dissolving boundaries

excerpts from the story of the lost child by elena ferrante

she used that term: dissolving boundaries. it was on that occasion that she resorted to it for the first time; she struggled to elucidate the meaning, she wanted me to understand what the dissolution of boundaries meant and how much it frightened her. she was still holding my hand tight, breathing hard. she said that the outlines of things and people were delicate, that they broke like cotton thread. she whispered that for her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and poured into another, into a solution of heterogenous materials, a merging and mixing. she exclaimed that she had always had to struggle to believe that life had firm boundaries, for she had known since she was a child that it was not like that -- it was absolutely not like that -- and so she couldn't trust in their resistance to being banged and bumped. contrary to what she had been doing, she began to utter a profusion of overexcited sentences, sometimes kneading in the vocabulary of the dialect, sometimes drawing on the vast reading she had done as a girl. she muttered that she mustn't ever be distracted: if she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give sensations clear outlines. a tactile emotion would melt into a visual one, a visual one would melt into an olfactory one, ah, what is the real world, lenu, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively: it's like that. and so if she didn't stay alert, if she didn't pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.

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i lived, in other words, on the money that pietro contributed punctually every month and that nino supplemented by taking on the rent for the house, the bills, and, i have to admit, often giving me money for clothes for myself and the children. but as long as i had had to confront all the upheavals and inconveniences and sufferings that followed my return to naples, it had seemed fair. now instead -- after that evening -- i decided that it was urgent to become as autonomous as possible. i had to write and publish regularly, i had to reinforce my profile as an author, i had to earn money. and the reason was not any literary vocation, the reason had to do with the future: did i really think that nino would take care of me and my daughters forever?

it was then that a part of me -- only a part -- began to emerge that consciously, without particular suffering, admitted that it couldn't really count on him. it wasn't just the old fear that he would leave me; rather it seemed to me an abrupt contraction of perspective. i stopped looking into the distance, i began to think that in the immediate future i couldn't expect from nino more than what he was giving me, and that i had to decide if it was enough.

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. . .sometimes i obey money, sometimes respect, in some cases myself. as for infidelities, he said, if you don't find out about them at the right moment they're of no use: when you're in love you forgive everything. for infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. and he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.

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she had often express that idea of eliminating herself, but, starting in the late nineties -- and especially from 2000 on -- it became a sort of teasing chorus. it was a metaphor, of course. she liked it, she had resorted to it in the most diverse circumstances, and it never occurred to me, in the many years of our friendship -- not even in the most terrible moments following tina's disappearance -- that she would think of suicide. eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project. one can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: i want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.

that learning had been more true in some periods, in others less. i remember a malicious tirade that started with my fame. eh, she said once, what a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. she mocked me at length on that point: i untie the ribbon - elena greco - and the sack stays there, it functions just the same, haphazardly, of course, without virtues or vices, until it breaks. on her darkest days she said with a bitter laugh: i want to untie my name, slip it off me, throw it away, forget it. but on other occasions she was more relaxed. it happened - let's say - that i called her hoping to persuade her to talk to me about her text and, although she forcefully denied its existence, continuing to be evasive, it sounded as if my phone call had surprised her in the middle of a creative moment. one evening i found her happily dazed. she made the usual speech about annihilating all hierarchies - so much fuss about the greatness of this one and that one, but what virtue is there in being born with certain qualities, it's like admiring the bingo basket when you shake it and good numbers come out - but she expressed herself with imagination and with precision, i perceived the pleasure of inventing images. ah, how she could use words when she wanted to. she seemed to safeguard a secret meaning that took meaning away from everything else. perhaps it was that which began to sadden me.