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

by Elena Ferrante

Accept that to be adult is to disappear, is to learn to hide to the point of vanishing?

It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.

Even when they asked each other questions and answered them, they ignored each other and addressed me, as if I were their only interlocutor.

I answered with a half smile: No, I’m sorry, we really have to run. And I glanced at Nino, who immediately gestured to the waiter, to pay. Lila said: I’ve already done it, and while he protested she turned to me again, insisting in a cajoling tone: “Gennaro isn’t coming by himself, Enzo’s bringing him. And someone else is coming with them, someone who’s dying to see you, it would really be terrible if you left without seeing him.”

Shall I tell the girls that you won’t be here for Christmas Eve dinner?” “Yes, I probably won’t arrive in time.” He burst into laughter, he hung up. I traveled in a totally empty, frigid train. Not even the conductor came by. I felt as if I had lost everything and was heading toward nothingness, prisoner of a bleakness that accentuated my guilt. I arrived in Florence in the middle of the night, and couldn’t find a taxi. I carried my suitcase through the cold, on the deserted streets; even the Christmas bells had long since vanished into the night. I used my keys to enter. The apartment was dark and there was an anguished silence. I went through the rooms, no trace of the children, or of Adele. Tired, terrified, but also exasperated, I looked for at least a note that would tell me where they had gone. Nothing. The house was in perfect order.

“Think about it. A woman separated, with two children and your ambitions, has to take account of reality and decide what she can give up and what she can’t.”

“Then why didn’t they publish it?” “Out of envy.” I burst out laughing. “The editors were envious of me?” “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. The seconds passed and I tried, disoriented, to keep it close to me, so that it could not reinforce the bad reputation that, according to Adele, Nino had in Milan, or the invitation not to trust him that had come to me from Lila and Antonio. Then I shook myself, the positive side of that confession leaped to my eyes, and I embraced him. There was, in essence, no need for him to tell me that episode, it was a bad deed that was very distant in time. And yet he had just told me, and that need of his to be sincere, greater than any personal gain, even at the risk of putting himself in a terrible light, moved me. Suddenly, starting from that moment, I felt that I could always believe him.

But there is doing and doing, Sarratore is intelligence without traditions, he would rather be liked by those in charge than fight for an idea, he’ll become a very useful technocrat.

“I, too, am an intelligence without traditions.” She smiled. “Yes, you are, too, and in fact you are unreliable.” Silence. Adele had spoken serenely, as if the words had no emotional charge but were limited to recording the facts. Still, I felt offended. “What do you mean?” “That I trusted a son to you and you didn’t treat him honestly. If you wanted someone else, why did you marry him?”

From me and from my husband you’ll have nothing anymore, in fact I’ll take away everything I’ve given you.” I took a deep breath, I tried to keep my voice calm, just as she continued to do. “Adele,” I said, “I am Elena Greco and my daughters are my daughters. I don’t give a damn about you Airotas.” She nodded, pale, and her expression was now severe. “It’s obvious that you are Elena Greco, it’s now far too obvious. But the children are my son’s daughters and we will not allow you to ruin them.”

It was humiliating to have to admit that a little fame, and love for Nino, could obscure Dede and Elsa.

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.

While Silvia said that I should take my daughters back, and Mariarosa said that, as long as I hadn’t found a stable arrangement, Dede and Elsa were fine with their grandparents, Franco exaggerated his praise of my capacities, ironically defined as male, and insisted that I should continue to refine them without getting lost in female obligations.

I surprised myself by looking anxiously for the faces of Pasquale and Nadia; I didn’t find them. We were released at dawn, returned to the place where we had been forced to leave our car. No one apologized: we had an Italian license plate, we were Italians, the check was obligatory. I was surprised by my instinct to seek in Germany, among the mug shots of criminals all over the world, that of the very person who was then close to Lila’s heart. Pasquale Peluso, that night, seemed to me a sort of rocket launched from the narrow space in which Lila had enclosed herself to remind me, in my much broader space, of her presence in the whirlwind of planetary events. For a few seconds Carmen’s brother became the point of contact between her diminishing world and my expanding world.

a woman without love for her origins is lost.

I observed Nino instead. How handsome he was as he regained my daughters’ trust. Here, he was coming back into the room with them, pretending nothing had happened, praising them as he addressed Mariarosa—See, aunt, what exceptional young ladies?—and the charm came naturally to him, the light touch of his fingers on her bare knee.

view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust,

Then out of the blue came a conversation that surprised me. Dede, in front of Elsa, who listened in some alarm, said in the tone she took when she wanted to explain a problem full of perils: “You know that Aunt Lina sleeps with Enzo, but they’re not married?” “Who told you?” “Rino. Enzo isn’t his father.” “Rino told you that, too?” “Yes. So I asked Aunt Lina and she explained to me.” “What did she explain?” She was tense. She observed me to see if she was making me angry. “Shall I tell you?” “Yes.” “Aunt Lina has a husband just as you do, and that husband is Rino’s father, his name is Stefano Carracci. Then she has Enzo, Enzo Scanno, who sleeps with her. And the exact same thing happens with you: you have Papa, whose name is Airota, but you sleep with Nino, whose name is Sarratore.” I smiled to reassure her. “How did you ever learn all those surnames?” “Aunt Lina talked to us about it, she said that they’re stupid. Rino came out of her stomach, he lives with her, but he’s called Carracci like his father. We came out of your stomach, we live much more with you than with Papa, but we’re called Airota.” “So?” “Mamma, if someone talks about Aunt Lina’s stomach he doesn’t say this is Stefano Carracci’s stomach, he says this is Lina Cerullo’s stomach. The same goes for you: your stomach is Elena Greco’s stomach, not Pietro Airota’s.” “And what does that mean?” “That it would be more correct for Rino to be called Rino Cerullo and us Dede and Elsa Greco.” “Is that your idea?” “No,...

Loving courses together with hating, and I can’t, I can’t manage to solidify myself around any goodwill. Maestra Oliviero was right, I’m bad. I don’t even know how to keep friendship alive. You’re kind, Lenù, you’ve always had a lot of patience. But tonight I finally understood it: there is always a solvent that acts slowly, with a gentle heat, and undoes everything, even when there’s no earthquake. So please, if I insult you, if I say ugly things to you, stop up your ears, I don’t want to do it and yet I do. Please, please, don’t leave me, or I’ll fall in.

I asked Nino to find out if, through the doctors who were connected to his in-laws and had taken care of my mother before, it would be possible to avoid the wards and get a private room. But Nino said that he was opposed to using connections or appeals, that in a public institution treatment should be the same for everyone, and he muttered ill-humoredly: in this country we have to stop thinking that even for a bed in the hospital you have to be a member of a lodge or rely on the Camorra.

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.

Meanwhile Enzo came home from work, cordially laconic as usual.

“You want to continue with Nino?” I could hear her opposition and I almost shouted: “What can I do?” “The only thing possible: leave him.” For her it was the right solution, she had always wanted it to end like that, she had never concealed it from me. I said: “I’ll think about it.” “No, you won’t think about it. You’ve already decided to pretend it was nothing and go on.” I avoided answering but she pressed me, she said that I shouldn’t throw myself away, that I had another destiny, that if I went on like that I would lose myself. I noticed that she was becoming harsh, I felt that to restrain me she was on the point of telling me what for a long time I had wanted to know and what for a long time she had been silent about. I was afraid, but had I not myself, on various occasions, tried to urge her to be clear? And now, had I not come to her also so that finally she would tell me everything? “If you have something to tell me,” I said, “speak.” And she made up her mind, she looked at me, I looked down. She said that Nino had often sought her out. She said that he had asked her to come back to him, both before he had become involved with me and after. She said that when they took my mother to the hospital he had been particularly insistent. She said that while the doctors were examining my mother and they were waiting for the results in the waiting room he had sworn to her that he was with me only to feel closer to her. “Look at me,” she whispered. “I know I’m mean to tell yo...

As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first.

And the chains of motherhood weakened, sometimes I forgot to call Lila, to say goodnight to the girls. Only when I noticed that I would have been capable of living without them did I return to myself, did I feel remorse.

But that was petty compared to what happened a few weeks later. Things had scarcely calmed down when Lila began to quarrel with Alfonso, who was now indispensable to the operations of Basic Sight and yet had become increasingly unreliable. He missed important appointments, when he did make them his attitude was an embarrassment, he was heavily made up, he spoke of himself using the feminine. By now Lila had disappeared completely from his face and, in spite of his efforts, he was regaining his masculinity. In his nose, in his forehead, in his eyes something of his father, Don Achille, was appearing, and he himself was disgusted by it. As a result he seemed continuously in flight from his own body, which was putting on weight, and sometimes nothing was heard of him for days. When he reappeared he almost always showed signs of beatings. He went back to work but listlessly. Then one day he disappeared for good. Lila and Enzo looked for him everywhere, without success. His body was found days later on the beach at Coroglio. He had been beaten to death somewhere else and then thrown into the sea. At the time I couldn’t believe it. When I realized that it was all brutally true I was seized by a grief that wouldn’t go away. I saw him again as he had been in our school days, gentle, attentive to others, beloved by Marisa, tormented by Gino, the pharmacist’s son. Sometimes I even recalled him behind the counter at the grocery during his summer vacations, when he was obliged to do a...

a state of anxiety now seemed to me inherent to writing—I

I wanted her to say in the authentic Neapolitan of our childhood: What the fuck do you want, Lenù, I’m like this because I lost my daughter, and maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s dead, but I can’t bear either of those possibilities, because if she’s alive she’s alive far away from me, she’s in a place where horrible things are happening to her, which I see clearly, I see them all day and all night as if they were happening right before my eyes; but if she’s dead I’m dead, too, dead here inside, a death more unbearable than real death, which is death without feeling, while this death forces you to feel everything, every day, to wake up, wash, dress, eat and drink, work, talk to you who don’t understand or won’t understand, to you who even if I just see you, all set, fresh from the hairdresser, with your daughters who do well in school, who always do everything perfectly, who aren’t spoiled even by this place of shit, which, rather, seems to do them good—makes them even more confident, even more arrogant, even more sure they have the right to take everything—all this makes me more furious than I already was: so go, go, leave me in peace, Tina would have been better than all of you, and instead they took her, and I can’t bear it anymore.

“They know that if they don’t read at least one book a month from the first page to the last I won’t give them a lira. I’m doing the right thing, no, Lenù?”

I realized with some annoyance that she was imitating my walk. “Don’t make fun of me, my hip hurts.” “Nothing hurts, Lenù. You invented that limp in order not to let your mother die completely, and now you really do limp, and I’ve studied you, it’s good for you. The Solaras took your bracelet and you said nothing, you weren’t sorry, you weren’t worried. At the time I thought it was because you don’t know how to rebel, but now I understand it’s not that. You’re getting old properly. You feel strong, you stopped being a daughter, you truly became a mother.” I felt uneasy, I repeated: “It’s just a little pain.” “Even pain does you good. You just needed a slight limp and now your mother stays quietly inside you. Her leg is glad that you limp and so you, too, are glad. Isn’t that true?”

she had long since cut off even the slightest contact between our bodies; if by chance we touched she sprang back as if by a force of repulsion.

it depressed me to see that big slow body around, available at the slightest nod and yet moping, always obedient except when it came to basic rules like remembering to raise the toilet seat when he peed, leaving the bathtub clean, not leaving his dirty socks and underwear on the floor.

If Imma leaves me, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?

she understood that I was the reason she had been deprived of the pleasure of standing publicly next to her father, and she said: You don’t love me, Mamma, you send Dede and Elsa to Pietro, but I can’t even spend five minutes with Papa. When Nino wasn’t reelected Imma began to cry, she muttered between her sobs that it was my fault.

My father thought you could change one thing here and one there, deliberately. But when you change almost nothing like that you’re forced to enter into the system of lies and either you tell them, like the others, or they get rid of you.

Sometimes you make a mistake, but when as a child you haven’t been taught what the public good is, you don’t understand what a crime is.

What a grave negligence it had been to be born and live in Naples without making an effort to know it. I was about to leave the city for the second time, I had been there altogether for thirty full years of my life, and yet of the place where I was born I knew almost nothing.

“I’ve often thought that they might have taken Tina because of that photo.” “What?” “They thought they were stealing your daughter, and instead they stole mine.”

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.

electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously:

In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.

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.

But now they were paging through them, they even read some sentences aloud. Those books originated in the climate in which I had lived, in what had influenced me, in the ideas that had impressed me. I had followed my time, step by step, inventing stories, reflecting. I had pointed out evils, I had staged them. Countless times I had anticipated redemptive changes that had never arrived. I had used the language of every day to indicate things of every day. I had stressed certain themes: work, class conflicts, feminism, the marginalized. Now I was hearing my sentences chosen at random and they seemed embarrassing. Elsa—Dede was more respectful, Imma more cautious—was reading in an ironic tone from my first novel, she read from the story about the invention of women by men, she read from books with many prizes. Her voice skillfully highlighted flaws, excesses, tones that were too exclamatory, the aged ideologies that I had supported as indisputable truths. Above all she paused with amusement on the vocabulary, she repeated two or three times words that had long since passed out of fashion and sounded foolish. What was I witnessing? An affectionate mockery in the Neapolitan manner—certainly my daughter had learned that tone there—which, however, line by line, was becoming a demonstration of the scant value of all those volumes, sitting there along with their translations?

me. I loved Lila. I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last. I thought it was my task. I was convinced that she herself, as a girl, had assigned it to me.

There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has ever invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors and yet we are resentful if others say: This little thing you did doesn’t interest me, in fact it bores me, who gave you the right.

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.