Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

Making an effort, I seized Ilaria by the hand and dragged her along the hall. She protested, but feebly, she lost a shoe, she wriggled free, she lost the wig, she said:

“You’re mean, I can’t stand you.”

I opened the door of the bathroom and, avoiding the mirror, dragged the child over to the bathtub that was full to the brim. With one hand I held Ilaria by the head and immersed her in the water, while with the other I rubbed her face energetically. Reality, reality, without rouge. I needed this, for now, if I wanted to save myself, save my children, the dog. To insist, that is, on assigning myself the job of savior. There, washed. I pulled the child out and she sprayed water in my face, blowing and writhing and gasping for breath and crying:

“You made me drink it, you were drowning me.”

I said to her with sudden tenderness, again I felt like crying:

“I wanted to see how pretty my Ilaria is, I had forgotten how pretty she is.”

I scooped up water in the hollow of my hand and then, as she wriggled and tried to get free, began again to rub her face, her lips, her eyes, mixing the remaining colors, loosening them and pasting them on her skin, until she became a doll with a purple face.

“There you are,” I said, trying to embrace her, “that’s how I like you.”

She pushed me away, she cried:

“Go away! Why can you wear makeup and I can’t?”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t, either.”

I left her and immersed my face, my hair in the cold water. I felt better. When I stood up and rubbed the skin of my face with both hands, I felt under my fingers the wet cotton that I had in one nostril and I took it out cautiously and threw it in the tub. The cotton floated, black with blood.

“Is it better now?”

“We were prettier before.”

“We are pretty if we love each other.”

“You don’t love me, you hurt my wrist.”

“I love you very much.”

“Not me.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Then if you love me, you have to help me.”

“What do I have to do?”

A flash, a throb in the wrists, the abrupt skid of things, I turned uncertainly to the mirror again. I wasn’t in a good state: my hair wet and stuck to my forehead, one nostril encrusted with blood, the makeup faded or reduced to small black clots, the lipstick washed off my lips but smeared around my nose and chin. I reached out a hand to take a cotton ball.

“Well?” Ilaria pressed me, impatiently.

The voice reached me from far away. Just a moment. First take off the makeup for good. Thanks to the side panels of the mirror, I saw the two halves of my face separately, far apart, and I was drawn first by my right profile, then by the left. They were both completely unfamiliar to me, normally I didn’t use the side panels, I recognized myself only in the image reflected by the big mirror. Now I tried to arrange the mirrors so that I could see from the side and from the front. There is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream. Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath. The mirror was summing up my situation. If the frontal image reassured me, saying to me that I was Olga and that perhaps I would arrive at the end of the day successfully, my two profiles warned me that it was not so. They showed me my neck, the ugly living ears, the lightly arched nose that I had never liked, the chin, the high cheekbones and the taut skin of the cheeks, like a white page. I felt that there, over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent. What did she have to do with those images. The worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden. If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about. To Mario, to Mario above all, I thought I had given Olga, the Olga of the central mirror, and now, in reality, I didn’t know which face, which body I had given him. He had assembled me on the basis of those two shifting, disjointed, ephemeral sides, and I don’t know what physiognomy he had attributed to me, what montage of me had made him fall in love, what, on the other hand, had turned out to be repugnant to him, making him fall out of love. For Mario I–I shuddered — had never been Olga. The meanings, the meaning of her life — I suddenly understood — were only a dazzlement of late adolescence, my illusion of stability. Starting now, if I wanted to make it, I had to trust myself to those two profiles, to their strangeness rather than to their familiarity, and moving on from there very slowly restore confidence in myself, make myself adult.

That conclusion seemed to me very true. Especially since, looking hard into my half face on the left, at the changing physiognomy of the secret sides, I recognized the features of the poverella —never would I have imagined that we had so many elements in common. Her profile, when she descended the stairs and interrupted my games and those of my companions to pass by with her absent gaze of suffering, had been huddling in me for years, it was that which I now offered to the mirror. The woman murmured to me from the panel:

“Remember that the dog is dying and Gianni has a nasty intestinal fever.”

“Thank you,” I said without fear, in fact with gratitude.

“Thank you for what?” asked Ilaria, annoyed.

I shook myself.

“Thank you for having promised that you would help me.”

“But you haven’t told me what I have to do!”

I smiled, I said:

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

I moved, I seemed to myself to be pure air compressed between the poorly connected halves of a single figure. How inconclusive it was to traverse that known house. All its spaces had been transformed into separate platforms, far away from one another. Once, five years earlier, I had known its dimensions minutely, I had measured every corner, I had furnished it with care. Now I didn’t know how far the bathroom was from the living room, the living room from the storage closet, the storage closet from the front hall. I was pulled here and there, as if in a game, I had a sense of vertigo.

“Mamma, watch out,” said Ilaria and grabbed my hand. I staggered, perhaps I was about to fall. At the entrance, I pointed out to her the toolbox.

“Take the hammer,” I said, “and follow me.”

We went back, now she held the hammer proudly in both hands, she seemed finally happy that I was her mother. And I, too, was pleased. Once in the living room I said to her:

“Now sit here and bang on the floor without stopping.”

Ilaria took on an expression of great amusement.

“That’s going to make Signor Carrano angry.”

“Exactly.”

“And if he comes up to complain?”

“Call me and I’ll speak to him.”

The child went to the middle of the room and began to beat the floor, holding the hammer in both hands.

Now, I thought, I must see how Gianni is, I’m forgetting about him, what a careless mother.

I exchanged a final glance of understanding with Ilaria and started to go, but my eyes fell on an object that was lying out of place, at the foot of the bookcase. It was the spray can of insecticide, it should have been in the storage closet, instead it was there on the floor, dented by Otto’s jaws, even the white spray top had come off.

I picked it up, examined it, looked around disoriented, noticed the ants. They ran in a line along the base of the bookcase, they had returned to besiege the house, perhaps they were the only black thread that held it together, that kept it from disintegrating completely. Without their obstinacy, I thought, Ilaria would now be on a splinter of floor much farther away than she seems and the room where Gianni is lying would be harder to reach than a castle whose drawbridge has been raised, and the room of pain where Otto is in agony would be a leper colony, and impenetrable, and my very emotions and thoughts and memories of the past, foreign places and the city of my birth and the table under which I listened to my mother’s stories, would be a speck of dust in the burning light of August. Leave the ants in peace. Maybe they weren’t an enemy, I had been wrong to try to exterminate them. At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion.