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.

*                   *                     *

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.

*                                         *                                           *

. . .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.

*         *            *            *            *          *         *

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.

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.

weakness

excerpts from the story of a new name by elena ferrante

but he promptly shifted onto the only terrain that seemed to justify our meeting. he said that he was glad to see me, all he could talk about with his friend was soccer and exam subjects. he praised me. professor galiani perceived it, he said, you're the only girl in the school who has any curiosity about things that aren't useful for exams and grades. he started to speak about serious subjects, we resorted immediately to a fine, impassioned italian in which we knew we excelled. he started off with the problem of violence. he mentioned a peace demonstration in cortona and related it skillfully to the beating that had taken place in a piazza in turin. he said he wanted to understand more about the link between immigration and industry. i agreed, but what did i know about those things? nothing. nino realized it, and he told me in great detail about an uprising of young southerners and the harshness with which the police had repressed them. "they call them napoli, they call them moroccans, they call them fascists, provocateurs, anarcho-syndicalists. but really they are boys whom no institution cares about, so neglected that when they get angry they destroy everything." searching for something to say that would please him, i ventured, "if you don't have a solid knowledge of the problems and if you don't find lasting solutions, then naturally violence breaks out. but the people who rebel aren't to blame. it's the ones who don't know how to govern." he gave me an admiring look, and said, "that's exactly what i think."

i was really pleased. i felt encouraged and cautiously went on to some reflections on how to reconcile individuality and universality, drawing on rousseau and other memories of the readings imposed by professor galiani. then i asked, "have you read federico chabod?"

i mentioned that name because he was the author of the book on the idea of nationhood that i had read a few pages of. i didn't know anything else, but at school i had learned to give the impression that i knew a lot. have you read federico chabod? it was the only moment when nino seemed to be annoyed. i realized that he didn't know who chabod was and from that i got an electrifying sensation of fullness. i began to summarize the little i had learned, but i quickly realized that to know, to compulsively display what he knew, was his point of strength and at the same time his weakness. he felt strong if he took the lead and weak if he lacked words. he darkened, in fact he stopped me almost immediately. he sidetracked the conversation, he started talking about the regions, about how urgent it was to get them approved, about autonomy and decentralization, about economic planning on a regional basis, all things i had never heard a word about. no chabod, then: i left him the field. and i liked to hear him talk, read the passion in his face. his eyes brightened when he was excited.

            *                         *                               *

who knows if michele solara had kept to himself what he had seen. who knows if everything was going smoothly. who knows if nunzia was already asleep in the house on the road in cuotto or was trying to calm her son-in-law who had arrived unexpectedly on the last boat, hadn't found his wife and was furious. who knows if lila had telephoned her husband and, reassured that he was in naples, far away, in the apartment in the new neighborhood, was now in bed with nino, without fear, a secret couple, a couple intent on enjoying the night. everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn't agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. i understood suddenly why i hadn't had nino, why lila had had him. i wasn't capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. i didn't know how to be drawn beyond the limits. i didn't possess that emotional power that had driven lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. i stayed behind, waiting. she, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn't afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. she deserved nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.

          *                        *                    *

unlike pietro, his father, mother, and sister conversed on a wide variety of subjects. at lunch, in the restaurant of the hotel where they were staying, professor airota and his daughter had, for example, affectionate skirmishes on political subjects that i had heard about from pasquale, from nino, and from franco but of whose substance i knew almost nothing. arguments like: you've been trapped by inter-class collaboration; you call it a trap, i call it mediation; mediation in which the christian democrats always and only win; the politics of the center left is difficult; if it's difficult, go back to being socialists; you're not reforming a thing; in our place what would you do; revolution, revolution, and revolution; revolution is taking italy out of the middle ages, without us socialists in the government, the students who talk about sex at school would be in jail and so would those who distribute pacifist leaflets; i want to see how you'd manage with the atlantic pact; we were always against the war and against all imperialism; you govern with the christian democrats, but will you stay anti-american?

like that, a swift back and forth: a polemical exercise that they both obviously enjoyed, maybe a friendly habit of long standing. i recognized in them, father and daughter, what i had never had and, i now knew, would always lack. what was it? i wasn't able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam, in view of a good grade; a mental conformation that didn't reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful. mariarosa was kind, and so was her father; their tones were controlled, without a trace of the verbal excesses of armando, professor galiani's son, or of nino; and yet they injected warmth into political formulas that on other occasions had seemed to me cold, remote, to be used only in an attempt not to make a bad impression. following each other in rapid succession, they moved on, without interruption, to the bombing of north vietnam, to the student revolts on various campuses, to the many breeding grounds of anti-imperialist struggle in latin america and africa. and the daughter now seemed to be more up to date than the father. how many things mariarosa knew, she talked as if she had first-hand information, so that airota at a certain point looked at his wife ironically, and adele said to her, "you're the only one who hasn't chosen a dessert yet."

"i'll have chocolate cake," she said, breaking off with a graceful frown.

i looked at her in admiration. she drove a car, lived in milan, taught at the university, stood up to her father without resentment. i, instead: i was frightened by the idea of opening my mouth, and, at the same time, humiliated by staying silent. i couldn't contain myself, i said hyperbolically, "the americans, after hiroshima and nagasaki, should be brought to trial for crimes against humanity."

silence. the whole family looked at me. mariarosa exclaimed bravo!, she took my hand, shook it. i felt encouraged and immediately bubbled over with words, scraps of old phrases memorized at various times. i talked about planning and rationalization, the socialist-christian democratic precipice, about neocapitalism, about organizational structures, about africa, asia, primary school, piaget, collusion of the police and the courts, fascist rot in every manifestation of the state. i was muddled, breathless. my heart was pounding, i forgot who i was with and where i was. yet i felt around me an atmosphere of increasing approval, and i was happy to have expressed myself, i seemed to have made a good impression. i was also glad that no one in that nice little family had asked me, as happened frequently, where i came from, what my father did, and my mother. i was i, i , i.

          *                       *                        *

i was working night and day on my thesis, i harassed pietro, reading aloud to him what i had written. he was kind, he shook his head, he fished in his memory of virgil and other authors for passages that might be useful to me. i noted down every word he uttered, i worked hard, but in a bad mood. i went back and forth between two feelings. i sought help and it humiliated me to ask for it, i was grateful and at the same time hostile, in particular i hated that he did his best not to let his generosity weigh on me. what caused me the greatest anxiety was to find myself -- together with him, before him, after him -- submitting my research to the assistant professor who was following the progress of both of us, a man of around forty, earnest, attentive, sometimes even sociable. i saw that pietro was treated as if he already had a professorship, i as a normal brilliant student. often i decided not to talk to the teacher, out of rage, out of pride, out of fear of having to be aware of my constitutional inferiority. i have to do better than pietro, i thought, he knows so many more things than i do, but he's gray, he has no imagination. his way of proceeding, the way that he gently tried to suggest to me, was too cautious. so i undid my work, i started again, i pursued an idea that seemed to me original. when i returned to the professor i was listened to, yes, i was praised, but without seriousness, as if my struggle were only a game well played. i soon grasped that pietro airota had a future and i didn't.