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

by Elena Ferrante

hate men who are too intelligent and tell me how I should be; I prefer this suffering and reflective man I’ve taken in and am caring for.

The fact that you’re still together seems to me a miracle. You’re really a good girl, poor you.

I sometimes imagined what my life and Lila’s would have been if we had both taken the test for admission to middle school and then high school, if together we had studied to get our degree, elbow to elbow, allied, a perfect couple, the sum of intellectual energies, of the pleasures of understanding and the imagination. We would have written together, we would have been authors together, we would have drawn power from each other, we would have fought shoulder to shoulder because what was ours was inimitably ours.

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.

I had to learn to be satisfied with myself.

“Your father?” “The usual. But time passes, one grows up, and recently we’ve reconciled. Like everyone, he has his flaws and his virtues.”

He turned to Pietro: “How much trouble we’ve made for fathers and for the family. Now that it’s our turn, how are we doing?”

Well u, youre a shithead just like your father hoe

As soon as the door closed behind him I was overwhelmed by the dreariness of the apartment.

Instead he said contentedly: Finally a person it’s worthwhile spending time with. That remark, I don’t know why, hurt me.

But I also felt as if my body had the consistency of eggshell, and a slight pressure on my arm, on my forehead, on my stomach would be enough to break it and dig out all my secrets, in particular those which were secrets even to me.

I hated competing in looks with another woman, especially under the gaze of a man, and I suffered at the thought of finding myself in the same place with the beautiful girl I had seen in the photograph, it made me sick to my stomach.

And I felt more and more ungainly, too much bosom, too much ass, wide hips, and that dirty-blond hair, that big nose. I had the body of my mother, a graceless body, all I needed was for the sciatica to return and start limping.

I said who gives a damn about her, him, all of them.

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.

His project was to liberate me by disparaging him, restore me to myself by demolishing him. But in doing so did he realize that he had proposed himself, like it or not, as an alternative model of virility?

“Tell me you won’t forget me, tell me you won’t leave me, tell me you love me.”

I thought you would never answer me again. Then he added, relieved: but I would have telephoned forever, in your absence I would have loved the sound of the telephone, that sound in the void, it seemed the only thing that remained to me.

But when I saw him exhausted and happy, something suddenly went bad in my mind. For me that was a unique experience, for him a repetition.

Did he know how to love and induce one to love only in that excessive way, did he not know others? Was this mad love of ours the repeat of other mad loves? Was he exploiting a prototype: wanting me in this way, without caring about anything, was it the same way he had wanted Lila?

what did he want from me, what should I do? I loved Nino, I had always loved him: how could I tear him out of my breast, my head, my belly, now that he wanted me, too?

Not one of my true desires had ever prevailed, I had always found a way of channeling every yearning. Now enough, I said to myself, let it all explode, me first of all.

“You’re throwing away everything you are for Nino? You’re ruining your family for him? You know what will happen to you? He’ll use you, he’ll suck your blood, he’ll take away your will to live and abandon you. Why did you study so much? What fucking use has it been for me to imagine that you would enjoy a wonderful life for me, too? I was wrong, you’re a fool.”