all women. But if for him I wasn’t unique, what help could his opinion give me, how could I draw energy from it to do well?

Exasperated, one evening, by the praise he had heaped on a biologist friend in my presence, I asked him:

“Is it possible that a stupid woman doesn’t exist?”

“I didn’t say that: I said that as a rule you are better than us.”

“I’m better than you?”

“Absolutely, yes, and I’ve known it for a very long time.”

“All right, I believe you, but at least once in your life, have you met a bitch?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me her name.”

I knew what he would say, and yet I insisted, hoping he would say Eleonora. I waited, he became serious:

“I can’t.”

“Tell me.”

“If I tell you you’ll get mad.”

“I won’t get mad.”

“Lina.”

If in the past I had believed somewhat in his recurring hostility toward Lila, now I found it less and less convincing, partly because it was joined not infrequently to moments when, as had happened a few nights earlier, he demonstrated a completely different feeling. He was trying to finish an essay on work and the automation of Fiat, but I saw that he was in trouble ( What precisely is a microprocessor, what’s a chip, how does this stuff function in practice ). I had said to him: talk to Enzo Scanno, he’s smart. He had asked absentmindedly: Who is Enzo Scanno? Lina’s companion, I answered. He said with a half smile: Then I prefer to talk to Lina, she certainly knows more. And, as if the memory had returned, he added, with a trace of resentment: Wasn’t Scanno the idiot son of the fruit seller?

That tone struck me. Enzo was the founder of a small, innovative business — a miracle, considering that the office was in the heart of the old neighborhood. Precisely because he was a scholar, Nino should have displayed interest and admiration toward him. Instead, he had returned him, thanks to that imperfect— was —to the time of elementary school, when he helped his mother in the shop or went around with his father and the cart and didn’t have time to study and didn’t shine. He had, with irritation, taken every virtue away from Enzo, and given them all to Lila. That was how I realized that if I had forced him to delve into himself, it would have emerged that the highest example of female intelligence — maybe his own worship of female intelligence, even certain lectures claiming that the waste of women’s intellectual resources was the greatest waste of all — had to do with Lila, and that if our season of love was already darkening, the season of Ischia would always remain radiant for him. The man for whom I left Pietro, I thought, is what he is because his encounter with Lila reshaped him that way.