Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment

I sat down in the living room, the house felt empty, as if it had never been inhabited by anyone but puppets of papier-maché or by clothes that had never hugged living bodies. Then I got up, I went to look in the storage closet for the spray can that Otto had played with the night before that terrible day in August. I looked for the marks of his teeth, I ran my fingers over it to feel the dents. I tried to stick the cap onto the can. When it seemed to me that I had succeeded, I pressed with my index finger but there was no spray, only a slight odor of insecticide.

The children were with Mario and Carla, they would return in two days. I took a shower, carefully made up my face, put on a dress that I knew looked nice and went to knock on Carrano’s door.

I felt myself observed through the peephole for a long time: I imagined that he was trying to calm the pounding of his heart, that he wanted to remove from his face the emotion inspired by that unexpected visit. Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell. To make the emotion even stronger I rang the bell again.

Carrano opened the door, his hair was disheveled, his clothes were in disarray, the belt of his pants undone. He smoothed the dark fabric with both hands, adjusting it so as to cover the belt. Seeing him, I had a hard time realizing that he knew how to produce warm sweet notes, to give the pleasure of harmony.

I asked him about his last gift, I thanked him for the others. He was evasive, he was brief, he said only that he had found the spray top in the trunk of his car and had thought that it would be helpful to me in putting order into my feelings.

“It must have been in Otto’s paws or his fur or even in his mouth,” he said.

I thought with gratitude that in those months, discreetly, he had worked to sew up around me a world that could be trusted. He had now arrived at his kindest act. He wanted me to understand that I no longer had to be frightened, that every movement could be narrated with all its reasons good and bad, that, in short, it was time to return to the solidity of the links that bind together spaces and times. With that gift he was trying to exonerate himself, he was exonerating me, he was attributing the death of Otto to the chance of the games of a dog at night.

I decided to go along with him. Because of his constitutional wavering between the figure of the sad colorless man and that of the virtuoso creator of luminous sounds, capable of making your heart swell and giving you an impression of intense life, he seemed to me at that moment the person I needed. I doubted of course that that spray top was really from my insecticide, that he had really found it in the trunk of his car. Yet the intention with which he offered it to me made me feel light, an attractive shadow behind frosted glass.

I smiled at him, I brought my lips to his, I kissed him.

“Has it been very bad?” he asked me in embarrassment.

“Yes.”

“What happened to you that night?”

“I had an excessive reaction that pierced the surface of things.”

“And then?”

“I fell.”

“And where did you end up?”

“Nowhere. There was no depth, there was no precipice. There was nothing.”

He embraced me, he held me close to him for a while, without saying a word. He was trying to communicate silently that, through his mysterious gift, he knew how to make meaning stronger, to invent a feeling of fullness and joy. I pretended to believe him and so we loved each other for a long time, in the days and months to come, quietly.

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples, Italy. Though one of Italy’s most important and acclaimed contemporary authors, she has stunned public attention and kept her identity a mistery. In addiction to The Days of Abandonment , she is the author of Troubling Love (Europa Editions 2006) and The Lost Daughter (Europa Editions 2008).