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

by Elena Ferrante

a girl I remember as being tall and thin asked me to explain, breaking off her phrases with nervous laughs, why I had considered it necessary to write, in such a polished story, a risqué part. I was embarrassed, I think I blushed, I jumbled together a lot of sociological reasons. Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including—I said emphatically—what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.

I’m sorry I made you come at this hour, my mind’s no help to me, it’s coming unglued like wallpaper, luckily you’re here. “What’s happening?” I asked, and moved to caress her hand. That question, that gesture were enough. She opened her eyes wide, clenched her hand, abruptly pulled it away. “I’m not well,” she said, “but wait, don’t be scared, I’ll calm down now.” She became calm. She said softly, enunciating the words: “I’ve disturbed you, Lenù, because you have to make me a promise, you’re the only person I trust: if something happens to me, if I end up in the hospital, if they take me to the insane asylum, if they can’t find me anymore, you have to take Gennaro, you have to keep him with you, bring him up in your house. Enzo is good, he’s smart, I trust him, but he can’t give the child the things you can.” “Why are you talking like that? What’s wrong? If you don’t explain I can’t understand.” “First promise.” “All right.” She became agitated again, alarming me. “No, you mustn’t say all right; you must say here, now, that you’ll take the child. And if you need money, find Nino, tell him he has to help you. But promise: I will bring up the child.” I looked at her uncertainly. But I promised. I promised and I sat and listened to her all night long.

The more she observed her son, the more she felt that, even if the neighbor found him very intelligent, he wasn’t growing up as she would have liked. She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain, now it seemed to her wrong that the quality of a person depends on the quality of his early childhood. You had to be constant, and Gennaro had no constancy, nor did she. My mind is always scattering, she said to herself, I’m made badly and he’s made badly. Then she was ashamed of thinking like that, she whispered to the sleeping child: you’re clever, you already know how to read, you already know how to write, you can do addition and subtraction, your mother is stupid, she’s never satisfied. She kissed the little boy on the forehead and turned out the light.

You and the others are making trouble for my son; for you it’s only an amusement, nothing terrible will happen to you; for me, for him, no, it’s a serious thing, so either do something to fix it or I’ll bash your face in. That was what she intended to say, and she coughed and her rage mounted; she couldn’t wait to explode.

We joined Lila in the kitchen. She had just had a fight with Gennaro. Now that the child spent more time with his mother and less with the neighbor he was disoriented. He had less freedom, he was forced to give up a set of habits, and he rebelled by insisting, at the age of five, on being fed with a spoon. Lila had started yelling, he had thrown the plate, which shattered on the floor. When we went into the kitchen she had just slapped him. She said to me aggressively: “Was it you who pretended the spoon was an airplane?” “Just once.” “You shouldn’t.” I said: “It won’t happen again.” “No, never again, because you’re going to be a writer and I have to waste my time like this.”

but I don’t ever want to be pregnant again.” She was silent, and I didn’t say anything, either. When she began talking once more, she told me about the first time she had realized she was expecting a baby, and the second. She described both as terrible experiences: the second time, she said, I was sure the baby was Nino’s and even though I felt sick I was happy. But, happy or not, you’ll see, the body suffers, it doesn’t like losing its shape, there’s too much pain. From there she went on in a crescendo that got darker and darker, telling me things she had told me before but never with the same desire to pull me into her suffering, so that I, too, would feel it. She seemed to want to prepare me for what awaited me, she was very worried about me and my future. This life of another, she said, clings to you in the womb first and then, when it finally comes out, it takes you prisoner, keeps you on a leash, you’re no longer your own master.

As soon as I was back on my feet I telephoned Lila, I didn’t want her to be angry that I hadn’t told her anything. “It was a wonderful experience,” I told her. “What?” “The pregnancy, the birth. Adele is beautiful, and very good.” She answered: “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

I felt abandoned but with the impression that I deserved it: I wasn’t capable of providing tranquility for my daughter. Yet I kept going, doggedly, even though I was more and more frightened. My organism was rejecting the role of mother.

But I persisted, I wore myself out taking charge of everything. Since the building had no elevator, I carried the stroller with the baby in it up and down, I did the shopping, came home loaded down with bags, I cleaned the house, I cooked, I thought: I’m becoming ugly and old before my time, like the women of the neighborhood.

I struggled for months, trying to keep at bay the more opaque parts of myself. Occasionally I surprised myself by praying to the Madonna, even though I considered myself an atheist, and was ashamed. More often, when I was alone in the house with the baby, I let out terrible cries, not words, only breath spilling out along with despair. But that difficult period wouldn’t end; it was a grueling, tormented time. At night, I carried the baby up and down the hall, limping. I no longer whispered sweet nonsense phrases, I ignored her and tried to think of myself. I was always holding a book, a journal, even though I hardly managed to read anything. During the day, when Adele slept peacefully—at first I called her Ade, without realizing how it sounded like Hades, a hell summed up in two syllables, so that when Pietro pointed it out I was embarrassed and began calling her Dede—I

When Pietro found Clelia in the house without even having been consulted he made a gesture of annoyance. “I don’t want slaves in my house,” he said. Adele answered calmly: “She’s not a slave, she’s a salaried employee.” And I, fortified by the presence of my mother-in-law, stammered: “Do you think I should be a slave?” “You’re a mother, not a slave.” “I wash and iron your clothes, I clean the house, I cook for you, I’ve given you a daughter, I bring her up in the midst of endless difficulties, I’m worn out.” “And who makes you do that, have I ever asked you for anything?”

But I also felt, just then, that in no way did my mother-in-law’s cultivated conversation arise from a true need to exchange ideas with me. Adele intended to systematically pull me out of the desperate state of an incompetent mother, she was rubbing words together to strike a spark and rekindle my frozen mind, my frozen gaze. But the truth was that she liked saving me more than listening to me.

Don’t make me read anything else, I’m not fit for it, I expect the best from you, I’m too certain that you can do better, I want you to do better, it’s what I want most, because who am I if you aren’t great, who am I? I whispered: Don’t worry, always tell me what you think, that’s the only way you can help me, you’ve helped me since we were children, without you I’m not capable of anything. And finally she smothered her sobs, she said, sniffling: Why did I start crying, I’m an idiot. She laughed: I didn’t want to upset you, I had prepared a positive speech, imagine, I wrote it, I wanted to make a good impression. I urged her to send it, I said, it could be that you know better than I do what I should write. And at that point we forgot the book, I told her that Elsa was born, we talked about Florence, Naples, the cholera. What cholera, she said sarcastically, there’s no cholera, there’s only the usual mess and the fear of dying in shit, more fear than facts, we eat a bag of lemons and no one shits anymore.

“As a girl I would have liked to be like you.” “Why? You think it’s nice to be born with everything all ready-made for you?” “Well, you don’t have to work so hard.” “You’re wrong—the truth is that it seems like everything’s been done already and you’ve got no good reason to do anything. All you feel is the guilt of what you are and that you don’t deserve it.” “Better that than to feel the guilt of failure.” “Is that what your friend Lina tells you?” “No.” “I prefer her to you. You’re two pieces of shit and nothing can change you, two examples of underclass filth. But you act all friendly and Lina doesn’t.”

My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition.

“You should leave your wife more time.” “She has all day available.” “I’m not kidding. If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one.” “What’s the crime?” “The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”