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A review by teniamonet
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
5.0
The fourth and final book of the Neapolitan Novels talks about the Maturity and Old Age stage of Lenú and Lila’s lives.
Maturity
Maturity
Although I now wrote about women’s autonomy and discussed it everywhere, I didn’t know how to live without his body, his voice, his intelligence. It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters. At the idea of hurting him and of no longer seeing him I withered painfully, the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother, and the woman-mother was disconnected from the woman-lover, and the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions.
On one occasion I tried, with affectionate irony, to show him up as a liar in front of everyone:
“Don’t believe him. At first he helped me clear, he washed the dishes: today he doesn’t even pick his socks up off the floor.”
“That’s not true,” he protested.
“Yes, it is. He wants to liberate the women of others but not his.”
“Well, your liberation shouldn’t necessarily signify the loss of my freedom.”
In remarks like this, too, uttered playfully, I soon recognized, uneasily, echoes of my conflicts with Pietro. Why had I gotten so angry at my ex-husband while with Nino I let it go? I thought: maybe every relationship with men can only reproduce the same contradictions and, in certain environments, even the same smug responses.”
“If you have something to tell me,” I said, “speak.”
And she made up her mind, she looked at me, I looked down. She said that Nino had often sought her out. She said that he had asked her to come back to him, both before he had become involved with me and after. She said that when they took my mother to the hospital he had been particularly insistent. She said that while the doctors were examining my mother and they were waiting for the results in the waiting room he had sworn to her that he was with me only to feel closer to her.
“Look at me,” she whispered. “I know I’m mean to tell you these things, but he is much worse than I am. He has the worst kind of meanness, that of superficiality.”
So I began to observe the child and was soon convinced that she really suffered. She was the slave of Tina’s joyful expansiveness, of her elevated capacity for verbalization, of the way she aroused tenderness, admiration, affection in everyone, especially me. Although my daughter was pretty, and intelligent, beside Tina she turned dull, her virtues vanished, and she felt this deeply.
Old Age
“It’s not insanity, Dede, it’s grief.”
“She’s never shed a tear.”
“Tears aren’t grief.”
“Yes, but without tears how can you be sure that the grief is there?”
“It’s there and often it’s an even greater suffering.”
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.
But Dede did leave; rather, after that breakdown she seemed tougher and more determined. With Imma she was affectionate, she kissed her hundreds of times, she said: I want at least one letter a week. She let me hug and kiss her, but without returning it. I hovered around her, I struggled to predict her every desire, it was useless. When i complained of her coldness she said: It’s impossible to have a real relationship with you, the only things that count are work and Aunt Lina; there’s nothing that’s not swallowed up inside them, the real punishment, for Elsa, is to stay here. Bye, Mamma.
I was what Lila herself, sometimes joking, sometimes serious, had often repeated: Elena Greco, the brilliant friend of Raffaella Cerullo. From that unexpected reversal of destinies I would emerge annihilated.