Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Novels, #3)

by Elena Ferrante

Her face was deeply lined, and increasingly recalled her father’s.

A common theme throughout the series

(What am I to the Airotas, a jewel in the crown of their broad-mindedness?)

Nino was not fleeing his father out of fear of becoming like him: Nino already was his father and didn’t want to admit it.

“We made a pact when we were children: I’m the wicked one.”

It was important for me to talk to her, it seemed to me that she listened not with her ears but with an organ that she alone had and that made the words acceptable.

When the baby emerged and I saw her, black-haired, a violet organism that, full of energy, writhed and wailed, I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it.

But the truth was that she liked saving me more than listening to me.

The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence. I observed Dede carefully; she seemed to resemble Pietro. Mirko, on the other hand, was just like Nino.

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what.

I was young at the time, and I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman.