Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante Read Free Book Online Page A

certainly they had been working in me for a long time, occasionally they excited me. But driving that decision to bring myself up to date by forced marches was, at least at first, I think, the old urgency to succeed. I had long ago convinced myself that one can train oneself to anything, even to political passion.
    As I was paying, I glimpsed my novel on a shelf, and immediately looked in another direction. Whenever I saw the book in a window, among other novels that had just come out, I felt inside a mixture of pride and fear, a dart of pleasure that ended in anguish. Certainly, the story had come into being by chance, in twenty days, without struggle, as a sedative against depression. Moreover, I knew what great literature was, I had done a lot of work in the classics, and it never occurred to me, while I was writing, that I was making something of value. But the effort of finding a form had absorbed me. And the absorption had become
that
book, an object that contained me. Now
I
was there,
exposed
, and seeing myself caused a violent pounding in my chest. I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart, the same that had burst out of my chest in that distant moment when Lila had proposed that we write a story together. It had fallen to me to do it seriously. But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts, which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had had the opportunity?
    I came out of the bookshop, I stopped in Piazza Cavour. The day was fine, Via Foria seemed unnaturally clean and solid in spite of the scaffolding that shored up the Galleria. I imposed on myself the usual discipline. I took out a notebook that I had bought recently, I wished to start acting like a real writer, putting down thoughts, observations, useful information. I read
l’Unità
from beginning to end, I took notes on the things I didn’t know. I found the article by Pietro’s father in
Il Ponte
and skimmed it with curiosity, but it didn’t seem as important as Nino had claimed. Rather, it put me off for two reasons: first, Guido Airota used the same professorial language as the man with the thick eyeglasses but even more rigorously; second, in a passage in which he spoke about women students (“It’s a new crowd,” he wrote, “and by all the evidence they are not from well-off families, young ladies in modest dresses and of modest upbringing who justly expect from the immense labor of their studies a future not of domestic rituals alone”), it seemed to me that I saw an allusion to myself, whether deliberate or completely unconscious. I made a note of that in my notebook as well (
What am I to the Airotas, a jewel in the crown of their broad-mindedness
?) and, not exactly in a good mood, in fact with some irritation, I began to leaf through the
Corriere della Sera
.
    I remember that the air was warm, and I’ve preserved an olfactory memory—invented or real—a mixture of printed paper and fried pizza. Page after page I looked at the headlines, until one took my breath away. There was a photograph of me, set amid four dense columns of type. In the background was a view of the neighborhood, with the tunnel. The headline said:
Salacious Memoirs of an Ambitious Girl: Elena Greco’s Début Novel
. The byline was that of the man with the thick eyeglasses.

10.
    I was covered in a cold sweat while I read; I had the impression that I was close to fainting. My book was treated as an occasion to assert that in the past decade, in all areas of productive, social, and cultural life, from factories to offices, to the university, publishing, and cinema, an entire world had collapsed under the pressure of a spoiled youth,