The Story of the Lost Child

by Elena Ferrante

  “See him—she can see him when she wants: I’m only afraid that Gennaro might be annoyed, he’s grown-up, she’s a girl.”

  “Lenù, be clear. You think my son isn’t good for your daughter?”

  I stared at her in bewilderment.

  “Good how?”

  “You know perfectly well she’s in love.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “Dede? Rino?”

  “Why, don’t you think it’s possible that your child has lost her head over mine?”

  20.

  Until that moment I had paid little attention to the fact that Dede, unlike her sister, who happily changed suitors every month, had never had a declared and ostentatious passion. I had attributed that withdrawn attitude partly to the fact that she didn’t feel pretty, partly to her rigor, and from time to time I had teased her (Are all the boys in your school unappealing?). She was a girl who didn’t forgive frivolity in anyone, above all in herself, but especially in me. The times she had seen me, I wouldn’t say flirt but even just laugh with a man—or, I don’t know, give a warm welcome to some boy who had brought her home—she made her disapproval clear and on one unpleasant occasion some months earlier had even gone so far as to use a vulgarity in dialect to me, which had made me furious.

  But maybe it wasn’t a question of a war on frivolity. After Lila’s words I began to observe Dede and I realized that her protective attitude toward Lila’s son could not be reduced, as I had thought until then, to a long childhood affection or a heated adolescent defense of the humiliated and offended. I realized, rather, that her asceticism was the effect of an intense and exclusive bond with Rino that had endured since early childhood. That frightened me. I thought of the long duration of my love for Nino and I said to myself in alarm: Dede is setting off on the same path, but with the aggravating factor that if Nino was an extraordinary boy and had become a handsome, intelligent, successful man, Rino is an insecure, uneducated youth, without attractions, without any future, and, if I thought about it, more than Stefano he physically recalled his grandfather, Don Achille.

  I decided to speak to her. It was a few months until her final exams, she was very busy, it would be easy for her to say to me: I’ve got a lot to do, let’s put it off. But Dede wasn’t Elsa, who was able to reject me, who could pretend. With my oldest daughter it was enough to ask and I was sure that she, at any moment, whatever she was doing, would answer with the greatest frankness. I asked:

  “Are you in love with Rino?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Since when have you had that feeling?”

  “Forever.”

  “But if he doesn’t reciprocate?”

  “My life would no longer have meaning.”

  “What are you thinking of doing?”

  “I’ll tell you after the exams.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “If he wants me we’ll go away.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know, but certainly away from here.”

  “He also hates Naples?”

  “Yes, he wants to go to Bologna.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a place where there’s freedom.”

  I looked at her with affection.

  “Dede, you know that neither your father nor I will let you go.”

  “There’s no need for you to let me go. I’m going and that’s it.”

  “What about money?”

  “I’ll work.”

  “And your sisters? And me?”

  “Some day or other, Mamma, we’ll have to separate anyway.”

  I emerged from that conversation drained of strength. Although she had presented unreasonable things in an orderly fashion, I tried to behave as if she were saying very reasonable things.

  Later, anxiously, I tried to think what to do. Dede was only an adolescent in love, one way or another I would make her obey. The problem was Lila, I was afraid of her, I knew immediately that the fight with her would be bitter. She had lost Tina, Rino was her only child. She and Enzo had gotten him away from drugs in time, using very harsh methods; she wouldn’t accept that I, too, would cause him suffering. All the more since the company of my two daughters was doing him good; he was even working a little with Enzo, and it was possible that separating him from them would send him off the rails again. Besides, any possible regression of Rino worried me, too. I was fond of him, he had been an unhappy child and was an unhappy youth. Certainly he had always loved Dede, certainly giving her up would be unbearable for him. But what to do. I became more affectionate, I didn’t want any misunderstandings: I valued him, I would always try to help him in everything, he had only to ask; but anyone could see that he and Dede were very different and that any solution they came up with would in a short time be disastrous. Thus I proceeded, and Rino became in turn kinder, he fixed broken blinds, dripping faucets, with the three sisters acting as helpers. But Lila didn’t appreciate her son’s availability. If he spent too much time at our house she summoned him with an imperious cry.

  21.

  I didn’t confine myself to that strategy, I telephoned Pietro. He was about to move to Boston; now he seemed determined. He was mad at Doriana, who—he said with disgust—had turned out to be an untrustworthy person, completely without ethics. Then he listened to me attentively. He knew Rino, he remembered him as a child and knew what he had become as an adult. He asked a couple of times, to be sure of not making a mistake: He has no drug problems? And once only: Does he work? Finally he said: It’s preposterous. We agreed that between the two of them, taking account of our daughter’s sensitivity, even a flirtation had to be ruled out.

  I was glad that we saw things the same way, I asked him to come to Naples and talk to Dede. He promised he would, but he had endless commitments and appeared only near Dede’s exams, in essence to say goodbye to his daughters before leaving for America. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time. He had his usual distracted expression. His hair was by now grizzled, his body had become heavier. He hadn’t seen Lila and Enzo since Tina’s disappearance—when he came to see the girls he would stay only a few hours or take them off on a trip—and he devoted himself to them. Pietro was a kind man, careful not to cause embarrassment with his role as a prestigious professor. He talked to them at length, assuming that serious and sympathetic expression that I knew well and that in the past had irritated me, but that today I appreciated because it wasn’t feigned, and was natural also to Dede. I don’t know what he said about Tina, but while Enzo remained impassive Lila cheered up, she thanked him for his wonderful letter of years earlier, said it had helped her a lot. Only then did I learn that Pietro had written to her about the loss of her daughter, and Lila’s genuine gratitude surprised me. He was modest; she excluded Enzo from the conversation completely and began to speak to my ex-husband about Neapolitan things. She dwelt at length on the Palazzo Cellamare, about which I knew nothing except that it was above Chiaia, while she—I discovered then—knew in minute detail the structure, the history, the treasures. Pietro listened with interest. I fumed, I wanted him to stay with his daughters and, especially, deal with Dede.

  When Lila finally left him free and Pietro, after spending some time with Elsa and Imma, found a way of going off with Dede, father and daughter talked a lot, peacefully. I observed them from the window as they walked back and forth along the stradone. It struck me, I think for the first time, how similar they were physically. Dede didn’t have her father’s bushy hair but she had his large frame and also something of his clumsy walk. She was a girl of eighteen, she had a feminine softness, but at every gesture, every step, she seemed to enter and exit Pietro’s body as if it were her ideal dwelling. I stayed at the window hypnotized by the sight. The time extended, they talked so long that Elsa and Imma began to get restless. I also have things to
tell Papa, said Elsa, and if he leaves when will I tell him? Imma murmured: He said he’d talk to me, too.

  Finally Pietro and Dede returned, they seemed in a good mood. In the evening all three girls gathered around to listen to him. He said he was going to work in a very big, very beautiful redbrick building that had a statue at the entrance. The statue represented a man whose face and clothes were dark, except for one shoe, which the students touched every day for good luck and so it had become highly polished, and sparkled in the sun like gold. They had a good time together, leaving me out. I thought, as always on those occasions: now that he doesn’t have to be a father every day he’s a very good father, even Imma adores him; maybe with men things can’t go otherwise: live with them for a while, have children, and then they’re gone. The superficial ones, like Nino, would go without feeling any type of obligation; the serious ones, like Pietro, wouldn’t fail in any of their duties and would if necessary give the best of themselves. Anyway, the time of faithfulness and permanent relationships was over for men and for women. But then why did we look at poor Gennaro, called Rino, as a threat? Dede would live her passion, would use it up, would go on her way. Every so often she would see him again, they would exchange some affectionate words. The process was that: why did I want something different for my daughter?

  The question embarrassed me, I announced in my best authoritarian tone that it was time to go to bed. Elsa had just finished vowing that in a few years, once she got her high school diploma, she would go and live in the United States with her father, and Imma was tugging on Pietro’s arm, she wanted attention, she was no doubt about to ask if she could join him, too. Dede sat in uncertain silence. Maybe, I thought, things are already resolved, Rino has been put aside, now she’ll say to Elsa: You have to wait four years, I’m finishing high school now and in a month at most I’m going to Papa’s.

  22.

  But as soon as Pietro and I were alone I had only to look at his face to understand that he was very worried. He said:

  “There’s nothing to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dede functions by theorems.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “It’s not important what she said but what she will certainly do.”

  “She’ll go to bed with him?”

  “Yes. She has a very firm plan, with the stages precisely marked out. Right after her exams she’ll make a declaration to Rino, lose her virginity, they’ll leave together and live by begging, putting the work ethic in crisis.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “I’m not joking, I’m reporting her plan to you word for word.”

  “Easy for you to be sarcastic, since you can avoid it, leaving the role of the bad mother to me.”

  “She’s counting on me. She said that as soon as that boy wants, she’ll come to Boston, with him.”

  “I’ll break her legs.”

  “Or maybe he and she will break yours.”

  We talked into the night, at first about Dede, then also about Elsa and Imma, finally everything: politics, literature, the books I was writing, the newspaper articles, a new essay he was working on. We hadn’t talked so much for a long time. He teased me good-humoredly for always taking, in his view, a middle position. He made fun of my halfway feminism, my halfway Marxism, my halfway Freudianism, my halfway Foucault-ism, my halfway subversiveness. Only with me, he said in a slightly harsher tone, you never used half measures. He sighed: Nothing was right for you, I was inadequate in everything. That other man was perfect. But now? He acted like the rigorous person and he ended up in the socialist gang. Elena, Elena, how you have tormented me. You were angry with me even when those kids pointed a gun at me. And you brought to our house your childhood friends who were murderers. You remember? But so what, you’re Elena, I loved you so much, we have two children, and of course I still love you.

  I let him talk. Then I admitted that I had often held senseless positions. I even admitted that he was right about Nino, he had been a great disappointment. And I tried to return to Dede and Rino. I was worried, I didn’t know how to manage the issue. I said that to keep the boy away from our daughter would cause, among other things, trouble with Lila and that I felt guilty, I knew she would consider it an insult. He nodded.

  “You have to help her.”

  “I don’t know how to.”

  “She’s trying everything possible to engage her mind and emerge from her grief, but she’s unable to.”

  “It’s not true, she did before, now she’s not even working, she’s not doing anything.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Lila had told him that she spent entire days in the Biblioteca Nazionale: she wanted to learn all she could about Naples. I looked at him dubiously. Lila again in a library, not the neighborhood library of the fifties but the prestigious, inefficient Biblioteca Nazionale? That’s what she was doing when she disappeared from the neighborhood? That was her new mania? And why had she not told me about it? Or had she told Pietro just so that he would tell me?

  “She hid it from you?”

  “She’ll talk to me about it when she needs to.”

  “Urge her to continue. It’s unacceptable that a person so gifted stopped school in fifth grade.”

  “Lila does only what she feels like.”

  “That’s how you want to see her.”

  “I’ve known her since she was six.”

  “Maybe she hates you for that.”

  “She doesn’t hate me.”

  “It’s hard to observe every day that you are free and she has remained a prisoner. If there’s an inferno it’s inside her unsatisfied mind, I wouldn’t want to enter it even for a few seconds.”

  Pietro used precisely the phrase “enter it,” and his tone was of horror, of fascination, of pity. I repeated:

  “Lina doesn’t hate me at all.”

  He laughed.

  “All right, as you like.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  He looked at me uncertainly. I hadn’t made up the cot as I usually did.

  “Together?”

  It was a dozen years since we had even touched each other. All night I was afraid that the girls would wake up and find us in the same bed. I lay looking in the shadowy light at that large, disheveled man, snoring faintly. Rarely, when we were married, had he slept with me for long. Usually he tormented me for a long time with his sex and his arduous orgasm, he fell asleep, then he got up and went to study. This time lovemaking was pleasant, a farewell embrace, we both knew it wouldn’t happen again and so we felt good. From Doriana Pietro had learned what I had been unable or unwilling to teach him, and he did all he could so that I would notice.

  Around six I woke him, I said: It’s time for you to go. I went out to the car with him, he urged me yet again to look after the girls, especially Dede. We shook hands, we kissed each other on the cheeks, he left.

  I walked idly to the newsstand, the news dealer was unpacking the papers. I went home with, as usual, three dailies, whose headlines I would look at but no more. I was making breakfast, I was thinking about Pietro, and our conversation. I could have lingered on any subject—his bland resentment, Dede, his somewhat facile psychologizing about Lila—and yet sometimes a mysterious connection is established between our mental circuits and the events whose echo is about to reach us. His description of Pasquale and Nadia—the childhood friends he had polemically alluded to—as murderers had stayed with me. To Nadia—I realized—I by now applied the word “murderer” naturally, to Pasquale, no, I continued to reject it. Yet again, I was asking myself why when the telephone rang. It was Lila calling from downstairs. She had heard me when I went out with Pietro and when I returned. She wanted to know if I had bought the papers. She had just heard on the radio that Pasquale had been arrested.

  23.

  That news absorbed us entire
ly for weeks, and I was more involved—I admit—in the story of our friend than in Dede’s exams. Lila and I hurried to Carmen’s house, but she already knew everything, or at least the essentials, and she appeared serene. Pasquale had been arrested in the mountains of Serino, in the Avellinese. The carabinieri had surrounded the farmhouse where he was hiding and he had behaved in a reasonable way, he hadn’t reacted violently, he hadn’t tried to escape. Now—Carmen said—I only have to hope that they don’t let him die in prison the way Papa did. She continued to consider her brother a good person, in fact on the wave of her emotion she went so far as to say that the three of us—she, Lila, and I—carried within us a quantity of wickedness much greater than his. We have been capable of attending only to our own affairs—she murmured, bursting into tears—not Pasquale, Pasquale grew up as our father taught him.

  Owing to the genuine suffering in those words, Carmen managed, perhaps for the first time since we had known one another, to have the better of Lila and me. For example, Lila didn’t make objections, and, as for me, I felt uneasy at her speech. The Peluso siblings, by their mere existence in the background of my life, confused me. I absolutely ruled out that their father the carpenter had taught them, as Franco had done with Dede, to challenge the silly moral fable of Menenius Agrippa, but both—Carmen less, Pasquale more—had always known instinctively that the limbs of a man are not nourished when he fills the belly of another, and that those who would make you believe it should sooner or later get what they deserve. Although they were different in every way, with their history they formed a block that I couldn’t relate to me or to Lila, but that I couldn’t distance us from, either. So maybe one day I said to Carmen: You should be happy, now that Pasquale is in the hands of the law we can understand better how to help him; and the next day I said to Lila, in complete agreement with her: Laws and guarantees count for nothing, whereas they should protect those who have no power—in prison they’ll kill him. At times, I even admitted, with the two of them, that, although the violence we had experienced from birth now disgusted me, a modest amount was needed to confront the fierce world we lived in. Along those confusing lines I undertook to do everything possible for Pasquale. I didn’t want him to feel—unlike his companion Nadia, who was treated with great consideration—like a nobody whom nobody cared about.