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

by Elena Ferrante

Yet only then did I understand that even if I had never been aware that he was different, I was fond of him precisely because he wasn’t like the other boys, precisely because of that peculiar alienation from the male behaviors of the neighborhood. And now, as he spoke, I discovered that that bond endured.

And so in a hidden corner of myself I was never really serene.

it’s your own body that’s angry with you, and in fact rebels against you until it becomes its own worst enemy, until it achieves the most terrible pain possible.

If it’s happening to her, I thought, there’s no escape, it will happen to me as well.

Lenù, I’m truly content now, it’s only you I’m worried about, but you are you and you’ve always been able to arrange things as you liked, so I have confidence.

I struggled to accept my mother’s death. Even though I didn’t shed a tear, the pain lasted for a long time and perhaps has never really gone away.

My pregnancy had brought back the pain in my hip and Imma’s birth hadn’t relieved it, but maybe that was why I decided not to go to the doctor. I nurtured that pain like a bequest preserved in my body.

Generally I tended to give more importance not to what would be helpful to me but to what he would appreciate. And then I didn’t want to admit that the same problems I had already experienced with Pietro were surfacing in our relationship.

I stopped looking into the distance, I began to think that in the immediate future I couldn’t expect from Nino more than what he was giving me, and that I had to decide if it was enough.

Yet something about him had begun to bother me.

I thought: maybe every relationship with men can only reproduce the same contradictions and, in certain environments, even the same smug responses.

That was how I realized that if I had forced him to delve into himself, it would have emerged that the highest example of female intelligence—maybe his own worship of female intelligence, even certain lectures claiming that the waste of women’s intellectual resources was the greatest waste of all—had to do with Lila, and that if our season of love was already darkening, the season of Ischia would always remain radiant for him.

The man for whom I left Pietro, I thought, is what he is because his encounter with Lila reshaped him that way.

Then everything seemed clearer. There was no split between that man who came after Lila and the boy with whom—before Lila—I had been in love since childhood. Nino was only one,

Nino was what he wouldn’t have wanted to be and yet always had been.

Ah, what a piece of shit, all I did was make mistakes.

When I reached Lila’s house I hated Nino as until that moment I had never hated anyone.

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.

That was when I learned that the story of Nino and Lila would have lasted a little longer if Antonio hadn’t cut it off with a beating. But I immediately discarded the hypothesis that they would have loved each other all their lives, and perhaps both he and she would have become utterly different people: to me it seemed not only unlikely but unbearable.

You just tell me that the son of Sarratore should repent the day he was born and I’ll make him repent.”

I’m laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who’ve wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I’m laughing out of despair, because I’ve never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don’t know if you can imagine, because at this moment I’m so ill that I think I’m fainting.

On that theme he often undertook long, very cultured monologues in which he tried to convince me that it wasn’t his fault but that of nature, of astral matter, of spongy bodies and their excessive liquids, of the immoderate heat of his loins—in short, of his exorbitant virility.

I managed to get the keys back and I threw him out. I realized then, and to my surprise, that I no longer felt anything for him. The long time that I had loved him dissolved conclusively that morning.

I felt strong, no longer a victim of my origins but capable of dominating them, of giving them a shape, of taking revenge on them for myself, for Lila, for whomever.

You’ve managed to have your whole life here, but not me: I feel I’m in pieces scattered all over.”

What you are, what you become, depends on what I, sacrificing, allow you to be, to become.

It seems to me that I conceived the child with a ghost, certainly you weren’t in the bed.

I only know that she feels fatherless and isn’t even sure she has a mother.”

Imma was unhappily compliant, she wanted everything and pretended to want nothing.

I thought, as always on those occasions: now that he doesn’t have to be a father every day he’s a very good father, even Imma adores him; maybe with men things can’t go otherwise: live with them for a while, have children, and then they’re gone. The superficial ones, like Nino, would go without feeling any type of obligation; the serious ones, like Pietro, wouldn’t fail in any of their duties and would if necessary give the best of themselves. Anyway, the time of faithfulness and permanent relationships was over for men and for women.

But so what, you’re Elena, I loved you so much, we have two children, and of course I still love you.

“It’s hard to observe every day that you are free and she has remained a prisoner. If there’s an inferno it’s inside her unsatisfied mind, I wouldn’t want to enter it even for a few seconds.”

“I didn’t want to hurt Dede, Mamma, I love Rino, it happened.” “It will happen countless more times.” “It’s not true.” “Worse for you. It means you’ll love Rino your whole life.”

A decade hadn’t served to calm her, her brain couldn’t find a quiet corner for her daughter.

You forgive me, too, she said, and, embracing me, concluded: Go, go, do better things than you’ve done so far. I’ve stayed near Imma also out of fear that someone might take her, and you loved my son truly also when your daughter left him. How many things you’ve endured for him, thank you. I’m so glad we’ve been friends for so long and that we are still.

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

I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.

I want to untie my name, slip it off me, throw it away, forget it.

I was in a corner with the baby and looking serenely at the young bodies of my daughters, charged with energy. They all resembled me and none of them did, their lives were very far from mine and yet I felt them as inseparable parts of me.

The world has changed tremendously and belongs more and more to them, less and less to me.

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.

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.

did it because everything that came from her, or that I ascribed to her, had seemed to me, since we were children, more meaningful, more promising, than what came from me.

It’s only and always the two of us who are involved: she who wants me to give what her nature and circumstances kept her from giving, I who can’t give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself.

Ah, Lila the shoemaker, Lila who imitated Kennedy’s wife, Lila the artist and designer, Lila the worker, Lila the programmer, Lila always in the same place and always out of place.

I intended to capture her, to have her beside me again, and I will die without knowing if I succeeded.

I looked around anxiously. I wanted Lila to emerge from stairway A or B or from the deserted porter’s room, thin, gray, her back bent. I wished it more than any other thing, I wished it more than an unexpected visit from my daughters with their children.

I thought: now that Lila has let herself be seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.