Category Archives: motherhood

The Days of Abandonment: Writing a New Story

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Olga is a writer, a mother of two young children, living in Turin. Her husband, Mario, has just announced that he is leaving her. So begins Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002). What follows is an exploration of her response to her new situation, which veers from grief to anger, tragedy to something like comedy. Along the way, there is a fair amount of overlap with Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, which covers much the same territory. What distinguishes Ferrante is, first, the materiality of the world she describes, whose very thinginess at times seems to conspire against the novel’s protagonist. Second, the fact that Ferrante’s heroine has children (where Ernaux’s does not) changes almost everything. This is as much the portrait of a mother as it is of a wife. After all, as Olga discovers, the maternal bond has to endure even as the marital relationship breaks down.

At first, Mario offers little in the way of explanation. But soon enough it becomes clear (and despite his initial denials) that he has in fact taken up with another woman. To add insult to injury, it turns out that his new girlfriend, Carla, is significantly younger, the daughter of a woman who had once been the couple’s friend when the two of them had first moved to Turin. Indeed, at the time the young girl’s apparent infatuation with Mario already caused ructions within their marriage, and now Olga concludes that far from cutting off contact with Carla then, 

For almost five years he had secretly enjoyed that body, had cultivated that passion, had transformed it into love, had slept patiently with me abandoning himself to the memory of her, had waited until she became of age, more than of age, to tell me that he was taking her definitively, that he was leaving me. (70)

Olga realizes all of this only when, by mere accident, she comes across Mario and Carla out on the street. Any previous sympathy she may have had for her husband now vanishes. A woman enraged, she attacks him physically, shoving his face against a shop window. “Hold the commas, hold the periods,” she says to herself. “It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70). She wants to drag him with her to this unpunctuated experience in which the narratives providing sense and meaning to everyday life suddenly no longer hold. And yet, of course, in their own ways each of the two of them is playing out their part in one of the oldest stories in the book: the cheating husband; the betrayed wife.

There is then a double challenge here. Ferrante’s challenge is to tell this well-worn tale in a new way. And this then echoes or is echoed in Olga’s challenge to reconstruct her sense of self, and perhaps particularly her sense of self as a woman, without falling into familiar traps and stereotypes.

For Olga is now haunted by a story from her childhood, a story that at the time she perhaps did not understand but which now gains new meaning, of “a dark figure of my Neapolitan childhood,” a woman whose husband had abandoned her with her children and becomes the subject of cautionary gossip in the neighbourhood:

My mother talked about it with her workers [. . .] while I played under the table [. . .], repeating to myself what I heard, words between sorrow and warning, when you don’t know how to keep a man you lose everything, female stories of the end of love, what happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved, are left with nothing. The woman lost everything, even her name (perhaps it was Emilia), for everyone she became the “poverella,” that poor woman, when we spoke of her that was what we called her. The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man, and his perfidious green eyes. (15–16)

How to avoid becoming the poverella, who lost her name and her individuality, transformed into an archetype? And how, now for Ferrante, to avoid simply writing another poverella’s tale?

Of course, one way to avoid the same old story is to give the scorned woman voice, and this is fundamental to Ferrante’s novel. We may perhaps intuit or (from Olga’s point of view) fear what others may be saying, but here we still rigorously close to Olga’s own perspective, even if it may leave us in the dark about other aspects of the story. We know little to nothing substantial about Carla, for instance: she becomes simply the girlish seducer, childlike in her presumed infatuation. Her perspective will have to be left for others to tell. Olga by this point has no desire to be “fair,” and neither does Ferrante.

And perhaps another way to reiterate the same old tragedy of the helpless victim is to veer into comedy. At times I did wonder if this was intentional, but to me much in the novel approached a dark slapstick humor, especially as Olga comes to be betrayed not only by Mario, but by the physical world around her. Her telephone is broken, for instance. She has to replace the locks to her apartment, and even getting in and out becomes a struggle. Everyday, habitual acts become a mystery:

Maybe I was too tired to maintain the usual order of the world. I shouldn’t have gone out. What had I done? Had I put the coffeepot on the stove? Had I put in the coffee, filled it with water? Had I screwed it tight so that it wouldn’t explode? And the milk for the child? Were they actions that I had completed or had I only suggested to myself that I complete them? (95–96)

There is also a sex scene, in which Olga tries to seduce her downstairs neighbour, a musician she hardly knows, that is also surely funny in its spectacular failure as the musician comes too soon (here the object that betrays her is his penis). Dragging herself up the stairs afterwards, “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” (87). But who is that phantom from the past to give Olga her advice?

The novel is entitled Days of Abandonment, though in fact it covers several months: it starts on “one April afternoon” (9) and continues until at least August, because we are told that “the hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment” is “Saturday August 4th” (88). Indeed, almost a third of the entire book (pages 88 to 151) is devoted to this single day, which proves to be a catalogue of disasters that range from a sick kid to a dead dog (possibly poisoned, she imagines), fights with her children (one of whom stabs her with a paper cutter), and Olga accidentally locking them all into the apartment. To cap it all, by the end her indignity is witnessed by her downstairs neighbour, who has come up with “a rose, a single long-stemmed rose, a ridiculous rose offered with a ridiculous gesture by a man not at his ease” (148). Again, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

No wonder the children periodically add to Olga’s woes by suggesting they might be better off with their father. But she perseveres and by the end, when Mario asks her to take them more often because “Carla is exhausted, she has exams to take, she can’t take care of them, you’re they’re mother” (185), this is truly the last straw for Olga, the point at which she realizes “He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print made by a hand on the wall” (186). And it is about the same time that she also senses that she has somehow broken from the paths set for her by the stories she has read (Anna Karenina) or been told: “I had even buried somewhere the abandoned wife of my Neapolitan childhood, my heart no longer beat in her chest, the veins were broken. The poverella had become again an old photograph, the petrified past, without blood” (184). The present does not always have to repeat the past. 

She can even return to the site of her earlier embarrassment and clumsiness, looking for someone who “knew how to make meaning stronger, to invent a feeling of fullness and joy” (188). The book ends with the acknowledgement that this is a fiction, but at least it is a new one, and she is prepared to pretend to believe it. She is writing herself into a new story.

A Girl Returned: Mothers, Sisters, Strawberries

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Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned (2017) reminded me of a host of similar novels, though it also has much that is original and striking of its own. Its opening scene, for instance, has echoes (deliberate or otherwise) with the way that Carmen Laforet’s Spanish classic, Nada (1945), begins. In both, we see an adolescent girl struggling up steps with a loaded suitcase to an unfamiliar apartment where (for reasons that are not fully explained) she will spend the next year or so with relatives she has never previously met, who strike her, at first at least, as hostile and even monstrous. In both cases, the host family is impoverished, and there is much emphasis on food (or its lack). But there are also strange psychological tensions and a disturbing erotic undercurrent, especially around a strong-willed older male figure who never quite fits his environment and then dramatically dies–in Laforet’s novel, at the tale’s conclusion; in Di Pietrantonio’s, more like halfway through. The protagonist is only able to negotiate all these difficulties as she becomes friends with a female figure of about the same age, who teaches her lessons in resilience and resistance.

The twist in A Girl Returned is that the family to whose strange ways the unnamed narrator has to adapt is in fact her own birth family. (In Nada, the equivalent household is packed instead with uncles and aunts.) For it turns out that she has been living with, and formally or informally adopted by, an aunt or uncle. But when the story opens, she has been forced out of that arrangement (because, she believes, her adoptive mother is ill, perhaps terminally) and is returned to a set of biological parents and siblings that she has never known. Moreover, in a test of in the influence of nurture versus nature, her aunt and uncle had raised her in a life of relative privilege, of urban sophistication, ballet lessons, and beach clubs by the sea. Her “real” family, by contrast, live hand to mouth in a much smaller town, speak dialect rather than standard Italian, are crowded in a single bedroom with only a flimsy partition to separate the young from the adult, and the children drop out of school early as they are expected to help in the constant effort to put food on the table.

If Carmen Laforet is a possible forbear for Di Pietrantonio, it is also impossible to ignore the shadow of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (likewise translated by Ann Goldstein), whose female narrator similarly looks back on a youth marked by economic hardship, with scholastic success the apparent key to social mobility. But if Ferrante’s novels revolve around a “brilliant friend” (“amica genial”), here it is the narrator’s new-found younger sister, Adriana, who calls the narrator a “genius of verbs” (78) and is subsequently in turn described as “a genius, that Adriana” (133). (It must be admitted, however, that almost any novel is bound to suffer in a comparison with My Brilliant Friend. Di Pietrantonio’s is not a bad book, but it does not have the texture and finely-judged ambivalence sustained at such length by Ferrante’s magnum opus.)

A Girl Returned is perhaps most interesting for what it has to say about memory and forgetting. Like both Nada and My Brilliant Friend, its story is told by a narrator who is recounting her experience at a much later date. (We are teased with fleeting references to what must have happened in the meantime: her youngest brother is now in an institution, for instance; Adriana may soon be getting married.) As such, she reviews and reflects on the gap between what she realizes now and what she did not know then. Thinking back, for instance, she is kinder and less judgemental towards her biological parents than she was at the time. She is drawn to moments of light amidst what was often darkness and even violence: “Every so often I think again,” for example she tells us, “of the hand of the first [mother] that for a few moments rested on my shoulder, at school. I still wonder why she placed it there, a woman so sparing of caresses” (129). Ferrante’s narrator–if we have to make the comparison–is by contrast much less forgiving of her own mother, even if she can similarly see that the older woman’s defects are the result of a struggle against a harsh and inhospitable environment for women of her class and [lack of] social status.

Softened perhaps by memory and time passing, Di Pietrantonio’s narrator is even surprisingly generous towards an older brother who is a hair’s breadth (or less) from taking advantage of her sexually. She is saved only by his sudden accidental death. Yet at the very end of the book (on its penultimate page) there is a moment of solemn mourning, as the narrator and her sister “silently [. . .] remember [. . .] him” (179) at the very beach where he had first acted on his incestuous desire, kissing her open-mouthed (53). One would have thought this would be something the narrator would want to forget.

But her greatest fear is to be forgotten. Even as she is with her biological family, she continually hopes that she may be reunited with her former mother, and has to believe that she has not been forgotten by her. She clings on to the hope that, even if her adoptive mother is not in touch with her, this must be for some good reason–perhaps because she is in hospital; or even because she is dead. If she is alive, however, she must surely be thinking about her “lost” daughter, and at some point will come to take her back. But she is not always able to sustain this hope: “In certain melancholy moods, I felt forgotten. I’d fallen out of her thoughts. There was no longer any reason to exist in the world. I softly repeated the word mamma a hundred times, until it lost all meaning and was only an exercise of the lips” (115). And when the narrator learns the true reason why she was “returned” to her biological family–her adoptive mother, who previously thought herself infertile, gets pregnant–the worst thing she can imagine doing in revenge is to erase her erstwhile mother from her memory: “I immediately decided not to see her Again [. . .]. I truly lost her, and for a few hours I thought I could forget her” (128).

Of course, she cannot fully forget, and by the novel’s end, after a rather excruciating dinner, she can see her adoptive mother as herself a victim, constrained by rules to which she only unwillingly agrees. More generally, at last the narrator seems able to let go of motherhood entirely, and certainly the idealization of mothers. It seems significant that, so far as we can tell, the narrator has not had any children. Mothers cannot protect you–if anything, whatever their best intentions, they only make things worse. It is thanks to her “alliance” with her sister that the two of them are said, at the book’s conclusion, to have “survived” (170). And together, the two sisters care for their disadvantaged younger brother, visiting him regularly, bringing him strawberries: “Then he eats them, after holding them up to the light, one by one, gripping them by the stem. He observes the tiny variations in shape, in color. I suspect that he’s trying to count all those seeds on the surface” (113). These are the relationships, and these the observations of detail and minor difference, that ultimately matter. This, perhaps, is what is worth remembering for Di Pietrantonio.