The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

  I pushed my tongue into the mouth of that man with exaggerated eagerness, for a long time, as if I were following something to the bottom of his throat and wished to catch it before it slid into the esophagus. I put my arm around his neck, I pressed him with my body into the corner of the sofa and kissed him for a long time, with my eyes wide open, trying to stare at the objects arranged in one corner of the room, define them, cling to them, because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes I would see Carla’s impudent mouth, she had had that impudence since the age of fifteen, and who could say how much Mario liked it, if he had dreamed of it while he slept beside me, until he woke and kissed me as if he were kissing her and then withdrew and went back to sleep as soon as he recognized my mouth, the usual mouth, the mouth without new tastes, the mouth of the past.

  Carrano sensed in my kiss the sign that any skirmishing was over. He put his hand on my neck, he wanted to press me even harder against his lips. Then he left my mouth and planted wet kisses on my cheeks, on my eyes. I thought he must be following a precise exploratory plan, he even kissed my ears, so that the sound echoed annoyingly against my eardrums. Then he moved to my neck, he bathed with his tongue the hair at the nape, and meanwhile he touched my chest with his broad hand.

  “My breasts are small,” I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can’t offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age.

  “I like them,” he said in a whisper, while he unbuttoned my shirt and with his hand pulled down the edge of the bra and tried to bite my nipples and suck them. But my nipples, too, are small, and the breasts eluded him, falling back into the cups of the bra. I said wait, I pushed him away, I sat up, I took off the shirt, unhooked the bra. I asked stupidly: do you like them, anxiety was growing in me, I wanted him to repeat his approval.

  Looking at me he sighed:

  “You’re beautiful.”

  He took a deep breath, as if he wished to control a strong emotion or nostalgia, and just touched me with his fingertips so that I lay on the sofa with my chest bare and he could gaze at me more easily.

  Lying there, I saw him from below, I noted the wrinkles of his aging neck, the beard that needed a shave and showed flecks of white, the deep creases between his eyebrows. Perhaps he was serious, perhaps he really was captivated by my beauty, or perhaps they were only words to ornament a desire for sex. Perhaps I remained beautiful even if my husband had rolled up the sense of my beauty into a ball and thrown it into the wastebasket, like wrapping paper. Yes, I could still make a man passionate, I was a woman able to do this, the flight of Mario to another bed, another flesh, had not ruined me.

  Carrano bent over me, licked my nipples, sucked them. I tried to abandon myself, I wanted to eliminate disgust and desperation from my breast. I closed my eyes cautiously, the warmth of his breath, the lips on my skin, I let out a moan of encouragement for me and for him. I hoped to notice in myself some nascent pleasure, even if that man was a stranger, a musician perhaps of little talent, no quality, no capacity for seduction, dull and therefore alone.

  Now I felt him kissing my ribs, my stomach, he stopped even on my navel, what he found there I don’t know, he moved his tongue in it, tickling me. Then he got up. I opened my eyes, he was rumpled, his eyes were bright, I seemed to see in his face the expression of a guilty child.

  “Tell me again that you like me,” I insisted, short of breath.

  “Yes,” he said, but with a little less enthusiasm. He put his hands on my knees, parted them, slid his fingers under my skirt, caressed the insides of my thighs, lightly, as if he were sending a probe into the dark depths of a well.

  He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, I would have preferred everything to proceed more quickly. Now I thought of the possibility that the children might wake up or even of the hypothesis that Mario, after our tumultuous encounter, frightened, repentant, had decided to return home that very night. It even seemed to me that I could hear Otto barking joyfully, and I was about to say the dog is barking, but then it seemed to me inappropriate. Carrano had just raised my skirt and now was caressing the crotch of my underpants with the palm of his hand, and then he ran his fingers over the material pressing, pushing it deep into the fold of my sex.

  I moaned again, I wanted to help him take off the underpants, he stopped me.

  “No,” he said, “wait.”

  He moved aside the material, caressed my bare sex with his fingers, entered with his index finger, murmured again:

  “You’re really beautiful.”

  Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies. Was Mario doing that, with me he had never taken his time. But maybe he, too, now, in the long night, somewhere else, was spreading Carla’s thin legs, letting his gaze rest on her cunt half covered by the underpants, lingering, his heart pounding, on the obscenity of that position, making it more obscene with his fingers. Or, who knows, maybe it was I alone who was obscene now, abandoned to that man who was touching me in secret places, who, in no hurry, was bathing his fingers inside me, with the casual curiosity of one who isn’t in love. Carla, on the other hand—Mario believed this, I was certain that he believed it—was a young woman in love who gives herself to her lover. Not a gesture, not a sigh was vulgar or sordid, not even the coarsest words had any power against the true meaning of their intercourse. I could say cunt and cock and asshole, they were not marked by it. I marked, I disfigured, only my own image on the sofa, what I was at that moment, rumpled, with Carrano’s big fingers rousing in me a fund of muddy pleasure.

  Again I felt like crying, I clenched my teeth. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to burst into tears again, I reacted by moving my pelvis, shaking my head, moaning, murmuring:

  “You want me, it’s true that you want me, tell me…”

  Carrano nodded yes, pushed me onto my side, pulled down my underpants. I have to leave, I thought. Now what I wanted to know I knew. I am still attractive to men. Mario took everything but not me, not my person, not my beautiful charming mask. That’s enough with my ass. He was biting my buttocks, licking me.

  “Not my ass,” I said, moving his fingers away. He touched my anus again, I moved him away again. Enough. I drew back, I stretched out a hand toward his bathrobe.

  “Let’s get it over with,” I exclaimed. “Do you have a condom?”

  Carrano nodded yes but didn’t move. He took his hands off my body, showing a sudden sadness, and leaned his head on the back of the sofa, stared at the ceiling.

  “I don’t feel anything,” he murmured.

  “What don’t you feel?”

  “An erection.”

  “Never?”

  “No, now.”

  “Since we started?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt myself flare up with shame. He had kissed me, embraced me, touched me, but he hadn’t gotten hard, I hadn’t been able to make his blood burn, he had roused my flesh without rousing his, ugly shit.

  I opened his bathrobe, now I couldn’t leave, between the fourth floor and the fifth there were no longer stairs, if I left I would find the abyss.

  I looked at his small pallid sex, lost in the black forest of hairs, between the heavy testicles.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “you’re upset.”

  I jumped up, I took off the skirt that I was still wearing, I was naked, but he didn’t even realize it, he continued to look at the ceiling.

  “Now you lie down,” I ordered him with false calm. “Relax.”

  I pushed him down on the sofa, supine, in the position in which until that moment I had been.

  “Where are the condoms?”

  He gave a melancholy smile.

  “It’s useless at this point,” and yet he pointed to a chest of drawers with a gesture of discouragement.
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br />   I went to the chest, opened one drawer after another, found the condoms.

  “But I was attractive to you…” Again I insisted.

  He hit his forehead lightly with the back of his hand.

  “Yes, in my mind.”

  I laughed angrily, I said:

  “You have to like me everywhere,” and I sat on his chest, turning my back to him. I began to caress his stomach, going slowly lower and lower along the black track of hairs to where they were thick around his sex. Carla was fucking my husband and I couldn’t fuck this man, a man alone, without opportunities, a depressed musician for whom I was to be the happy surprise of his fifty-third birthday. She ruled Mario’s cock as if it belonged to her, she made him put it in her pussy, in her ass, which he had never done with me, and I, I could only chill that gray flesh. I grabbed his penis, I pulled down the skin to make sure there were no lesions and put it in my mouth. After a while Carrano began to moan, it sounded like braying. Soon his flesh swelled against my palate, this is what the shit wanted, this is what he was waiting for. Finally his prick emerged strong from his belly, a prick to fuck me with, to make my stomach ache for days, as Mario had never fucked me. My husband didn’t know what to do with real women: he dared only with whores of twenty, without intelligence, without experience, without teasing words.

  Now Carrano was agitated, he told me to wait: wait, wait. I moved backward until I was pressing my sex against his mouth, I left his penis and turned with the most disdainful look I was capable of. “Kiss it,” I said, and he kissed me literally, with devotion, I felt the shock of the kiss on my pussy, old fool, the metaphoric language I used with Mario evidently wasn’t his, he misunderstood, he didn’t realize what I was really ordering him to do, I don’t know if Carla was able to decipher my husband’s suggestions, I don’t know. With my teeth I tore open the condom wrapper, I put it on his prick, come on, get up, I said to him, you like the asshole, deflower me, I never did that with my husband, I want to tell him about it in every detail, put it in my ass.

  The musician struggled out from under me, I remained on all fours. I laughed to myself, I couldn’t contain myself thinking of Mario’s face when I told him. I stopped laughing only when I felt Carrano pushing forcefully against me. I was suddenly afraid, I held my breath. A bestial position, animal liquids and a perfidy utterly human. I turned to look at him, perhaps to beg him not to obey me, to let it go. Our glances met. I don’t know what he saw, I saw a man no longer young, with his white bathrobe open, his face shiny with sweat, lips pressed in concentration. I murmured something to him, I don’t know what. He unclenched his lips, opened his mouth, closed his eyes. Then he sank down behind me. I supported myself on one side. I saw the whitish stain of semen against the wall of the condom.

  “Never mind,” I said with a dry explosion of laughter in my throat, and I tore the rubber off his already limp penis, threw it away, it stained the floor with a viscid yellow stripe. “You missed the target.”

  I put on my clothes, went to the door, he followed me, pulling his bathrobe tight around him. I was disgusted with myself. I murmured before I left:

  “It’s my fault, I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m the one…”

  I shook my head, forced a smile, falsely conciliating:

  “Putting my ass in your face so boldly: Mario’s lover certainly doesn’t do that.”

  I went up the stairs slowly. Crouching in a corner, beside the banister, I saw the poverella of so long ago, who said to me in a weary but very serious tone: “I am clean I am true I play with my cards on the table.”

  In front of the door with its metal plates I kept getting the order of the keys wrong, it was a while before I opened it. When I went inside, I wasted more time locking it. Otto ran up to me cheerfully, I paid no attention, I went to take a shower. I deserved everything that had happened to me, even the harsh words with which I mentally insulted myself, rigid under the spray of the water. I managed to calm myself only by saying aloud: “I love my husband and so all this has meaning.” I looked at the clock, it was ten after two, I went to bed and turned out the light. I fell asleep immediately, unexpectedly. I slept with that sentence in my head.

  18.

  When I opened my eyes again, five hours later, at seven o’clock on Saturday August 4th, I had trouble getting my bearings. The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn’t know it yet.

  I reached out a hand toward Mario, I was sure he was sleeping beside me, but beside me there was nothing, not even his pillow, or mine, either. It seemed to me that the bed had grown wider and at the same time shorter. Maybe I’ve gotten taller, I said to myself, maybe thinner.

  I felt sluggish, as if from a circulatory problem, my fingers were swollen. I saw that I hadn’t taken off my rings before falling asleep, I hadn’t put them on the night table with my habitual gesture. I felt them in the flesh of my ring finger, a chokehold that seemed to me at the origin of the illness in my whole body. With cautious gestures I tried to take them off, I wet my finger with saliva, I couldn’t do it. I seemed to have the taste of gold in my mouth.

  I was staring at an unfamiliar portion of the ceiling, in front of me was a white wall, not the big closet that I saw every morning. My feet looked out on a void, there was no headboard behind my head. My senses were dulled, between my eardrums and the world, between fingertips and sheets perhaps there was some padding, felt or velvet.

  I tried to gather my strength, I raised myself up on my elbows cautiously, in order not to tear the bed, the room, with the movement, or tear myself, like a label torn from a bottle. With an effort I realized that I must have tossed and turned in my sleep, that I had left my usual corner, that with my absent body I had crawled or rolled through sheets that were wet with sweat. This had never happened before, in general I slept curled up on my side, without changing position. But I couldn’t find any other explanation, there were two pillows on my right side and the closet on my left. I fell back exhausted onto the sheets.

  At that moment there was a knock at the door. It was Ilaria, she came in with her dress rumpled and a sleepy look, and said:

  “Gianni threw up on my bed.”

  I looked at her obliquely, listlessly, without raising my head. I imagined her old, her features deformed, near death or already dead, and yet a piece of me, the apparition of the child I had been, that I would have been, why that “would have been”? I had swift and faded images in my head, entire sentences, but uttered in a hurry, a whisper. I realized that my grammatical tenses weren’t correct, because of that jumbled waking up. Time is a breath, I thought, today it’s my turn, in a moment my daughter’s, it had happened to my mother, to all my forebears, maybe it was even happening to them and me simultaneously, it will happen.

  I decided to get up, but there was a kind of suspension of the order: “get up” remained an intention that hovered idly in my ears. Being a child, then a girl, I waited for a man, now 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.

  “I’m coming,” I said without moving.

  “Why did you sleep in that position?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Gianni put his mouth on my pillow.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “He got my bed all dirty and the pillow, too. You have to slap him.”

  I pulled myself up with an effort of will, I lifted a weight that I hadn’t enough strength for. 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. I yawned, I turned my head first to the right and then to the left, I tried again to take off my rings, without success.

  “If you don’t punish him, I’ll pinch you,” Ilaria threatened.

  I went into the children’s room with deliberately slow movements, preceded by my daughter, who, however, w
as impatient. Otto barked, whined, I heard him scratching at the door that separated the bedrooms from the living room. Gianni was lying on Ilaria’s bed, dressed exactly as I had seen him the night before, but sweaty and pale, his eyes closed though he was clearly awake. The light blanket was stained, on the floor a yellowish splotch was spreading.

  I said nothing to the child, I didn’t need to or feel like it. I went instead to the bathroom, spit in the sink, washed out my mouth. Then I took a rag, I used a cautious gesture, but even that seemed too quick, I had the impression that, against my will, it had made me twist my eyes, pushing them sideways disjointedly, in a sort of forced torsion that threatened to set in motion the wall, the mirror, the chest, everything.

  I sighed, a long sigh that was able to fix my pupils on the rag, subduing panic. I returned to the children’s room, I squatted down to clean the floor. The acid odor of vomit recalled to me the days of nursing, of baby food, and sudden regurgitations. As I removed the traces of my son’s illness from the floor, I thought of the woman of Naples with her whining children, silenced by candies. At a certain point, she, the abandoned wife, began getting angry at them. She said that they had left the odor of motherhood on her, and this had ruined her, it was their fault that her husband had left. First they swell your belly, yes, first they make your breasts heavy, and then they have no patience. Words like that, I recalled. My mother repeated them in a low voice so that I wouldn’t hear, gravely agreeing. But I heard them just the same, and now, too, in a sort of double hearing: I was the child of that time playing under the table, stealing sequins, putting them in my mouth, and sucking them; and I was the adult of this morning, here beside Ilaria’s bed, mechanically performing a dirty job and yet sensitive to the sound of the sticky rag sliding over the floor. How had Mario been? Tender, it seemed to me, with no outward signs of impatience or annoyance with my pregnancies. In fact, when I was pregnant he wanted to make love more often, and I did it more willingly. Now I was cleaning, and meanwhile I made mental calculations, numbers without emotion. Ilaria had been a year and a half when Carla appeared in our life, and Gianni less than five. I had had no work, any sort of work, even writing, for at least five years. I lived in a new city, still a new city, I had no relatives to ask for help, and even if I had I wouldn’t have asked, I wasn’t a person who asks for help. I did the shopping, I cooked, I cleaned, I took the two children from place to place, from room to room, exhausted, exasperated. I dealt with deadlines of every sort, I took care of the income taxes, I ran to the bank, ran to the post office. At night I wrote down, in my notebooks, income and expenses, in every detail, as if I were an accountant who had to show the books to the owner of the business. At times I also wrote, between the numbers, how I felt: I was like a lump of food that my children chewed without stopping; a cud made of a living material that continually amalgamated and softened its living substance to allow two greedy bloodsuckers to nourish themselves, leaving on me the odor and taste of their gastric juices. Nursing, how repulsive, an animal function. And then the warm sweetish odor of baby-food breath. No matter how much I washed, that stink of motherhood remained. Sometimes Mario pasted himself against me, took me, holding me as I nearly slept, tired himself after work, without emotions. He did it persisting on my almost absent flesh that tasted of milk, cookies, cereal, with a desperation of his own that overlapped mine without his realizing it. I was the body of incest, I thought, stunned by the odor of Gianni’s vomit, I was the mother to be violated, not a lover. Already he was searching elsewhere for figures more suitable for love, fleeing the sense of guilt, and he became melancholy, sighed. Carla had happened into the house at the right moment, a figment of unsatisfied desire. She was then thirteen years older than Ilaria, ten more than Gianni, seven more than me when I heard my mother speaking of the poverella of Piazza Mazzini. Mario must have imagined her as the future, and yet he desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for. She herself perhaps believed she was giving him the future and had encouraged him to believe it. But we were all confused, especially me. 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. No, I thought, squeezing the rag and struggling to get up: starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.