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

by Elena Ferrante

Ah, Lenù, what happens to us all, we’re like pipes when the water freezes, what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is. You remember what we did with my wedding picture? I want to continue on that path. The day will come when I reduce myself to diagrams, I’ll become a perforated tape and you won’t find me anymore.

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.

One after the other the French copy and the Spanish arrived, a copy in German without the crumpled look of the one sent by Antonio. 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. I leafed through them, I showed them to Pietro, I placed them on a bookshelf among other novels. Mute paper, useless paper.

You’re joking, she said, Pietro has trouble keeping together his own virility, imagine if he has the energy to impose on you his feeling for what a woman is. You want to know something? I would have sworn that you wouldn’t marry him. I would have sworn that, if you had, you would leave him in a year. I would have sworn that you would be careful not to have children. The fact that you’re still together seems to me a miracle. You’re really a good girl, poor you.

I was in a state of such exaltation that I couldn’t feel that I was wrong. In fact, it seemed to me that even the pain I caused, the humiliation and attacks I endured, were working in my favor. That unbearable experience not only would help me to become something I would be satisfied with but in the end, by inscrutable means, would also be useful to those who now were suffering.

I put on the kitchen table the letters I had written and I left. I thought: Something great is happening that will dissolve the old way of living entirely and I’m part of that dissolution.

How thrilling it was to squeeze his hand while the sound of the engines grew louder, louder, and louder, and the plane began its takeoff. How exciting it was to lift off from the ground with a jerk and see the houses that became parallelopipeds and the streets that changed into strips and the countryside that was reduced to a green patch, and the sea that inclined like a compact paving stone, and the clouds that fell below in a landslide of soft rocks, and the anguish, the pain, the very happiness that became part of a unique, luminous motion. It seemed to me that flying subjected everything to a process of simplification, and I sighed, I tried to lose myself. Every so often I asked Nino: Are you happy? And he nodded yes, kissed me. At times I had the impression that the floor under my feet—the only surface I could count on—was trembling.