The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

with the stupid certainty (those certainties without foundation that we call premonitions, the fantastic outlet of our desires)

thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.

What a mistake it had been to close off the meaning of my existence in the rites that Mario offered with cautious conjugal rapture. What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. 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.

I have to relearn—I said to myself—the tranquil

pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.

But as for me, if all the features that I had assimilated from him had once seemed to me lovable, how, now that they no longer seemed

lovable, was I going to tear them out of me? How could I scrape them definitively off of my body, my mind, without finding that I had in the process scraped away myself?

I searched for signs of my autonomy in the body I had had before meeting my future husband.

Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn’t die, it doesn’t want to die.