Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

I was amazed. I thought: Tina says “Mamma” clearly, all the syllables, Imma doesn’t do that yet and is almost a month older. I felt at a loss and sad. 1981 was about to end. I would get rid of Silvana. I didn’t know what to write, the months would fly by, I wouldn’t deliver my book, I would lose ground as well as my reputation as a writer. I would remain without a future, dependent on financial support from Pietro, alone with three daughters, without Nino. Nino lost, Nino over. The part of me that continued to love him appeared again, not as in Florence but, rather, as the child in elementary school had loved him, seeing him coming out of school. In confusion I searched for an excuse to forgive him in spite of the humiliation, I couldn’t bear to drive him out of my life. Where was he? Was it possible that he hadn’t even tried to look for me? I put together Enzo, who had immediately taken care of the two children, and Lila, who had freed me of every task and had listened, leaving me all the space I wanted. I finally understood that they had known everything before I arrived in the neighborhood. I asked:

“Did Nino call?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“That it was foolish, that I should stay with you, that I should help you understand, that today people live like this. Talk.”

“And you?”

“I slammed the telephone down on him.”

“But he’ll call again?”

“Of course he’ll call again.”

I felt discouraged.

“Lila, I don’t know how to live without him. It all lasted such a short time. I broke up my marriage, I came to live here with the children, I had another child. Why?”

“Because you made a mistake.”

I didn’t like the remark, it sounded like the echo of an old offense. She was reminding me that I had made a mistake even though she had tried to get me out of the mistake. She was saying that I had wanted to make a mistake, and as a result she had been mistaken, I wasn’t intelligent, I was a stupid woman. I said:

“I have to talk to him, I have to confront him.”

“All right, but leave me the children.”

“You can’t do it, there are four.”

“There are five, there’s also Gennaro. And he’s the most difficult of all.”

“You see? I’ll take them.”

“Don’t even mention it.”

I admitted that I needed her help, I said:

“I’ll leave them until tomorrow, I need time to resolve the situation.”

“Resolve it how?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to continue with Nino?”

I could hear her opposition and I almost shouted:

“What can I do?”

“The only thing possible: leave him.”

For her it was the right solution, she had always wanted it to end like that, she had never concealed it from me. I said:

“I’ll think about it.”

“No, you won’t think about it. You’ve already decided to pretend it was nothing and go on.”

I avoided answering but she pressed me, she said that I shouldn’t throw myself away, that I had another destiny, that if I went on like that I would lose myself. I noticed that she was becoming harsh, I felt that to restrain me she was on the point of telling me what for a long time I had wanted to know and what for a long time she had been silent about. I was afraid, but had I not myself, on various occasions, tried to urge her to be clear? And now, had I not come to her also so that finally she would tell me everything?

“If you have something to tell me,” I said, “speak.”

And she made up her mind, she looked at me, I looked down. She said that Nino had often sought her out. She said that he had asked her to come back to him, both before he had become involved with me and after. She said that when they took my mother to the hospital he had been particularly insistent. She said that while the doctors were examining my mother and they were waiting for the results in the waiting room he had sworn to her that he was with me only to feel closer to her.

“Look at me,” she whispered. “I know I’m mean to tell you these things, but he is much worse than I am. He has the worst kind of meanness, that of superficiality.”

I returned to Via Tasso determined to cut off every relation with Nino. I found the house empty and in perfect order, I sat beside the French door that led to the balcony. Life in that apartment was over, in a couple of years the reasons for my very presence in Naples had been consumed.

I waited with growing anxiety for him to appear. Several hours passed, I fell asleep, I woke with a start, when it was dark. The telephone was ringing.

I hurried to answer, sure that it was Nino, but it was Antonio. He was calling from a café nearby, he asked if I could meet him. I said: Come up. I heard his hesitation, then he agreed. I had no doubt that Lila had sent him, and he admitted it himself right away.

“She doesn’t want you to do something foolish,” he said, making an effort to speak in Italian.

“You can stop me?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He sat down in the living room, after refusing the coffee I wanted to make for him, and deliberately, in the tone of someone who is used to giving detailed reports, listed all Nino’s lovers: names, surnames, professions, relatives. Some I didn’t know, they were relationships from long ago. Others he had brought to dinner at my house and I remembered them, affectionate with me and the children. Mirella, who had taken care of Dede, Elsa, and also Imma, had been with him for three years. And his relationship with the gynecologist who had delivered my daughter, and Lila’s too, was even longer. Antonio enumerated a sizable number of females — he used that word — with whom, at various times, Nino had applied the same scheme: an intense period of meetings, then occasional encounters, in no case a definitive break. He’s faithful, Antonio said, sarcastically, he never really cuts off relations: now he goes to that one, now he goes to that other.

“Does Lina know?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Recently.”

“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

“I wanted to tell you right away.”

“And Lina?”

“She said to wait.”

“And you obeyed her. You two let me cook and set the table for people he had betrayed me with the day before or would betray me with the day after. I ate with people whose foot or knee or something else he touched under the table. I entrusted my children to a girl he jumped on as soon as I looked away.”

Antonio shrugged, he looked at his hands, clasped them, and left them between his knees.

“If they tell me to do a thing I do it,” he said in dialect.

But then he got confused. I almost always do it, he said, and tried to explain: sometimes I obey money, sometimes respect, in some cases myself. As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love. As if by way of example, he told me again about how, years before, he had spied on Nino and Lila for the Solaras. In that case, he said proudly, I didn’t do what they ordered. He hadn’t felt like handing Lila over to Michele and had called Enzo so that he could get her out of trouble. He spoke again of the beating he had given Nino. I did it, he muttered, most of all because you loved him and not me, and then because if that piece of shit went back to Lina, she would have stayed faithful to him and would be ruined forever. You see, he concluded, in that case, too, there was little to be gained by talking, Lina wouldn’t have listened to me, love not only doesn’t have eyes, it doesn’t have ears, either.