Free Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante Page B

eliminated the generosity. Now he was pinched, restrained, he weighed his words. In the course of a short, apparently confidential exchange, he never alluded to our old relationship, and when I brought it up, complaining that he had never written to me, he cut me off, saying: It had to be like that. About the university, too, he was vague, and I understood that he hadn’t graduated.
    “There are other things to do,” he said.
    “What?”
    He turned to Marirosa, as if irritated by the too private note of our exchange:
    “Elena is asking what there is to do.”
    Mariarosa answered cheerfully: “The revolution.”
    So I assumed a mocking tone, I said: “And in your free time?”
    Juan, who was sitting next to Silvia, broke in seriously, gently shaking the baby’s closed fist. “In our free time we’re getting ready for it.”
    After dinner we piled into Mariarosa’s car; she lived in a large old apartment in Sant’Ambrogio. I discovered that the Venezuelan had a kind of studio there, a very untidy room where he brought Franco and me to show us his work: big canvases depicting crowded urban scenes, painted with an almost photographic skill, but he had spoiled them by nailing to the surface tubes of paint or brushes or palettes or bowls for turpentine and rags. Mariarosa praised him warmly, but addressing Franco in particular, whose opinion she seemed to value.
    I observed, without comprehending. Certainly Juan lived there, certainly Silvia also lived there, since she moved through the house confidently with Mirko, the baby. But at first I thought that the painter and the young mother were a couple and lived as tenants in one of those rooms, but soon I changed my idea. The Venezuelan, in fact, all evening showed Silvia an abstracted courtesy, while he often put an arm around Mariarosa’s shoulders and once he kissed her on the neck.
    At first there was a lot of talk about Juan’s work. Franco had always had an enviable expertise in the visual arts and a strong critical sensibility. We all listened eagerly, except Silvia, whose baby, until then very good, suddenly began to cry inconsolably. For a while I hoped that Franco would also talk about my book, I was sure he would say something intelligent, such as, with some severity, he was saying about Juan’s paintings. Instead no one alluded to my novel, and, after a burst of impatience from the Venezuelan, who hadn’t appreciated a remark of Franco’s on art and society, we went on to discuss Italy’s cultural backwardness, the political picture that emerged from the elections, the chain-reaction concessions of social democracy, the students and police repression, what was termed
the lesson of France
. The exchange between the two men immediately became contentious. Silvia couldn’t understand what Mirko needed. She left the room and returned, scolding him harshly as if he were a grown child, and then, from the long hall where she was carrying him up and down or from the room where she had gone to change him, shouted out clichéd phrases of dissent. Mariarosa, after describing the nurseries organized at the Sorbonne for the children of the striking students, evoked a Paris of early June, rainy and cold, still paralyzed by the general strike—not at first hand (she regretted it, she hadn’t managed to get there) but as a friend had described it to her in a letter. Franco and Juan both listened distractedly, and yet never lost the thread of their argument; rather, they confronted each other with increasing animosity.
    The result was that we found ourselves, we three women, in the situation of drowsy heifers waiting for the two bulls to complete the testing of their powers. This irritated me. I waited for Mariarosa to intervene in the conversation again; I intended to do so myself. But Franco and Juan left us no space; the baby meanwhile was screaming and Silvia treated him even more aggressively. Lila—I thought—was even younger when she had Gennaro. And I