Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

“I found it this morning at the end of the street.”

He looked at me in confusion.

“Not the bottle,” I explained, “the license.”

Only then did he seem to understand, and he said to me in puzzlement:

“Thank you, I didn’t expect to find it. Will you come in?”

“Maybe it’s too late,” I murmured, again seized by panic.

He answered with a small, embarrassed smile:

“It’s late, yes, but… please, it would be a pleasure… and thank you… the house is a little untidy… come in.”

I liked that tone. It was the tone of a timid man who tries to appear worldly, but without conviction. I went in, closed the door behind me.

From that moment, miraculously, I began to feel at my ease. In the living room I saw the big instrument case leaning in a corner and it seemed to me a known presence, like that of a maidservant of fifty years ago, one of those large village women who in cities bring up the children of the well off. The house certainly was a mess (a newspaper on the floor, old cigarette butts of some visitor in the ashtray, a dirty milk glass on the table) but it was the pleasant disorder of a man alone, and then the air smelled of soap, you could still smell the clean steam of the shower.

“Excuse my outfit, but I had just…”

“Of course.”

“I’ll get some glasses, I have some olives, crackers…”

“Really, I just wanted to drink to your health.”

And to mine. And to the sorrow, the sorrow of love and sex that I hoped would come soon to Mario and Carla. I had to get used to saying that, the permanently linked names of a new couple. Before, people said Mario and Olga, now they say Mario and Carla. He ought to feel a terrible pain in his prick, disfigurement of syphilis, a rot throughout his body, the stink of betrayal.

Carrano returned with glasses. He uncorked the bottle, waited a little, poured the wine, and meanwhile said nice things in a gentle voice: I had lovely children, he had often watched me from the windows when I was with them, I knew how to treat them. He didn’t mention the dog, he didn’t mention my husband, I felt that he found both unbearable, but that in that circumstance, out of politeness, it didn’t seem nice to say so.

After the first glass I said so to him. Otto was a good dog, but frankly I would never have had a dog in the house, a big dog suffers in an apartment. It was my husband who had insisted, he had taken responsibility for the animal, and, indeed, many other responsibilities. But in the end he had shown himself to be a contemptible man, incapable of keeping faith with the commitments he had made. We don’t know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

“I know just as much about my husband as I know about you, there’s no difference,” I exclaimed. The soul is an inconstant wind, Signor Carrano, a vibration of the vocal chords, for pretending to be someone, something. Mario went off — I told him — with a girl of twenty. He had betrayed me with her for five years, in secret, a duplicitous man, two-faced, with two separate streams of words. And now he has disappeared, leaving all the worries to me: his children to take care of, the house to maintain, and the dog, stupid Otto. I was overwhelmed. By the responsibilities alone, nothing else. It didn’t matter about him. The responsibilities that we had shared were all mine now, even the responsibility of having been unable to keep our relationship alive — alive, keep alive: a cliché; why should I be working to keep it alive; I was tired of clichés — and also the responsibility of understanding where we had gone wrong. Because I was forced to do that torturous work of analysis for Mario, too, he didn’t want to get to the bottom, he didn’t want to adjust or renew. He was as if blinded by the blonde, but I had given myself the task of analyzing, point by point, our fifteen years together, I was doing it, I worked at night. I wanted to be ready to re-establish everything, as soon as he became reasonable. If that ever happened.

Carrano sat beside me on the sofa, he covered his ankles as much as he could with the dressing gown, he sipped his wine listening attentively to what I was saying. He never interrupted, but managed to communicate to me such a certainty of listening that I felt not a single word, not an emotion, was wasted, and I wasn’t ashamed when I felt like crying. I burst out crying without hesitation, sure that he understood me, and I felt something move inside me, a jolt of grief so intense that the tears seemed to me fragments of a crystal object stored for a long time in a secret place and now, because of that movement, shattered into a thousand stabbing shards. My eyes felt wounded, and my nose, yet I couldn’t stop. And I was moved even more when I realized that Carrano, too, could not contain himself, his lower lip was trembling, his eyes were wet, he murmured:

“Signora, please…”

His sensitivity touched me, in the midst of my tears I placed the glass on the floor and, as if to console him, I who had need of consolation drew close to him.

He said nothing, but quickly offered me a Kleenex. I whispered some excuse, I was distraught. He wanted to quiet me, he couldn’t bear the sight of grief. I dried my eyes, my nose, my mouth, I huddled beside him, finally relief. I rested my head gently on his chest, let an arm fall across his legs. I would never have thought I could do such a thing with a stranger, and burst into tears again. Carrano cautiously, timidly, put an arm around my shoulders. In the house there was a warm silence, I became calm again. I closed my eyes, I was tired and wanted to sleep.

“May I stay like this for a little?” I asked and the answer came almost imperceptibly, almost a breath.

“Yes,” he answered, his voice slightly hoarse.

Perhaps I fell asleep. For an instant I had the impression of being in Carla and Mario’s room. Above all a strong odor of sex disturbed me. At that hour surely they were still awake, soaking the sheets with sweat, eagerly plunging their tongues into each other’s mouth. I started. Something had grazed my neck, maybe Carrano’s lips. I looked up in confusion, he kissed me on the mouth.

Today I know what I felt, but then I didn’t understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.

“Shall we begin?” I said with a false cheer.

Carrano gave an uncertain hint of a smile.

“No one is forcing us.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“No…”

He again brought his lips to mine, but I didn’t like the odor of his saliva, I don’t even know if it really was unpleasant, only it seemed to me different from Mario’s. He tried to put his tongue in my mouth, I opened my lips a little, touched his tongue with mine. It was slightly rough, alive, it felt animal, an enormous tongue such as I had seen, disgusted, at the butcher, there was nothing seductively human about it. Did Carla have my tastes, my odors? Or had mine always been repellent to Mario, as now Carrano’s seemed to me, and only in her, after years, had he found the essences right for him?

I pushed my tongue into the mouth of that man with exaggerated eagerness, for a long time, as if I were following something to the bottom of his throat and wished to catch it before it slid into the esophagus. I put my arm around his neck, I pressed him with my body into the corner of the sofa and kissed him for a long time, with my eyes wide open, trying to stare at the objects arranged in one corner of the room, define them, cling to them, because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes I would see Carla’s impudent mouth, she had had that impudence since the age of fifteen, and who could say how much Mario liked it, if he had dreamed of it while he slept beside me, until he woke and kissed me as if he were kissing her and then withdrew and went back to sleep as soon as he recognized my mouth, the usual mouth, the mouth without new tastes, the mouth of the past.