The Neapolitan Novels

by Elena Ferrante

  It was a mistake. I knew her, she was just waiting for a small provocation. Her litany broke off, things changed in a flash. She slapped me violently, shouting nonstop: Shut up, you whore, shut up, shut up. And she tried to grab me by the hair, she cried that she couldn’t stand it any longer, that it wasn’t possible that I, I, should want to ruin my life, running after Sarratore’s son, who was worse, much worse, than that man of shit who was his father. Once, she cried, I thought it was your friend Lina leading you on this evil course, but I was wrong, you, you, are the shameless one; without you, she’s become a fine person. Damn me that I didn’t break your legs when you were a child. You have a husband of gold who makes you a lady in this beautiful city, who loves you, who has given you two daughters, and you repay him like this, bitch? Come here, I gave birth to you and I’ll kill you.

  She was on me, I felt as if she really wanted to kill me. In those moments I felt all the truth of the disappointment that I was causing her, all the truth of the maternal love that despaired of subjecting me to what she considered my good—that is, what she had never had and what I instead had and what until the day before had made her the most fortunate mother in the neighborhood—and was ready to turn into hatred and destroy me to punish me for my waste of God’s gifts. So I pushed her away, I pushed her shouting louder than she was. I pushed her involuntarily, instinctively, with such force that I made her lose her balance and she fell to the floor.

  Pietro was frightened. I saw it in his face, in his eyes: my world colliding with his. Certainly in all his life he had never witnessed a scene like that, words so aggressive, reactions so frenzied. My mother had overturned a chair, she had fallen heavily. Now she had trouble getting up, because of her bad leg, she was waving one arm in an effort to grab the edge of the table and pull herself up. But she didn’t stop, she went on screaming threats and insults at me. She didn’t stop even when Pietro, shocked, helped her up with his good arm. Her voice choked, angry and at the same time truly grieved, eyes staring, she gasped: You’re not my child anymore, he’s my child, him, not even your father wants you anymore, not even your siblings; Sarratore’s son is bound to stick you with the clap and syphilis, what did I do wrong to come to a day like this, oh God, oh God, God, I want to die this minute, I want to die now. She was so overwhelmed by her suffering that—incredibly—she burst into tears.

  I ran away and locked myself in the bedroom. I didn’t know what to do; never would I have expected that a separation would involve such torture. I was frightened, I was devastated. From what obscure depth, what presumption, had come the determination to push back my mother with her own physical violence? I became calmer only when, after a while, Pietro knocked and said softly, with an unexpected gentleness: Don’t open the door, I’m not asking you to let me in; I just want to say that I didn’t want this, it’s too much, not even you deserve it.

  14.

  I hoped that my mother would soften, that in the morning, with one of her abrupt swerves, she would find a way of affirming that she loved me and in spite of everything was proud of me. But she didn’t. I heard her talking to Pietro all night. She flattered him, she repeated bitterly that I had always been her cross, she said, sighing, that one had to have patience with me. The next day, to avoid quarreling again, I wandered through the house or tried to read, without ever joining their councils. I was very unhappy. I was ashamed of the shove I had given her, I was ashamed of her and of myself, I wanted to apologize, embrace her, but I was afraid that she would misunderstand and be convinced that I had given in. If she had gone so far as to assert that I was the black soul of Lila, and not Lila mine, I must have been a truly intolerable disappointment to her. I said to myself, to excuse her: her unit of measure is the neighborhood; there everything, in her eyes, is arranged for the best; she feels related to the Solaras thanks to Elisa; her sons finally work for Marcello, whom she proudly calls her son-in-law; in those new clothes she wears the sign of the prosperity that has rained down on her; it’s natural therefore that Lila, working for Michele Solara, in a stable home with Enzo, so rich she wants to bequeath her parents the small apartment they live in, appears to her much more successful than me. But arguments like that served only to further mark the distance between her and me; we no longer had any point of contact.

  She departed without our having spoken a word to each other. Pietro and I took her to the station in the car, but she acted as if I were not driving. She confined herself to wishing Pietro all the best and urging him, until a moment before the train left, to keep her informed about his broken arm and about the children.

  As soon as she left I realized with some surprise that her irruption had had an unhoped-for effect. My husband, as we were returning home, went beyond the few phrases of solidarity whispered outside my door the night before. That intemperate encounter with my mother must have revealed to him about me, about how I had grown up, more than what I had told him and he had imagined. He felt sorry for me, I think. He returned abruptly to himself, our relations became polite, a few days later we went to a lawyer, who talked for a moment about this and that, then asked:

  “You’re sure you don’t want to live together anymore?”

  “How can one live with a person who no longer loves you?” Pietro answered.

  “You, Signora, you no longer want your husband?”

  “It’s my business,” I said. “All you have to do is settle the practical details of the separation.”

  When we were back on the street Pietro laughed: “You’re just like your mother.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “You’re right, it’s not true: you’re like your mother if she had had an education and had started writing novels.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re worse.”

  I was angry but not very. I was glad that within the limits of the possible he had come to his senses. I drew a sigh of relief and began to focus on what to do. In the course of long phone calls to Nino, I told him everything that had happened since the moment we parted, and we discussed my moving to Naples; out of prudence I didn’t tell him that Pietro and I had begun to sleep under the same roof, even if in separate rooms, naturally. Most important, I talked to my daughters often and I told Adele, with explicit hostility, that I would come to get them.

  “Don’t worry,” my mother-in-law tried to reassure me, “you can leave them as long as you need to.”

  “Dede has school.”

  “We can send her here, nearby, I would take care of everything.”

  “No, I need them with me.”

  “Think about it. A woman separated, with two children and your ambitions, has to take account of reality and decide what she can give up and what she can’t.”

  Everything, in that last sentence, bothered me.

  15.

  I wanted to leave immediately for Genoa, but I got a phone call from France. The older of my two publishers asked me to put into writing, for an important journal, the arguments she had heard me make in public. So right away I found myself in a situation in which I had to choose between going to get my daughters and starting work. I put off my departure, I worked day and night with the anxiety of doing well. I was still trying to give my text an acceptable form when Nino announced to me that, before returning to the university, he had some free days and was eager to see me. I couldn’t resist; we drove to Argentario. I was dazed by love. We spent marvelous days devoted to the winter sea and, as had never happened with either Franco or, even less, Pietro, to the pleasure of eating and drinking, conversation, sex. Every morning at dawn I dragged myself out of bed and began writing.

  One evening, in bed, Nino gave me some pages he had written, saying that he would value my opinion. It was a complicated essay, on Italsider in Bagnoli. I read it lying close beside him, while now and then he murmured, self-critical: I write badly, correct it if you want, you’re better, you were better in high
school. I praised his work highly, and suggested some corrections. But he wasn’t satisfied, he urged me to intervene further. Then, finally, as if to convince me of the need for my corrections, he said that he had a terrible thing to reveal to me. Half embarrassed, half ironic, he described this secret: “the most shameful thing I’ve done in my life.” And he said that it had to do with the article I had written in high school about my fight with the religion teacher, the one that he had commissioned for a student magazine.

  “What did you do?” I asked, laughing.

  “I’ll tell you, but remember I was just a boy.”

  I felt that he was seriously ashamed and I became slightly worried. He said that when he read my article he couldn’t believe that someone could write in such a pleasing and intelligent way. I was content with that compliment, I kissed him, I remembered how I had labored over those pages with Lila, and meanwhile I described to him in a self-ironic way the disappointment, the pain I had felt when the magazine hadn’t had space to publish it.

  “I told you that?” Nino asked, uneasily.

  “Maybe, I don’t remember now.”

  He had an expression of dismay.

  “The truth is that there was plenty of space.”

  “Then why didn’t they publish it?”

  “Out of envy.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “The editors were envious of me?”

  “No, it was I who felt envy. I read your pages and threw them in the wastebasket. I couldn’t bear that you were so good.”

  For a few moments I said nothing. How important that article had been to me, how much I had suffered. I couldn’t believe it: was it possible that Professor Galiani’s favorite had been so envious of the lines of a middle-school student that he threw them away? I felt that Nino was waiting for my reaction, but I didn’t know how to place such a petty act within the radiant aura I had given him as a girl. The seconds passed and I tried, disoriented, to keep it close to me, so that it could not reinforce the bad reputation that, according to Adele, Nino had in Milan, or the invitation not to trust him that had come to me from Lila and Antonio. Then I shook myself, the positive side of that confession leaped to my eyes, and I embraced him. There was, in essence, no need for him to tell me that episode, it was a bad deed that was very distant in time. And yet he had just told me, and that need of his to be sincere, greater than any personal gain, even at the risk of putting himself in a terrible light, moved me. Suddenly, starting from that moment, I felt that I could always believe him.

  We loved each other that night with more passion than usual. Upon waking I realized that, in confessing his sin, Nino had confessed that in his eyes I had always been a girl out of the ordinary, even when he was Nadia Galiani’s boyfriend, even when he had become Lila’s lover. Ah, how exciting it was to feel that I was not only loved but esteemed. He entrusted his text to me, I helped him give it a more brilliant form. In those days in Argentario I had the impression that I had now definitively expanded my capacity to feel, to understand, to express myself, something that—I thought with pride—was confirmed by the modest welcome that the book I had written goaded by him, to please him, had received outside Italy. I had everything, at that moment. Only Dede and Elsa were left in the margins.

  16.

  I said nothing to my mother-in-law about Nino. I told her instead about the French journal and portrayed myself as being fully absorbed by what I was writing. Meanwhile, if reluctantly, I thanked her for taking care of her grandchildren.

  Although I didn’t trust her, I understood at that point that Adele had raised a real problem. What could I do to keep my life and my children together? Certainly I intended to go and live with Nino soon, somewhere, and in that case we would help each other. But meanwhile? It wouldn’t be easy to balance the need to see each other, Dede, Elsa, the writing, the public engagements, the pressures that Pietro, although he had become more reasonable, would nevertheless subject me to. Not to mention the problem of money. Very little remained of my own, and I still didn’t know how much the new book would earn. It was out of the question that at the moment I could pay rent, telephone, daily life for my daughters and me. And then where would our daily life take shape? Any moment now, I would go and get the children, but to take them where? To Florence, to the apartment where they were born and in which, finding a gentle father, a courteous mother, they would be convinced that everything had miraculously gone back to normal? Did I want to delude them, knowing that as soon as Nino burst in I would disappoint them even more? Should I tell Pietro to leave, even though I was the one who had broken with him? Or was it up to me to leave the apartment?

  I went to Genoa with a thousand questions and no decision.

  My in-laws received me with polite coldness, Elsa with uncertain enthusiasm, Dede with hostility. I didn’t know the house in Genoa well, only an impression of light remained in my mind. In reality there were entire rooms full of books, old furniture, crystal chandeliers, floors covered with precious carpets, heavy curtains. Only the living room was bright: it had a big window that framed a section of light and sea, displaying it like a prized object. My daughters—I realized—moved through the entire apartment with more freedom than in their own house: they touched everything, they took what they wanted with never a reproach, and they spoke to the maid in the courteous but commanding tones they had learned from their grandmother. In the first hours after I arrived they showed me their room, they wanted me to get excited about the many expensive toys that they would never have received from me and their father, they told me about the many wonderful things they had done and seen. I slowly realized that Dede had become very attached to her grandfather, while Elsa, although she had hugged and kissed me as much as she could, turned to Adele for anything she needed or, when she was tired, climbed up on her lap and looked at me from there with a melancholy gaze, her thumb in her mouth. Had the children learned to do without me in so short a time? Or, rather, were they exhausted by what they had seen and heard in the past months and now, apprehensive of the swarm of disasters I conjured up, were afraid to take me back? I don’t know. Certainly I didn’t dare to say immediately: Pack your things and let’s go. I stayed a few days, I began to care for them again. And my in-laws never interfered; rather, at the first recourse to their authority against mine, especially by Dede, they withdrew, avoiding any conflict.

  Guido in particular was very careful to speak about other things; at first he didn’t even allude to the break between me and his son. After dinner, when Dede and Elsa went to bed and he, politely, stayed with me for a while before shutting himself in his study to work late into the night (evidently Pietro did little more than apply his father’s model), he was embarrassed. He usually took refuge in political talk: the deepening crisis of capitalism, the cure-all of austerity, the broadening area of marginalization, the earthquake in Friuli as the symbol of a precarious Italy, the great difficulties of the left, old parties and factions. But he did it without displaying any interest in my opinions, and I, in turn, made no effort to have any. If he actually decided to encourage me to say something, he fell back on my book, whose Italian edition I saw for the first time in that house: it was a slender volume, not very conspicuous, which arrived along with the many books and magazines that piled up continuously on the tables, waiting to be perused. One evening he asked some questions, and I—knowing that he hadn’t read it and wouldn’t—summarized for him the arguments, read him a few lines. In general he listened seriously, attentive. In one case only did he offer some learned criticisms on a passage of Sophocles that I had cited inappropriately, and he assumed professorial tones that shamed me. He was a man who emanated authority, even though authority is a patina and at times it doesn’t take much to crack it, if only for a few minutes, and glimpse a less edifying person. At a mention of feminism Guido’s composure suddenly shattered, an unexpected malice appeared in his eyes, and he began to hum sarcastically, red
in the face—he who in general had an anemic complexion—a couple of slogans he had heard: Sex, sex behind the wall, who has orgasms of us all? No one; and also: We’re not machines for reproduction but women fighting for liberation. He sang in a low voice and laughed, all excited. When he realized that he had unpleasantly surprised me, he grabbed his glasses, cleaned them carefully, withdrew to his study.

  On those few evenings Adele was almost always silent, but I soon realized that both she and her husband were looking for a way to draw me out into the open. Since I wouldn’t bite, my father-in-law finally confronted the problem in his own way. When Dede and Elsa said good night, he asked his granddaughters in a sort of good-humored ritual:

  “What is the name of these two lovely young ladies?”

  “Dede.”

  “Elsa.”

  “And then? Grandfather wants to hear the whole name.”

  “Dede Airota.”

  “Elsa Airota.”

  “Airota like who?”

  “Like Papa.”

  “And also?”

  “Like Grandpa.”

  “And what’s Mamma’s name?”

  “Elena Greco.”

  “And is your name Greco or Airota?”

  “Airota.”

  “Bravo. Good night, dear ones, sweet dreams.”

  Then, as soon as the children left the room, accompanied by Adele, he said as if following a thread that started from the answers of the two children: I’ve learned that the break with Pietro is due to Nino Sarratore. I jumped, I nodded yes. He smiled, he began to praise Nino, but not with the absolute support of years earlier. He said that he was very intelligent, someone who knew what was what, but—he said, emphasizing the adversative conjunction—he is fickle, and he repeated the word as if to make sure that he had chosen the right one. Then he emphasized: I didn’t like Sarratore’s most recent writings. And in a suddenly contemptuous tone he relegated him to the heap of those who considered it more urgent to make the gears of neocapitalism function rather than to continue to demand transformations in social relations and in production. He used that language, but giving every word the substance of an insult.