Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

I stood for a while in front of the door, as if I really had been running. All right, I’ll ask Carrano for help, even if he’s the one who poisoned Otto. There’s nothing else to do, I’ll ask him if I can use his telephone. And if he wants to try to fuck me again, to do it in my ass, I’ll say no, the moment has passed, I’m here only because there’s an emergency in my house, don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll tell him that right away, so that it won’t even occur to him that I’ve come to him for that sort of thing. When you miss your chance, there aren’t any others. Maybe there’s no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second. Since that one time you came by yourself in the condom, you shit.

But I knew immediately, even before trying, that the door wouldn’t open. And when I held the key and tried to turn it, the thing that I had predicted a minute before happened. The key wouldn’t turn.

I was gripped by anxiety, precisely the wrong reaction. I applied more pressure, chaotically, I tried to turn the key first to the left, then to the right. No luck. Then I tried to take it out of the lock, but it wouldn’t come out, it remained in the keyhole as if metal had fused to metal. I beat my fists against the panels, I pushed with my shoulder, I tried the key again, suddenly my body woke up, I was consumed by desperation. When I stopped, I discovered that I was covered with sweat. My nightgown was stuck to me, but my teeth were chattering. I felt cold, in spite of the heat of the day.

I squatted on the floor, I had to reason. The workers, yes, had told me that I had to be careful, the mechanism could break. But they had told me in that tone men have when they exaggerate in order to exaggerate their own indispensability. Sexual indispensability, above all. I remembered the sneer with which the older one had given me his card, in case I should need help. I knew perfectly well what lock he wished to intervene in, certainly not that of the reinforced door. Therefore, I said to myself, I had to eliminate from his words every real piece of information of a technical nature, he had used the jargon of his skills to suggest obscene things to me. Which meant, in practice, that I also had to eliminate from my head the alarming sense of those words, I didn’t have to fear that the mechanism of the door would jam. Good riddance to the words of those two vulgar men, clean up. Relax the tension, re-establish order, plug up the leaks in meaning. The dog, too, for example: why should he have swallowed poison? Eliminate “poison.” I had seen Carrano close up — I felt like laughing at the thought — and he didn’t seem like a person who would prepare dog biscuits with strychnine, maybe Otto had only eaten something rotten. Therefore preserve “rotten,” stare hard at the word. Reconsider every event of that day from the moment of waking. Bring back Otto’s spasms within the limits of probability, give back to the facts a sense of proportion. Give back to me a sense of proportion. What was I? A woman worn out by four months of tension and grief; not, surely, a witch who, out of desperation, secretes a poison that can give a fever to her male child, kill a domestic animal, put a telephone line out of order, ruin the mechanism of a reinforced door lock. And hurry up. The children hadn’t eaten anything. I myself still had to have breakfast, wash. The hours were passing. I had to separate the dark clothes from the white. I had no more clean underwear. The vomit-stained sheets. Run the vacuum. Housecleaning.

I stood up taking care not to make any abrupt movements. I stared at the key for a long time, as if it were a mosquito to be squashed, then I reached out my right hand decisively and commanded the fingers to make the rotating movement to the left. The key didn’t move. I tried to pull it toward me, I hoped it would shift just a tiny bit, just enough to find the right position, but I gained not a fraction of an inch. It didn’t seem like a key, it seemed an excrescence of the brass plate, a dark arch in it.

I examined the panels. They were smooth, without knobs apart from the glittering handle, massive on massive hinges. Useless, there was no way to open the door except by turning that key. I studied the round plates of the two locks, the key was sticking out of the lower one. Each was fixed by four screws of small dimensions. I already knew that to unscrew them wouldn’t get me very far, but I thought that doing it would encourage me not to give up.

I went to the storage closet to get the tool box, I dragged it to the front door. I dug around in it, but couldn’t find a screwdriver to fit those screws, all too big. So I went to the kitchen, took a knife. I chose a screw at random and stuck the point of the blade in the tiny crossed channel, but the knife jumped away immediately, it got no purchase. I went back to the screwdrivers, I took the smallest, I tried to slide the end under the brass plate of the lower lock, another useless gesture. I gave up after a few attempts and went back to the storage closet. I searched slowly, careful not to lose my concentration, for a strong object to insert under the door, that might serve as a lever to raise one of the panels and pry it off its hinges. I reasoned, I must admit, as if I were telling myself a fable, without in the least believing that I would find the right instrument, or that, if I had found it, I would have the physical strength to do what I had in mind. But I was fortunate, I found a short iron bar that ended in a point. I went back to the entrance and tried to insert the sharp end of the object under the door. There was no room, the panels adhered perfectly to the floor, and besides, even if I had succeeded — I realized — the space at the top would be insufficient to allow the door to come off the hinges. I let the bar fall and it made a loud noise. I didn’t know what else to try, I was an incompetent, a prisoner in my own house. For the first time in the course of the day, I felt tears in my eyes, and I wasn’t sorry.

I was about to cry when Ilaria, who evidently had arrived on tiptoe behind me, asked:

“What are you doing?”

It was, of course, not a real question, she only wanted me to turn around and see her. I did, I felt a shudder of loathing. She had dressed in my clothes, she had put on makeup, she was wearing on her head an old blond wig that her father had given her. On her feet was a pair of my high-heeled shoes, on top a blue dress of mine that hampered her movements and made a long train behind her, her face was a painted mask, eye shadow, blush, lipstick. She looked to me like an old dwarf, one of those my mother used to tell of seeing in the funicular at Vomero when she was a girl. They were identical twins, a hundred years old, she said, who got on the cars and without saying a word began to play the mandolin. They had tow-colored hair, heavily shadowed eyes, wrinkled faces with red cheeks, painted lips. When they finished their concert, instead of saying thank you they stuck out their tongues. I had never seen them, but the stories of adults are thick with images, I had the two old dwarves clearly, vividly, in my mind. Now Ilaria was before me and she seemed to have come precisely from those stories of childhood.

When she became aware of the revulsion that must have showed on my face, the child smiled in embarrassment, and, eyes sparkling, said as if to justify herself:

“We’re identical.”

The sentence disturbed me, I shuddered, in a flash I lost that bit of ground I seemed to have gained. What did it mean, we are identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself. I couldn’t, I mustn’t imagine myself as one of the old women of the funicular. At the mere idea I felt a slight dizziness, a veil of nausea. Everything began to break down again. Maybe, I thought, Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria. Maybe she really was one of those minuscule women of The Vomero, who had appeared by surprise, just as, earlier, the poverella who had drowned herself at Capo Miseno had. Or maybe not. Maybe for a long time I had been one of those old mandolin players, and Mario had discovered it and had left me. Without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria was only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me. This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game.