Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

So, on a wave first of resentment, then of apprehension, I convinced myself that I had to have a new lock on the door. But — the locksmiths I called explained to me — even if locks, with their panels, clamps, plates, latches, and bolts, would properly lock the house door, they could all, if someone wanted to, be unlocked, forced. They therefore advised me, for my peace of mind, to have the door reinforced.

I hesitated for a long time, I couldn’t spend money lightheartedly. It was easy to foresee that with Mario’s desertion my economic future would be worse as well. But in the end I decided to do it, and I began to make the rounds of specialized shops, comparing prices and service, advantages and disadvantages. In the end, after weeks of obsessive investigations and negotiations, I made a decision, and so one morning two workers arrived at the house, one in his thirties, the other in his fifties, both reeking of tobacco.

The children were at school, Otto was lying in a corner completely indifferent to the two strangers, and I immediately began to feel uneasy. This irritated me, every change in my normal behavior irritated me. In the past I had always been nice to anyone who came to the door: workers from the gas company, the electric company, the building administrator, the plumber, the upholsterer, even door-to-door salesmen and real-estate agents looking for apartments to sell. I was a trusting woman, sometimes I exchanged a few words with these strangers, I liked to appear serenely curious about their lives. I was so sure of myself that I would invite them in and close the door, sometimes I asked if they wanted something to drink. On the other hand, my behavior must have been, in general, so courteous and yet so aloof that it would not occur to any visitor to utter a disrespectful word or attempt some double-entendre to see how I would react and evaluate my sexual availability. Those two men, instead, immediately began to exchange allusive remarks, to snicker, to sing suggestively vulgar songs while they worked, lazily. So I had the suspicion that in my body, my gestures, my looks there was something that I no longer had under control. I became agitated. What could they read in me? That I hadn’t slept with a man for almost three months? That I wasn’t sucking cocks, that no one was licking my pussy? That I wasn’t screwing? Was that why those two men kept speaking to me, laughing, of keys, of keyholes, of locks? I should have armored myself, made myself inscrutable. I became more and more nervous. As they hammered energetically and smoked without asking permission and spread through the house a maddening smell of sweat, I didn’t know what to do.

First I retreated to the kitchen, taking Otto with me, closed the door, sat at the table, tried to read the paper. But I was distracted, they made too much noise. So I stopped reading, began to cook. But I wondered why I was behaving like that, why I was hiding in my own house, it made no sense. After a while I returned to the entrance, where the two were busy in the house and on the landing, setting the metal plates on the old door panels.

I brought them some beers and was greeted with ill-contained enthusiasm. The older one in particular started up again with his vulgarly allusive language, maybe he just wanted to be witty, and that was the only form of wit he knew. Almost unconsciously — it was the throat blowing air against the vocal cords — I answered him laughing, with even heavier allusions, and, realizing that I had surprised them both, I didn’t wait for them to reply but piled it on, so foul-mouthed that the two looked at one another, perplexed, gave a slight smile, left the beer half drunk, and began to work more quickly.

Soon only a persistent hammering could be heard. Uneasiness returned, and this time it was unbearable. I felt all the shame of standing there as if waiting for further vulgarities that didn’t come. There was a long interval of embarrassment, perhaps they asked me to hand them some object, a tool, but with exaggerated courtesy, and not even a smile. After a while I picked up bottles and glasses, and went back to the kitchen. What was happening to me. Was I following, literally, the process of self-degradation, had I surrendered, was I no longer trying to find a new measure of myself?

Eventually the men called me. They had finished. They showed me how the lock worked, they gave me the keys. The older one said that if I had trouble I had only to call, and with large dirty fingers handed me his card. It seemed to me that he was looking at me insistently, but I didn’t react. I gave him my attention really only when he slipped the keys into the two keyholes, as bright as suns above the dark panels of the door, and kept insisting on their positions.

“This goes in vertically,” he said, “this horizontally.”

I looked at him in puzzlement and he added:

“Be careful, you can ruin the mechanism.”

With renewed impudence he philosophized:

“Locks become habituated. They have to recognize the hand of their master.”

He tried first one key, then the other, and it seemed to me that even he had to force them a little. I asked to try myself. I locked and then unlocked both locks with a firm motion, easily. The younger man said with exaggerated languor:

“The signora has a nice sure hand.”

I paid them and they left. I closed the door behind them and leaned against it, feeling the long, living vibrations of the panels until they died away and everything was calm again.

In the beginning there were no difficulties with the keys. They slid into the locks, they turned with decisive clicks, I got into the habit of locking myself in when I came home, day or night, I didn’t want any more surprises. But soon the door became the least of my worries; I had so many things to take care of, I put reminders everywhere: remember to do this, remember to do that. So I was distracted, and began to get confused: I used the key for the top lock in the bottom and vice versa. I forced, I persisted, I got angry. I arrived loaded with shopping bags, I took out the keys and got them wrong, again and again. Then I forced myself to concentrate. I stopped, I took deep breaths.

Pay attention, I said to myself. And very slowly and carefully I chose the key, carefully chose the lock, held both in my mind until the clicks of the mechanism announced that I had succeeded, it was the correct operation.

But I felt that things were taking a turn for the worse, and I was frightened. Having to stay alert in order to avoid mistakes and confront dangers had exhausted me to the point where sometimes simply the urgency of doing something made me think that I really had done it. The gas, for example, was an old anxiety. I was certain that I had turned off the flame under a pot — remember, remember to turn off the gas! — and yet no, I had cooked the meal, set the table, cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and the blue flame had remained discreetly lighted, shining all night like a crown of fire on the metal of the stove, a sign of lunacy; I found it in the morning when I went into the kitchen to make breakfast.

Ah the head: I could no longer trust it. Mario expanded, he cancelled out everything that was not his figure, a boy, a man, as he had grown before my eyes over the years, in my arms, in the warmth of my kisses. I thought only of him, of how it happened that he had stopped loving me, of the necessity that he should give me back that love, he couldn’t leave me like this. I made a list for myself of everything he owed me. I had helped him prepare for his university exams, I had gone with him when he didn’t have the courage to appear, urging him through the noisy streets of Fuorigrotta, his heart splitting his chest, I could hear it beating, amid the din of students from city and province, his face going pale as I encouraged him along the corridors of the university. I had stayed awake night after night making him repeat the abstruse material of his studies. I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his. At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, I had taken care of the meals, I had taken care of the children, I had taken care of all the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become. It seemed to me an action so unjust, a behavior so offensive, that I couldn’t believe it, and sometimes I thought his mind had been obscured, he had lost the memory of us, was helpless and at risk, and it seemed to me that I loved him as I had never loved him, with anxiety rather than with passion, and I thought he had a pressing need for me.