Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

by Elena Ferrante

  “Why?” she had asked, but without particular interest.

  “Why what?”

  “Why aren’t you getting married in church.”

  “We aren’t believers.”

  “And the finger of God, the Holy Spirit?” she had quoted, reminding me of the article we had written together as girls.

  “I’m grown up.”

  “But at least have a party, invite your friends.”

  “Pietro doesn’t want to.”

  “You wouldn’t invite even me?”

  “Would you come?”

  She laughed, shaking her head.

  “No.”

  That was it. But in early May, when I had decided on a final venture before leaving the city for good, things took an unpleasant turn concerning my wedding, but not only that. I decided to go and see Professor Galiani. I looked for her number, I called. I said I was about to get married, I was going to live in Florence, I wanted to come and say goodbye to her. She, without surprise, without joy, but politely, invited me for five o’clock the next day. Before hanging up she said: Bring your friend, Lina, if you want.

  Lila in that case didn’t have to be asked twice, and she left Gennaro with Enzo. I put on makeup, I fixed my hair, I dressed according to the taste I had developed from Adele, and helped Lila to at least look respectable, since it was difficult to persuade her to dress up. She wanted to bring pastries, I said it wasn’t suitable. Instead I bought a copy of my book, although I assumed that Professor Galiani had read it: I did it so that I would have a way of inscribing it to her.

  We arrived punctually, rang the bell, silence. We rang again. Nadia opened the door, breathless, half dressed, without her usual courtesy, as if we had introduced disorder not only into her appearance but also into her manners. I explained that I had an appointment with her mother. She’s not here, she said, but make yourselves comfortable in the living room. She disappeared. We remained mute, but exchanged little smiles of uneasiness in the silent house. Perhaps five minutes passed, finally steps could be heard in the hall. Pasquale appeared, slightly disheveled. Lila didn’t show the least surprise, but I exclaimed, in real astonishment: What are you doing here? He answered seriously, unfriendly: What are you two doing here. And the phrase reversed the situation, I had to explain to him, as if that were his house, that I had an appointment with my professor.

  “Ah,” he said, and asked Lila, teasingly, “Are you recovered?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I’m glad.”

  I got angry, I answered for her, I said that Lila was only now beginning to get better and that anyway the Soccavo factory had been taught a lesson—the inspectors had paid a visit, the business had had to pay Lila everything she was owed.

  “Yes?” he said just as Nadia reappeared, now immaculate, as if she were going out. “You understand, Nadia? Dottoressa Greco says she taught Soccavo a lesson.”

  I exclaimed: “Not me.”

  “Not her, God Almighty taught Soccavo a lesson.”

  Nadia gave a slight smile, crossed the room and although there was a sofa free she sat on Pasquale’s lap. I felt ill at ease.

  “I only tried to help Lina.”

  Pasquale put his arm around Nadia’s waist, leaned toward me, said:

  “Excellent. You mean that in all the factories, at all the construction sites, in every corner of Italy and the world, as soon as the owner kicks up a fuss and the workers are in danger, we’ll call Elena Greco: she telephones her friends, the labor authority, her connections in high places, and resolves the situation.”

  He had never spoken to me like that, not even when I was a girl and he seemed to me already adult, and acted like a political expert. I was offended, and was about to answer, but Nadia interrupted, ignoring me. She spoke to Lila, in her slow little voice, as if it were not worth the trouble to speak to me.

  “The labor inspectors don’t count for anything, Lina. They went to Soccavo, they filled out their forms, but then? In the factory everything is the same as before. And meanwhile those who spoke out are in trouble, those who were silent got a few lire under the counter, the police charged us, and the fascists came right here and beat up Armando.”

  She hadn’t finished speaking when Pasquale started talking to me more harshly than before, this time raising his voice:

  “Explain to us what the fuck you thought you resolved,” he said, with genuine pain and disappointment. “You know what the situation is in Italy? Do you have any idea what the class struggle is?”

  “Don’t shout, please,” Nadia asked him, then she turned again to Lila, almost whispering: “Comrades do not abandon one another.”

  She answered: “It would have failed anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In that place you don’t win with leaflets or even by fighting with the fascists.”

  “How do you win?”

  Lila was silent, and Pasquale, now turning to her, hissed:

  “You win by mobilizing the good friends of the owners? You win by getting a little money and screwing everyone else?”

  Then I burst out: “Pasquale, stop it.” Involuntarily I, too, raised my voice. “What kind of tone is that? It wasn’t like that.”

  I wanted to explain, silence him, even though I felt an emptiness in my head, I didn’t know what arguments to resort to, and the only concept that occurred to me readily was malicious and politically useless: You treat me like this because, now that you’ve got your hands on this young lady from a good family, you’re full of yourself? But Lila, here, stopped me with a completely unexpected gesture of irritation, which confused me. She said:

  “That’s enough, Lenù, they’re right.”

  I was upset. They were right? I wanted to respond, to get angry at her. What did she mean? But just then Professor Galiani arrived: her footsteps could be heard in the hall.

  59.

  I hoped that the professor hadn’t heard me shouting. But at the same time I wanted to see Nadia jump off Pasquale’s lap and hurry over to the sofa, I wished to see both of them humiliated by the need to pretend an absence of intimacy. I noticed that Lila, too, looked at them sardonically. But they stayed where they were; Nadia, in fact, put an arm around Pasquale’s neck, as if she were afraid of falling, and said to her mother, who had just appeared in the doorway: Next time, tell me if you’re having visitors. The professor didn’t answer, she turned to us coldly: I’m sorry I was late, let’s sit in my study. We followed her, while Pasquale moved Nadia off him, saying in a tone that seemed to me suddenly depressed: Come on, let’s go.

  Professor Galiani led us along the hall muttering irritably: What really bothers me is the boorishness. We entered an airy room with an old desk, a lot of books, sober, cushioned chairs. She assumed a polite tone, but it was clear that she was struggling with a bad mood. She said she was happy to see me and to see Lila again; yet at every word, and between the words, I felt her rage increasing, and I wanted to leave as quickly as possible. I apologized for not having come to see her, and went on somewhat breathlessly about studying, the book, the innumerable things that had overwhelmed me, my engagement, my approaching marriage.

  “Are you getting married in church or only in a civil service?”

  “Only a civil service.”

  “Good for you.”

  She turned to Lila, to draw her into the conversation: “You were married in church?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a believer?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you get married in church?”

  “That’s what’s done.”

  “You don’t always have to do things just because they’re done.”

  “We do a lot of them.”

  “Will you go to Elena’s wedding?”

  “She didn’t invite me.”

  I was
startled, I said right away:

  “It’s not true.”

  Lila laughed harshly: “It’s true, she’s ashamed of me.”

  Her tone was ironic, but I felt wounded anyway. What was happening to her? Why had she said earlier, in front of Nadia and Pasquale, that I was wrong, and now was making that hostile remark in front of the professor?

  “Nonsense,” I said, and to calm down I took the book out of my bag and handed it to Professor Galiani, saying: I wanted to give you this. She looked at it for a moment without seeing it, perhaps following her own thoughts, then she thanked me, and saying that she already had a copy, gave it back:

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s a professor of Latin literature in Florence.”

  “Is he a lot older than you?”

  “He’s twenty-seven.”

  “So young, already a professor?”

  “He’s very smart.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Pietro Airota.”

  Professor Galiani looked at me attentively, like when I was at school and I gave an answer that she considered incomplete.

  “Relative of Guido Airota?”

  “He’s his son.”

  She smiled with explicit malice.

  “Good marriage.”

  “We love each other.”

  “Have you already started another book?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “I saw that you’re writing for l’Unità.”

  “A bit.”

  “I don’t write for it anymore, it’s a newspaper of bureaucrats.”

  She turned again to Lila, she seemed to want to let her know how much she liked her. She said to her:

  “It’s remarkable what you did in the factory.”

  Lila grimaced in annoyance.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s not true.”

  The professor got up, rummaged through the papers on the desk, and showed her some pages as if they were an incontrovertible truth.

  “Nadia left this around the house and I took the liberty of reading it. It’s a courageous, new work, very well written. I wanted to see you so that I could tell you that.”

  She was holding in her hand the pages that Lila had written, and from which I had taken my first article for l’Unità.

  60.

  Oh yes, it was really time to get out. I left the Galiani house embittered, my mouth dry, without the courage to say to the professor that she didn’t have the right to treat me like that. She hadn’t said anything about my book, although she’d had it for some time and surely had read it or at least skimmed it. She hadn’t asked for a dedication in the copy I had brought for that reason and when, before leaving—out of weakness, out of a need to end that relationship affectionately—I had offered anyway, she hadn’t answered, she had smiled, and continued to talk to Lila. Above all, she had said nothing about my articles, rather she had mentioned them only to include them in her negative opinion of l’Unità, and then pulled out Lila’s pages and began to talk to her as if my opinion on the subject didn’t count, as if I were no longer in the room. I would have liked to yell: Yes, it’s true, Lila has a tremendous intelligence, an intelligence that I’ve always recognized, that I love, that’s influenced everything I’ve done; but I’ve worked hard to develop mine and I’ve been successful, I’m valued everywhere, I’m not a pretentious nobody like your daughter. Instead, I listened silently while they talked about work and the factory and the workers demands. They kept talking, even on the landing, until Professor Galiani absently said goodbye to me, while to Lila she said, now using the familiar tu, Stay in touch, and embraced her. I felt humiliated. Moreover, Pasquale and Nadia hadn’t returned, I hadn’t had a chance to refute them and my anger at them was still raging inside me: why was it wrong to help a friend, to do it I had taken a risk, how could they dare to criticize what I’d done. Now, on the stairs, in the lobby, on the sidewalk of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, it was only Lila and me. I was ready to shout at her: Do you really think I’m ashamed of you, what were you thinking, why did you say those two were right, you’re ungrateful, I did all I could to stay close to you, to be useful to you, and you treat me like that, you really have a sick mind. But as soon as we were outside, even before I could open my mouth (and on the other hand what would have changed if I had?), she took me by the arm and began to defend me against Professor Galiani.

  I couldn’t find a single opening in order to reproach her for aligning herself with Pasquale and Nadia, or for the senseless accusation that I didn’t want her at my wedding. She behaved as if it had been another Lila who said those things, a Lila of whom she herself knew nothing and whom it was pointless to ask for explanations. What terrible people—she began, and spoke without stopping all the way to the subway at Piazza Amedeo—did you see how the old woman treated you, she wanted to get revenge, she can’t bear that you write books and articles, she can’t bear that you’re about to marry well, she especially can’t bear that Nadia, brought up precisely to be the best of all, Nadia who was to give her so much satisfaction, isn’t up to anything good, is sleeping with a construction worker and acting like a whore right in front of her: no, she can’t bear it, but you’re wrong to be upset, forget about it, you shouldn’t have left her your book, you shouldn’t have asked if she wanted it inscribed, you especially shouldn’t have done that, those are people who should be treated with a kick in the ass, your weakness is that you’re too good, you swallow everything that educated people say as if they’re the only ones who had a mind, but it’s not true, relax, go, get married, have a honeymoon, you were too worried about me, write another novel, you know that I expect great things from you, I love you.

  I simply listened, overwhelmed. With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me. I couldn’t understand if those words were in fact intended to apologize to me, or if she was lying, concealing feelings that she had no intention of confiding to me, or if she was aiming at a final farewell. Certainly she was false, and she was ungrateful, and I, in spite of all that had changed for me, continued to feel inferior. I felt that I would never free myself from that inferiority, and that seemed to me intolerable. I wished—and I couldn’t keep the wish at bay—that the cardiologist had been wrong, that Armando had been right, that she really was ill and would die.

  For years after that, we didn’t see each other, we only talked on the phone. We became for each other fragments of a voice, without any visual corroboration. But the wish that she would die remained in a far corner, I tried to get rid of it but it wouldn’t go away.

  61.

  The night before I left for Florence I couldn’t sleep. Of all the painful thoughts the most persistent had to do with Pasquale. His criticisms burned me. At first I had rejected them altogether, now I was wavering between the conviction that they were undeserved and the idea that if Lila said he was right maybe I really had been mistaken. Finally I did something I had never done: I got out of bed at four in the morning and left the house by myself, before dawn. I felt very unhappy; I wished something terrible would happen to me, an event that, punishing me for my mistaken actions and my wicked thoughts, would as a result punish Lila, too. But nothing happened. I walked for a long time on the deserted streets, which were much safer than when they were crowded. The sky turned violet. I reached the sea, a gray sheet under a pale sky with scattered pink-edged clouds. The mass of Castel dell’Ovo was cut sharply in two by the light, a shining ochre shape on the Vesuvius side, a brown stain on the Mergellina and Posillipo side. The road along the cliff was empty, the sea made no sound but gave off an intense odor. Who knows what feeling I would have had about Naples, about myself, if I had waked every morning not in my neighborhood but in one of those bu
ildings along the shore. What am I seeking? To change my origins? To change, along with myself, others, too? Repopulate this now deserted city with citizens not assailed by poverty or greed, not bitter or angry, who could delight in the splendor of the landscape like the divinities who once inhabited it? Indulge my demon, give him a good life and feel happy? I had used the power of the Airotas, people who for generations had been fighting for socialism, people who were on the side of men and women like Pasquale and Lila, not because I thought I would be fixing all the broken things of the world but because I was in a position to help a person I loved, and it seemed wrong not to do so. Had I acted badly? Should I have left Lila in trouble? Never again, never again would I lift a finger for anyone. I departed, I went to get married.

  62.

  I don’t remember anything about my wedding. A few photographs, acting as props, rather than inspiring memory, have frozen it around a few images: Pietro with an absent-minded expression, me looking angry, my mother, who is out of focus but manages nevertheless to appear unhappy. Or not. It’s the ceremony itself that I can’t remember, but I have in mind the long discussion I had with Pietro a few days before we got married. I told him that I intended to take the Pill in order not to have children, that it seemed to me urgent to try first of all to write another book. I was sure that he would immediately agree. Instead, surprisingly, he was opposed. First he made it a problem of legality, the Pill was not yet officially for sale; then he said there were rumors that it ruined one’s health; then he made a complicated speech about sex, love, and reproduction; finally he stammered that someone who really has to write will write anyway, even if she is expecting a baby. I was unhappy, I was angry, that reaction seemed to me not consistent with the educated youth who wanted only a civil marriage, and I told him so. We quarreled. Our wedding day arrived and we were not reconciled: he was mute, I cold.