Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

I drew back, frightened, the abyss of the fifth floor had regained its depth. I felt Ilaria tight on my leg. I waited for the hoarse voice of the musician, anger at the damage I had caused. There was no reaction. Instead the birds returned, the wave of burning wind that hit me and the child, my daughter, a true invention of my flesh that forced me to reality.

“You did well,” I said.

“If I hadn’t held you, you would have fallen.”

“You don’t hear anything?”

“No.”

“Then let’s call: Carrano, Carrano, help!”

We shouted together, for a long time, but still Carrano gave no sign of life. There answered instead a long feeble bark, it might be from a distant dog, abandoned in the summer on the side of the road, or Otto himself.

Get moving again, right away, think of solutions. Avoid surrendering to the senselessness of the day, hold the fragments of life together as if they still had their allotted place in a design. I nodded to Ilaria to follow me, I smiled at her. Now she was the lady of the sword, she held in her hand the paper cutter, she had taken her task so seriously that her knuckles were white.

Where I had failed, maybe she would succeed, I thought. We went back to the entrance, in front of the door.

“Try to turn the key,” I asked her.

Ilaria switched the paper cutter from her right hand to her left, stretched out her arm, she couldn’t reach the key. So I held her around the waist, lifted her up as high as necessary.

“Do I turn here?” she asked.

“No, on the other side.”

Tender little hand, fingers of vapor. She tried and tried again, but didn’t have the strength. She couldn’t have done it even if the key hadn’t been jammed.

I put her down, she was disappointed that she hadn’t proved herself up to the new task I had entrusted to her. In a sudden shift she became angry with me.

“Why are you making me do something that you should do yourself?” she said reproachfully.

“Because you’re better.”

“You don’t know how to open the door anymore?” She was alarmed.

“No.”

“Like that other time?”

I looked at her uncertainly.

“What time?”

“The time we went to the country.”

I felt a sharp, protracted pain in my chest. How could she remember, she couldn’t have been more than three.

“Sometimes with keys you’re really stupid and it’s embarrassing,” she added, to make it clear to me that she remembered very well.

I shook my head. No, in general with keys I had a good relationship. Usually I opened doors with a natural gesture, I didn’t feel any anxiety that a lock might jam. Sometimes, however, especially with unknown locks — a hotel room, for example — I immediately got confused and although I was embarrassed went back to the reception desk; it could happen especially if the key was electronic. Those magnetic cards made me anxious, a hint of a thought was enough, the sense of a possible difficulty, and the gesture lost naturalness, I was no longer able to open the door.

The hands forgot, the fingers had no memory of the right grip, the correct pressure. Like that other time. How humiliated I had been. Gina, the mother of the little traitor Carla, had given me the keys to their country house so that I could go there with the children. I had left, Mario had things to do, he would join us the following day. In the late afternoon, after a couple of hours in the car, unnerved by the fierce weekend traffic, by the children, who had quarreled continuously, by Otto, still a puppy, whimpering, I had arrived at the house. I had spent the whole trip thinking about how I was stupidly wasting time, I couldn’t read, I was no longer writing, I had no social role that provided encounters, conflicts, sympathies. The woman I as an adolescent had imagined I would be, what had become of her? I envied Gina, who at the time worked with Mario. They always had things to discuss, my husband talked more to her than to me. And already Carla had begun to annoy me, she seemed so certain of her destiny, and at times even ventured some criticism, said I was too devoted to the children, to the house, she praised my first book, she exclaimed: if I were you, I would think above all of my work. Not only was she beautiful but she had been brought up by her mother in the secure prospect of a bright future. It seemed to her natural to interfere in everything, even though she was only fifteen, she often wanted to teach me something and would spout opinions on things she knew nothing about. Her voice alone by then could put me on edge.

I had parked in the courtyard, but was agitated by my thoughts. What was I doing there with two children and a puppy. I had gone to the door and tried to open it. But I hadn’t succeeded, and no matter how I tried and tried again — meanwhile it was growing dark, Gianni and Ilaria, tired and hungry, were whining — I couldn’t do it. Yet I didn’t want to telephone Mario, out of pride, out of arrogance, out of not wanting to make him come to my rescue after a hard day at work. The children and little Otto ate some cookies, they fell asleep in the car. I went back and tried again, I had tried again and again, my fingers worn out, stiff, until I gave up, I had sat on a step and let the weight of the night fall on me.

At ten in the morning Mario arrived. But not alone. With him, unexpectedly, were the owners of the house. What happened, what in the world, why didn’t you telephone. I explained, stammering, furious because my husband, ill at ease, joked about my incompetence, painting me as a woman of great imagination but useless in practical matters, an idiot, in short. There had been — I recall — a long look between me and Carla, which had seemed to me a look of complicity, of understanding, as if she wished to say to me: rebel, say how things are, say that you’re the one who confronts practical life every day, the obligations, the burden of the children. That look had surprised me, but evidently I had not understood its true significance. Or perhaps I had understood it, it was the look of a girl who was wondering how she would have treated that seductive man, if she had been in my place. Gina meanwhile had put the key in the lock and opened the door without any problem.

I shook myself, I felt the point of the paper cutter on the skin of my left arm.

“You’re distracted,” said Ilaria.

“No, I was just thinking that you’re right.”

“Right about what?”

“Right. Why couldn’t I open the door that time?”

“I told you, because sometimes you’re stupid.”

“Yes.”

Yes, I was stupid. The channels of my senses were blocked, how long had it been since life flowed in them. What a mistake it had been to close off the meaning of my existence in the rites that Mario offered with cautious conjugal rapture. What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him. Where was his skin under my fingers, for example, where was the heat of his mouth. If I were to interrogate myself deeply — and I had always avoided doing it — I would have to admit that my body, in recent years, had been truly receptive, truly welcoming, only on obscure occasions, pure chance: the pleasure of seeing, and seeing again, a casual acquaintance who had paid attention to me, had praised my intelligence, my talent, had touched my hand with admiration; a tremor of happiness at an unexpected encounter in the street, with someone I had worked with in the past; the verbal fencing, or silences, with a friend of Mario’s who had let me understand that he would like to be my friend in particular, the enjoyment in certain attentions of ambiguous meaning addressed to me at various times, maybe yes maybe no, more yes than no if only I had been willing, if I had dialed a telephone number with the right excuse at the right moment, it happens it doesn’t happen, the palpitation of events with unpredictable outcomes.