The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

  “I have to stay with you and prick you, you told me to.”

  “I was wrong, Gianni is alone, he needs someone to feel his forehead, and put the refreshing coins on it, I can’t do everything.”

  I pushed her toward the living room, she rebelled:

  “Who’s going to prick you if you get distracted?”

  I looked at the long cut on my leg, from which a thick stripe of blood continued to well up.

  “Call me every so often, and don’t forget. That will be enough to keep me from being distracted.”

  She thought for a moment, then said:

  “But hurry up, I get bored with Gianni, he doesn’t know how to play.”

  That last phrase pained me. With that explicit reminder of the game I realized that Ilaria didn’t want to play anymore, that she was beginning to be seriously worried about me. If I had the responsibility for two sick creatures, she was starting to perceive that the sick who burdened her were three. Poor, poor little thing. She felt alone, she was secretly waiting for a father who wasn’t showing up, she could no longer hold the confusion of that day within the limits of a game. I was now aware of her anguish, I added it to mine. How changeable it all is, nothing has fixed points. With every step I took toward Gianni’s room, toward Otto’s, I was afraid of feeling ill, of presenting to her I don’t know what spectacle of collapse. I had to maintain judgment and the clarity of memory, they always go together, a binomial of health.

  I pushed the little girl into the room, I glanced at the boy who was still sleeping and I went out, locking the door with a clear gesture, entirely natural. Although Ilaria protested, called me, beat her hands against the door, I ignored her and went to the room where Otto was lying. I didn’t know what was happening to the dog. Ilaria loved him deeply, I didn’t want her to be present at horrifying scenes. Protect her, yes, the truth of this preoccupation did me good. That the cold plan of guarding my children should slowly be transformed into an inescapable need, the principal preoccupation, seemed to me a positive sign.

  In the dog’s room, under Mario’s desk, there was now the evil odor of death. I went in cautiously, Otto was still, he hadn’t moved an inch. I crouched beside him, then sat on the floor.

  First of all I saw the ants, they had arrived, they were exploring the muddy territory that lapped the dog’s back. Otto, however, didn’t care. It was as if he had turned gray, an island drained of color breathing its last. His muzzle, with the greenish saliva from the jaws, seemed to have corroded the material of the tiles and to be sinking into them. His eyes were closed.

  “Forgive me,” I said.

  I ran the palm of my hand over the fur on his neck, he gave a jolt, his jaws unlocked, he emitted a threatening growl. I wanted to be forgiven for what I had perhaps done to him, for what I had been unable to do. I pulled him toward me, I rested his head on my legs. He gave off a sick heat that entered my blood. He barely moved his ears, his tail. I thought it was a sign of well-being, even his breath seemed less labored. The big spots of shining drool that were spreading like an enamel around the black edge of his mouth appeared to freeze, as if he had no longer any need to produce those humors of suffering.

  How unbearable the body of a living being who fights with death, and now seems to win, now to lose. I don’t know how long we remained like that. At times the dog’s breathing accelerated as when he was healthy and was eager for a game, for a run in the open air, for understanding and petting, at times it became imperceptible. Even his body alternated moments of trembling and spasms with moments of absolute immobility. I felt the remains of his power slowly slip away, images of the past dripping out: the flight among the bright corpuscles of pressurized water from the sprinklers in the park, the inquisitive scratching among the bushes, the way he followed me through the house when he expected me to feed him. That proximity of real death, that bleeding wound of his suffering, of guilt, unexpectedly made me ashamed of my grief of the previous months, of that day with its overtones of unreality. I felt the room return to order, the house weld together its spaces, the solidity of the floor, the hot day that extended over everything, a transparent glue.

  How could I have let myself go like that, let my senses disintegrate, the sense of being alive. I caressed Otto between the ears and he opened his colorless eyes and stared at me. I saw in him the look of the friendly dog who, instead of accusing me, asked forgiveness for his condition. Then an intense pain in his body obscured his pupils, he gnashed his teeth and barked at me without ferocity. Soon afterward he died in my lap, and I burst out crying in an uncontrollable lament, utterly unlike any other crying of those days, those months.

  When my eyes dried and the last sobs died in my breast, I realized that Mario had become again the good man he had perhaps always been, I no longer loved him.

  33.

  I laid the dog’s head on the floor, I got up. Slowly the voice of Ilaria returned, calling me, immediately afterward Gianni’s joined it. I looked around, I saw the feces black with blood, the ants, the dead body. I went out of the room, I went to get a bucket, a rag. I opened the windows, cleaned the room, working quickly but efficiently. I kept calling to the children:

  “Just a minute, I’m coming.”

  It seemed to me brutal that Otto was lying there, I didn’t want the children to see him. I tried to pick him up, I didn’t have the strength. I took him by the back paws and dragged him across the floor to the living room, onto the balcony. How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there’s no need to let anyone make it heavy for us. I looked for a moment at the dog’s fur ruffled by the wind, then I went back in and, despite the heat, closed the window carefully.

  The house was silent, it now seemed to me small, concentrated, without dark corners, made almost cheerful by the voices of the children who, laughing, had begun to make a game of calling me. Ilaria said mamma with the voice of a soprano, Gianni repeated mamma like a tenor.

  I hurried to them, I opened the door with a secure motion, I said gaily:

  “Here’s mamma.”

  Ilaria threw herself on me, hit me again and again, slapping my legs.

  “You mustn’t lock me in.”

  “It’s true, I’m sorry. But I unlocked you.”

  I sat on Gianni’s bed, he was certainly less feverish, he seemed like a boy who couldn’t wait to go back to playing with his sister, to shouting, laughing, furiously quarreling. I felt his forehead, the drops had had an effect, his skin was warm, just slightly sweaty.

  “Does your head still hurt?”

  “No. I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll make you some rice.”

  “I don’t like rice.”

  “I don’t, either,” Ilaria added.

  “The rice I make is very good.”

  “Where’s Otto?” asked Gianni.

  I hesitated.

  “In there, he’s sleeping, leave him alone.”

  And I was about to say something else, about the dog’s serious illness, something that would prepare them for his disappearance from their life, when, completely unexpectedly, we heard the electric charge of the doorbell.

  All three of us were as if suspended, without moving.

  “Daddy,” murmured Ilaria, full of hope.

  I said:

  “I don’t think so, it’s not daddy. Wait here, I forbid you to move, you’re in big trouble if you leave this room. I’m going to open the door.”

  They recognized my normal tone, firm but also ironic, words deliberately excessive for minimal situations. I recognized it myself, I accepted it, they accepted it.

  I went along the hall, reached the entrance. Was it possible that Mario had remembered us? Had he come by to see how we were? The question gave me no emotion, I thought only that I would like to have someone to talk to.

  I looked through the peephole. It was Carrano.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I only wanted to know how you were. I went out early this m
orning to see my mother and I didn’t want to disturb you. But now I’m back, I found a window broken. Has something happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you open the door, please?”

  I didn’t know if I could, but I didn’t tell him. I reached my hand toward the key, I grasped it decisively with my fingers, I moved it slightly, I felt it obedient. The key turned in the lock simply.

  “Oh, well,” Carrano murmured, looking at me in embarrassment, then he took from behind his back a rose, a single long-stemmed rose, a ridiculous rose offered with a ridiculous gesture by a man not at his ease.

  I took it, I thanked him without smiling, I said:

  “I have an ugly job for you.”

  34.

  Carrano was kind. He wrapped Otto in a plastic sheet that he had in the cellar, put him in his car, and, leaving me his cell phone, went to bury him outside the city.

  I immediately telephoned the pediatrician and was fortunate, I found him even though it was August. As I was minutely describing to him the child’s symptoms, I realized that my pulses were throbbing, so hard that I was afraid the doctor would hear the thud through the cell phone. My heart was swelling again in my breast, it was no longer empty.

  I spoke to the doctor at length, making an effort to be precise, and meanwhile I wandered through the house, I tasted the connection between the spaces, touched objects, and at every slight contact with a knickknack, a drawer, the computer, the books, the notebooks, the handle of a door, I repeated to myself: the worst is over.

  The pediatrician listened to me in silence, he assured me that there was no reason to worry about Gianni, he said that he would come and see him that evening. Then I took a long cold shower, the needles of water pricked my skin, I felt all the darkness of the months, of the past hours. I saw the rings that I had left upon waking on the edge of the sink and I put on my finger the one with the aquamarine, while, without hesitation, I let the wedding ring fall down the drain. I examined the wound that Ilaria had made with the paper cutter, I put antiseptic on it, covered it with a bandage. I also went, calmly, to separate the dark clothes from the white, I started the washing machine. I wanted the flat certainty of normal days, even though I knew all too well that a frenetic movement upward endured in my body, a darting, as if I had seen an ugly poisonous insect at the bottom of a hole and every part of me were still retreating, my arms and hands waving, feet kicking. I have to relearn—I said to myself—the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.

  I concentrated, therefore, on the children, I had to tell them that the dog was dead. I chose my words with care, I tried for the proper tone of fables, but Ilaria wept for a long time anyway and Gianni, although he confined himself at first to a stern look, saying, with a fleeting echo of threatening tones, that Mario had to be informed, immediately afterward went back to complaining of a headache, of nausea.

  I was still trying to console them when Carrano returned. I let him in but I treated him coldly, even though he had been so helpful. The children did nothing but call to me from the other room. Convinced as they were that it was he who had poisoned the dog, they didn’t want him to set foot in the house, much less have me speak to him.

  And I myself had a sensation of repulsion when I smelled on him the odor of dug earth, and to his timidly confidential tone I responded in monosyllables that seemed sporadic drops from a broken faucet.

  He tried to tell me about the burial of the dog, but since I didn’t show myself interested either in the location of the hole or in the details of the sad task, as he called it, and in fact every so often interrupted him, calling to Gianni and Ilaria, quiet, I’m coming right away, he became embarrassed, and broke off. To cover the children’s disruptive cries he began talking about his mother, about the problems of dealing with her old age. He went on until I said that children with long-lived mothers have the misfortune of not really knowing what death is and so never being free of it. He was hurt, he said goodbye with obvious ill humor.

  In the course of the day he made no other attempts to see me. I let his rose wither in a vase on my desk, a vase painfully empty of flowers since the long-ago time when, on my birthday, Mario would give me a cattleya, in imitation of Swann. In the evening the flower was already black and bent on its stem. I threw it in the trash.

  The pediatrician arrived after dinner, an old man, very thin, very endearing to children because, while he was seeing them, he bowed continually and called them Signor Giovanni, Signorina Illi.

  “Signor Giovanni,” he said, “show me your tongue immediately.”

  He examined the boy thoroughly and attributed the illness to a summer virus that caused intestinal upset. It might well be, however, that Gianni had eaten something bad, an egg, for example, or—he said to me later in the living room, in a low voice—that it was a reaction to a powerful sorrow.

  As he sat at the desk and prepared to write a prescription, I told him calmly, as if between us there were a habit of confidences of this type, about the breakup with Mario, about that terrible day that was finally about to end, about the death of Otto. He listened to me with attention and patience, he shook his head disapprovingly and prescribed milk enzymes and tenderness for the children, tisane of normality and repose for me. He promised that he would return in a few days.

  35.

  I slept for a long time, deeply.

  Starting the next morning I took good care of Ilaria and Gianni. Since I had the impression that they were watching me closely to see if I was again becoming the mother they had always known or if they had to expect new, sudden transformations, I did my best to reassure them. I read books of fairy tales, I played boring games for hours, I exaggerated the thread of lightheartedness with which I kept at bay the reflux of desperation. Neither of the two, perhaps by a common accord, ever mentioned their father, not even to reiterate that they had to report to him about the death of Otto. I became concerned that they avoided it because they were afraid of wounding me and thus pushing me off course again. I began, then, to bring up Mario, recounting old incidents in which he had been very amusing or had shown himself inventive and clever or had undertaken daredevil acts. I don’t know what impression those stories made on them, certainly they listened with absorption, sometimes they smiled in satisfaction. In me they produced only a feeling of annoyance. As I spoke, I noticed that I didn’t like having Mario in my memories.

  When the pediatrician returned for another visit, he found Gianni in good shape, perfectly healthy.

  “Signor Giovanni,” he said, “you have a good pink color, are you sure you’re not turning into a little pig?”

  In the living room, after ascertaining that the children couldn’t hear, I asked him, in order to clarify for myself whether I should feel guilty, if Gianni could have been made sick by an insecticide that I had sprayed throughout the house one night for ants. He ruled it out, noting that Ilaria hadn’t shown any kind of effects.

  “But our dog?” I asked, showing him the can, dented and without the nozzle to spray the poison. He examined it but seemed perplexed, he concluded that he was unable to judge. Finally he returned to the children’s room and, with a bow, said goodbye:

  “Signorina Illi, Signor Giovanni, it is with true sorrow that I take my leave. I hope that you will soon again be sick, so that I may pay you another visit.”

  The children were reassured by that tone. For days we continually bowed to each other, saying Signor Giovanni, Signora Mamma, Signorina Illi. Meanwhile, to consolidate a climate of benevolence, I tried to return to normal activities, like a sick person who has been in the hospital for a long time and, partly to overcome the fear of falling ill again, wants to reanchor himself to the life of the healthy. I started cooking again, forcing myself to entice them with new recipes. I began again to slice, brown, salt. I even tried to make sweets, but for sweets I had no vocation, no ability.

  36.
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  I was not always equal to the loving and efficient appearance I wished to have. Certain signs alarmed me. It still happened that I left pots on the stove and didn’t even notice the smell of burning. I felt an unfamiliar nausea at the sight of green spots of parsley mixed with the red skins of tomatoes floating on the greasy water of the clogged sink. I was unable to regain the old indifference toward the sticky remains of food that the children left on the tablecloth, on the floor. At times when I was grating cheese the motion became so mechanical, so detached and independent, that the metal cut my nails, the skin of my fingertips. And often I locked myself in the bathroom and—something I had never done—devoted to my body long, detailed, obsessive examinations. I touched my breasts, slid my fingers between the folds of flesh that curled over my belly, I examined my sex in the mirror to see how worn out it was, I checked to see if I was getting a double chin, if there were wrinkles on my upper lip. I was afraid that the effort I had made not to lose myself had aged me. It seemed to me that my hair was thinner, there was more gray, I had to dye it, it felt greasy and I washed it continuously, drying it in a thousand different ways.

  But what frightened me above all was the nearly imperceptible images of the mind, the scarce syllables. A thought that I couldn’t fix on sufficed, a simple violet flash of meanings, a green hieroglyphic of the brain, for the bad feeling to reappear and panic to mount. Shadows too dense and damp suddenly returned to certain corners of the house, with their noises, the swift movements of their dark masses. Then I caught myself turning the television on and off mechanically, just to have company, or softly singing a lullaby in the dialect of my childhood, or I felt an unbearable anguish because of Otto’s empty bowl near the refrigerator, or, suddenly sleepy for no reason, I found myself lying on the sofa caressing my arms, scratching them lightly with the edge of my nails.

  On the other hand what helped me greatly, in that period, was the discovery that I was again capable of good manners. The obscene language suddenly disappeared, I no longer felt an urge to use it, I was ashamed of having done so. I retreated to a bookish, studied language, somewhat convoluted, which, however, gave me a sense of security and detachment. I controlled the tone of my voice, anger stayed in the background, the words were no longer charged. As a result, relationships with the external world improved. I managed, with the obstinacy of being nice, to get the telephone fixed, and even discovered that the old cell phone could be repaired. A young clerk in a shop that I miraculously found open showed me how easy it was to put it together, I would have been able to do it even by myself.