The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

The fact, now, of not knowing where he was anymore, of not having his phone number, of calling his cell phone with restless frequency and discovering that it was always turned off—this making himself untraceable,

WHAT THE FUCK

They were my children, I knew them thoroughly, they were assimilating, without letting it be seen, the news that I had just given them: their father had left, he had chosen, over them, over me, a stranger.

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

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.

Mario must have imagined her as the future, and yet he desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for.

And hurry up. The children hadn’t eaten anything. I myself still had to have breakfast, wash. The hours were passing. I had to separate the dark clothes from the white. I had no more clean underwear. The vomit-stained sheets. Run the vacuum. Housecleaning.

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.

How unbearable the body of a living being who fights with death, and now seems to win, now to lose.

How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn’t die, it doesn’t want to die.

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