Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

No, stop it. Think of the cell phone. In the drawer I found a green ribbon, I tied the two halves tightly together and tried to press the on button. Nothing. I hoped for a sort of magic, I tried to hear a dial tone. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

I abandoned the instrument on the bed, worn out by Ilaria’s hammering. Then in a flash the computer came to mind. How had I not thought of it. A fault of how I was made, I knew so little, the final proof. I went to the living room, moving as if the hammer blows were a gray curtain, a curtain through which I had to open a way for myself with arms outstretched, hands groping.

I found the child crouching on the floor and banging the hammer, just as she had been. The pounding was insupportable, I counted on its being that way also for Carrano.

“Can I stop?” she asked, all sweaty, red in the face, eyes shining.

“No, it’s important, keep going.”

“You do it, I’m tired.”

“I have something else urgent to do.”

At my desk now there was no one. I sat down, the seat conserved no human warmth. I turned on the computer, I went to the mail icon, I typed to send or receive e-mail. I hoped to succeed in connecting in spite of the disturbance that kept me from telephoning, I hoped that the problem was limited to the instrument, as the person at the telephone company had said. I thought of sending requests for help to all the friends and acquaintances who showed up among my and Mario’s contacts. But the computer tried over and over again without success to make a connection. It searched for the line with prolonged sounds of discomfort, it snorted, it gave up. I clutched the edges of the keyboard, I rotated my gaze over here, over there in order not to feel anxiety, occasionally my eyes fell on the still open notebook, on the sentences underlined in red: “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” Anna’s words, stupidly motivated by the suspicion that her lover is about to betray her, leave her. Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning. For a moment Ilaria’s hammering sliced the anxious thread of sounds emitted by the computer as if an eel had slid through the room and the child were chopping it in pieces. I resisted as long as I could, then I shouted.

“That’s enough! Stop that hammering!”

Ilaria, opening her mouth wide in surprise, stopped.

“I told you I wanted to stop.”

I nodded yes, depressed. I had yielded, Carrano hadn’t. From no corner of the building had a single sign of life been roused. I was acting without a plan, I couldn’t stick with one strategy. The only ally I had in the world was that child of seven and I constantly risked ruining my relations with her.

I looked at the computer screen, nothing. I got up and went to embrace the child, I emitted a long groan.

“Do you have a headache?” she asked me.

“It will pass,” I answered.

“Shall I massage your temples?”

“Yes.”

I sat on the floor while Ilaria carefully rubbed my temples with her fingers. Here I was, giving in again, how much time did I think I had available, Gianni, Otto.

“I’ll make everything go away,” she said. “Do you feel better?”

I nodded yes.

“Why did you put that clip on your arm?”

I roused myself, saw the clip, I had forgotten it. The tiny pain it caused me had become a constitutional part of my flesh. Useless, that is. I took it off, I left it on the floor.

“It helps me remember. Today is a day when everything is slipping my mind, I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll help you.”

“Really?”

I got up, took from the desk a metal paper cutter.

“Hold this,” I said to her, “and if you see me getting distracted, poke me.”

The child took the paper cutter and observed me attentively.

“How will I know if you’re distracted?”

“You can tell. A distracted person is a person who no longer smells odors, doesn’t hear words, doesn’t feel anything.”

She showed me the paper cutter.

“And if you don’t even feel this?”

“Prick me until I feel it. Now come on.”

I dragged her behind me to the storage closet. I rooted around everywhere in search of a strong rope, I was sure I had one. Instead I found only a ball of string for tying packages. I went to the entrance hall, I tied one end of the string to the short iron bar that I had left on the floor, in front of the armored door. Followed by Ilaria, I returned to the living room, went out onto the balcony.

I collided with a gust of warm wind that had just bowed the trees, leaving behind an irritating rustle of leaves. I almost lost my breath, the short nightgown stuck to my body, Ilaria was grabbing the hem with her free hand, as if she were afraid of flying away. In the air was a thick smell of wild mint, of dust, of bark burned by the sun.

I leaned over the balcony, I tried to look onto the balcony below, which belonged to Carrano.

“Don’t fall,” Ilaria said to me in alarm, holding on to my nightgown.

The window was closed, the only sound was the song of some birds, the distant rumble of a bus. No human voices. On all five floors, below, to the right, to the left, I couldn’t make out a sign of life. I strained to hear the music from a radio, a song, the chatter of a television show. Nothing, nothing nearby, at least, nothing that was indistinguishable from the periodic roar of leaves stirred by that incongruous burning wind. I shouted over and over, in a weak voice, a voice that, in any case, had never had great power:

“Carrano! Aldo! Is anyone there? Help! Help me.”

Nothing happened, the wind cut the words off my lips as if I were trying to speak while bringing a cup of boiling liquid to my mouth.

Ilaria, now visibly tense, asked:

“Why do we need help?”

I didn’t answer, I didn’t know what to say, I mumbled:

“Don’t worry, we’ll help ourselves.”

I stuck the bar through the railing, I let out the string, dropping the bar until it touched Carrano’s railing. I leaned over to try to see how far it was from the window and immediately Ilaria let go of my nightgown and held tight instead to a bare leg, I felt her breathing against my skin, saying:

“I’ll hold you, mamma.”

I stretched my right arm down as far as possible, I gripped the string tight between thumb and forefinger, then I gave a swinging motion to the bar with rapid, decisive pulses. The bar — I saw — began to move like a pendulum along Carrano’s balcony. In order for the motion to be successful, I leaned my chest out farther and farther, I stared at the bar as if I wanted to hypnotize myself, I watched that dark pointed segment, now flying above the pavement, now coming back to graze my neighbor’s railing. I soon lost the fear of falling, it seemed to me in fact that my balcony was no farther from the street than the length of the string. I wanted to hit Carrano’s windows. I wanted the bar to break them and penetrate his house, the living room where he had received me the night before. I felt like laughing. Surely he was lazing in bed, in a half sleep, a man on the threshold of physical decay, a man of dubious erections, a casual lover unfit for reascending the slope of humiliation. Imagining how he spent the days, I felt an impulse of contempt for him. In the hottest hours of the day he would take a long siesta in the half-light, sweating, his breath heavy, waiting to go and play in some faded orchestra, with no more hope. I recalled his rough tongue, the salty taste of his mouth, and I came to only when I felt the point of Ilaria’s paper cutter against the skin of my right thigh. Good girl: attentive, sensible. That was the tactile signal I needed. I let the string run through my fingers, the bar disappeared at great speed under the floor of my balcony. I heard the sound of broken glass, the string broke, I saw the bar tumble along the tiles of the balcony below, bump the railing, and fall into the void. It fell for a long time, followed by sparkling fragments of glass, hitting from floor to floor the railings of other balconies, all the same, a black bar, smaller and smaller. It landed on the pavement, ricocheting several times with a distant ringing.