Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

“Hey, Aldo,” Gianni would cry, and he wouldn’t stop until Carrano decided to murmur, head lowered: Hi, Gianni.

Afterward I grabbed my son and said to him:

“What’s all this familiarity? You should be more polite.”

But he ignored me, and started making demands like: I want to have my ear pierced, I want to wear an earring, tomorrow I’m dyeing my hair green.

Sundays — when Mario couldn’t take them, and that was not infrequently — the hours in the house were filled with irritations, reproaches, scenes. Then I took the children to the park and sent them for infinite rides on the merry-go-round, while autumn blew flocks of red and yellow leaves from the trees, tossing them along the pavement of the streets or dumping them on the water of the Po. But at times, especially when the day was damp and foggy, we went to the city center, and they chased each other around the fountains that sprayed white jets from the pavement while I wandered about idly, holding off the buzz of moving images and crowding voices that at moments of weariness still returned to my head. Sometimes if things felt particularly disturbing, I tried to catch southern accents under the Turinese voices, regaining a fragile, deceptive sense of childhood, an impression of the past, of years accumulated, of a proper distance for memories. More often, I sat apart, on the steps behind the monument to Emanuele Filiberto, while Gianni, armed with a noisy science-fiction gun, a gift from his father, gave his sister harsh lessons on the war of 1915-18, getting excited about the number of soldiers killed, the black faces of the bronze combatants, the guns at their feet. Then, looking toward the flower bed, I stared at three tall mysterious chimneys that rose from the grass and seemed to survey the gray castle like periscopes, I felt that nothing, nothing could console me, even if — I thought — I’m here now, my children are alive and playing with each other, the pain is distilled, it hurt me but didn’t break me. With my fingers, sometimes, I touched, above my knee, the scar of the wound that Ilaria had made.

Then something happened that surprised and disturbed me. Right in the middle of the week, at the end of a work day, I found a message from Lea on my cell phone. She invited me to a concert that evening, she said it was really important to her. I listened to her lightly high-pitched voice, with the slight verbosity it assumed when she talked about early music, which she was a great fan of. I didn’t feel like going out, but, as with so many things in my life at that time, I forced myself. Then I was afraid she had secretly organized another encounter with the vet, and I hesitated, I had no desire to feel tense all evening. Finally I decided that, vet or not, the concert would relax me, music is always soothing, it loosens the knots of nerves tied tight around the emotions. So I made a lot of telephone calls to find somewhere for Gianni and Ilaria to stay. When I succeeded, I had to convince them that the friends I had decided to entrust them to were not as hateful as they said. They resigned themselves, in the end, even though Ilaria said pointblank:

“Since you’re never here, why don’t you send us to live with Daddy all the time.”

I didn’t answer. Every temptation to yell at them was balanced by the terror that I would set off again on some dark pathway, losing myself, so I restrained it. I met Lea, I breathed a sigh of relief, she was alone. We went by taxi to a little theatre outside the city, a sort of nutshell, without corners, smooth. In that setting, Lea knew everyone and was known, and I found myself at my ease, enjoying the reflection of her popularity.

For a while the small room was a hubbub of voices calling and responding, of nods of greeting, a cloud of perfumes and breaths. Then we sat down, the room became silent, the lights dimmed, the musicians entered, the singer.

“They’re really good,” Lea whispered in my ear.

I said nothing. Incredulous, I had just recognized Carrano among the musicians. In the spotlights he looked different, even taller. He was thin, elegant, every gesture left a bright wake, his hair shone as if it were made of a precious metal.

When he began to play the cello, he lost every remaining trace of the man who lived in my building. He became an exalting hallucination of the mind, a body full of seductive anomalies that seemed to extract from itself impossible sounds, for the instrument was a part of him, alive, born from his chest, his legs, his arms, his hands, from the ecstasy of his eyes, his mouth.

Spurred by the music, I went back, without anxiety, to Carrano’s apartment, the bottle of wine on the table, the glasses now full now empty, the dark cloak of that Friday night, the naked male body, the tongue, the sex. I searched in those images of memory, in the man in the bathrobe, in the man of that night, for this other man who was playing, and couldn’t find him. How absurd, I thought. I’ve been to the extreme of intimacy with this skilled and seductive man, but I didn’t see it. Seeing him now it seems to me that that intimacy doesn’t belong to him, is that of someone who replaced him, perhaps the memory of an adolescent nightmare, perhaps the waking fantasy of a ruined woman. Where am I? Into what world did I sink, into what world did I re-emerge? To what life am I restored? And to what purpose?

“What’s wrong?” Lea asked, perhaps worried by my signs of agitation.

I murmured:

“The cellist is my neighbor.”

“He’s wonderful, do you know him well?”

“No, I don’t know him at all.”

At the end of the concert the audience applauded and applauded. The musicians left the stage and returned, Carrano’s bow was deep and refined, like the curving of a flame pushed by a gust of wind, and his hair of metal fell toward the floor, and then suddenly, when he arched his back and with a forceful motion pulled up his head, returned to order. They played another piece, the beautiful singer moved us with her passionate voice, we applauded again. The audience didn’t want to leave, and the musicians, on the wave of applause, were first sucked back into the shadow of the wings, then expelled as if by some rigid command. I was stunned, I had the impression that my skin was binding my muscles and bones too tightly. This was Carrano’s true life. Or the false one, which now, however, seemed to me more his than the true one.

I tried to release the euphoric tension I felt, but I couldn’t, it seemed to me that the hall had done a headstand, the stage was on the bottom and I was as if high up, looking out from the edge of a hole. Even when one spectator who evidently wanted to go to sleep yelped ironically, and many people laughed, and the applause slowly died away, and the stage emptied, turning a faded green color, and to me it seemed that the shade of Otto had joyously crossed the scene like a dark vein through bright, living flesh, I wasn’t frightened. The whole future — I thought — will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it won’t be worse than the past.

In the taxi Lea asked me at length about Carrano. I answered with circumspection. Then, incongruously, as if jealous that I was keeping for myself a man of genius, she began to complain about the quality of his playing.

“He seemed out of shape,” she said.

Immediately afterward she added something like: he stayed in the middle of the stream, he was unable to make the leap of quality; a great talent ruined by his own insecurities; an artist diffident through excess of prudence. Just as we reached my house, before saying goodbye, she suddenly started talking about Dr. Morelli. She had brought her cat to him and he had asked insistently about me, if I was well, if I had gotten over the trauma of the separation.