"What words am I supposed to use for what you've done to me, for what you're doing to me? What words should I use for what you're doing with that woman! Let's talk about it! Do you lick her cunt? Do you stick it in her ass? Do you do all the things you never do all the things you never did with me? Tell me! Because I see you! With these eyes I see everything you do together, I see it a hundred thousand times, I see it night and day, eyes open and eyes closed!"
When Mario tells her that he is leaving, Olga screams at him. She insists that she isn't surprised because she's known about his affair for a long time. Her incredulous begging for words reveals that she is in fact shocked at his declaration. By asserting her supposed omniscience about his liaisons, she is actually asserting whatever control she can over the situation. If she tells him that she knew all along, she is convincing herself that she is responsible and not in fact the victim of his abandonment.
"So I stood silently watching him from the fifth floor, thin but broad in the shoulders, his hair gray and thick. I felt an increasing hostility toward him that became more tenacious the more unreasonable I felt it to be. What were his secrets of a man alone, a male obsession with sex, perhaps, the late-life cult of the cock. Certainly, he, too, saw no farther than his ever-weaker squirt of sperm, was content only when he could verify that he could still get it up, like the dying leaves of a dried-up plant that's given water. Rough with the women's bodies he happened to encounter, hurried, dirty, certainly his only objective was to score points, as in a rifle range, to sink into a red pussy as into a fixed thought surrounded by concentric circles. Better if the patch of hair is young and shiny, ah the virtue of a firm ass. So he thought, such were the thoughts I attributed to him, I was shaken by vivid electric shocks of rage."
Olga describes her neighbor Carrano in an awful light. He, like all men his age, reminds her of her ex-husband. Comparing him to Mario, Olga begins to imagine his depravity and pitiful selfishness in his sex life. Her vivid, frantic language reflects the intense emotional reaction this line of thinking evokes within her. Finally, she is overwhelmed with misplaced hatred. Though looking at Carrano, she is thinking of Mario.
"Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, that the children were mostly mine, that they had remained within the radius of my body, subject to my care, still I couldn't avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. Mario would explode suddenly from inside their bones, now, over the days, over the years, in ways that were more and more visible. How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? 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."
In this quotation, Olga contemplates the implications of her children belonging to both her and her ex-husband. She has gained joint custody of them, but that just ensures that they will be close to her most of the time. Mentally and genetically, however, they continue to be subject to his influence. They're carriers of his DNA. Olga is mourning how, even if she puts her failed marriage to rest, she will continually be forced to look upon the remnants of that failure. Her life was so closely intertwined with Mario's that she will forever be untangling herself from him, specifically in the form of his children.
"It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall."
At the end of the novel, Olga has found peace. After dealing with the intense fallout after Mario leaves her, she has found herself whole once more. She concludes that she has indeed been able to move past her ex-husband. While she will never forget him, she does not need to consider him an active part of her life anymore. He is just memory for her now.
