The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

But a favor has to be answered by another favor, and the courtesies became a chain that imprisoned us.

And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.

when you don’t know how to keep a man you lose everything,

Once my mother exclaimed: poverella, she’s as dry now as a salted anchovy.

Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knickknacks in the hands of their straying men.

The reasonableness of others and my own desire for tranquility got on my nerves.

The breath built up in my throat, ready to vibrate with words of rage.

I wandered through the house, and I soon ended up watching the channels where women, above all women, tossed in their beds like wagtails on the branch of a tree.

To blow away the past as if it were a nasty insect that has landed on your hand.

In those long hours I was the sentinel of grief, keeping watch along with a crowd of dead words.

he could follow for a single day our life as it had become—disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh—if

Day and night the park seemed to be pushing itself toward our house, as if with branches and leaves it wanted to devour it.

“You mean that I brought you anguish? 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.

Disgust at the torments that shackle us, the chains of heavy life.

Sometimes she gave me the feeling that she didn’t like me, as if she recognized in

me something of herself that she hated, a secret evil of her own.

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to keep him on a leash? He’s supposed to have a muzzle!” Ugly bitch. She was the one who needed a leash. I yelled at her, unable to contain myself: “Don’t you have any sense? When you start shouting, you frighten the child, the child cries, and you both frighten the dog, which is why he’s barking! Action and reaction, shit, action and reaction! You should put a muzzle on yourself!”

Eliminate the exclamation points.

Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don’t let yourself break like an ornament, you’re not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack.

For what could I do, I had lost everything, all of myself, all, irremediably.

We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex.

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.

Time is a breath,

I couldn’t seem to take in the fact that it was I myself weighing on me, I weighed more than lead, I had no desire to hold myself up for the whole day.

And those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools.

Nor did I remember having drawn firm lines in red ink under the questions that Anna asks herself a little before the train hits her and runs her over: “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?”

I didn’t know how to find answers to the question marks, every possible answer seemed absurd. I was lost in the where am I, in the what am I doing. I was mute beside the why. This I had become in the course of a night. Maybe, I didn’t know when, after protesting, after resisting for months, I had seen myself in those books and I was in bad shape, definitively broken. A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.

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

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.

“No. 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.”

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.