The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

You mean that sleeping with me you felt yourself growing old? You measured death by my ass, by how once it was firm and what it is now? Is that what you mean?”

Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.

A woman can easily kill on the street, in the middle of a crowd, she can do it more easily than a man. Her violence seems a game, a parody, an improper and slightly ridiculous use of the male intent to do harm.

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 reached out a hand toward Mario, I was sure he was sleeping beside me, but beside me there was nothing, not even his pillow, or mine, either. It seemed to me that the bed had grown wider and at the same time shorter. Maybe I’ve gotten taller, I said to myself, maybe thinner.

What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.

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. The essential thing was that the string, the weave that now supported me, should hold.

Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.”