Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

“At first,” she said, dividing the hair into two, and beginning to braid it without losing sight of her image in the mirror, “Dede resembled you, now instead she’s becoming like her father. The opposite is happening with Elsa: she seemed identical to her father and now instead she’s starting to look like you. Everything moves. A wish, a fantasy travels more swiftly than blood.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remember when I thought Gennaro was Nino’s?”

“Yes.”

“To me he really seemed so, he was identical to Nino, his exact image.”

“You mean that a desire can be so strong as to seem fulfilled?”

“No, I mean that for a few years Gennaro was truly Nino’s child.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

She stared at me spitefully for a moment, she took a few steps in the bathroom, limping, she burst out laughing in a slightly artificial way.

“So it seems to you that I’m exaggerating?”

I realized with some annoyance that she was imitating my walk.

“Don’t make fun of me, my hip hurts.”

“Nothing hurts, Lenù. You invented that limp in order not to let your mother die completely, and now you really do limp, and I’ve studied you, it’s good for you. The Solaras took your bracelet and you said nothing, you weren’t sorry, you weren’t worried. At the time I thought it was because you don’t know how to rebel, but now I understand it’s not that. You’re getting old properly. You feel strong, you stopped being a daughter, you truly became a mother.”

I felt uneasy, I repeated:

“It’s just a little pain.”

“Even pain does you good. You just needed a slight limp and now your mother stays quietly inside you. Her leg is glad that you limp and so you, too, are glad. Isn’t that true?”

“No.”

She gave me an ironic look to reassert that she didn’t believe me, and with her made-up eyes narrowed to cracks said:

“Do you think that when Tina is forty-two, she’ll be like this?”

I stared at her. She had a provocative expression, her hands tight around the braids. I said:

“It’s likely, yes, maybe so.”

My daughters had to fend for themselves, I stayed to eat with Lila, even though I felt cold in my bones. We talked the whole time about physical resemblances; I tried to understand what was happening in her mind. But I also mentioned to her the work I was doing. Talking to you helps, I said to give her confidence, you make me think.

The idea seemed to cheer her, she said: Knowing I’m useful to you I feel better. Right afterward, thanks to the effort involved in being useful to me, she moved on to contorted or illogical arguments. She had put on a lot of powder to hide her pallor, and she didn’t seem herself but a Carnival mask with very red cheeks. At times I followed her with interest, at times I recognized only the signs of the illness that I was well acquainted with by now, and was alarmed. For example, she said, laughing: For a while I brought up Nino’s child, just as you’ve done with Imma, a flesh and blood child; but when that child became Stefano’s where did Nino’s child go, does Gennaro still have him inside, do I have him? Remarks like that: she got lost. Then she started abruptly to praise my cooking, she said she had eaten with pleasure, something she hadn’t done for a long time. When I said it wasn’t mine but Pinuccia’s, she darkened, she grumbled that she didn’t want anything from Pinuccia. At that point Elsa called me from the landing, she shouted that I had to come home right away, Dede with a fever was even worse than Dede healthy. I urged Lila to call me whenever she needed me, I told her to rest, I hurried up to my apartment.

For the rest of the day I tried to forget about her; I worked late into the night. The children had grown up with the idea that when I really had my back to the wall they had to look after themselves and not disturb me. In fact they left me in peace, and I worked well. As usual a half sentence of Lila’s was enough and my brain recognized her aura, became active, liberated my intelligence. By now I knew that I could do well especially when she, even just with a few disjointed words, assured the more insecure part of me that I was right. I gave to her digressive complaints a concise, elegant organization. I wrote about my hip, about my mother. Now that I was surrounded by admiration, I could admit without uneasiness that talking to her incited ideas, pushed me to make connections between distant things. In those years of being neighbors, I on the floor above, she below, it often happened. A slight push was enough and the seemingly empty mind discovered that it was full and lively. I attributed to her a sort of farsightedness, as I had all our lives, and I found nothing wrong with it. I said to myself that to be adult was to recognize that I needed her impulses. If once I had hidden, even from myself, that spark she induced in me, now I was proud of it, I had even written about it somewhere. I was I and for that very reason I could make space for her in me and give her an enduring form. She instead didn’t want to be her , so she couldn’t do the same. The tragedy of Tina, her weakened physical state, her drifting brain surely contributed to her crises. But that was the underlying cause of the illness that she called “dissolving boundaries.” I went to bed around three, I woke at nine.

Dede’s fever was gone, but in compensation Imma had a cough. I straightened the apartment, I went to see how Lila was. I knocked for a long time, she didn’t open the door. I pressed the bell until I heard her dragging footsteps and her voice grumbling insults in dialect. Her braids were half undone, her makeup was smeared, even more than the day before it was a mask with a pained expression.

“Pinuccia poisoned me,” she said with conviction. “I couldn’t sleep, my stomach is splitting.”

I went in, I had an impression of carelessness, of filth. On the floor, next to the sink, I saw toilet paper soaked with blood. I said:

“I ate the same things you ate and I’m fine.”

“Then explain to me what’s wrong with me.”

“Menstruation?”

She got mad:

“I’m always menstruating.”

“Then you should be examined.”

“I’m not going to have my stomach examined by anyone.”

“What do you think is wrong?”

“I know what it is.”

“I’ll go get you a painkiller at the pharmacy.”

“You must have something in the house?”

“I don’t need them.”

“And Dede and Elsa?”

“They don’t, either.”

“Ah, you’re perfect, you never need anything.”

I was irked, it was starting up again.

“You want to quarrel?”

“You want to quarrel, since you say I have menstrual cramps. I’m not a child like your daughters, I know if I have that pain or something else.”

It wasn’t true, she knew nothing about herself. When it came to the workings of her body she was worse than Dede and Elsa. I realized that she was suffering, she pressed her stomach with her hands. Maybe I was wrong: certainly she was overwhelmed with anguish, but not because of her old fears — she really was ill. I made her some chamomile tea, forced her to drink it. I put on a coat and went to see if the pharmacy was open. Gino’s father was a skilled pharmacist, he would surely give me good advice. But I had barely emerged onto the stradone , among the Sunday stalls, when I heard explosions— pah, pah, pah, pah —similar to the sound of the firecrackers that children set off at Christmastime. There were four close together, then came a fifth: pah .

I turned onto the street where the pharmacy was. People seemed disoriented, Christmas was still weeks away, some walked quickly, some ran.