Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

“That’s enough, Otto, stop it!”

When he didn’t stop I raised the branch that I had in my hand menacingly, but even then he wouldn’t be silent. This enraged me, and I hit him hard. I heard the whistling in the air and saw his look of astonishment when the blow struck his ear. Stupid dog, stupid dog, whom Mario had given as a puppy to Gianni and Ilaria, who had grown up in our house, had become an affectionate creature — but really he was a gift from my husband to himself, who had dreamed of a dog like that since he was a child, not something wished for by Gianni and Ilaria, spoiled dog, dog that always got its own way. Now I was shouting at him, beast, bad dog, and I heard myself clearly, I was lashing and lashing and lashing, as he huddled, yelping, his body hugging the ground, ears low, sad and motionless under that incomprehensible hail of blows.

“What are you doing?” the woman murmured.

When I didn’t answer but continued to hit Otto, she hurried away, pushing the carriage with one hand, frightened now not by the dog but by me.

When I became aware of her reaction I stopped. I looked at the woman, who was almost running along the path, raising the dust, and then I heard Otto whining unhappily, his head between his paws.

I threw away the whip, crouched down beside him, caressed him for a long time. What had I done to him. I had decomposed, as if exposed to an acid, within the perception of a poor disoriented animal. I had struck the brutal blow of what comes randomly. I had upset the stratified structure of experience, and now everything was a capricious flux. Yes, poor Otto, I murmured, over and over again, yes.

We returned home. I opened the door, went in. But the house didn’t feel empty, someone was there.

Otto darted quickly down the hallway, recovering energy and cheerfulness. I ran to the children’s room, they were sitting on their beds, their schoolbags on the floor, with a look of perplexity. I checked the time: it had happened — I had forgotten about them.

“What’s that bad smell?” asked Gianni, pushing away Otto’s greetings.

“Insecticide. We have ants in the house.”

Ilaria complained:

“When do we eat?”

I shook my head. Dimly in my mind was a question, and meanwhile I explained aloud to the children that I hadn’t gone shopping, I hadn’t cooked, I didn’t know what to give them to eat, it was the fault of the ants.

Then I gave a start. The question was:

“How did you get into the house?”

Yes, how had they got in? They didn’t have keys, I hadn’t given them keys, I doubted that they would know how to deal with a lock. And yet there they were in their room, like an apparition. I hugged them with excessive force, embraced them to be sure that it was really them in flesh and blood, that I wasn’t talking to figures made of air.

Gianni answered:

“The door was partly open.”

I went to the door and examined it. I found no sign of forced entry, but that wasn’t surprising, the lock was old and would be easy to open.

“There was no one in the house?” I asked the children, in dismay, and meanwhile I thought: what if the burglars had been surprised by the children and now were hiding somewhere?

I went through the house keeping the children close to me, reassured only by the fact that Otto followed us, dashing around, without showing any sign of alarm. I looked everywhere, no one. Everything was tidy, clean, there was no trace even of the ants.

Ilaria persisted:

“What is there to eat?”

I made a frittata. Gianni and Ilaria devoured it, I nibbled on some bread and cheese. I ate distractedly, distractedly listened to the chatter of the children, what they had done at school, what that friend had said, who had been mean to them.

Meanwhile I thought: burglars root around everywhere, they overturn drawers, if they don’t find anything to steal they take revenge by shitting on the sheets, peeing throughout the house. No sign of this in the apartment. And anyway it wasn’t a rule. I became lost in a memory of an episode of twenty years earlier, when I was still living at home with my parents. It contradicted all reports about the behavior of robbers. Coming home we had found the door forced open, but the house in perfect order. There was no trace of foul vengeance. Only hours later did we discover that the one thing of value we had was missing: a gold clock that my father had given my mother years earlier.

I left the children in the kitchen and went to see if there was money in the place where I usually put it. There was. But I couldn’t find the earrings that had belonged to Mario’s grandmother. They weren’t in their place, in the chest on the bureau, or in any other place in the house.

I spent the night and the following days in reflection. I felt occupied on two fronts: I had to keep hold of the reality of the facts while sidelining the flow of mental images and thoughts; and meanwhile try to give myself strength by imagining I was like the salamander, which can pass through fire without feeling pain.

Don’t succumb, I goaded myself. Fight. I feared above all my growing incapacity to stick to a thought, to concentrate on a necessary action. The abrupt, uncontrollable twists frightened me. Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He’s gone, you’re still here. You’ll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don’t let yourself break like an ornament, you’re not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue , the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.

Meanwhile, I wondered: who came into the house, who took the earrings and nothing else. I answered: him. He took the family earrings. He wants me to understand that I am no longer his blood, he has made me a stranger, he has exiled me from himself for good.

But then I changed my mind, that seemed to me too unbearable. I said to myself: wait. Stick with the thieves. Drug addicts, maybe. Spurred by the urgent need of a fix. Possible, probable. And, afraid of exaggerating this fantasy, I stopped writing, I went to the door of the house, I opened it, I closed it without slamming it. Then I grabbed the handle, pulled it hard, and, yes, the door opened, the lock didn’t hold, the spring was worn, the bolt went in barely a fraction of an inch. The door appeared closed, and yet you had only to pull and it opened. The apartment, my life and that of my children, it was all open, exposed night and day to anyone.

I quickly came to the conclusion that I had to change the lock. If burglars had entered the house, they could return. And if Mario had entered, furtively, what distinguished him from a thief? He was worse, in fact. Entering his own house secretly. Hunting around in known places, perhaps reading my outbursts, my letters. My heart was bursting with rage. No, he would never cross that threshold again, never, the children would agree with me, you don’t speak to a father who sneaks into the house and leaves no trace of himself, not a hello, not a goodbye, not even a how are you.