The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

She pointed to two large packages tied up in wrapping paper. In them were the school books.

“You have to try to relax.” “Help me.” “How.” “Stay near me.” “That’s what I’m doing.” “It’s not true. I tell you all my secrets, even the worst, you tell me hardly anything about yourself.” “You’re wrong. The only person I don’t hide anything from is you.” She shook her head no energetically, she said, “Even if you’re better than me, even if you know more things, don’t leave me.”

“I didn’t like Signora Lina. You are much better, you’re prettier and more intelligent. I talked about it with the Sarratores, too, and they agree with me.”

“No. Pay attention, Lenù. I know that you are good friends, my cousin told me. And I don’t want to interfere in things that have nothing to do with me. But a glance is enough for me to judge people. Signora Lina knows that you’re better than her and so she doesn’t love you the way you love her.”

I said to myself every day: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.

I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.

But she had imagined for me a road that my mother wasn’t able to imagine and had compelled me to take it. For this I was grateful to her.

But now it was clear, she was right and I was wrong. Nino was not fleeing his father out of fear of becoming like him: Nino already was his father and didn’t want to admit it.

Males are like that, she thought, at least the ones I’ve known: they have to have sex constantly, otherwise they’re unhappy.

He was genuinely happy to see me. The arduous years of middle school and high school we’d spent together had created an affectionate bond, and even though we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, we picked up again right away. We started joking. We talked easily, the words tumbling out, about our academic past, the teachers, the book I had published, his marriage, mine.

“It’s hard to say: you and I became friends immediately, you I love. With her that always seemed impossible. There was something tremendous about her that made me want to go down on my knees and confess my most secret thoughts.”

“Bravo, Lenù, compliments for everything, the book, the husband, the children. You might think that we’re the only ones who know you and instead even the Germans do. What you have, you deserve, you got it with hard work, without hurting anyone, without bullshitting with other people’s husbands. Thank you, now I really have to go, good night.”

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.

How long did it last? Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it.

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.

Lila is right, one writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain.

that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.

But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one’s own interests.

“Good, then tell the boys what they should read and what they shouldn’t. You are an example for us, you and your daughters. When we see you pass by on the street we always say: once Lenuccia was like us, and look how she is now. She doesn’t know what pride is, she is democratic, she lives here with us, just like us, even though she’s an important person. Ah, yes, those who study become good. Today everyone goes to school, everyone keeps his eyes on the books, and so in the future we’ll have so much of that goodness it’ll be coming out of our ears. But if you don’t read and you don’t study, which is what happened to Lina, it happened to all of us, you stay malicious, and malice is ugly. Isn’t it true, Lenù?”

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

“If I’d known that to get a diploma and a degree all you needed to have was free time, to be shut up in a place without worrying about earning a living, and, with discipline, learning by heart pages and pages of some books, I would have done it before,” he said once, in a teasing tone.