March 21, 2022
I am watching the television adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s third Neopolitan novel. The protagonist is in her twenties, newlywed and newly a mother. When I read this book many years ago I knew it was brilliant, but its significance surpassed me. I was still a child in so many ways. I have barely written since achieving this new subjectivity, that of someone who is no longer a child. Words fall over themselves clumsily, I have entirely forgotten prose and voice, I spend almost no time at all considering my own experience. Everything is geared outward. I could blame it on the fact that my efforts have been targeted at realizing a proper and difficult external goal – becoming a lawyer, for example – but in all honesty it is just laziness and a fear of putting words to a familiar desire which could be called self-immolation.
Ferrante’s protagonist is, in this third novel, self-actualized (perhaps for the first time) in resistance to her circumstance of new marriage and motherhood. It occasions me to reflect on these things, which loom over me like inevitabilities. In the sense that I am hell bent on bringing them upon myself.
For nearly four years now I have been with the same man. During the first year, the obsessive period, all I thought about was the love. I found it so metaphysical, confounding, intolerable, consuming. I loved to talk about it with my friends and write perfectly tortured diary entries about it. This is how it was in the beginning. The manner of A.’s attention, directed solely at me, made me into a hysteric.
It also made me into a woman. When we began living together there was a transformation. The need to name the love, to observe it, to hoard his attention…these impulses abated. A sureness greeted me. I had felt the desire to enmesh our lives, and I had done so, and so I was free.
Two years have passed since we moved into our first shared apartment. The familiarity we have now allows for the kind of independence I have always wanted for myself. It does feel like less in some ways, certainly the level of physical passion has lessened somewhat, though it arises every now and then to bring us together when it becomes clear we have grown apart. There is also nuisance in shared life – this cannot be swept away. Sometimes I feel the onset of an acute and temporary spell of insanity. It is normal to be irritated by someone’s continued presence, I guess. There he is, wherever I turn... I am glad of our mutual desire to travel independently of one another. We speak infrequently on these occasions and this has the effect of temporarily lessening the irritation.
It is not like the marriage Lenuccia faces in the novel. A. is a gentleman and not an ogre. I am not his housekeeper. We share 500 square feet in Vancouver, not a sprawling prewar apartment in Florence. But the comparison I am making is not material. It is more to do with the reckoning that comes at this stage of love – the new opportunity to articulate what love even is. Ferrante articulates this better than anyone does, and perhaps because of the cultural similarity between Neapolitans and metropolitan Yugoslavians (more on this another day), I relate to it more than I have any other fictionalized narrative of a woman in love. And I really think I’ve read most of them.
Like Ferrante, I believe that love is reflective, at least for women. It has to do with the experience of being loved, of being observed. As a mind, sure, but primarily as a delicate physical object, one which is necessarily graceful, rounded, fragile, open, warm, female. I love and observe him, too, but this is a secondary impulse. Perhaps it is grotesque to admit that. I was spoiled with affection as a girl, as most little girls are where I am from. The apple of my family’s eye, the first grandchild, female and somewhat precocious. A. meets my very high demands for affection easily much of the time, and he does it so generously that I find it hard to be dissatisfied.
I only ever feel ignored sexually. I could write about this but I feel too afraid to lay it out. Some writing can only be done in coda. It feels wrong to expose feelings on making love with another person while you still do it. I omit these reflections for this reason.
And what of my feelings for him? This question arises naturally after I spend several paragraphs detailing the extent of his ability to make me feel meaningfully perceived.
Well, I perceive him too. I think this exchange of perception is the bulwark of romantic love. I perceive his slender hands, his immaculate posture, his manner inherited from a previous century. The way he chooses garments, his crystalline intelligence. I love to watch him read, or walk toward me with a cigarette in one hand when we are meeting after a day of work. Observing him talk to other people that I love is my favourite one of all. A. was a precocious child as well and this begets a similar ease of being loved on his part. He is the only person to whom I give affection freely and I think it is the first time I am doing so honestly.
I have said many times that I am with A. because he does not let anything slide. Our shared vigilance against insincerity. And his speech. You do a lot of senseless talking when sharing a life. To think on it too much fills me with dread. But these loose and idiotic conversations are interrupted every now and then with the more glorious kind, returning us both to the beginning. I love him most in these moments. He is a singular narrator in a world of contractions and platitudes. I don’t know anyone near my age who can communicate the way he does, the way that adults spoke around me when I was a child learning to speak.
But I do not want to dress anything up. What I have written above is not the whole story. There are problems, namely my inability to rest and his inability to move. Like many of the characters Ferrante writes, I have always craved totalizing upheaval. Perhaps I relate most to Lila from the Neapolitan series because of this. I am like a maniacal arsonist in some ways. I have lived many lives and they have all been really extreme.
It is, of course, hard to come by an antidote to restlessness in a domestic circumstance. A few options remain: marriage, a child, or breaking up. Everything I have written is the preamble to this – the real precipice from which I write.