The Days of Abandonment: A Novel

by Elena Ferrante

sudden absence of sense.

and he looked at her as one looks from a gray area at a white wall struck by the sun.

draw out as long as possible the time for reaction, filling it with puzzled looks, uncertain smiles.

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.

Mario had been vague, like a patient who is unable to enumerate his symptoms precisely; I never managed to make him say what he felt, what he wanted, what I should expect for myself.

Mario was like that, I said to myself: tranquil for years, without a single moment of confusion, and then suddenly thrown off by a nothing.

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

She became transparent skin over bones, her eyes drowning in violet wells, her hands damp spider webs. Once my mother exclaimed: poverella, she’s as dry now as a salted anchovy.

Compress pain, eliminate the possibility of the strident gesture, the strident voice.

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

like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought.

But his presence—or, rather, his absence, which, however, could always be changed into presence, if necessary—reassured me.

I couldn’t even act as I thought I should. No work, no husband, numbed, blunted.

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

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

I imagined that for love of her husband the poverella was lying on the edge of a sword, and the blade had cut through her dress, her skin.

the city’s compactness seemed to me torn, wounded by a broad gash made by the shining tram tracks.

make them unhappy with my unhappiness.

A tangle of resentments, the sense of revenge, the need to test the humiliated power of my body were burning up any residue of good sense.

a nebulizer of the gall I felt in my body.

They projected their fears onto the beasts,

I had decomposed, as if exposed to an acid, within the perception of a poor disoriented animal.

imagining I was like the salamander, which can pass through fire without feeling pain.

Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself.

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 ...

while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become.

She opened her thighs, she bathed his prick, and imagined that thus she had baptized him, I baptize you with the holy water of the cunt, I immerse your cock in the moist flesh and I rename it, I call it mine and born to a new life. The bitch. So she thought she had full rights to take my place, to play my part, the fucking whore. Give me those earrings, give me those earrings.

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

you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood,

We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone.

anxiety pounded in my throat.

rousing in me a fund of muddy pleasure.

I had lost my husband, I will be unhappy until the moment of death, last night I sucked Carrano’s dick out of desperation, to cancel out the insult to my cunt, how much ruined pride.

Beauty brightens things,

Males small or big are unable to appreciate true beauty, they think only of their own needs.

after the outrage of abandonment preceded by that long period of deception,

told me in that tone men have when they exaggerate in order to exaggerate their own indispensability. Sexual indispensability, above all.

It didn’t seem like a key, it seemed an excrescence of the brass plate, a dark arch in it.

Without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria was only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me. This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when.

malady of miseries and distant climes, a sign of the world at the boiling point, everything in flux, borders fluid, the far that becomes near, rumors of subversion, old and new hatreds, wars distant or at the gates?

We fabricate objects in a semblance of our bodies, one side joined to the other. Or we design them thinking they’re joined as we are joined to the desired body. Creatures born from a banal fantasy.

I realized that I had a great need to release my hardened flesh in smiles, words, cordial gestures.

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.

Mario would explode suddenly from inside their bones, now, over the days, over the years, in ways that were more and more visible. 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.

I realized that, although they didn’t care about hurting me when they talked about Carla, they were jealously watchful to make sure that I devoted myself to them and no one else.