Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment

To emerge from my isolation, I began right away to make a series of phone calls. I wanted to search out acquaintances who had children the age of Gianni and Ilaria and arrange vacations even of a day or two that would make up for those black months. As I made these calls, I realized that I had a great need to release my hardened flesh in smiles, words, cordial gestures. I got in touch again with Lea Farraco and reacted with nonchalance when she came to see me one day with the cautious air of someone who has something urgent and delicate to discuss. She dragged it out, as was her custom, and I didn’t hurry her, showed no anxiety. After making sure that I wouldn’t get into a rage, she advised me to be reasonable, she told me that a relationship can end but nothing can deprive a father of his children or children of their father and other things like that. And she concluded:

“You should settle on some days when Mario can see the children.”

“Did he send you?” I asked without hostility.

Uneasily she admitted it.

“Tell him that when he wants to see them all he has to do is telephone.”

I knew I had to find with Mario the right tone for our future relations, if only for the sake of Gianni and Ilaria, but I had no desire to do it, I would have preferred never to see him again. In the evening after that encounter, before going to sleep, I felt that his smell still emanated from the closets, was exhaled by the drawer of his night table, the walls, the shoe rack. In the past months that olfactory signal had provoked nostalgia, desire, rage. Now I associated it with Otto’s death and it no longer moved me. I discovered that it had become like the memory of the odor of an old man who, on a bus, has rubbed off on us the desires of his dying flesh. This fact annoyed me, depressed me. I waited for the man who had been my husband to react to the message I had sent him, but with resignation, not anxiety.

For a long time Otto was my torment. I got furious one afternoon when I caught Gianni, who had put the dog’s collar around Ilaria’s neck, shouting at her, while she barked, and pulling on the leash: good, down, I’ll kick you if you don’t stop. I confiscated collar and muzzle, and locked myself in the bathroom, distressed. There, however, with a sudden impulse, as if intending to see how I looked in a late punk ornament, I tried to buckle the collar around my neck. When I realized what I was doing, I began to cry and threw it all in the garbage.

One morning in September, while the children were in the rocky garden, playing and sometimes quarreling with other children, I thought I saw our dog, our own dog, passing quickly by. I was sitting in the shade of a big oak, not far from a fountain in whose constant spray the pigeons slaked their thirst as the drops of water rebounded off their feathers. I was struggling to write about things, and had only a faint perception of the place, I heard the murmur of the fountain, of its cascade among the rocks, among the aquatic plants. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the long, fluid shadow of a German shepherd crossing the lawn. For a few seconds I was certain that it was Otto, returning from the isle of the dead, and thought that again something was crumbling inside me, and was afraid. In reality — I immediately saw — that dog, a stranger, had no real similarity to our unfortunate dog, he wanted only what Otto often wanted after a long run in the park: to drink. He went to the fountain, put the pigeons to flight, barked at the wasps buzzing around the source of the water, and with his purple tongue broke, avidly, the luminous flow. I closed my notebook and watched him, I was moved. He was a stockier, fatter dog than Otto. He seemed less good-natured, but I felt tender toward him just the same. At a whistle from his master he went off without hesitation. The pigeons returned to play under the stream of water.

In the afternoon I looked for the number of the vet, named Morelli, to whom Mario had taken Otto when necessary. I had never had occasion to meet him, but my husband had spoken of him enthusiastically, he was the brother of a professor at the Polytechnic, a colleague with whom he was friendly. I telephoned the vet, he sounded nice. He had a deep voice, a kind of performing voice, like that of an actor in a movie. He told me to come to the clinic the next day. I left the children with some friends and went.

Morelli’s animal clinic was marked by a blue neon sign that was lighted day and night. I descended a long staircase and found myself in a small brightly lit entrance hall with a strong odor, I was greeted by a dark-haired girl who asked me to wait in a side room: the doctor was operating.

In the waiting room were various people, some with dogs, some with cats, even a woman of around thirty with a black rabbit on her lap whom she caressed continuously with a mechanical movement of her hand. I passed the time studying a notice board that displayed offers for breeding purebred animals interspersed with detailed descriptions of lost dogs or cats. From time to time people arrived wanting news of a beloved animal: one asked about a cat recovering from a test, one about a dog who was having chemotherapy, a woman was in anguish over her French poodle who was dying. In that place pain crossed the fragile threshold of the human and expanded into the vast world of domestic animals. I felt slightly dizzy and was covered in a cold sweat when I recognized in the stagnant smell of the place the smell of Otto’s suffering, the sum of bad things that it now suggested to me. Soon the feeling that I was responsible for the dog’s death was magnified, I felt I had been cruelly careless, my unease increased. Not even the TV in one corner, transmitting the latest harsh news on the deeds of men, could lessen the sense of guilt.

More than an hour passed before I went in. I don’t know why, but I had imagined I would find myself facing a fat brute with a bloody shirt, hairy hands, a broad cynical face. Instead I was greeted by a tall man of around forty, dry, with a pleasant face, blue eyes and fair hair over a high forehead, clean in every inch of his body and mind, an impression that doctors know how to give, and he also had the manners of a gentleman who cultivates his melancholy soul while the old world collapses around him.

The doctor listened closely to my description of Otto’s agony and death. He interrupted only from time to time to suggest to me the scientific term that to his ear made more reliable my abundant and impressionistic lexicon. Scialorrhea. Dyspnea. Muscular fasciculation. Fecal and urinary incontinence. Epileptoid convulsions and attacks. At the end, he said that it was almost certainly strychnine that had caused Otto’s death. He didn’t completely rule out the insecticide, on which I kept insisting. But he was skeptical. He uttered obscure terms like diazine and carbaryl, then he shook his head, concluded:

“No, I really would say strychnine.”

With him, as with the pediatrician, I felt the impulse to talk about the borderline situation I had been in, I had a strong urge to find the right words for that day. He reassured me, listening without any sign of impatience, looking me in the eye with attention. At the end he said to me soothingly:

“You have no responsibility other than that of being a very sensitive woman.”

“Excess of sensitivity can also be a fault,” I responded.

“The real fault is Mario’s insensitivity,” he answered, letting me know by a glance that he could well understand my reasons and considered those of his friend stupid. He also added some gossip on certain opportunistic maneuvers my husband was making to obtain some job or other, things he knew from his brother. I marveled, I didn’t know Mario in that aspect. The doctor smiled, showing his very regular teeth, and added: