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

by Elena Ferrante

Today I think that if it had been only the insult that wounded me—You’re an idiot, she had shouted on the telephone when I told her about Nino, and she had never, ever spoken to me like that before—I would have soon calmed down. In reality, what mattered more than that offense was the mention of Dede and Elsa. Think of the harm you’re doing to your daughters, she had warned me, and at the moment I had paid no attention. But over time those words acquired greater weight, and I returned to them often.

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.”

Pietro kind of ate with this

He was a man who emanated authority, even though authority is a patina and at times it doesn’t take much to crack it, if only for a few minutes, and glimpse a less edifying person.

What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check.

It shocked me seeing her so desperate for nothing, I wasn’t used to it. She, too, shook her head, incredulous, she laughed and cried, she laughed to let me know that she didn’t know what there was to cry about.

I observed her: she was a gray, wrinkled old woman, even though she wasn’t a hundred but sixty. I then first felt the impact of time, the force that was pushing me toward forty, the velocity with which life was consumed, the concreteness of the exposure to death: If it’s happening to her, I thought, there’s no escape, it will happen to me as well.