Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment

I was pressing her to know more, when the phone, which I hadn’t charged for I don’t know how long, went dead. I searched frantically through the house for the charger, but couldn’t find it. The day before, I had tidied every corner of the house for Mario’s visit; surely I had stuck it in a safe place that now, though I searched nervously everywhere, I couldn’t remember. I had one of my outbursts of rage, Otto began to bark, his barking was intolerable, I hurled the phone at a wall to avoid hurling it at the dog.

The instrument broke in two, the pieces fell to the floor with a sharp crack, the dog attacked them, barking as if they were alive. When I calmed down, I went to the regular telephone, picked up the receiver, and heard again that long hiss, the distant voices. But instead of hanging up, I dialed, almost without thinking, and with a habitual movement of my fingers, Lea’s number. The hissing was suddenly cut off, the line returned: mysteries of the telephone.

That second call turned out to be useless. A little time had passed by now, and when my friend answered I found her painfully reticent. Perhaps her husband had reproached her or she herself had regretted helping to complicate an already notoriously complicated situation. She said with affectionate uneasiness that she didn’t know anything else. She hadn’t seen Mario for a while and about the woman she really didn’t know anything, if she was young, if she was old, if she worked. As for where they lived, Largo Brescia was only a general idea: it might be Corso Palermo, Via Teramo, Via Lodi, hard to say, all the streets in that neighborhood had names of cities. And yet it seemed to her rather odd that Mario had ended up there. She advised me to forget about it, time would settle everything.

That didn’t stop me, that very evening, from waiting until the children were asleep and, at one or two in the morning, going out in the car to drive around, Largo Brescia, Corso Brescia, Corso Palermo. I proceeded slowly. In that area the city’s compactness seemed to me torn, wounded by a broad gash made by the shining tram tracks. Like the implacable base of a piston in motion, the black sky, held back only by a tall, elegant crane, compressed the low buildings and the dim light of the street lamps. White or blue sheets hung across the balconies and, shifted by the breeze, slapped against the gray plates of satellite dishes. I parked, I walked the streets with bitter tenacity. I hoped to meet Mario and his lover. I wished for it. I thought I could surprise them as they got out of her Volkswagen, returning from the movies or a restaurant, happy as he and I had been, at least until the children were born. But there was nothing: empty cars, closed shops, a drunk crouching in a corner. Newly renovated buildings were followed by crumbling structures, animated by foreign voices. I read, in yellow, on the roof tile of a low structure: “Silvano free.” He’s free, we’re free, all of us are free. Disgust at the torments that shackle us, the chains of heavy life. I leaned weakly on the blue-painted wall of a building on Via Alessandria, with letters cut in the stone: “Prince of Naples Nursery.” That’s where I was, accents of the south cried in my head, cities that were far apart became a single vice, the blue surface of the sea and the white of the Alps. Thirty years ago the poverella of Piazza Mazzini had been leaning against a wall, a house wall, as I was now, when her breath failed, out of desperation. I couldn’t, like her, give myself the relief of protest, of revenge. Even if Mario and his new woman really were secluded in one of those buildings — in that massive one that looked on a vast courtyard, the legend “Aluminum” over the entrance, the walls studded with balconies, not one without its sheet — they would surely have concealed, behind one of those cloths put up to bar the indiscreet eyes of the neighbors, their happiness at being together, and I could do nothing, nothing, with all my suffering, with all my rage, to tear the screen they were hiding behind and show myself to them and make them unhappy with my unhappiness.

I wandered for a long time through black-violet streets, with the stupid certainty (those certainties without foundation that we call premonitions, the fantastic outlet of our desires) that they were there somewhere, in a doorway, around a corner, behind a window, and perhaps they had even seen me and retreated, like criminals happy with their crimes.

But I got nowhere, I returned home around two, exhausted by disappointment. I parked in the street, I walked up toward the little square, I saw the silhouette of Carrano heading for the door. The instrument case sprouted from his curved shoulders like a stinger.

I had an impulse to call to him, I could no longer bear the solitude, I needed to speak to someone, argue, shout. I hurried to catch up with him, but he had already disappeared behind the door. Even if I had run (and I didn’t have the courage, I was afraid that the asphalt would tear, the park, every tree trunk, even the black surface of the river), I wouldn’t have reached him before he got on the elevator. Still, I was about to when I saw that there was something on the ground, under the double corolla of a lamppost.

I bent over, it was the plastic case of a driver’s license. I opened it, I saw the face of the musician, but much younger: Aldo Carrano; he was born in a town in the south; from the date of birth I saw that he was almost fifty-three, he would be in August. Now I had a plausible excuse to ring his bell.

I put the document in my pocket, got on the elevator, pressed the button for the fourth floor.

The elevator seemed slower than usual, its hum in the absolute silence accelerated the beating of my heart. But when it stopped on the fourth floor I was seized with panic; I didn’t hesitate an instant but pressed the button for five.

Home, home immediately. What if the children had waked, if they had looked for me in the empty rooms? I would give Carrano his license the next day. Why knock at the door of a stranger at two in the morning?

A tangle of resentments, the sense of revenge, the need to test the humiliated power of my body were burning up any residue of good sense.

Yes, home.

The next day, with some resistance, Carrano and his license slid into oblivion. The children had just gone to school when I realized that the house had been invaded by ants. It happened every year in this season, as soon as the warmth of summer arrived. In dense multitudes they advanced from the windows, from the balcony, they emerged from under the parquet, hurried to hide again, marched toward the kitchen, the sugar, the bread, the jam. Otto sniffed them, barked, unknowingly dragged them, buried in his coat, into every corner of the house.

I quickly got a rag and washed every room thoroughly. I rubbed lemon peel in the places that seemed to me most at risk. Then I waited, nervously. As soon as the ants reappeared, I took precise note of the places where they gained access to the apartment, the entrances to the innumerable hiding places, the exits, and filled them with talcum powder. When I realized that neither the powder nor the lemon was effective, I decided to move on to an insecticide, although I worried about Otto, who licked anything and everything without distinguishing between what was safe and what was harmful.

I rummaged around in the storage closet and found a can. I read the instructions carefully, shut Otto in the children’s room, and sprayed noxious liquid in every corner of the house. I did it uneasily, feeling that the spray can might well be a living extension of my organism, a nebulizer of the gall I felt in my body. Then I waited, trying not to pay attention to Otto’s whines as he scratched at the door. I went out onto the balcony in order not to breathe the poisoned air of the house.