Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

How unbearable the body of a living being who fights with death, and now seems to win, now to lose. I don’t know how long we remained like that. At times the dog’s breathing accelerated as when he was healthy and was eager for a game, for a run in the open air, for understanding and petting, at times it became imperceptible. Even his body alternated moments of trembling and spasms with moments of absolute immobility. I felt the remains of his power slowly slip away, images of the past dripping out: the flight among the bright corpuscles of pressurized water from the sprinklers in the park, the inquisitive scratching among the bushes, the way he followed me through the house when he expected me to feed him. That proximity of real death, that bleeding wound of his suffering, of guilt, unexpectedly made me ashamed of my grief of the previous months, of that day with its overtones of unreality. I felt the room return to order, the house weld together its spaces, the solidity of the floor, the hot day that extended over everything, a transparent glue.

How could I have let myself go like that, let my senses disintegrate, the sense of being alive. I caressed Otto between the ears and he opened his colorless eyes and stared at me. I saw in him the look of the friendly dog who, instead of accusing me, asked forgiveness for his condition. Then an intense pain in his body obscured his pupils, he gnashed his teeth and barked at me without ferocity. Soon afterward he died in my lap, and I burst out crying in an uncontrollable lament, utterly unlike any other crying of those days, those months.

When my eyes dried and the last sobs died in my breast, I realized that Mario had become again the good man he had perhaps always been, I no longer loved him.

I laid the dog’s head on the floor, I got up. Slowly the voice of Ilaria returned, calling me, immediately afterward Gianni’s joined it. I looked around, I saw the feces black with blood, the ants, the dead body. I went out of the room, I went to get a bucket, a rag. I opened the windows, cleaned the room, working quickly but efficiently. I kept calling to the children:

“Just a minute, I’m coming.”

It seemed to me brutal that Otto was lying there, I didn’t want the children to see him. I tried to pick him up, I didn’t have the strength. I took him by the back paws and dragged him across the floor to the living room, onto the balcony. How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there’s no need to let anyone make it heavy for us. I looked for a moment at the dog’s fur ruffled by the wind, then I went back in and, despite the heat, closed the window carefully.

The house was silent, it now seemed to me small, concentrated, without dark corners, made almost cheerful by the voices of the children who, laughing, had begun to make a game of calling me. Ilaria said mamma with the voice of a soprano, Gianni repeated mamma like a tenor.

I hurried to them, I opened the door with a secure motion, I said gaily:

“Here’s mamma.”

Ilaria threw herself on me, hit me again and again, slapping my legs.

“You mustn’t lock me in.”

“It’s true, I’m sorry. But I unlocked you.”

I sat on Gianni’s bed, he was certainly less feverish, he seemed like a boy who couldn’t wait to go back to playing with his sister, to shouting, laughing, furiously quarreling. I felt his forehead, the drops had had an effect, his skin was warm, just slightly sweaty.

“Does your head still hurt?”

“No. I’m hungry.”

“I’ll make you some rice.”

“I don’t like rice.”

“I don’t, either,” Ilaria added.

“The rice I make is very good.”

“Where’s Otto?” asked Gianni.

I hesitated.

“In there, he’s sleeping, leave him alone.”

And I was about to say something else, about the dog’s serious illness, something that would prepare them for his disappearance from their life, when, completely unexpectedly, we heard the electric charge of the doorbell.

All three of us were as if suspended, without moving.

“Daddy,” murmured Ilaria, full of hope.

I said:

“I don’t think so, it’s not daddy. Wait here, I forbid you to move, you’re in big trouble if you leave this room. I’m going to open the door.”

They recognized my normal tone, firm but also ironic, words deliberately excessive for minimal situations. I recognized it myself, I accepted it, they accepted it.

I went along the hall, reached the entrance. Was it possible that Mario had remembered us? Had he come by to see how we were? The question gave me no emotion, I thought only that I would like to have someone to talk to.

I looked through the peephole. It was Carrano.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Nothing. I only wanted to know how you were. I went out early this morning to see my mother and I didn’t want to disturb you. But now I’m back, I found a window broken. Has something happened?”

“Yes.”

“Can I help you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you open the door, please?”

I didn’t know if I could, but I didn’t tell him. I reached my hand toward the key, I grasped it decisively with my fingers, I moved it slightly, I felt it obedient. The key turned in the lock simply.

“Oh, well,” Carrano murmured, looking at me in embarrassment, then he took from behind his back a rose, a single long-stemmed rose, a ridiculous rose offered with a ridiculous gesture by a man not at his ease.

I took it, I thanked him without smiling, I said:

“I have an ugly job for you.”

Carrano was kind. He wrapped Otto in a plastic sheet that he had in the cellar, put him in his car, and, leaving me his cell phone, went to bury him outside the city.

I immediately telephoned the pediatrician and was fortunate, I found him even though it was August. As I was minutely describing to him the child’s symptoms, I realized that my pulses were throbbing, so hard that I was afraid the doctor would hear the thud through the cell phone. My heart was swelling again in my breast, it was no longer empty.

I spoke to the doctor at length, making an effort to be precise, and meanwhile I wandered through the house, I tasted the connection between the spaces, touched objects, and at every slight contact with a knickknack, a drawer, the computer, the books, the notebooks, the handle of a door, I repeated to myself: the worst is over.

The pediatrician listened to me in silence, he assured me that there was no reason to worry about Gianni, he said that he would come and see him that evening. Then I took a long cold shower, the needles of water pricked my skin, I felt all the darkness of the months, of the past hours. I saw the rings that I had left upon waking on the edge of the sink and I put on my finger the one with the aquamarine, while, without hesitation, I let the wedding ring fall down the drain. I examined the wound that Ilaria had made with the paper cutter, I put antiseptic on it, covered it with a bandage. I also went, calmly, to separate the dark clothes from the white, I started the washing machine. I wanted the flat certainty of normal days, even though I knew all too well that a frenetic movement upward endured in my body, a darting, as if I had seen an ugly poisonous insect at the bottom of a hole and every part of me were still retreating, my arms and hands waving, feet kicking. I have to relearn — I said to myself — the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.

I concentrated, therefore, on the children, I had to tell them that the dog was dead. I chose my words with care, I tried for the proper tone of fables, but Ilaria wept for a long time anyway and Gianni, although he confined himself at first to a stern look, saying, with a fleeting echo of threatening tones, that Mario had to be informed, immediately afterward went back to complaining of a headache, of nausea.