The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels, #4)

by Elena Ferrante

Montpellier, on the other hand, although it was far less exciting than Paris, gave me the impression that my boundaries had burst and I was expanding. The pure and simple fact of being in that place constituted in my eyes the proof that the neighborhood, Naples, Pisa, Florence, Milan, Italy itself were only tiny fragments of the world and that I would do well not to be satisfied with those fragments any longer.

When we were back on the street Pietro laughed: “You’re just like your mother.” “It’s not true.” “You’re right, it’s not true: you’re like your mother if she had had an education and had started writing novels.” “What do you mean?” “I mean you’re worse.”

“No, it was I who felt envy. I read your pages and threw them in the wastebasket. I couldn’t bear that you were so good.” For a few moments I said nothing. How important that article had been to me, how much I had suffered. I couldn’t believe it: was it possible that Professor Galiani’s favorite had been so envious of the lines of a middle-school student that he threw them away? I felt that Nino was waiting for my reaction, but I didn’t know how to place such a petty act within the radiant aura I had given him as a girl.

Although I now wrote about women’s autonomy and discussed it everywhere, I didn’t know how to live without his body, his voice, his intelligence. It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters.

It began one morning, at her house, when she told me why she was lame. She did it spontaneously, with no preamble. The angel of death, she said proudly, touched me when I was a child, with the exact same illness as now, but I screwed him, even though I was just a girl. And you’ll see, I’ll screw him again, because I know how to suffer—I learned at the age of ten, I haven’t stopped since—and if you know how to suffer the angel respects you, after a while he goes away. As she spoke she pulled up her dress and showed me the injured leg like the relic of an old battle. She smacked it, observing me with a fixed half-smile on her lips and terrified eyes.

She revealed that the only good thing in her life was the moment I came out of her belly, I, her first child. She revealed that the worst sin she had committed—a sin for which she would go to Hell—was that she had never felt attached to her other children, she had considered them a punishment, and still did so. She revealed finally, without circumlocutions, that her only true child was me.

Of course he was attentive, he regularly asked: Are you writing? But that was it. The central place that my effort to write had had at the start of our relationship had vanished.

"i dont paint anymore"

I grumbled, it had always been like that: if I didn’t agree to go with her she abandoned me. I nodded to Enzo to watch the girls—he seemed not to have noticed the Solaras—and in the same spirit with which I had followed her up the stairs to Don Achille’s house or in the stone-throwing battles with the boys, I followed her through the geometry of whitish buildings, packed with burial niches.

I realized in a flash that the memory was already literature and that perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

Elsa, for example, gleefully bestowed offensive nicknames in class and outside, she had no respect for anyone. She called Enzo the mute bumpkin; she called Lila the poisonous moth; she called Gennaro the laughing crocodile.

It occurred to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language.

The voters were angry with the old, the new, and the very new. If people had been horrified at those who wanted to overthrow the state, now they were disgusted by those who, pretending to serve it, had consumed it, like a fat worm in the apple. A black wave, which had lain hidden under gaudy trappings of power and a flow of words as impudent as it was arrogant, became increasingly visible and spread to every corner of Italy.

My daughters know it but only through words, and they become indignant, all the time enjoying the pleasures of existence, while it lasts. They attribute their well-being and their success to their father. But I—I who did not have privileges—am the foundation of their privileges.