The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  Only of him did she speak with respect, at length, and right afterward she asked about Pietro.

  “Everything’s going well with your husband?”

  “Very well.”

  “And for me with Enzo.”

  When she hung up, her voice left a trail of images and sounds of the past that stayed in my mind for hours: the courtyard, the dangerous games, the doll she had thrown into the cellar, the dark stairs we climbed to Don Achille’s to retrieve it, her wedding, her generosity and her meanness, how she had taken Nino. She can’t tolerate my good fortune, I thought fearfully, she wants me with her again, under her, supporting her in her affairs, in her wretched neighborhood wars. Then I said to myself: How stupid I’ve been, what use has my education been, and I pretended everything was under control. To my sister Elisa, who called frequently, I said that being a mother was wonderful. To Carmen Peluso, who told me about her marriage to the gas-pump owner on the stradone, I responded: What good news, I wish you every happiness, say hello to Pasquale, what’s he up to. With my mother, the rare times she called, I pretended I was ecstatic, but once I broke down and asked her: What happened to your leg, why do you limp. She answered: What does it matter to you, mind your own business.

  I struggled for months, trying to keep at bay the more opaque parts of myself. Occasionally I surprised myself by praying to the Madonna, even though I considered myself an atheist, and was ashamed. More often, when I was alone in the house with the baby, I let out terrible cries, not words, only breath spilling out along with despair. But that difficult period wouldn’t end; it was a grueling, tormented time. At night, I carried the baby up and down the hall, limping. I no longer whispered sweet nonsense phrases, I ignored her and tried to think of myself. I was always holding a book, a journal, even though I hardly managed to read anything. During the day, when Adele slept peacefully—at first I called her Ade, without realizing how it sounded like Hades, a hell summed up in two syllables, so that when Pietro pointed it out I was embarrassed and began calling her Dede—I tried to write for the newspaper. But I no longer had time—and certainly not the desire—to travel around on behalf of l’Unità. So the things I wrote had no energy, they were merely demonstrations of my formal skill, flourishes lacking substance. Once, having written an article, I had Pietro read it before dictating it to the editorial office. He said: “It’s empty.”

  “In what sense?”

  “It’s just words.”

  I felt offended, and dictated it just the same. It wasn’t published. And from then on, with a certain embarrassment, both the local and the national editorial offices began to reject my texts, citing problems of space. I suffered, I felt that everything that up to a short time earlier I had taken as an unquestioned condition of life and work was rapidly collapsing around me, as if violently jolted from inaccessible depths. I read just to keep my eyes on a book or a newspaper, but it was as if I had stopped at the signs and no longer had access to the meanings. Two or three times I came across articles by Nino, but reading them didn’t give me the usual pleasure of imagining him, of hearing his voice, of enjoying his thoughts. I was happy for him, certainly: if he was writing it meant that he was well, he was living his life who knows where, with who knows whom. But I stared at the signature, I read a few lines, I retreated, as if every one of his sentences, black on white, made my situation even more unbearable. I lost interest in things, I couldn’t even bother with my appearance. And besides, for whom would I bother? I saw no one, only Pietro, who treated me courteously, but I perceived that for him I was a shadow. At times I seemed to think with his mind and I imagined I felt his unhappiness. Marrying me had only complicated his existence as a scholar, and just when his fame was growing, especially in England and the United States. I admired him, and yet he irritated me. I always spoke to him with a mixture of resentment and inferiority.

  Stop it, I ordered myself one day, forget l’Unità, it will be enough if I can find the right approach for a new book: as soon as it’s done, everything will be in order. But what book? To my mother-in law, to the publisher, I claimed that I was at a good point, but I was lying, I lied on every occasion in the friendliest tones. In fact all I had was notebooks crammed with idle notes, nothing else. And when I opened them, at night or during the day, according to the schedule that Dede imposed on me, I fell asleep without realizing it. One late afternoon Pietro returned from the university and found me in a condition worse than the one I had surprised him in some time earlier: I was in the kitchen, fast sleep, with my head resting on the table; the baby had missed her feeding and was screaming, off in the bedroom. Her father found her in the crib, half naked, forgotten. When Dede calmed down, greedily attached to the bottle, Pietro said in despair: “Is it possible that you don’t have anyone who could help you?”

  “Not in this city, and you know that perfectly well.”

  “Have your mother come, your sister.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then ask your friend in Naples: you did so much for her, she’ll do the same for you.”

  I started. For a fraction of a second, part of me had the clear sensation that Lila was in the house already, present: if once she had been hiding inside me, now, with her narrow eyes, her furrowed brow, she had slipped into Dede. I shook my head energetically. Get rid of that image, that possibility, what was I looking onto?

  Pietro resigned himself to calling his mother. Reluctantly he asked her if she could come and stay with us for a little while.

  66.

  I entrusted myself to my mother-in-law with an immediate sense of relief, and here, too, she showed herself to be the woman I would have liked to resemble. In the space of a few days she found a big girl named Clelia, barely twenty, and originally from the Maremma, to whom she gave detailed instructions about taking care of the house, the shopping, the cooking. When Pietro found Clelia in the house without even having been consulted he made a gesture of annoyance.

  “I don’t want slaves in my house,” he said.

  Adele answered calmly: “She’s not a slave, she’s a salaried employee.”

  And I, fortified by the presence of my mother-in-law, stammered: “Do you think I should be a slave?”

  “You’re a mother, not a slave.”

  “I wash and iron your clothes, I clean the house, I cook for you, I’ve given you a daughter, I bring her up in the midst of endless difficulties, I’m worn out.”

  “And who makes you do that, have I ever asked you for anything?”

  I couldn’t bear to argue, but Adele did, she crushed her son with a sometimes ferocious sarcasm, and Clelia remained. Then she took the child away from me, carried the crib into the room I had given her, managed with great precision the schedule of bottles both at night and during the day. When she noticed that I was limping, she took me to a doctor, a friend of hers, who prescribed various injections. She herself appeared every morning and every evening with the syringe and the vials, to blithely stick the needle into my buttocks. I felt better right away, the pain in my leg disappeared, my mood improved, I was happier. But Adele didn’t stop there. She politely insisted that I attend to myself, she sent me to the hairdresser, made me go back to the dentist. And above all she talked to me constantly about the theater, the cinema, a book she was translating, another she was editing, what her husband or other famous people whom she called familiarly by name had written in this or that journal. From her I heard for the first time about the new radical feminist tracts. Mariarosa knew the women who were writing them; she was infatuated with them, admired them. Not Adele. She said with her usual ironic attitude that they went on and on about the feminist question as if it could be dealt with separately from the class conflict. Read them anyway, she advised me, and left me a couple of those little volumes with a final cryptic phrase: Don’t miss anything, if you want to be a writer. I put them aside, I didn’t want to waste time with writings that Adele herself
disparaged. But I also felt, just then, that in no way did my mother-in-law’s cultivated conversation arise from a true need to exchange ideas with me. Adele intended to systematically pull me out of the desperate state of an incompetent mother, she was rubbing words together to strike a spark and rekindle my frozen mind, my frozen gaze. But the truth was that she liked saving me more than listening to me.

  And yet. Yet Dede, in spite of everything, continued to cry at night, I heard her and became agitated, she gave off a sense of unhappiness that undid the beneficial action of my mother-in-law. And though I had more time I still couldn’t write. And Pietro, who was usually controlled, in the presence of his mother became uninhibited to the point of rudeness; his return home was almost always followed by an aggressive exchange of sarcastic remarks, and this only increased the sense of breakdown I felt around me. My husband—I soon realized—found it natural to consider Adele ultimately responsible for all his problems. He got angry with her for everything, even what happened to him at work. I knew almost nothing about the wearing tensions that he was experiencing at the university; in general to my how are things he responded fine, he tended to spare me. But with his mother the barriers broke down; he assumed the recriminatory tone of the child who feels neglected. He poured out onto Adele everything he hid from me, and if I was present he acted as if I weren’t, as if I, his wife, were to act only as silent witness.

  Thus many things became clear to me. His colleagues, all older than him, attributed his dazzling career, as well as the small reputation that he was starting to develop abroad, to the name he bore, and had isolated him. The students considered him unnecessarily rigid, a pedantic bourgeois who tended his own plot without making any concession to the chaos of the present, in other words a class enemy. And he, as usual, neither defended himself nor attacked, but kept straight on his path, offering—of this I was sure—lectures of acute intelligence, assessing students’ abilities with equal acuity, failing them. But it’s hard, he almost shouted at Adele, one evening, in a tone of complaint. Then he immediately lowered his voice, said that he needed tranquility, that the job was a struggle, that no small number of his colleagues set the students against him, that groups of youths often erupted into the classroom where he was teaching and forced him to break off the classes, that despicable slogans had appeared on the walls. At that point, even before Adele could speak, I lost control. If you were a little less reactionary, I said, those things wouldn’t happen to you. And he, for the first time since I’d known him, answered rudely, hissing: Shut up, you always speak in clichés.

  I locked myself in the bathroom and I suddenly realized that I scarcely knew him. What did I know about him? He was a peaceful man but determined to the point of stubbornness. He was on the side of the working class and the students, but he taught and gave exams in the most traditional way. He was an atheist, he hadn’t wanted to get married in a church, he had insisted that Dede not be baptized, but he admired the early Christian communities of the Oltrarno and he spoke on religious matters with great expertise. He was an Airota, but he couldn’t bear the privileges and comforts that came from that. I calmed down, I tried to be closer to him, more affectionate. He’s my husband, I said to myself, we ought to talk more. But Adele’s presence became increasingly problematic. There was something unexpressed between them that drove Pietro to set aside manners and Adele to speak to him as if he were a fool with no hope of redemption.

  We lived now like that, amid constant battles: he quarreled with his mother, he ended up saying something that made me angry, I attacked him. Until the point came when my mother-in-law, at dinner, in my presence, asked him why he was sleeping on the sofa. He answered: It’s better if you leave tomorrow. I didn’t intervene, and yet I knew why he slept on the sofa: he did it for me, so that he wouldn’t disturb me when, around three, he stopped working and allowed himself some rest. The next day Adele returned to Genoa. I felt lost.

  67.

  Nevertheless, the months passed and both the baby and I made it. Dede started walking by herself the day of her first birthday: her father squatted in front of her, encouraged her warmly, she smiled, left me, and moved unsteadily toward him, arms outstretched, mouth half open, as if it were the happy goal of her year of crying. From then on, her nights became tranquil, and so did mine. She spent more time with Clelia, her anxieties diminished, I carved out some space for myself. But I discovered that I had no desire for demanding activities. As after a long illness, I couldn’t wait to go outside, enjoy the sun and the colors, walk on the crowded streets, look in the shop windows. And since I had some money of my own, in that period I bought clothes for myself, for the baby, and for Pietro, I crowded the house with furniture and knickknacks, I squandered money as I never had before. I felt the need to be pretty, to meet interesting people, have conversations, but I hadn’t made any friends, and Pietro, for his part, rarely brought guests home.

  I tried gradually to resume the satisfying life I had had until a year before, and only then noticed that the telephone hardly ever rang, that the calls for me were rare. The memory of my novel was fading and, with it, interest in my name was diminishing. That period of euphoria was followed by a phase of anxiety and, occasionally, depression, as I wondered what to do; I began reading contemporary literature again, and was often ashamed of my novel, which in comparison seemed frivolous and very traditional; I put aside the notes for the new book, which tended to repeat the old one, and made an effort to think of a story with more political engagement, one that would contain the tumult of the present.

  I made a few timid phone calls to l’Unità and tried again to write articles, but I soon realized that my pieces no longer appealed to the editors. I had lost ground, I wasn’t well informed, I didn’t have time to go and examine particular situations and report on them, I wrote elegant sentences of an abstract rigor to announce—in that particular newspaper, to whom I’m not sure—my support of the harshest criticisms of the Communist Party and the unions. Today it’s hard to explain why I insisted on writing that stuff or, rather, why, although I scarcely took part in the city’s political life, and in spite of my meekness, I felt increasingly drawn to extreme positions. Maybe I did it out of insecurity. Or maybe out of distrust in every form of mediation, a skill that, from early childhood, I associated with the intrigues of my father, who operated shrewdly in the inefficiency of the city hall. Or out of the vivid knowledge of poverty, which I felt an obligation not to forget; I wanted to be on the side of those who remained downtrodden and were fighting to turn everything upside down. Or because everyday politics, the demands that I myself had scrupulously written about, didn’t matter to me, I wished that something great—I had used and often did use that formulation—would break out, which I could experience, and report on. Or because—and this was hard to admit—my model remained Lila, with her stubborn unreasonableness that refused to accept half measures, so that although I was now distant from her in every way, I wanted to say and do what I imagined she would say and do if she had had my tools, if she had not confined herself within the space of the neighborhood.

  I stopped buying l’Unità, I began to read Lotta Continua and Il Manifesto. In the latter, I discovered, Nino’s name sometimes appeared. His articles were, as usual, well documented, and shaped with cogent logic. As I had when I talked to him as a girl, I, too, felt the need to contain myself in a network of deliberately formulated general propositions that would keep me from breaking down. I noticed that I no longer thought of him with desire, or even with love. He had become, it seemed to me, a figure of regret, the synthesis of what I was at risk of not becoming, even though I had had the opportunity. We were born in the same environment, both had brilliantly got out of it. Why then was I sliding into despair? Because of marriage? Because of motherhood and Dede? Because I was a woman, because I had to take care of house and family and clean up shit and change diapers? Every time I came upon an article by Nino, and the article seemed well done, I wa
s resentful. And the person who paid for it was Pietro, in fact the only person I had to talk to. I got angry at him, I accused him of abandoning me in the most terrible period of my life, of caring only about his career and forgetting me. Our relations—I had trouble admitting it because it frightened me, but that was the reality—got worse and worse. I knew that he suffered because of his problems at work, and yet I couldn’t forgive him, rather I criticized him, often starting from political positions no different from those of the students who made things so hard for him. He listened to me uneasily, scarcely responding. I suspected, in those moments, that the words he had shouted before (shut up, you speak in clichés) hadn’t been an accidental loss of temper but indicated that in general he didn’t consider me capable of a serious discussion. It exasperated me, depressed me, my rancor increased, especially because I myself knew that I wavered between contradictory feelings whose essence could be summed up like this: it was inequality that made school laborious for some (me, for example), and almost a game for others (Pietro, for example); on the other hand, inequality or not, one had to study, and do well, in fact very well—I was proud of my journey, of the intelligence I had demonstrated, and I refused to believe that my labor had been in vain, if in certain ways obtuse. And yet, for obscure reasons, with Pietro I gave expression only to the injustice of inequality. I said to him: You act as if all your students were the same, but it’s not like that, it’s a form of sadism to insist on the same results from kids who haven’t had the same opportunities. And I even criticized him when he reported that he’d had a violent discussion with a colleague some twenty years his senior, an acquaintance of his sister’s, who had thought he would find in him an ally against the most conservative part of the faculty. It happened that that man had in a friendly way advised him to be less severe with the students. Pietro had replied in his polite but un-nuanced way that he didn’t think he was severe but only demanding. Well, the other had said, be less demanding, especially with the ones who are generously spending a lot of their time changing the current situation. At that point things came to a head, although I don’t know exactly how or based on what arguments. Pietro, whose account was as usual minimal, first maintained that he had said only, in self-defense, that it was his habit always to treat all students with the respect that they deserved; then he admitted he had accused his colleague of using a double standard, of accommodating the students who were more aggressive and ruthless and even humiliating the more fearful ones. The man had taken offense, had gone so far as to say that only the fact that he knew his sister well prevented him from telling Pietro—and meanwhile, however, he had told him—that he was a fool unworthy of the professorship he held.