inferiority

excerpts from those who leave and those who stay by elena ferrante

he said only:
"it was predictable that it would end like this."
"why?"
"you remember when i told you that lina scared me?"
"yes."
"it wasn't fear, i understood much later."
"what was it?"
"estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time."
"meaning what?"
"it's hard to say: you and i became friends immediately, you i love. with her that always seemed impossible. there was something tremendous about her that made me want to go down on my knees and confess my most secret thoughts."
i said ironically: "great, an almost religious experience."
he remained serious: "no, only an admission of inferiority. but when she helped me study, that was great, yes. she would read the textbook and immediately understand it, then she'd summarize it for me in a simple way. there have been, and still are today, moments when i think: if i had been born a woman i would have wanted to be like her. in fact, in the carracci family we were both alien bodies, neither she nor i could endure. so her faults never mattered to me, i always felt on her side."

*                          *                          *

it happened that around that time mariarosa came to florence to present the book of a university colleague of hers on the madonna del parto. pietro swore he wouldn't miss it, but at the last minute he made an excuse and hid somewhere. my sister-in-law arrived by car, alone this time, a bit tired but affectionate as always and loaded with presents for dede and elsa. she never mentioned my aborted novel, even though adele had surely told her about it. she talked volubly about trips she'd taken, about books, with her usual enthusiasm. she pursued energetically the many novelties of the planet. she would assert one thing, get tired of it, go on to another that a little earlier, out of distraction, blindness, she had rejected. when she spoke about her colleague's book, she immediately gained the admiration of the art historians in the audience. and the evening would have run smoothly along the usual academic tracks if at a certain point, with an abrupt swerve, she hadn't uttered remarks, occasionally vulgar, of this type: children shouldn't be given to any father, least of all god the father, children should be given to themselves; the moment has arrived to study as women and not as men; behind every discipline is the penis and when the penis feels impotent it resorts to the iron bar, the police, the prisons, the army, the concentration camps; and if you don't submit, if, rather, you continue to turn everything upside down, then comes slaughter. shouts of discontent, of agreement: at the end she was surrounded by a dense crowd of women. she called me over with welcoming gestures, proudly showed off dede and elsa to her florentine friends, said nice things about me. some remembered my book, but i avoided it, as if i hadn't written it. the evening was nice, and brought an invitation, from a small, varied group of girls and adult women, to go to the house of one of them, once a week to talk -- they said -- about us.

mariarosa's provocative remarks and the invitation of her friends led me to fish out from under a pile of books those pamphlets adele had given me long before. i carried them around in my purse, i read them outside, under the gray sky of late winter. first, intrigued by the title, i read an essay entitled we spit on hegel. i read it while elsa slept in her carriage and dede, in coat, scarf, and woolen hat, talked to her doll in a low voice. every sentence struck me, every word, and above all the bold freedom of thought. i forcefully underlined many of the sentences, i made exclamation points, vertical strokes. spit on hegel. spit on the culture of men, spit on marx, on engels, on lenin. and on historical materialism. and on freud. and on psychoanalysis and penis envy. and on marriage, on family. and on nazism, on stalinism, on terrorism. and on war. and on the class struggle. and on the dictatorship of the proletariat. and on socialism. and on communism. and on the trap of equality. and on all the manifestations of patriarchal culture. and on all its institutional forms. resist the waste of female intelligence. deculturate. disacculturate, starting with maternity, don't give children to anyone. get rid of the master-slave dialectic. rip inferiority from our brains. restore women to themselves. don't create antitheses. move on another plane in the name of one's own difference. the university doesn't free women but completes their repression. against wisdom. while men devote themselves to undertakings in space, life for women on this planet has yet to begin. woman is the other face of the earth. woman is the unpredictable subject. free oneself from subjection here, now, in this present. the author of those pages was called carla lonzi. how is it possible, i wondered, that a woman knows how to think like that. i worked so hard on books, but i endured them, i never actually used them, i never turned them against themselves. this is thinking. this is thinking against. i -- after so much exertion -- don't know how to think. nor does mariarosa: she's read pages and pages, and she rearranges them with flair, putting on a show. that's it. lila, on the other hand, knows. it's her nature. if she had studied, she would know how to think like this.

that idea became insistent. everything i read in that period ultimately drew lila in, one way or another. i had come upon a female model of thinking that, given the obvious differences, provoked in me the same admiration, the same sense of inferiority that i felt toward her. not only that: i read thinking of her, of fragments of her life, of the sentences she would agree with, of those she would have rejected. afterward, impelled by that reading, i often joined the group of mariarosa's friends, but it wasn't easy: dede asked me continuously when we were leaving, elsa would suddenly let out cries of joy. but it wasn't just my daughters who were the problem. it was that there i found only women who, resembling me, couldn't help me. i was bored when the discussion became a sort of inelegant summary of what i already knew. and it seemed to me i knew well enough what it meant to be born female, i wasn't interested in the work of consciousness-raising. and i had no intention of speaking in public about my relationship with pietro, or with men in general, to provide testimony about what men are, of every class and of every age. and no one knew better than i did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; i had done it, i was doing it. furthermore i remained completely outside the tensions, the explosions of jealousy, the authoritarian tones, weak, submissive voices, intellectual hierarchies, struggles for primacy in the group that ended in desperate tears. but there was one new fact, which naturally led me to lila. i was fascinated by the way people talked, confronted each other -- explicit to the point of being disagreeable. i didn't like the amenability that yielded to gossip: i had known enough of that since childhood. what seduced me instead was an urge for authenticity that i had never felt and that perhaps was not in my nature. i never said a single word, in that circle, that was equal to that urgency. but i felt that i should do something like that with lila, examine our connection with the same inflexibility, that we should tell each other fully what we had been silent about, starting perhaps from the unaccustomed lament for my mistaken book.

that need was so strong that i imagined going to naples with the children for a while, or asking her to come to me with gennaro, or to write to each other. i talked about it with her once on the phone but it was a fiasco. i told her about the books by women i was reading, about the group i went to . she listened but then she laughed at titles like the clitoral woman and the vaginal woman, and did her best to be vulgar: what the fuck are you talking about, lenu, pleasure, pussy, we've got plenty of problems here already, you're crazy. she wanted to prove that she didn't have the tools to put into words the things that interested me. and in the end she was scornful, she said: work, do the nice things you have to do, don't waste time. she got angry. evidently it's not the right moment, i thought, i'll try again later on. but i never found the time or the courage to try again. i concluded that first of all i had to understand better what i was. investigate my nature as a woman. i had been excessive, i had striven to give myself male capacities. i thought i had to know everything, be concerned with everything. what did i care about politics, about struggles. i wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. at the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable. such persistence in memorizing fashionable jargon, wasted effort. i had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice. to what secret pacts with myself had i consented, just to excel. and now, after the hard work of learning, what must i unlearn. also, i had been forced by the powerful presence of lila to imagine myself as i was not. i was added to her, and i felt mutilated as soon as i removed myself. not an idea, without lila. not a thought i trusted without the support of her thoughts. not an image. i had to accept myself outside of her. the gist was that. accept that i was an average person. what should i do. try again to write. maybe i didn't have the passion, i merely limited myself to carrying out a task. so don't write anymore. find some job. or act the lady, as my mother said. shut myself up in the family. or turn everything upside down. house. children. husband.

    *                 *                 *

on one of those occasions i told her about my relationship with franco in the days of the normale, and what he had meant to me. i'm grateful to him, i said, i learned so much from him, and i'm sorry that he now treats me and the children coldly. i thought about it for a moment, and continued: maybe there's something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; i was young at the time, and i didn't realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn't like me as i was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn't want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. for franco, i said, i was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: i constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. and today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed.

*                       *                      *

. . . i was signora airota, elena airota, a woman depressed by submissiveness who nevertheless, urged by her sister-in-law but also in order to fight discouragement, had begun to study almost in secret the invention of woman by men, mixing the ancient and modern worlds. i didn't have an objective; only to be able to say to mariarosa, to my mother-in-law, to this or that acquaintance: i'm working.

and so i pushed on, in my speculations, from the first and second biblical creations to defoe-flanders, flaubert-bovary, tolstoy-karenina, la derniere mode, rose selavy, and beyond, and still further, in a frenzy of revelation. slowly i began to feel some satisfaction. i discovered everywhere female automatons created by men. there was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing.