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

by Elena Ferrante

And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

“Let me be, Lenù. Let us all be. We ought to disappear, we deserve nothing, neither Gigliola nor me, no one.”

How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?

I found to my annoyance that I was poised between opposing feelings: on the one hand, a strong sympathy for all those young men and women who in that place were flaunting, gestures and voices, with an absolute lack of discipline, and, on the other, the fear that the disorder I had been fleeing since I was a child might, now, right here, seize me and fling me into the middle of the commotion, where an incontrovertible power—a Janitor, a Professor, the Rector, the Police—would quickly find me at fault, me, me who had always been good, and punish me.

That girl disturbed me. In the noisy smoke-filled classroom, she was an incongruous icon of maternity. She was younger than me, she had a refined appearance, responsibility for an infant. Yet she seemed determined to reject the persona of the young woman placidly absorbed in caring for her child. She yelled, she gesticulated, she asked to speak, she laughed angrily, she pointed to someone with contempt. And yet the child was part of her, he sought her breast, he lost it. Together they made up a fragile image, at risk, close to breaking, as if it had been painted on glass: the child would fall out of her arms or something would bump his head, an elbow, an uncontrolled movement.

What’s got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?

The extremely cultured friend of Adele’s Tarratano, the Venezuelan artist Juan, were they of the same clay as Nino’s father, train conductor, bad poet, hack journalist?

The weeping of mother and child moved me, I would have liked to embrace them both, hold them tight, rock them.

“A male, apart from the mad moments when you love him and he enters you, always remains outside. So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.

The thing offended me, as if Lila were squatting in a corner of my mind and I felt her feelings. I was bitter as she would have been if she had known, I was furious as if I had suffered the same wrong. Nino had betrayed Lila and me. We were, she and I, similarly humiliated, we loved him without ever being truly loved in return. 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.

Donato’s former lover had caught resemblances that had seemed nonexistent to me. But now it was clear, she was right and I was wrong. 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.

Even if he had his father’s nature, surely his passion for women told a different story.

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.”

my mind’s no help to me, it’s coming unglued like wallpaper,

I know what a comfortable life full of good intentions means, you can’t even imagine what real misery is.

You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. “Fuck off,” she said, “you and the working class.”

The better and truer you feel, the farther away you go.

“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.”

For once I’ve got something people will actually look at if I put it on the page, and you want to make me wait for doomsday?”

“When is the wedding?” “May 17th.” “The seventeenth? That’s bad luck, please change the date.”

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.

I didn’t know what to do. I caressed him, I whispered words of love, and yet I hoped that he would stop.

I was afraid that my mother’s gait had caught up with me, that she had settled in my body, that I would limp forever, like her.

“Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

With my mother, the rare times she called, I pretended I was ecstatic, but once I broke down and asked her: What happened to your leg, why do you limp. She answered: What does it matter to you, mind your own business.

We were born in the same environment, both had brilliantly got out of it. Why then was I sliding into despair? Because of marriage? Because of motherhood and Dede? Because I was a woman, because I had to take care of house and family and clean up shit and change diapers?

I was for the second time pregnant and yet empty.

I knew clearly, now, that our friendship was possible only if we controlled our tongues.

He keeps me separate from the confusion inside him, he’s never been interested in what I was and what I’ve become, what’s the point of giving him the book?

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 had in mind phrases like: the thread is broken, that fluency of yours that had a positive effect on me is gone, now I’m truly alone. But I didn’t say

And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.

“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.” She left me in the kitchen, speechless.

ok damn

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 got lost following Enzo, who could say proudly: Without her I wouldn’t be able to do it. Thus he conveyed to us his love and devotion, and it was clear that he liked to remind himself and others of the extraordinary quality of his woman, whereas my husband never praised me but, rather, reduced me to the mother of his children; even though I had had an education he did not want me to be capable of independent thought, he demeaned me by demeaning what I read, what interested me, what I said, and he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness.

And then I admitted that there had been a kind of admiration for her body, maybe that, yes, but I ruled out anything ever happening between us.

Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.

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.

I was angry with him, with everyone, with myself. From the chaotic feeling I had inside, the desire that Lila would get sick and die was re-emerging. Not out of hatred, I loved her more and more, I wouldn’t have been capable of hating her. But I couldn’t bear the emptiness of her evasion.

Finally he said the ugliest words: She and that Michele are made for each other, if they aren’t already lovers they will be. Then I revolted.

And as I was speaking I seemed to perceive something that at that moment not even he knew: Lila had affected him, seriously; Pietro had grasped her exceptionality so well that he was frightened by it and now felt the need to vilify her. He was afraid not for himself, I think, but for me and for our relationship. He was afraid that, even at a distance, she would tear me away from him, destroy us. And to protect me he overdid it, he slandered her, in a confused way he wanted me to be disgusted by her and expel her from my life. I whispered good night, and turned the other way.

“So? Did you congratulate Elisa? Does one sleep well in Marcello’s house? Are you glad the old witch is sixty?”

Alfò, you don’t know anything about what I’m like, and even if we’re friends and you study me and spy on me and copy me, you’ll never know anything. So—he was having a good time—what do I do, I suffer being the way I am. And he confessed to me that he has always loved Michele—yes, Michele Solara—and he wishes Michele would like him the way he thinks Michele likes me. You understand, Lenù, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us. All right, I said, we’re friends, but get out of your mind that you can be a woman like me, all you’d succeed in being is what a woman is according to you men. You can copy me, make a portrait as precise as an artist, but my shit will always remain mine, and yours will be yours.

we’re like pipes when the water freezes, what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is.

The day will come when I reduce myself to diagrams, I’ll become a perforated tape and ...

Lila will take him back, I fantasized, she’ll manage to see him again, she’ll influence him the way she knows how, she’ll get him away from his wife and son,

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

They were ugly books: on the cover were women in black dresses, men with drooping mustaches and a cloth cap on their head, laundry hung out to dry.

And it was pointless to explain to him, anxiously, that even if my words and tone were argumentative, the situation actually seemed very dangerous and I was worried. I’m afraid for you, I said, for the children, for me. But he didn’t console me.

I thought about it for a moment, and continued: Maybe there’s something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; 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. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed.