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

by Elena Ferrante

I realized the offensiveness of those words; I should have rebuked him. From that mistaken sex, I should have said to him, from an experience of which you now express a negative opinion, came a child, little Gennaro, who is very intelligent: it’s not nice for you to talk like that, you can’t reduce the question to who is made badly and who is made well. Lila ruined herself for you.

Time, as in all things, was decisive. Nino would last a single night, he would leave me in the morning. Even though I had known him forever, he was made of dreams, and holding on to him forever would have been impossible: he came from childhood, he was constructed out of childish desires, he had no concreteness, he didn’t face the future. Pietro, on the other hand, was of the present, massive, a boundary stone. He marked a land new to me, a land of good reasons, governed by rules that originated in his family and endowed everything with meaning. Grand ideals flourished, the cult of the reputation, matters of principle.

We are nothing to you, you tell us nothing until the last minute, the young lady thinks she’s somebody because she has an education, because she writes books, because she’s marrying a professor, but my dear, you came out of this belly and you are made of this substance, so don’t act superior and don’t ever forget that if you are intelligent, I who carried you in here am just as intelligent, if not more, and if I had had the chance I would have done the same as you, understand?

And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies.

I should have escaped from here, too, following the example of you two, who are intelligent. But I was born stupid and I can’t do anything about it.”

“If you had studied you would have been as successful as Greco.” “How can you say that?” “It’s my job.” “You professors insist so much on education because that’s how you earn a living, but studying is of no use, it doesn’t even improve you—in fact it makes you even more wicked.” “Has Elena become more wicked?” “No, not her.” “Why not?” Lila stuck the wool cap on her son’s head. “We made a pact when we were children: I’m the wicked one.”

The coarse language of the environment we came from was useful for attack or self-defense, but, precisely because it was the language of violence, it hindered, rather than encouraged, intimate confidences.

“Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always, even when you leave Naples. That way I’ll know that you see me and I’m at peace.”

Do you think I exist? Look at me, in your view do I exist? She hit her full breasts with her open hand, but she did it as if to demonstrate physically that the hand went right through her, that her body, because of Michele, wasn’t there. He had taken everything of her, immediately, when she was almost a child. He had consumed her, crumpled her, and now that she was twenty-five he was used to her, he didn’t even look at her anymore.

and Michele who attracted women like Nino but, unlike him, was capable of an absolute passion, and Lila, Lila who had aroused that passion, a rapture that was fed not only by a craving for possession, by thuggish bragging, by revenge, by low-level desire, as she might say, but was an obsessive form of appreciation of a woman, not devotion, not subservience, but rather a sought-after form of male love, a complex feeling that was capable—with determination, with a kind of ferocity—of making a woman the chosen among women.

With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me. I couldn’t understand if those words were in fact intended to apologize to me, or if she was lying, concealing feelings that she had no intention of confiding to me, or if she was aiming at a final farewell. Certainly she was false, and she was ungrateful, and I, in spite of all that had changed for me, continued to feel inferior. I felt that I would never free myself from that inferiority, and that seemed to me intolerable. I wished—and I couldn’t keep the wish at bay—that the cardiologist had been wrong, that Armando had been right, that she really was ill and would die.

What am I seeking? To change my origins? To change, along with myself, others, too? Repopulate this now deserted city with citizens not assailed by poverty or greed, not bitter or angry, who could delight in the splendor of the landscape like the divinities who once inhabited it? Indulge my demon, give him a good life and feel happy? I had used the power of the Airotas, people who for generations had been fighting for socialism, people who were on the side of men and women like Pasquale and Lila, not because I thought I would be fixing all the broken things of the world but because I was in a position to help a person I loved, and it seemed wrong not to do so. Had I acted badly? Should I have left Lila in trouble? Never again, never again would I lift a finger for anyone.

“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.”

it was inequality that made school laborious for some (me, for example), and almost a game for others (Pietro, for example); on the other hand, inequality or not, one had to study, and do well, in fact very well—I was proud of my journey, of the intelligence I had demonstrated, and I refused to believe that my labor had been in vain, if in certain ways obtuse. And yet, for obscure reasons, with Pietro I gave expression only to the injustice of inequality. I said to him: You act as if all your students were the same, but it’s not like that, it’s a form of sadism to insist on the same results from kids who haven’t had the same opportunities.

As in one of our childhood games, when it seemed to us that we were in all ways complementary, I followed her step by step, adding my voice excitedly to hers, and I had the impression that together—the girls of the past and the adults of the present—we were arriving at a truth that for two decades had been unspeakable. Think about it, she said, who really gained from that murder, who ended up with the money-lending market that Don Achille controlled? Yes, who? We found the answer in unison: the person who had gotten something out of it was the woman with the red book, Manuela Solara, the mother of Marcello and Michele. She killed Don Achille, we said excitedly, and then, turning melancholy, said softly, first I, then she: but what are we talking about, that’s enough, we’re still children, we’ll never grow up.

You mustn’t write those things, Lenù, you aren’t that, none of what I read resembles you, it’s an ugly, ugly book, and the one before it was, too.

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.

We had maintained the bond between our two stories, but by subtraction. We had become for each other abstract entities, so that now I could invent her for myself both as an expert in computers and as a determined and implacable urban guerrilla, while she, in all likelihood, could see me both as the stereotype of the successful intellectual and as a cultured and well-off woman, all children, books, and highbrow conversation with an academic husband. We both needed new depth, body, and yet we were distant and couldn’t give it to each other.

And I realized that my voice was taking on the tones of the dialect, out of nervousness, that words were coming to me in the Neapolitan of the neighborhood, that the neighborhood—from the courtyard to the stradone and the tunnel—was imposing its language on me, its mode of acting and reacting, its figures, those which in Florence seemed faded images and here were flesh and blood.

what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is.

Hers was a life in motion, mine was stopped.

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. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

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.