Elena Ferrante - Troubling Love

“No,” I said, “come to my house. I’m waiting for a phone call.” Then I added something about ghosts: I was certain — I assured her — that after a few hours they became less and less autonomous. “After a while they start doing and saying only what we order them to do. If we want them to be silent, finally they are silent.”

My proper Italian made Signora De Riso uneasy. To accept the invitation she tried for a formality equal to mine; then she locked the door of her apartment while I opened the door of my mother’s.

It was suffocating inside. I hurried to open the windows and put the cherries in a plastic container. I let the water run, while the old woman, after a suspicious look all around, sat down almost automatically at the kitchen table. She said, in explanation, that my mother always invited her in there.

I put the cherries down in front of her. She waited for me to ask her to take some, and, when I did, brought one to her mouth with a pleasing, childish gesture that I liked: she took it by the stalk and let it go in her mouth, rotating the fruit between tongue and palate without biting it, the green stalk dancing along her pale lips; then she grabbed the stem again with her fingers and pulled it off with a faint plop .

“Very good,” she said and, relaxing, began to praise the dress I was wearing. Then she added emphatically: “I said that this blue would be better for you than the other.”

I looked at the dress and then at her to be sure that she was referring to that dress. She had no doubts, she continued: it was very becoming. When Amalia had showed her the gifts for my birthday, she had immediately felt that that was the right dress for me. My mother, too, seemed certain. Signora De Riso told me that she was euphoric. There in the kitchen, at that very table, she had laid out the lingerie, the dresses, repeating, “They will look very good on her.” And she was very pleased with how she had got them.

“How?” I asked.

“That friend of hers,” said the widow De Riso. He had proposed an exchange: he wanted all her old lingerie in exchange for those new things. It cost him almost nothing, the swap. He was the proprietor of a very expensive shop on the Vomero. Amalia, who had known him since her youth and knew that he was very smart in business matters, suspected that he wanted to take those old underpants and mended slips as a starting point for some sort of new merchandise. But Signora De Riso was experienced in the world. She had said that, gentleman or not, old or young, rich or poor, with men it was always best to be wary. My mother was too happy to pay attention to her.

Noticing her deliberately equivocal tone, I felt like laughing but contained myself. I saw Caserta and Amalia, who, starting with her ancient rags, planned in that house together, night after night, a grand reintroduction of women’s lingerie of the fifties. I invented a persuasive Caserta, a suggestible Amalia, old and alone, both without any money, in that squalid kitchen, a few feet from the sharp ears of the widow, just as old, just as alone. The scene seemed to me plausible. But I said:

“Maybe it wasn’t a real exchange. Maybe her friend wanted to do her a favor and that was all. Don’t you think?”

The widow ate another cherry. She didn’t know what to do with the pits: she spit them into the palm of her hand and left them there.

“Maybe,” she admitted, but dubiously. “He was very respectable. He came almost every night and sometimes they dined together, sometimes they went to the cinema, sometimes for a walk. When I heard them on the landing, he was talking nonstop and your mother was always laughing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s nice to laugh.”

The old woman hesitated as she chewed her cherries.

“Your father had made me suspicious,” she said.

“My father?”

My father. I suppressed the sensation that he was already there, in the kitchen, and had been for a long time. Signora De Riso explained that he had come secretly to ask her to warn him if she noticed Amalia doing reckless things. It wasn’t the first time he had appeared suddenly with requests of that sort. But on this occasion he had been very insistent.

I wondered what, for my father, the difference was between something that was reckless and something that wasn’t. Signora De Riso seemed to realize this and in her way tried to explain it to me. Reckless was to carelessly expose oneself to the risks of existence. My father worried about his wife, even though they had been separated for twenty-three years. The poor man still loved her. He was so kind, so. . Signora De Riso searched carefully for the right Italian word. She said: “desolate.”

I knew it. He had tried as usual to make a good impression on the widow. He had been affectionate, he had said he was worried. But in fact — I thought — there was no barrier of the city that could keep him from hearing the echo of Amalia’s laugh. My father couldn’t bear her laugh. He thought that her laugh had a recycled, patently false resonance. Whenever there was a stranger in the house (for example the men who appeared at certain intervals to commission street urchins, Gypsies, or the classic Vesuvio with pine tree), he warned her: “Don’t laugh.” That laugh seemed to him added on purpose to humiliate him. In reality Amalia was only trying to give voices to the happy-looking women photographed or drawn on the posters and in the magazines of the forties: wide painted mouth, sparkling teeth, lively gaze. She imagined herself like that, and had found the appropriate laugh. It must have been difficult for her to choose the laugh, the voice, the gestures that her husband could tolerate. You never knew what was all right, what wasn’t. Someone who passes on the street and looks at you. A joking remark. A careless nod. See, they rang at the door. See, they were delivering roses to her. See, she didn’t reject them. She laughed instead, and chose a vase of blue glass, and arranged them in the container that she had filled with water. During the time when those mysterious gifts arrived regularly, those anonymous homages (but we all knew they were from Caserta: Amalia knew it), she had been young and seemed to be playing games with herself, without malice. She let the black curl fall over her forehead, she batted her eyelashes, she gave tips to the delivery boys, she allowed the things to remain in our house as if their remaining were permitted. Then my father would find out and destroy everything. He tried to destroy her, too, but he always managed to stop a step from stupidity. Yet the blood bore witness to the intention. While Signora De Riso was talking to me, I was telling myself about the blood. In the bathroom sink. It dripped from Amalia’s nose, thick, without stopping, and first it was red, then, when it touched the water from the tap, faded. It was also on her arm, up to the elbow. She tried to stanch it with one hand but it flowed out from under the palm, leaving red lines like scratches. It wasn’t innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn’t bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal. Not only sexual betrayal: I no longer believed that he feared only being betrayed by sex. I was certain, rather, that above all he feared abandonment, passage into the enemy camp, acceptance of the rationales, the lexicon, the taste of people like Caserta: faithless intriguers, without rules, crude seducers to whom he had to bow out of necessity. So he tried to impose on her a code of behavior intended to communicate distance if not hostility. But soon he exploded in insults. Amalia’s tone of voice, according to him, was too easily engaging; the gestures of her hands were too soft and slow; her gaze was eager to the point of shameless. Above all she could charm without effort and without the ambition to charm. It happened, even if she didn’t intend it. Oh yes: for that, for her charm he punished her with slaps and punches. He interpreted her gestures, her looks, as signs of dark dealings, of secret meetings, of allusive understandings meant to marginalize him. I had trouble removing him from my vision, so anguished, so violent. The force. He petrified me. The image of my father as he ravaged the roses, stripping off the petals, shouted and shouted down the decades in my head. Now he was burning the new dress that she hadn’t sent back, that she had worn in secret. I couldn’t bear the odor of burned fabric. Even though I had opened the window.