The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

Everything was so random. As a girl, I had fallen in love with Mario, but I could have fallen in love with anyone: a body to which we end up attributing who knows what meanings. A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself. We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself.

I decided, enough pain. To the lips of their nocturnal happiness I would attach those of my revenge. I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

I have to relearn—I said to myself—the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.

the circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

stretched a taut wire that pierced the days and I slid swiftly along it, unthinking, in a false equilibrium with increasing bravura,

When he began to play the cello, he lost every remaining trace of the man who lived in my building. He became an exalting hallucination of the mind, a body full of seductive anomalies that seemed to extract from itself impossible sounds, for the instrument was a part of him, alive, born from his chest, his legs, his arms, his hands, from the ecstasy of his eyes, his mouth.

Carrano’s bow was deep and refined, like the curving of a flame pushed by a gust of wind,

The dog had fallen through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect.

tantrums were their way, perhaps silently agreed on, for holding off distress and coming up with explanations that might diminish it.

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.

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.

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.