Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

“The children are there…”

“Here, there… and where am I? Where are you putting me? I want to know! If you feel distress, how do you think I feel distress? Read, read my letters! I can’t get to the bottom of it! I can’t understand what happened to us!”

He looked at the letters with revulsion.

“If you make an obsession of it you’ll never understand.”

“Oh? And how should I behave in order for it not to become an obsession?”

“You should distract yourself.”

I felt an abrupt twisting inside, a mad desire to know if he might at least become jealous, if he still cared about possession of my body, if he could accept the intrusion of someone else.

“Of course I’m distracting myself,” I said, assuming a smug tone. “Don’t think I’m just waiting around here. I’m writing, I’m trying to understand, tormenting myself. But I’m doing it for myself, for the children, certainly not to please you. Hardly. Have you looked around? Have you seen how well the three of us are doing? And have you seen me?”

I stuck out my chest, I made the earrings swing, presenting to him ironically first one profile, then the other.

“You look well,” he said without conviction.

“Well, my ass. I’m extremely well. Ask our neighbor, ask Carrano how I am.”

“The performer?”

“The musician.”

“Are you seeing him?” he asked indifferently.

I laughed, a kind of sob.

“Yes, let’s say I’m seeing him. I’m seeing him exactly the way you’re seeing your lover.”

“Why him? He’s a man I don’t like.”

“I’m the one who has to screw him, not you.”

He brought his hands to his face, rubbed it thoroughly, then murmured:

“Do you do it even in front of the children?”

I smiled.

“Fuck?”

“Speak like that.”

I lost control, and began to shout:

“Speak like what? I don’t give a shit about prissiness. You wounded me, you are destroying me, and I’m supposed to speak like a good, well-brought-up wife? Fuck you! What words am I supposed to use for what you’ve done to me, for what you’re doing to me? What words should I use for what you’re doing with that woman! Let’s talk about it! Do you lick her cunt? Do you stick it in her ass? Do you do all the things you never did with me? Tell me! Because I see you! With these eyes I see everything you do together, I see it a hundred thousand times, I see it night and day, eyes open and eyes closed! However, in order not to disturb the gentleman, not to disturb his children, I’m supposed to use clean language, I’m supposed to be refined, I’m supposed to be elegant! Get out of here! Get out, you shit!”

He got up immediately, hurried into his study, put books and notebooks in a bag, stopped for a moment as if bewitched by his computer, took a case with some diskettes, other stuff from the drawers.

I took a breath, ran after him. I had in mind a million recriminations. I wanted to cry: don’t touch anything; they are things you worked on while I was there, I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking, it’s time that belongs to me in a way, leave everything there. But now I was frightened of the consequences of every word I had uttered, of those that I could utter, I was afraid I had disgusted him, that he would go away for good.

“Mario, I’m sorry, come back, let’s talk…Mario! It’s just that I’m upset…”

He went to the door, pushing me back, he opened it, he said:

“I have to go. But I’ll be back, don’t worry. I’ll be back for the children.”

He was about to go out when he stopped and said:

“Don’t wear those earrings anymore. They don’t suit you.”

Then he disappeared without closing the door.

I pushed the door hard, it was an old door, so loose on its hinges that it hit the jamb and swung back, opening again. So I kicked it furiously until it closed. Then I ran to the balcony while the dog, worried, grumbled beside me. I waited for Mario to appear in the street, I cried desperately:

“Tell me where you live, or at least leave me a phone number! What do I do if I need you, if the children are ill…”

He didn’t even raise his head. I shouted at him, beside myself:

“I want to know the name of that whore, you’ve got to tell me… I want to know if she’s pretty, I want to know how old she is…”

Mario got in the car, started the engine. The car disappeared behind the foliage in the middle of the little square, reappeared, disappeared again.

“Mamma,” Gianni called.

I turned around. The children had opened the door of their room, but they didn’t dare to cross the threshold. My appearance could not have been reassuring. From there, in terror, they were spying on me.

Their look was such that I thought that, like certain characters in tales of fantasy, they might see more than it was in reality possible to see. Maybe I had beside me, stiff as a sepulchral statue, the abandoned woman of my childhood memories, the poverella . She had come from Naples to Turin to grab me by the hem of my skirt, before I flew down from the fifth floor. She knew that I wanted to pour out on my husband tears of cold sweat and blood, cry to him: stay. I recalled that she, the poverella , had done that. One evening, she poisoned herself. My mother said in a low voice to her two workers, the one dark, the other fair: “The poverella thought her husband would be sorry and rush to her bedside to be forgiven.” But he was far away, prudently, with the other woman whom he now loved. And my mother laughed bitterly at the bitterness of that story and of others she knew, all the same. Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive. She talked like this for hours while she cut out patterns and sewed for the clients who still, in the late sixties, had their clothes made to order. Stories and gossip and sewing: I listened. There, under the table, while I played, I discovered the need to write. The faithless man who fled to Pescara didn’t even come when his wife deliberately put herself between life and death, and an ambulance had to be called, to take her to the hospital. Phrases that remained in my mind forever. To deliberately put oneself between life and death, suspended like a tightrope walker. I heard my mother’s words and, I don’t know why, I imagined that for love of her husband the poverella was lying on the edge of a sword, and the blade had cut through her dress, her skin. When I saw that she had returned from the hospital, she seemed to me sadder than before; under her dress she had a dark-red cut. The neighbors avoided her, because they didn’t know how to speak to her, what to say.

I roused myself, resentment returned, I wanted to throw myself on Mario with all my weight, pursue him. The next day I decided to start telephoning old friends, to get back in touch. But the telephone didn’t work, Mario had told the truth about that. As soon as I picked up the receiver there was an unbearable hissing, and the sound of distant voices.

I turned to the cell phone. I methodically called all my acquaintances and, in an artificially gentle voice, let them know that I had calmed down, that I was learning to accept the new reality. With those who seemed willing, I asked cautiously about Mario and about his lover, with the air of someone who already knows everything and just wants to talk a little, unburden herself. Most responded in monosyllables, guessing that I was trying deviously to investigate on my own. But some couldn’t resist, and warily revealed small details: my husband’s lover had a metallic-color Volkswagen; she always wore vulgar red boots; she was a rather pale blonde, of indefinite age. Lea Farraco turned out to be the most willing to chat. She wasn’t malicious, to tell the truth, she confined herself to reporting what she knew. Meet them, no, she had never met them. About the woman she was unable to tell me anything. She knew, however, that they lived together. She didn’t know the address, but the rumor was that it was in the neighborhood of Largo Brescia, yes, in fact there, Largo Brescia. They had taken refuge far away, in a rather unappealing place, because Mario didn’t want to see anyone or be seen, especially by his old friends at the Polytechnic.