Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment

In parallel there began to grow inside me a permanent sense of danger. The weight of the two children — the responsibility but also the physical requirements of their lives — became a constant worry. I was afraid I would be unable to take care of them, I even feared harming them, in a moment of weariness or distraction. Not that, before, Mario had done a lot to help me; he was always overloaded with work. But his presence — or, rather, his absence, which, however, could always be changed into presence, if necessary — reassured me. The fact, now, of not knowing where he was anymore, of not having his phone number, of calling his cell phone with restless frequency and discovering that it was always turned off — this making himself untraceable, to the point that even at work his colleagues, perhaps his accomplices, told me that he was ill or that he had taken a leave or was abroad doing research — made me feel like a boxer who no longer remembers how to move and wanders around the ring with his legs buckling and his guard lowered.

I lived in terror of forgetting that I had to pick up Ilaria at school; and if I sent Gianni to buy some essential in a local shop, I was afraid that something would happen to him or, even worse, that in the grip of my preoccupations I would forget his existence and wouldn’t remember to make sure that he had returned.

So I was in an unstable condition, to which I reacted with a tense, depleted self-control. My head was completely preoccupied with Mario, with fantasies about him and that woman, with the reexamination of our past, with a mania to understand how I had been inadequate; and at the same time I was desperately vigilant about the obligatory daily tasks; be careful to salt the pasta, be careful not to salt it twice, be careful to note the expiration date of food, be careful not to leave the gas on.

One night I heard a noise in the house, like a piece of paper gliding quickly over the floor, pushed by a current of air.

The dog whined in fear. Otto, although a German shepherd, was not very courageous.

I got up, I looked under the bed, under the dresser. From the dust that had accumulated under the night table, I saw a black shape dart out, leave my room, and enter the children’s room as the dog barked.

I ran to their room, turned on the light, pulled them sleeping out of their beds, and closed the door. My fear frightened them, so I slowly found the strength to calm myself down. I told Gianni to get the broom, and he, a child of deep diligence, returned immediately with the dustpan as well. Ilaria on the other hand began to scream:

“I want Daddy, call Daddy.”

I stated angrily:

“Your father has left us. He’s gone to live in another place with another woman, we’re no use to him anymore.”

In spite of my horror at any living creature that evokes reptiles, I cautiously opened the door of the children’s room, pushed back Otto, who wanted to go in, and closed the door behind me.

I had to start from there, I said to myself. No more softness, I was alone. I stuck the broom with fury and disgust under the children’s beds, then under the armoire. A yellowish-green lizard that had somehow gotten up to the fifth floor slid rapidly along the wall looking for a hole, a crack in which to hide. I trapped it in a corner and crushed it, pressing with the weight of my whole body on the broom handle. Afterward, disgusted, I came out with the corpse of the big lizard in the dustpan and said:

“Everything’s all right, we don’t need Daddy.”

Ilaria retorted harshly:

“Daddy wouldn’t have killed it, he would have taken it by the tail and carried it out to the park.”

Gianni shook his head, came over to me, examined the lizard, and hugged me around the waist. He said:

“The next time I want to be the one to massacre it.”

In that extreme word, massacre, I heard all his unhappiness. They were my children, I knew them thoroughly, they were assimilating, without letting it be seen, the news that I had just given them: their father had left, he had chosen, over them, over me, a stranger.

They didn’t ask me anything, any explanation. They both went back to bed frightened at the idea that an untold number of other beasts from the park had climbed up to our apartment. They had trouble going back to sleep, and when they woke I saw that they were different, as if they had discovered that there was no longer any safe place in the world. It was the same thing I thought, after all.

After the episode of the lizard, the nights, nearly sleepless already, became a torment. Where was I coming from, what was I becoming. Already at eighteen I had considered myself a talented young woman, with high hopes. At twenty I was working. At twenty-two I had married Mario, and we had left Italy, living first in Canada, then in Spain and Greece. At twenty-eight I had had Gianni, and during the months of my pregnancy I had written a long story set in Naples and, the following year, had published it easily. At thirty-one I gave birth to Ilaria. Now, at thirty-eight, I was reduced to nothing, I couldn’t even act as I thought I should. No work, no husband, numbed, blunted.

When the children were at school, I lay on the sofa, got up, sat down again, watched TV. But there was no program that could make me forget myself. At night I wandered through the house, and I soon ended up watching the channels where women, above all women, tossed in their beds like wagtails on the branch of a tree. They simpered indecently behind the superimposed telephone numbers, behind captions that promised lavish pleasures. Or they made coy, teasing remarks in sugary voices as they writhed. I looked at them wondering if Mario’s whore was like that, the dream or nightmare of a pornographer, and if, during the fifteen years we had spent together, he had secretly longed for this, just this, and I hadn’t understood. So I became angry first with myself, then with him, until I started crying, as if the ladies of the television night, continuously, exasperatingly, touching their giant breasts, or licking their own nipples as they wiggled in faked excitement, made a spectacle that could sadden one to tears.

To calm myself I got into the habit of writing until dawn. In the beginning I tried to work on the book that I had been trying to put together for years, but then I gave it up, disgusted. Night after night I wrote letters to Mario, even though I didn’t know where to send them. I hoped that sooner or later I would have a way of giving them to him, I liked to think that he would read them. I wrote in the silent house, with only the breathing of the children in the other room, and Otto, who wandered through the house growling anxiously. In those long letters, I forced myself to take a judicious, conversational tone. I told him that I was re-examining our relationship in minute detail and that I needed his help to understand where I had gone wrong. The contradictions in the life of a couple are many — I admitted — and I was working on ours in the hope of untangling and resolving them. The essential, the only real claim I would make on him was that he should listen to me, tell me if he intended to collaborate in my labor of self-analysis. I couldn’t bear that he gave no signs of life, he shouldn’t deprive me of an encounter that for me was necessary, he owed me attention, at least; where had he found the courage to leave me alone, overwhelmed, examining through a microscope, year by year, our life together? It wasn’t important — I wrote, lying — that he should come back to live with me and our children. The urgency I felt was different, the urgency was to understand. Why had he so casually thrown away fifteen years of feelings, emotions, love? He had taken for himself time, time, all the time of my life, only to toss it out with the carelessness of a whim. What an unjust, one-sided decision. To blow away the past as if it were a nasty insect that has landed on your hand. My past, not only his, ended up in the trash. I asked him, I begged him to help me understand whether that time had at least had a solidity, and at what point it had begun to dissolve, and if then it really had been a waste of hours, months, years, or if, instead, a secret meaning redeemed it, made of it an experience that could produce new fruit. It was necessary, urgent, for me to know, I concluded. Only if I knew could I recover and survive, even without him. Like this, in the confusion of life at random, I was wasting away, desiccated, I was as dry as an empty shell on a summer beach.