The Story of the Lost Child: Neapolitan Novels, Book Four

Now I was distressed that nothing of me would endure through time.

taking drugs was one of many channels for individual well-being, a way of freeing oneself from taboos, a cultivated form of release.

Here’s what she had done: she had deceived me, she had dragged me wherever she wanted, from the beginning of our friendship. All our lives she had told a story of redemption that was hers, using my living body and my existence.

I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.

I want to untie my name, slip it off me, throw it away, forget it. But on other occasions she was more relaxed. It happened—let’s say—that I called her hoping to persuade her to talk to me about her text and, although she forcefully denied its existence, continuing to be evasive, it sounded as if my phone call had surprised her in the middle of a c

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. I thought: now that Lila has let herself be seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.

“Think about it. A woman separated, with two children and your ambitions, has to take account of reality and decide what she can give up and what she can’t.”

She was a vapor that in my imagination continued to burn without a wick.