The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante

I observed her, amazed and disappointed, and determined not to be like her, to become truly different and so show her that it was useless and cruel to frighten us with her repeated “You will never ever ever see me again”; instead she should have changed for real, or left home for real, left us, disappeared. How I suffered for her and for myself, how ashamed I was to have come out of the belly of such an unhappy person.

When he began with caresses and kisses, I became anxious, I felt that I was a stimulus abused for his solitary pleasures.

Losing your anchor, feeling yourself to be light is not an advantage, it’s cruel to yourself and to others.

Men, even before exchanging a kiss, made it clear to me, with polite conviction, that they had no intention of leaving their wives, or that they had the habits of a bachelor and wouldn’t give them up, or that they ruled out taking responsibility for my life and that of my daughters. I never complained; in fact it seemed to me predictable and therefore reasonable.

Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses.

You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore. “They think they know more than we do,” Giovanni confirmed. “Sometimes it’s true,” I said, “because to what we’ve taught them they add what they learn outside of us, in their time, which is always different—it’s not ours.”

Even that way of complaining about the present and the recent past, and idealizing the distant past, didn’t annoy me as it usually does. It seemed, rather, a way, like many, to convince oneself that there is always a slender branch of one’s life to hang on to, and, by being suspended there, get used to the inevitability of falling.

“Why did you leave your daughters?” I thought, searching for an answer that might help her. “I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.”

“And after your return?” “I was resigned to living very little for myself and a great deal for the two children: gradually I succeeded.” “So it passes,” she said. “What.” She made a gesture to indicate a vertigo but also a feeling of nausea. “The turmoil.” I remembered my mother and said: “My mother used another word, she called it a shattering.”