Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

The balcony extended over the void like a diving board over a pool. The heat weighed on the motionless trees in the park, hugged the blue surface of the Po, the gray or blue boats of the oarsmen, and the arches of the Princess Isabella bridge. Down below I saw Carrano, who was walking along the path, bent over, evidently in search of his license. I shouted to him:

“Signore! Signor Carrano!”

But I’ve always had a low voice, I can’t yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child. I wanted to tell him that I had his license, but he didn’t even turn around. So I stood silently watching him from the fifth floor, thin but broad in the shoulders, his hair gray and thick. I felt an increasing hostility toward him that became more tenacious the more unreasonable I felt it to be. What were his secrets of a man alone, a male obsession with sex, perhaps, the late-life cult of the cock. Certainly he, too, saw no farther than his ever-weaker squirt of sperm, was content only when he could verify that he could still get it up, like the dying leaves of a dried-up plant that’s given water. Rough with the women’s bodies he happened to encounter, hurried, dirty, certainly his only objective was to score points, as in a rifle range, to sink into a red pussy as into a fixed thought surrounded by concentric circles. Better if the patch of hair is young and shiny, ah the virtue of a firm ass. So he thought, such were the thoughts I attributed to him, I was shaken by vivid electric shocks of rage. I came to myself only when, looking down, I realized that the thin figure of Carrano was no longer cutting the path with its dark blade.

I went back inside, the odor of insecticide had faded. I swept away the black remains of dead ants, washed the floors again, vigorously, with concentration, and went to free Otto, who was whining frantically. But I discovered with disgust that now the children’s room had been invaded. From the loose squares of the old parquet they emerged in rows, with determined energy, black squads in desperate flight.

I went back to work, what else could I do, but indifferently now, discouraged by a sense of ineluctability: that swarming became more repellent to me the more it seemed a demand for an active and intense life that knows no obstacle but, rather, at every obstruction, unsheathes a stubborn, cruel will to do as it wishes.

After spraying insecticide in that room, too, I put the leash on Otto and let him pull me panting down the stairs, from flight to flight.

The dog advanced along the path, irritated by the restraint I imposed, by the pull of the collar. I passed the green stump of a submarine that Gianni liked, went into the tunnel full of obscene graffiti, came out near the pine grove. At that hour the mothers — compact groups of chatting mothers — stayed in the shade of the trees, enclosed in the circle of carriages like settlers encamped in a Western, or they watched the toddlers shouting as they played ball. Most of them didn’t like dogs off their leashes. They projected their fears onto the beasts, afraid the dogs would bite the children or foul the playing areas.

Otto was unhappy, he wanted to run and play, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I was a bundle of nerves and wanted to avoid any occasion for conflict. Better to hold him back, tugging hard on the leash, than to quarrel.

I went deeper into the pine grove, hoping that there would be no one to cause trouble. The dog was now sniffing the ground agitatedly. I had never paid much attention to him, but I was attached to him. And he loved me, without expecting much. From Mario had come sustenance, play, runs in the park. And now that my husband had vanished, Otto, as a good-natured beast, had adapted to his absence with some melancholy and with yelps of annoyance when I didn’t respect the established routines. For example, Mario would certainly have let him off the leash already, just beyond the tunnel, and meanwhile would have accosted the women on the benches to soothe them and reassure them that the dog was well-behaved, friendly to children. I, on the other hand, even in the woods, wanted to be sure that he wouldn’t bother anyone, and only then did I let him go. He raced around, this way and that, wild with joy.

I picked up a long, flexible branch and tried it in the air, first idly, then with decision. I liked the whistle, it was a game I had played as a child. Once, I had found a thin branch like that in the courtyard of our building, and I whipped the air, making it cry. It was then that I heard people say that our neighbor, unable to die by poison, had drowned herself near Capo Miseno. The news ran from one window to the next, from floor to floor. My mother immediately called me into the house, she was nervous and often got angry with me for nothing, I had done nothing wrong. Sometimes she gave me the feeling that she didn’t like me, as if she recognized in me something of herself that she hated, a secret evil of her own. On that occasion she forbade me to go down again to the courtyard, or to play on the stairs. I stayed in a dark corner of the house dreaming the story of the poverella ’ s waterlogged, lifeless body, a silver anchovy to be preserved in salt. And whenever, later, I played at whipping the air to get it to whine, I thought of her, the woman in salt. I heard the voice of her drowning, as she slid through the water all night, as far as Capo Miseno. Now, just thinking about it, I felt like whipping the air of the pinewood harder and harder, like a child, to evoke the spirits, perhaps to chase them away, and the more energy I put into it, the sharper the whistle became. I burst into laughter, alone, seeing myself like that, a thirty-eight-year-old woman in serious trouble who suddenly returns to her childhood game. Yes, I said to myself, we do, we imagine, even as adults, a lot of silly things, out of joy or exhaustion. And I laughed, waving that long thin branch, and felt more and more like laughing.

I stopped only when I heard shouting. A long cry from a young woman, a girl who had appeared unexpectedly at the end of the path. She was big, but not fat, with strong bones beneath her white skin; her features, too, were pronounced, and her hair was very dark. She was gripping the handle of a baby carriage as she cried out, and the wails of an infant echoed hers. Otto meanwhile was barking at her threateningly, frightened himself by the shouts and cries. I ran toward them, I, too, was yelling something at the dog: down, down. But he continued to bark and the woman shouted at me:

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to keep him on a leash? He’s supposed to have a muzzle!”

Ugly bitch. She was the one who needed a leash. I yelled at her, unable to contain myself:

“Don’t you have any sense? When you start shouting, you frighten the child, the child cries, and you both frighten the dog, which is why he’s barking! Action and reaction, shit, action and reaction! You should put a muzzle on yourself!”

She reacted with equal aggressiveness, growing angry with me, with Otto, who continued to bark. She brought up her husband, she said, threateningly, that he knew what to do, that he would resolve once and for all the outrage of dogs running free in the park, the green spaces were for children, she cried, not for animals. Then she grabbed the infant who was wailing in the stroller and picked him up and hugged him to her breast, murmuring words of reassurance, whether for herself or for him. Finally, wide-eyed, she turned to Otto and hissed:

“Look at him! Listen to him! If my milk dries up, I’ll make you pay!”

Maybe it was that mention of milk, I don’t know, but I felt a sort of tug in my breast, an abrupt awakening of my hearing, my eyes. Suddenly I saw Otto in all his reality of sharp fangs, pricked-up ears, bristling fur, fierce gaze, every muscle ready to spring, the threatening barks. He was truly a frightening spectacle, he seemed outside of himself, as if he were another dog, of great, unpredictable malice. The bad wolf of the fairy tales. By not lying down quietly as I had ordered, and continuing to bark, complicating the situation, he had — I was convinced — committed an intolerable act of disobedience. I yelled at him: