Free The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante Page B

immediately: Pack your things and let’s go. I stayed a few days, I began to care for them again. And my in-laws never interfered; rather, at the first recourse to their authority against mine, especially by Dede, they withdrew, avoiding any conflict.
    Guido in particular was very careful to speak about other things; at first he didn’t even allude to the break between me and his son. After dinner, when Dede and Elsa went to bed and he, politely, stayed with me for a while before shutting himself in his study to work late into the night (evidently Pietro did little more than apply his father’s model), he was embarrassed. He usually took refuge in political talk: the deepening crisis of capitalism, the cure-all of austerity, the broadening area of marginalization, the earthquake in Friuli as the symbol of a precarious Italy, the great difficulties of the left, old parties and factions. But he did it without displaying any interest in my opinions, and I, in turn, made no effort to have any. If he actually decided to encourage me to say something, he fell back on my book, whose Italian edition I saw for the first time in that house: it was a slender volume, not very conspicuous, which arrived along with the many books and magazines that piled up continuously on the tables, waiting to be perused. One evening he asked some questions, and I—knowing that he hadn’t read it and wouldn’t—summarized for him the arguments, read him a few lines. In general he listened seriously, attentive. In one case only did he offer some learned criticisms on a passage of Sophocles that I had cited inappropriately, and he assumed professorial tones that shamed me. He was a man who emanated authority, even though authority is a patina and at times it doesn’t take much to crack it, if only for a few minutes, and glimpse a less edifying person. At a mention of feminism Guido’s composure suddenly shattered, an unexpected malice appeared in his eyes, and he began to hum sarcastically, red in the face—he who in general had an anemic complexion—a couple of slogans he had heard:
Sex, sex behind the wall, who has orgasms of us all? No one
; and also:
We’re not machines for reproduction but women fighting for liberation
. He sang in a low voice and laughed, all excited. When he realized that he had unpleasantly surprised me, he grabbed his glasses, cleaned them carefully, withdrew to his study.
    On those few evenings Adele was almost always silent, but I soon realized that both she and her husband were looking for a way to draw me out into the open. Since I wouldn’t bite, my father-in-law finally confronted the problem in his own way. When Dede and Elsa said good night, he asked his granddaughters in a sort of good-humored ritual:
    “What is the name of these two lovely young ladies?”
    “Dede.”
    “Elsa.”
    “And then? Grandfather wants to hear the whole name.”
    “Dede Airota.”
    “Elsa Airota.”
    “Airota like who?”
    “Like Papa.”
    “And also?”
    “Like Grandpa.”
    “And what’s Mamma’s name?”
    “Elena Greco.”
    “And is your name Greco or Airota?”
    “Airota.”
    “Bravo. Good night, dear ones, sweet dreams.”
    Then, as soon as the children left the room, accompanied by Adele, he said as if following a thread that started from the answers of the two children: I’ve learned that the break with Pietro is due to Nino Sarratore. I jumped, I nodded yes. He smiled, he began to praise Nino, but not with the absolute support of years earlier. He said that he was very intelligent, someone who knew what was what, but—he said, emphasizing the adversative conjunction—he is
fickle
, and he repeated the word as if to make sure that he had chosen the right one. Then he emphasized: I didn’t like Sarratore’s most recent writings. And in a suddenly contemptuous tone he relegated him to the heap of those who considered it more urgent to make the gears of neocapitalism function rather than to continue to demand