The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante

At the origin was a gesture of mine that made no sense, and which, precisely because it was senseless, I immediately decided not to speak of to anyone. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.

One should never arrive in an unknown place at night, everything is undefined, every object is easily exaggerated.

I realized long ago that I’ve held onto little of myself and everything of them. Even now, I was looking at Gino through the filter of Bianca’s experiences, of Marta’s, according to the tastes and passions I imagine as theirs.

It was enough to feel myself protected, without deadlines to keep in mind, nothing urgent to confront. No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a burden to myself.

remember the dialect on my mother’s lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can’t take you anymore, I can’t take any more. Commands, shouts, insults, life stretching into her words, as when a frayed nerve is just touched, and the pain scrapes away all self-control. Once, twice, three times she threatened us, her daughters, that she would leave, you’ll wake up in the morning and won’t find me here. And every morning I woke trembling with fear. In reality she was always there, in her words she was constantly disappearing from home.

Fragments of words, mere syllables. The moment arrives when your children say to you with unhappy rage, why did you give me life:

child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.

How many things are done and said to children behind the closed doors of houses.

Everything in those years seemed to me without remedy, I myself was without remedy.

At that time I had a constant stomachache from tension, from a sense of guilt: I thought that any unhappiness in my daughters was caused by a now proved failure of my love.

the mother’s power always seems to be that she gives unfairly, beginning in the living niche of the womb.

Marta is like that, she protects herself by seeing herself as deprived.

Years earlier, I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities. Ambition was still burning, fed by a young body, by an imagination full of plans, but I felt that my creative passion was cut off more and more thoroughly by the reality of dealings with the universities and the need to exploit opportunities for a possible career. I seemed to be imprisoned in my own head, without the chance to test myself, and I was frustrated.

How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say: I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.

The two girls, on the other hand—they’ve gone far away. They belong to another time, I’ve lost them to the future.

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.

was pleasant to dance with that slender, tall dark boy, with his shining eyes and mussed hair and dry palms. His nearness was so different from Giovanni’s. I felt the difference in bodies, in odors. I perceived it as a division in time: it seemed to me that that very evening, there in the square, had been split in half and that I had magically ended up dancing in two different stages of my life.