The Story of the Lost Child (L'amica geniale #4)

by Elena Ferrante

It was as if, since I loved Nino and he loved me, that love made everything good that happened to me and would happen to me nothing but a pleasant secondary effect.

I grumbled, it had always been like that: if I didn’t agree to go with her she abandoned me.

“Your sister, for example,” I said, “doesn’t confront emotional issues the way you do; she finds feelings that are too intense ridiculous, and she always stands back a step.”

Now that I was surrounded by admiration, I could admit without uneasiness that talking to her incited ideas, pushed me to make connections between distant things. In those years of being neighbors, I on the floor above, she below, it often happened. A slight push was enough and the seemingly empty mind discovered that it was full and lively.

In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed.

In the world below is the inferno. My daughters know it but only through words, and they become indignant, all the time enjoying the pleasures of existence, while it lasts.

She has always acted like that: when I don’t submit, see how she excludes me, punishes me, ruins even my pleasure