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

by Elena Ferrante

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.

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.

Lila, that is. Lila, as usual: Lila who doesn’t say things, she does them; Lila who is steeped in the culture of the neighborhood and takes no account of police, the law, the state, but believes there are problems that can be resolved only with the shoemaker’s knife; Lila who knows the horror of inequality; Lila who, at the time of the collective of Via dei Tribunali, found in revolutionary theory and action a way of applying her hyperactive mind; Lila who has transformed into political objectives her rages old and new; Lila who moves people like characters in a story; Lila who has connected, is connecting, our personal knowledge of poverty and abuse to the armed struggle against the fascists, against the owners, against capital.

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.