The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

Don’t act like the poverella, don’t be consumed by tears. Don’t be like the women destroyed in a famous book of your adolescence.

I wanted at any cost to appear beautiful.

“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.

Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don’t let yourself break like an ornament, you’re not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight 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 thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality.

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.

Not even in moments of love had I ever sounded childish. A woman is a woman.

the anxiety of falling out of the web of certainties and having to relearn life without the security of knowing how to do it.

I wanted to be forgiven for what I had perhaps done to him, for what I had been unable to do.

I was afraid that the effort I had made not to lose myself had aged me.

“You have no responsibility other than that of being a very sensitive woman.”

Where am I? Into what world did I sink, into what world did I re-emerge? To what life am I restored? And to what purpose?

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.