The Days of Abandonment

Yes, I said to myself, we do, we imagine, even as adults, a lot of silly things, out of joy or exhaustion.

Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. 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.

He talked for a long time about our fifteen years of marriage, about the children, and admitted that he had nothing to reproach us with, neither them nor me

the autumn you could see the green of the Valentino grow yellow or red; the leaves, stripped by the wind, sped through the foggy air, and trailed over the gray surface of the Po. In the spring a fresh, sparkling breeze came from the river, animating the new shoots, the branches of the trees.

the circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

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.

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

But the computer tried over and over again without success to make a connection.

There answered instead a long feeble bark, it might be from a distant dog, abandoned in the summer on the side of the road, or Otto himself.

It searched for the line with prolonged sounds of discomfort, it snorted, it gave up.