Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

“Or maybe there was only the need for a scapegoat. And since I wasn’t going to be, it was up to Otto.”

At that point, in a reflexive gesture, I brushed some scales of dandruff from his jacket, it was a habit of years. He drew back, almost jumped, I said sorry, Carla intervened, to complete with greater care the work that I had immediately suspended.

We said goodbye after he assured me that he would call to make a date.

“If you want you can come, too,” I proposed to Carla.

Mario said curtly, without even giving her a glance:

“No.”

Two days later he came to the house, loaded with presents. Gianni and Ilaria, contrary to my expectations, greeted him perfunctorily, without enthusiasm, evidently the habit of the weekends had restored to him the normality of father. They immediately started unwrapping the gifts, which pleased them, Mario tried to join in, to play with them, but they didn’t want him. Finally he wandered around the room, touching some objects with his fingertips, looking out the window. I asked:

“Would you like some coffee?”

He accepted immediately, followed me into the kitchen. We talked about the children, I told him that, out of the blue, they were going through a difficult time, he assured me that with him they were good, well behaved. At some point he took pen and paper, he laid out a complex schedule of the days when he would have the children, and those when I would, he said that seeing them automatically every weekend was a mistake.

“I hope the money is enough,” he said.

“Fine,” I said, “you’re generous.”

“I’ll take care of the separation.”

I said, to clarify things:

“If I find out that you leave the children with Carla and go off on your own business without paying attention to them, you won’t see them anymore.”

He looked ill at ease and stared uncertainly at the piece of paper.

“Don’t worry, Carla has a lot of good qualities,” he said.

“I don’t doubt it, but I prefer that Ilaria not learn her childish affectations. And I don’t want Gianni to have the desire to put his hands on her chest the way you do.”

He abandoned the pen on the table, said despairingly:

“I knew it, nothing is over for you.”

I pressed my lips together, hard, then replied:

“Everything is over.”

He looked at the ceiling, the floor, I felt that he was dissatisfied. I leaned back in the chair. His chair seemed to have no space for his shoulders, a chair pasted to the kitchen’s yellow wall. I realized that on his lips was a mute laugh that I had never seen before. It became him, the expression of a sympathetic man who wishes to show that he knows what’s what.

“What do you think of me?” he asked.

“Nothing. Only what I’ve heard about you surprises me.”

“What have you heard?”

“That you’re an opportunist and a traitor.”

He stopped smiling, he said coldly:

“People who talk like that are no more virtuous than I am.”

“I’m not interested in what they are. I only want to know what you are and if you were always like that.”

I didn’t explain to him that I wanted to eliminate him from my body, get rid of even those aspects of him that, out of a sort of positive bias or out of connivance, I hadn’t been able to see. I didn’t say to him that I wanted to escape the pull of his voice, of his verbal expressions, of his habits, of his feeling about the world. I wanted to be me. If that formulation even made sense. Or at least I wanted to see what remained of me, once he was removed.

He answered me with feigned melancholy:

“What I am, what I’m not, how do I know.”

Wearily he pointed at Otto’s bowl that was still sitting in the corner, beside the refrigerator.

“I’d like to get the children another dog.”

I shook my head, Otto moved through the house, I heard the light clicking sound of his nails on the floor. I joined my hands and rubbed them slowly against one another, to eradicate the dampness of bad feeling from the

“I’m not capable of replacements.”

That night, when Mario left, I read again the pages in which Anna Karenina goes toward her death, leafed through the ones about women destroyed. I read and felt that I was safe, I was no longer like those women, they no longer seemed a whirlpool sucking me in. I realized that I had even buried somewhere the abandoned wife of my Neapolitan childhood, my heart no longer beat in her chest, the veins had broken. The poverella had become again an old photograph, the petrified past, without blood.

The children, too, suddenly began to change. Although they were still hostile toward each other, ready to come to blows, they slowly stopped getting mad at me.

“Daddy wanted to get us another dog, but Carla didn’t want to,” Gianni said to me one night.

“You’ll get one someday when you live on your own,” I consoled him.

“Did you love Otto?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, “while he was alive, no.”

I was astonished by the frankness and composure with which I now managed to answer all the questions they asked. Will Daddy and Carla make another child? Will Carla leave Daddy and find someone younger? Do you know, when she’s using the bidet he comes in and pees? I argued, I explained, sometimes I even managed to laugh.

Soon I got in the habit of seeing Mario, telephoning him about daily problems, protesting if he was late in putting money in my account. At some point I noticed that his body was changing again. He was getting gray, his cheekbones were swelling, his hips, his stomach, his chest were getting heavy again. Sometimes he tried growing a mustache, sometimes he left his beard long, sometimes he shaved completely with great care.

One evening he appeared at the house without warning, he seemed depressed, he wanted to talk.

“I have something unpleasant to tell you,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“I can’t stand Gianni, Ilaria gets on my nerves.”

“It’s happened to me, too.”

“I only feel good when I’m not around them.”

“Yes, sometimes it’s like that.”

“My relationship with Carla will be ruined if we continue to see them so often.”

“Could be.”

“Are you well?”

“Me, yes.”

“Is it true that you don’t love me anymore?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Because I lied to you? Because I left you? Because I humiliated you?”

“No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together.”

“And then?”

“I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.”

“It was.”

“No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.”

He made a grimace of annoyance, he said to me:

“You have to have the children more. Carla is exhausted, she has exams to take, she can’t take care of them, you’re their mother.”

I looked at him attentively. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.

Three days later, returning home from work, I found on the doormat, on a piece of paper towel, a tiny object that I had trouble identifying. It was a new gift from Carrano, by now I was used to these silent kindnesses: recently he had left me a button I had lost, also a hair clip I was very attached to. I realized that this was a conclusive gift. It was the white nozzle of a spray can.