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  But how and when does the opportunity to write become necessity? I don’t know. I know only that writing has a depressing side, when the sinews of the occasion are visible. Then even the truth can seem artificial. So, to avoid any misunderstandings, I will add in the margin, without capers or anything else of the sort, without literature, that my congratulations are true and heartfelt.

  Until next time,

  Elena

  In one of the many houses where I lived as a child, a caper bush grew, in all seasons, on the wall facing east. It was a rough, bare stone wall, riddled with chinks, and every seed could find a bit of earth. But that caper bush, especially, grew and flourished so proudly, and yet with colors so delicate, that it has remained in my mind as an image of just force, of gentle energy. The farmer who rented us the house cut down the plants every year, but in vain. When he decided to fix up the wall, he spread a uniform coat of plaster over it and then painted it an unbearable blue. I waited a long time, trustfully, for the roots of the caper to win out and suddenly fracture the flat calm of that wall.

  Today, as I search for a way to congratulate my publisher, I feel that it has happened. The plaster cracked, the caper exploded anew with its first shoots. So I hope that Edizioni E/O continues to struggle against the plaster, against all that creates harmony by elimination.

  May it do so by stubbornly opening up, season upon season, books like the flowers of the caper.

  NOTE

  Letter to Sandra Ozzola on the occasion of Edizioni E/O’s fifteenth anniversary, in September, 1994.

  4.

  THE ADAPTED BOOK

  Dear Sandro,

  Of course I’m curious, I can’t wait to read Martone’s screenplay, please send it to me right away, as soon as you get it. I’m afraid, however, that reading it won’t satisfy my curiosity, which to me means understanding what in my book nourished and is nourishing Martone’s film project, what nerve of his the text touched, how it set off his imagination. Further, in thinking about it, I foresee that I will find myself in a situation that is partly funny, partly embarrassing: I will become the reader of someone else’s text that is telling me a story written by me; I will imagine on the basis of his words what I’ve already imagined, seen, put down in my own words, and this second image will, like it or not, have to reckon—humorously? tragically?—with the first; I will, in other words, be the reader of a reader of mine who will describe in his way, with his means, with his intelligence and sensibility, what he read in my book. How I might take it I can’t say. I’m afraid of discovering that I know little about my own book. I’m afraid of seeing in someone else’s writing (a screenplay is specialist writing, I imagine, but still writing to tell a story) what I really wrote and of being disgusted with myself; or of discovering instead its weakness; or even just realizing what it lacks, what I should have told and—through lack of ability, fear, self-limiting literary choices, superficiality of view—did not tell.

  But enough, I don’t want to drag this out. I have to admit that the taste for a new experience prevails over small anxieties and worries. I think I’ll proceed like this: I’ll read Martone’s screenplay disregarding the fact that it’s a way of arriving at his film; I’ll read it as an occasion for going deeper, through the work, the invention of someone else, not into my book, which now is on its own, but into the material that I touched on in writing it. Tell him in fact, if you see or talk to him, that he shouldn’t expect a contribution that is technically useful.

  Thank you for the trouble you’ve taken.

  Elena

  NOTE

  The letter is from April, 1994, and refers to the screenplay adapted by Mario Martone from Troubling Love. The director sent the text to Ferrante with a letter.

  5.

  THE REINVENTION OF TROUBLING LOVE

  Correspondence with Mario Martone

  Campagnano, April 18, 1994

  Dear Signora Ferrante,

  What I’ve sent you is the third draft of the screenplay I’m working on. As you can imagine, there will be others, which will gradually incorporate new ideas, changes having to do with the development of characters or the choice of settings, and other adjustments. A screenplay in fact is a little like a map: the more precise it is, the freer the journey that begins with shooting the film. Until that moment, you never stop working on it.

  I tried to understand and respect the book, and at the same time filter it through my experiences, my memories, my perception of Naples. I’m trying to give life to a Delia who may be different from the one you know: it has to be done, precisely because in the novel you decided to conceal her image. You reveal her thoughts, throw the reader some definite hooks, but you never describe her to us through the evidence given by the other characters. That extraordinary process of writing, which creates the mystery of the relationship between Delia and Amalia, for me inevitably has to dissolve, in order to then, I hope, be re-created cinematographically: from the start of the film, in fact, we have to see Delia. I’m trying to give Delia a personality that is at the intersection of the character of your novel and the actress who will play her, Anna Bonaiuto, following a process I’m very attached to (if by chance you’ve seen the film Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, think of the character of Renato Caccioppoli and the actor Carlo Cecchi). It’s a way of trying to adhere to the story with cinematic concreteness: you mustn’t forget that the camera will be shooting that face, that body, that look.

  The flashbacks, like the intrusions of the offscreen voice, are perhaps too numerous, but consider that the material can be very freely edited later, and it seems to me better to keep for now. I’ve changed some settings, in particular you’ll see that I changed the hotel room to a spa. These changes, and there will likely be others, are due mainly to the fact that I’m going to try to find real places that are close to the spirit of the novel and not re-create the settings scenically; and in the second place because sometimes (as with the hotel room) seeing on the screen is inevitably different from seeing with the imagination. For that same reason I prefer, for example, that Uncle Filippo have both his arms: otherwise, I’m afraid that the spectator sits there wondering where the trick is.

  As for the period when the film takes place and the electoral climate that I’ve sketched in the background, I would like to know what you think: I don’t want it to seem gratuitous. I’m sending a photocopy of an article that appeared in Il Manifesto that I think captures well the relationship between the femininity of Alessandra Mussolini and Fascism as an “anthropological” fact in Naples: a relationship, it seems to me, not completely irrelevant to the story of Troubling Love.

  I ask you, therefore, not to hesitate, if you’d like, to give me directions and suggestions, even in detail: they will be incredibly valuable for me. I truly hope that the screenplay doesn’t disappoint you: as I start work on the film, I would like to be able to count on your faith in it.

  With affection and gratitude,

  Mario Martone

  Dear Martone,

  Your screenplay has excited me so much that, although I’ve tried several times to write to you, I haven’t managed to get beyond the first lines stating my esteem and admiration for your work. I’m sincerely afraid that I don’t know how to contribute to your project. I’ve decided therefore to do the following: I will indicate below, pedantically and with some embarrassment, a few marginal points, at times completely irrelevant, where one might intervene, as I noted them while I was reading, without too much insistence. Many of the notes will seem to you unjustified, dictated more by the way the event and the characters remain in my mind than by the way they are now in the writing. Furthermore, maybe they don’t take into account sufficiently your effort to reinvent the character of Delia in a cinematographic mode. I apologize in advance.

  p. 10 The reference to Augusto: Delia is a person who is constricted in every muscle, in every word; kind and cold, affectionate a
nd distant. Her relationships with men are not experiences but experiments intended to test a choked-off body: failed experiments. She can’t, I think, enjoy solitude. Solitude isn’t a break for her, a vacation in a busy life: it’s an entrenched defense transformed into a way of life. Every gesture or word of hers is a knot. It will be these events which loosen her. I don’t think it’s useful to refer to her having a normal life, made up of common phrases and feelings. If there were an Augusto, Delia wouldn’t talk about him. In other words I would eliminate that name and the reference to solitude, as well as the “Let’s tell each other a few things.”

  p. 14 Maria Rosaria’s remark seems excessive. I would replace it with one that gives an immediate, precise indication of the father’s jealousy. I will take advantage of this to tell you that it should perhaps be made clearer that the father has always been jealous. In fact, it’s starting from that paternal jealousy that Delia has constructed an image of the unreliable mother. She was convinced, as a child, that Amalia brought her into the world only to project her outside herself, to separate from Delia and give herself wantonly to others. That specter of Amalia—not the real Amalia—is the intersection between the father’s obsessions and the sense of abandonment experienced by Delia as a child (reference to the storeroom, in the first pages).

  pp. 16-17 Maria Rosaria’s second line and the line of Wanda’s that follows don’t seem justified. They say things that all three sisters already know. They’re formulated as rhetorical questions, useful perhaps to the audience but not to the characters. Furthermore, doesn’t Maria Rosaria’s tone contradict what she’s saying about her husband and her? If the theme is the flight from Naples and from their family situation, maybe it would be suitable for the three sisters to confront it with statements that reveal to each something about the others.

  p. 18 The body of the old sewing machines and the child’s exploration of them could lead to the mother’s work at home to the theme of clothes (putting on the clothes that she imagines to be her mother’s and that will turn out to have been chosen for her) to the injured finger. They are the signs (machine, needle, plaster, thimble, pincushion, and gloves and fabrics and clothes) that indicate how Amalia hid or empowered her disobedient body, deserving punishment. But I would also like to emphasize that Amalia’s work recalls the struggle, in certain milieus, in the forties and fifties, to move from pure survival to a more comfortable way of life (Caserta’s blue suit and camelhair overcoat were, in the eyes of the child Delia, the proof of the mother’s other life, a secret life). At the root of what happens in Troubling Love is the great waste of energy in moving from a state of working-class precariousness to possessing the symbols of some para-bourgeois comfort. We have to imagine that Nicola Polledro’s activities have supported his father’s pastry shop on the outskirts; that Nicola Polledro had an economically successful phase by exploiting “the art” of Delia’s father; that he then slid into small illegal enterprises, to the point where as an old man he scrapes by on the edges of his son’s illegal Camorrist activities. We have to imagine that Delia’s father originally had a crude talent—perhaps the painting of the Vossi sisters really is his—deflected first by the need to get by and then by the need not to keep up with Caserta (the prosperity that Caserta flaunts has made him envious, mean). We have to imagine that the effort directed toward a change of status has released in him tensions and violence fused with jealousy, sexual terror, revenge for his wasted talent, for the exploitation suffered. That scheming seems to Delia herself a thing that men do. But the moments when she realizes for the first time that her mother’s work produced money for the family are important; that her mother’s body was the nude model on which the image of the Gypsy is based; that the break between Caserta and her father (and Amalia’s being mixed up in it) happened around the economic use of the image of that body.

  p. 19 Why is the voice-over that prepares for the episode of the elevator placed here? Wouldn’t it be better to see Amalia, on the landing, calling Delia, and then return to the episode?

  p. 33 Delia’s first remark seems to me unjustified. Further, in my mind the father’s violent jealousy has always been there. At this point, simply, his reasons for jealousy become more complex and his fury increases.

  p. 34 The figure of Nicola Polledro’s father—Antonio’s grandfather—doesn’t seem very vivid to me (but perhaps I’m wrong). Yet it should be clearly defined, because of the role he plays. Caserta doesn’t sell the bar but pushes his pastry-maker father to sell it. The old man should be imagined as having been “put up to it” by Nicola, who meanwhile acts the gentleman.

  p. 38 The theme of the painting could be enhanced, beyond my book: it’s the only moment when Delia’s father can effectively waver between boasting and talent betrayed.

  p. 53 The change of setting (the baths in place of the hotel) I don’t mind. I’m only afraid, as I’ve already said, that one loses an aspect of Delia’s character: her body is blocked in a sort of programmatic reversal of the sexually intense figure that she has attributed to her mother. The scene has to communicate the sensation of Delia’s body choking between repulsion and desire, and at the same time her suffering, or it risks being an erotic gift to the spectator.

  p. 68 I would eliminate that “look, look, look.” It doesn’t seem to me the right tone for Delia.

  p. 69 The theme of the painting—I would insist—perhaps needs one more touch. The aspect of the search for economic, social, and cultural emancipation through the mythicizing of art could be a “positive” trait of the father, who has a socially disadvantaged talent, not cultivated but ambitious. But I don’t think it’s a question of adding: maybe it’s only something to be visualized, when you work with the actor who plays that character.

  p. 74 Delia’s line is difficult. It should be thought of not as a discovery (it’s a discovery for the audience, not for her) but as the effort of expressing a truth that is known yet only in that moment is about to become words.

  Finally: I don’t dislike the electoral updating, provided it remains “landscape,” distant sound, not indispensable detail.

  I hope you will be lenient with me. I know almost nothing about how to read a screenplay, and probably I’ve noted with some rudeness things that were already clear to you, that were already present in your mind, or that have little to do with a story in images. In that case throw it all away and keep only my admiration for your research, for your work. What is important to me (and flatters me) about my book is that it has served to inspire imagination and creativity, which fully belong to you.

  With respect,

  Elena Ferrante

  Dear Martone,

  This last draft is more convincing to me than the preceding, but it’s hard to explain clearly why. All I know is that I read your text with an intensity and an engagement that my own for now denies me. The more you reinvent Troubling Love, the more I find it again, I see it, I feel what it carries with it. It’s a sensation I ought to reflect on. For now, I’m pleased with the result, both for you and for me.

  I have almost no objections to placing Delia in Bologna. Rome has no role in the story: at most it conferred on Delia a more anonymous place, as a single woman, with a small talent that enables her to earn a living, a woman hard enough on herself and others to protect her precarious equilibrium; but fragile, anxious, in some ways childish when her mother’s visits impose on her a regression to her native city. Bologna, on the other hand, as far as I know, suggests a bit more of the “artistic” and the “alternative” that, at least in my intentions, isn’t in the character. But if you think that that city will be more useful for the construction of the working profile of the character and for its verisimilitude, that’s fine.

  I’m more excited about your decision to put Amalia’s apartment in one of the palazzos of the Galleria. I know those buildings. It seems to me a good choice, and even more promising because of your sensitivity to the story and to the a
nthropological changes in that space. I had imagined a narrow street in a less expensive area. But I very much liked the image of Delia looking out into the Galleria and hit by the echo of voices in dialect.

  Also, the changes you’ve brought to the night scene in the building—I suppose suggested by the choice of place—are convincing, although I was attached to Delia’s moving from the high toward the low. (Her adolescent refuge is high up, something that in my mind—perhaps a bit mechanically—was opposed to the low of the childhood cellar. Delia has drawn her mother to that refuge, there Caserta should ascend; but both encounters fail and Delia is forced to go downward, a slide that is faintly present in the whole plan of the story, and which you—it seems to me—have summarized well by accentuating the passage from the center to the periphery. But these are subtleties: the scene as it is now seems very tense, sharp, effective.)

  The meeting with the mother in the elevator remains a problem, in my opinion. It’s an important moment, in which the mother-daughter relationship plunges openly into jealousy for the first time and into an embarrassing physicality (an embarrassment represented, in the book, by a gesture: Delia pulls her hand away, places it on her heart, then opens the door and asks her mother to leave). I think that this is one of the cases in which the narrator’s voice, anticipating Delia’s jealous question, diminishes the scene and confuses the issue, rather than clarifying it. I don’t know how to keep the audience from seeing it as a vision rather than as a memory: but you’ve resolved a lot of problems, you’ll resolve this one, too.