Status Updates From The Days of Abandonment

“Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision. (…), I didn’t know how to yield completely to Mario’s gaze. I had tried. Obtuse though I was, I pretended to be a right angle, and had managed to choke off even my vocation of moving from fantasy to fantasy. It hadn’t been sufficient, he had withdrawn anyway, he had gone to be joined more solidly elsewhere”

Olga is insufferable.

“In order to write well, I need to go to the heart of every question, of a smaller, safer place. Eliminate the superfluous. Narrow the field. To write truly is to speak from the depths of the maternal womb. Turn the page, Olga, begin again from the beginning.”

“At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion.”

“He couldn’t decide to leave me and yet store in the house the perspiration from his pores, the aura of his body, so strong that it broke even the poisonous seal of Otto.”

“A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.”

“Something in my senses wasn’t working. An interruption of feeling, of feelings. Sometimes I abandoned myself to it, at times I was frightened.”

“While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would be again as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person.”

“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.”

“At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate.”

“I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his.”

“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.”