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

by Elena Ferrante

Ah, I had my faults, but I was certainly more a mother than she was.

I’m a scribble on a scribble, completely unsuitable for one of your books; forget it, Lenù, one doesn’t tell the story of an erasure.

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

It scared me when his tone became even slightly harsh; I was afraid I would have to acknowledge that something between us wasn’t working.

“There’s no man it’s not difficult to live with.”

I was wrong: it’s pointless to open the eyes of someone in love.”

I was made as I was made; she was elegant by nature.

“Now you have to admit that I was right.” “In what.” “You wanted him, and you lied to me.” “I was a girl.” “No, you were grown up. And you were more intelligent than me. You don’t know the harm you did letting me believe I was crazy.”

“If he hurts you, too, tell me.” I laughed: “Of course.” “Don’t laugh, I talked to Lina. She knows him well, she says you shouldn’t trust him. We respect you, he doesn’t.”

I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination—and

“You’re so involved in your own affairs that there’s not even a tiny spot left for me.”

I felt as if I had lost everything and was heading toward nothingness, prisoner of a bleakness that accentuated my guilt.

He had already hit me once, I knew that he would hit me now so violently that he would kill me, and I raised my arms abruptly to protect myself. But suddenly he changed his mind, turned, and once, twice, three times punched the metal closet where I kept the brooms. He would have continued if I hadn’t clung to his arm crying: Stop it, enough, you’ll hurt yourself.

can’t bear her, I can’t bear that at a moment like this, in front of Pietro, I also have to account for the fact that I am the daughter of this woman.

And she tried to grab me by the hair, she cried that she couldn’t stand it any longer, that it wasn’t possible that I, I, should want to ruin my life, running after Sarratore’s son, who was worse, much worse, than that man of shit who was his father.

I thought it was your friend Lina leading you on this evil course, but I was wrong, you, you, are the shameless one; without you, she’s become a fine person.

I felt as if she really wanted to kill me. In those moments I felt all the truth of the disappointment that I was causing her, all the truth of the maternal love that despaired of subjecting me to what she considered my good—that is, what she had never had and what I instead had and what until the day before had made her the most fortunate mother in the neighborhood—and was ready to turn into hatred and destroy me to punish me for my waste of God’s gifts.

I didn’t know what to do; never would I have expected that a separation would involve such torture.

Pietro knocked and said softly, with an unexpected gentleness: Don’t open the door, I’m not asking you to let me in; I just want to say that I didn’t want this, it’s too much, not even you deserve it.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.

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

“In all these years I believed that you were the mother figure I’d always felt the need for. I was wrong, my mother is better than you.”

I was hurt, not because she had revealed that for more than two years Nino had been telling me lies about the state of his marriage but because she had succeeded in proving to me what in fact she had said from the start: that my choice was mistaken, that I was stupid.

Am I always this furious other I? I, here in Naples, in this filthy house, I, who if I could would kill this man, plunge a knife into his heart with all my strength? Should I restrain this shadow—my mother, all our female ancestors—or should I let her go?

I don’t want you to pardon me, I want only to be understood. I interrupted him, angrier than ever, I cried: You lied to her and you lied to me, and you didn’t do it for love of either of us, you did it for yourself, because you don’t have the courage of your choices, because you’re a coward.

At the idea of hurting him and of no longer seeing him I withered painfully, the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother, and the woman-mother was disconnected from the woman-lover, and the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions.

I didn’t know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris.

My mother is my mother. Say what you like about my father and my brother, but leave her alone.”

she theorized that a woman without love for her origins is lost.

Only at that point did he say, in his refined way, that it was a good rule not to expect the ideal but to enjoy what is possible.

What if he loved you, seriously, and yet knew that he could love you only in this way?

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

Life now is this and can’t be other.

“Why are you having a lemonade?” I asked. “Because seeing you turns my stomach.”

“Imagine if I’ll throw away money on doctors and medicine.”

“I’ll take you to the doctor. What else do you feel?” “Everything that you brought on. Because of you a vein in my stomach ruptured.” “What do you mean?” “Yes, you’ve killed this body.” “I love you very much, Mamma.”

With that father they were growing up like children on television, and you, what do you do, you bring them to Naples?”

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.

Who am I for you, tell me why I’m in this city, why I wait for you every night, why I tolerate this situation.

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.

We liked sitting next to each other, I fair, she dark, I calm, she anxious, I likable, she malicious, the two of us opposite and united, and separate from the other pregnant women, whom we observed ironically.

already have two girls, if you really have a boy will you give it to me: and she replied, Yes, let’s do an exchange, no problem.

And yet on Ischia I was happy, full of love. But it was no use, my head always finds a chink to peer through, beyond—above, beneath, on the side—where the fear is.

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 know how I’m made.

Nino, on the other hand, reappeared many days later, as if he’d come back from a vacation. I couldn’t understand anything, he said, I took my children and fled. His children. What a responsible father. And the one I carried in my belly?