La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  The work with Mario ended in disagreements, Ernesto’s visits and phone calls diminished, I was again stricken by ill humor. Not seeing him made me sad. Several times I thought of calling him, of a meeting without Mario and Cecilia, in some way confirming our friendship. I gave it up out of prudence, modesty, virtues of mine that I detested. Then there was another conference, this time an important international conference in Erice. Mario asked me to go with him, he insisted, Cecilia was also going, Cecilia, too, insisted, and I accepted. But when I found out that Ernesto was busy and would remain in Turin for his own work, I cautiously found a way of getting out of it. Mario left, the children went to stay overnight with some friends, I was alone.

  I spent a long time beside the telephone, waiting until it was dark. What could be wrong with telephoning him? He was my friend now, surely more my friend than Mario’s. And we were both alone in the city, it was a pleasant way to spend the evening, that’s all. But I was lying and I knew it. I had crossed the boundaries of the game almost without realizing it. If he had invited me to dinner, I would have accepted. If he had said come have dinner at my house, I would have accepted. If he had asked me to cook something for him, I would have done it—, let’s meet at my house I would have proposed. I dialed the number with trepidation, knowing that I was performing an act that would be decisive for my life. Because if he kissed me I would kiss him. If he wanted to make love I would have done it. If he had asked me to leave Mario and the children, I wouldn’t have hesitated. If he had insisted that I go away with him, change cities, even though I was thirty-four and he was sixteen years older, I would have followed him.

  He answered on the second ring, his voice nervous. I tried some humorous phrase about how did he feel, shut in the house alone, in boring Turin. He said he was fine and he wasn’t alone. Cecilia at the last minute had decided not to go, too many things to do at the university, they were working. I flushed with shame, my voice choked. He abruptly handed the phone to Cecilia, who insisted that I should come to dinner at their house. I refused, hating myself. I had revealed to her, I had revealed to myself that I wanted to take her husband away. A desire more than a plan, a desire born equally from the admiration I had for her. Would I have liked Ernesto if he hadn’t gone to bed with her every night for decades? Occupying her place, taking myself out of mine, now seemed to me a mistake. Would I have fantasized about that man if he hadn’t been the husband of that distant woman, so obviously better than me, the woman I would have liked to become, by studying, writing? I hung up with a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, a desire for laceration.

  Now, years later, as the furious song of the birds began, I thought: if I was like that, why am I surprised at Mario? What is destroying me? His journey is known to me, I know how it began, how it continued. I only have to be quiet, accept, wait. But I wasn’t convinced, I said to myself no. I jumped out of bed furiously, I pulled up the blinds sharply to see the dawn. There was a difference between him and me: I had dreamed of betrayal, he had betrayed; I didn’t even know if those men scarcely touched were shadows of old desires, lies that I was now telling myself at dawn to pretend I had a life that was independent of his, while he for years really had hidden himself in the flesh of another. That difference counted. He hadn’t recognized anything indispensable in me. Nothing in the entire parade of semblances that in his eyes I ought to represent had been able to restrain him. I, on the other hand, bore invisible chains that had kept me from humiliating him, as if reality couldn’t accept the insult imagined in those small insubstantial love affairs, except by insulting me.

  It’s a long passage; I hope you’ll forgive me for imposing it on you. I cut it from the book for many reasons that it’s pointless to list here (for example, a boring, superficial Bovary-ism that didn’t really fit Olga). I will point out here the one reason that has to do with your question: Olga’s little love affairs, as you will have noted, are woven together by her need to betray yet remain faithful to the man whom, symbolically, her mother liked, and who therefore comes with a sort of parental seal; and that framing device, its obviousness, seemed a mistake.

  The inspiration for the long erotic digression further derived, consciously, from a couple of passages in “Female Sexuality,” the essay I cited above in regard to Troubling Love. There Freud speaks at least twice about marriage, and in a curious manner. First, he says that a woman, even when she chooses her husband based on a paternal model, “yet in her married life repeats with her husband her bad relations with her mother.” Then he hypothesizes that “the attachment to the mother must inevitably perish just because it is the first and most intense, similarly to what we so often find in the first marriages of young women, entered into when they were most passionately in love.” In both cases, he says, “the love-relation probably comes to grief by reason of the unavoidable disappointments and an accumulation of occasions for aggression.” And he concludes, “As a rule second marriages turn out much better.”

  Now, in telling the story of Olga’s sexuality and what I know about sexuality, I wanted at least three basic things to be perceived, all inspired by those passages, even if critically: first, that for women every love relationship, in marriage or not, is based not only in its bad aspects but also in the good ones on the reactivation of the primitive bond with the mother; second, that marriage—whether first, second, or third, heterosexual or homosexual—can’t expel from a woman’s life the troubling love for the maternal image, the only love-conflict that in every case lasts forever; third, that what keeps Olga from betraying Mario is the fact that Mario from the beginning inadvertently became for her the cocoon of fantasies tied to the mother, and it is this above all that makes the abandonment so devastating.

  The convictions remain, obviously; they are now part of my way of seeing. But I wanted the story of Olga, although it might accommodate that mode, to do it silently, not to be strangled by it. When you begin a story, you have to be the sole source of the story, you have to get lost in it, because there are no predetermined maps; and if perceptible traces of what you have learned from books remain, they have to be eliminated without indulgence, assuming it’s possible. Because it’s not always possible, nor is it good: writing is also the story of what we have read and are reading, of the quality of our reading, and a good story, finally, is one written from the depths of our life, from the heart of our relations with others, from the heights of the books we’ve liked.

  Cities

  One morning—it was summer, a very hot Neapolitan summer, I was eleven—two boys who were scarcely older, playmates who were silently in love, invited my sister and me to get an ice cream. Our mother had absolutely forbidden us to leave the courtyard of the building where we lived. But we were tempted by the ice cream, by the prospect of love, and decided to disobey. One act of disobedience led to another. We didn’t limit ourselves to going to the café at the end of the street, but, absorbed by the pleasure of acting as uninhibited women, we kept going, all the way to the gardens of Piazza Cavour, to the Museum.

  At a certain point the air turned black. It began to rain, with thunder and lightning, the liquid sky dripped down on us and ran in torrents toward the sewers. Our escorts looked for shelter, my sister and I didn’t: I already saw my mother anxiously shouting our names from the balcony.

  We felt abandoned in the rain, and we ran, lashed by the heavy water. I held my sister by the hand, shouting at her to hurry, the rain was soaking us, my heart was pounding. It was a long overexcited moment of disorder. The boys had left us to our fate; the home we were running toward was surely a place of punishment, anything could happen there. I was aware of the city for the first time. I felt it on my back and under my feet, it was running along with us, panting with its dirty breath, horns honking madly, it was alien and known at the same time, limited and boundless, dangerous and exciting, I recognized it by getting lost.

  That impression remained. Ever since, every city has existed only
when it abruptly enters the blood that moves the legs and blinds the eyes. I took the wrong street many times not because I didn’t know the way home but because the known space also felt my anxiety and opened up before me in erroneous routes, and the erroneous routes were also a desire for error, possibilities of flight from my mother, of never returning home but wickedly getting lost in the streets, in all my most secret thoughts.

  I had to stop, tug on my sister so that she wouldn’t run away, grasp the thread of orientation, which is a magic thread, to tie one street to the next, making tight knots, so that the streets would calmly settle down and I could find the way home. At first our mother was overcome by emotion, because we were alive, then, just because we were alive, she punished us by spanking us with a trowel.

  As for your question about the cities of Delia, of Olga, I want to try to answer by starting with that run in the rain. I soon left Naples, and, as it happened, I lived in various and distant places. I rarely got along well with the cities I lived in. Now cities all seem to me merely prostheses, but with different effects: either they remain dead material, forever alien, or they become one with your body and you feel them as an active part of what you feel. Only in that second case do cities count for me, for better or worse. Otherwise they are meaningless topographies. Even if they have beautiful, evocative names and fascinating traces of the past, they don’t excite me even as a tourist; I have little interest in being a tourist with my nose stuck in a Touring Club guide. Starting with that experience of late childhood, the true model of urban involvement is Naples pressing in on me and confusing me as I run in the storm.

  I must tell you, however, that the aftermath of that run was crucial. I mean the calming down, regaining eyes and ears, seeing the city as if I had redrawn it with anxieties and its pleasures. I mean the resorting to a thread that reconnects the places shattered by emotions and allows us not only to get lost but to govern our getting lost.

  In this regard there is a passage by Walter Benjamin that I am very fond of. Over the years I’ve found everything I need there: the descent to the Mothers of an urban area seen through the eyes of a child, the city-labyrinth, the role of love, the troublesome governess, even the rain that falls on childhood. I’m referring to the opening chapter of Berlin Childhood Around 1900, entitled “Tiergarten.”

  I’m not going to talk here about Benjamin’s gaze, the extraordinary gaze of eyeballs that are pupils in their entire spherical surface, and which therefore see not only before, not only outside, not the afterward that is in store but the ahead-behind, the inside-outside, the after in the then-now, without chronological order. I wish to emphasize, rather, the marvelous opening that goes: “Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.”6

  Learning to get lost in a city, precisely: hearing the names of the streets like the snapping of dry twigs, like mountain gullies that reflect the time of day. Benjamin talks about it in an anomalous sort of writing, a vortex-like writing that seeks to reach the difficult to express, what is deep down and barely visible. When does the city become the city of being lost? Where is the origin of the labyrinth, when is one schooled in the art of getting lost? “This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. No, not the first, for there was one earlier that has outlasted the others. The way into this labyrinth, which was not without its Ariadne, led over the Bendler Bridge, whose gentle arch became my first hillside.”

  The dizzying velocity of the writing is beautiful, the going back, in just a few lines, to the ink marks on the blotting paper of childhood, in search of the primary labyrinth. Is the intuition of the art of getting lost in the city in that swirl of ink? No, the valley goes deeper, there’s an even before, a before that comes before the squiggles on the blotting paper. One has to go back. The original urban labyrinth is in childhood. It’s the labyrinth that in the form of the park at the zoo in Berlin in which the child Benjamin navigated a mysterious corner where “in fact must have lain the couch of that Ariadne in whose proximity I first experienced what only later I had a word for: love. Unfortunately the Fraulein intervenes at its earliest budding to overspread her icy shadow. And so this park, which, unlike every other, seemed open to children, was for me, as a rule, distorted by difficulties and impracticalities.”

  The primary labyrinth is sketched by the child’s gaze as it wanders in the mystery outside the house, far from his guardian divinities, and encounters love for the first time. It is difficulties and impracticalities that the child Benjamin experiences when the icy shadow of the governess is cast over his Ariadne (there is not a city-labyrinth, therefore, without a Pasiphae who gives birth to the Beast-Minotaur, without an Ariadne and love), disturbing the apparition. The adult Benjamin will dream forever of that getting lost which began when he crossed the Bendler Bridge, and will seek the thread enabling him to return to that experience and transform it into art that can be expressed, apprehended.

  Of Benjamin’s Ariadne we know nothing, of course, he tells us not about her but about the childhood of a small Berlin Theseus; it’s only natural. But for me the faint apparition of the girl, immediately covered by the icy shadow of another woman, the governess-mother-monster, is unforgettable. If Theseus is stopped at the incapacity to orient himself, it’s little Ariadne who preserves the art of getting lost, it’s she who possesses the thread that can control it. I’ve loved this myth since I was a child. It’s very possible that that day in Naples, in the storm, I thought of Ariadne, and that I thought of her many years later, describing Delia who, wandering through the city, gets lost in her childhood. As a very studious and dreamy middle-school adolescent I often had fantasies of guiding the hand of Theseus as he killed the Beast, my blood relation, leading the hero to safety, abandoning for him the city-prison and my terrible family, sailing to another city, discovering him ungrateful behind the appearance of the fine curly-haired youth, and finally winning for myself wild and vengeful joys, perdition with Dionysus, perdition that at fifteen I desired more than I did later, as an adult.

  With myths there is always something that shifts within. Years afterward—by then grown up and in a completely different frame of mind—I returned to Naples for several months; I had my own problems. I retraced many of the routes of my childhood, including the one I had taken with my sister in the rain. I rediscovered the anguish of that breathless run, but also the pleasing impression of a city that was mine and no one else’s, hostile and seductive, which I had taken possession of for the first time on that long-ago day. I recalled the image of the labyrinth as an ordinary space, a known place that, with oneself, is suddenly disrupted by a strong emotion. I got some books (including that vast captivating hodgepodge that is Graves’s The Greek Myths), I wanted to see if the myth would help me describe, by giving me distance, a story of intolerance, flight, love, and abandonment: not the abandonment experienced by Olga—that came much later, when I had understood that to write well you have to do the opposite of what the handbooks prescribe, get close, shorten the distance, abolish it, feel the pulsing veins of living bodies on the page.

  A variation of the Ariadne story fascinated me. It’s the story of the Cretan girl who is now pregnant, and worn out by seasickness, and whom Theseus puts ashore in Amathus for fear she’ll miscarry. The girl has just set foot on land when a strong wind forces the hero’s fleet to put out to sea. Ariadne is desperate, about to give birth, suffering because of her lover’s abandonment. Then the women of Amathus intervene, and, to console her, take turns writing her love letters, pretending they’re from Theseus. The lie lasts until Ariadne dies in childbirth.

  I worked on this story for a while, during those months in Naples. I invented in detail a sort of Campanian city of today, an Amathus that was like a town on the Amalfi coast. It was a city of female friendship and solidarity,
but free in its thoughts and in its conflicts. I imagined a community of modern women writing consoling love letters to a modern Ariadne, the abandoned foreigner, attributing them to the traitorous lover. I was drawn to the possibility of describing how women dream of being loved, and so I applied myself mainly to four things: the women’s effort to enter the head, the words of a man; the women’s collaboration—a true, harmonious group project—to feign a man’s psychic and lexical makeup; questioning themselves, on the other hand, to find out what they would have liked to hear from a man in love; the search-confession of what they would have said to the desperate Ariadne if, as was happening to some, amid endless contradictions, they had been hopelessly in love.

  I remember that I liked imagining the arguments that preceded the drafting of the letters. But when I began to actually draft them, everything got complicated; in the end they seemed pointless effort—I wrote two and stopped. Evidently the idea was weak, the letters tended to sketch an ideal male in whose reality no Ariadne, however desperate in her abandonment, would have believed, especially today; the city was too perfect; the community of women, even in its vivacity, seemed sentimentally full of good feelings and thus inauthentic. No, even in the case of cities dominated by women one can and must write only of city-labyrinths, the repositories of our complex and contradictory emotions, where the Beast is lying in ambush and it’s dangerous to get lost without having first learned to do so.

  The problem—and here I’m expanding slightly on the subject of your question—is that one has trouble imagining what sort of polis women could construct, if they sought to do so in their image and likeness. Where is the image-model, what female traits would it resemble? As far as I know the city, for women, always belongs to others, even when it’s their native city. It’s true that for a long time now women representatives have actively taken part in the management of the polis but only on the condition that they don’t take over, immediately, to try to really reinvent it. Those who try are disappointed, leaving behind a wake of bitter discourse or adapting to the clichéd phrases of contemporary politics.