Elena Ferrante - Troubling Love

I went on to the purse. The first thing I took out was a pair of white lace underpants. I was convinced immediately by the three “V”s clearly visible on the right and from the stylish design that they were the companion of the bra that Amalia was wearing when she drowned. I examined them carefully: they had a little tear on the left side, as if they had been put on even though they were clearly a size too small. I felt my stomach contract and I held my breath. Then I rummaged in the purse again, looking first for the house keys. Naturally I didn’t find them. I found instead her reading glasses, nine telephone tokens, and her wallet. In the wallet were two hundred and twenty thousand lire (a sizable amount for her: she lived on the little money that we three sisters sent her every month), the receipt for the electricity bill, her identity card in a plastic case, an old photograph of my sisters and me with our father. The photograph was ruined. Those images of us from so long ago were yellowed, cracked, like the figures of winged demons in certain altarpieces that the faithful have defaced with pointed objects.

I left the photograph on the floor and got up, fighting a growing nausea. I looked through the house for a telephone book and, when I found it, turned quickly to Caserta. I didn’t want to telephone him: I wanted the address. When I discovered that there were three densely printed pages of Casertas I realized that I didn’t even know what his name was: no one, in the course of my childhood, had ever called him anything but Caserta. So I threw the phone book in a corner and went into the bathroom. I couldn’t hold back the retching, and for a few seconds I was afraid that my whole body would be unleashed against me, with a self-destructive fury that as a child I had always feared and, growing up, had tried to control. Then I calmed down. I rinsed out my mouth and washed my face carefully. Seeing it pale and un-made-up in the mirror tilted over the sink I decided to put on makeup.

It was an unusual reaction. I didn’t wear makeup often or willingly. I had worn it as a girl but for a long time I hadn’t used any: it didn’t seem to me that makeup improved me. But just then I seemed to need it. I took the beauty case from my mother’s suitcase, went back to the bathroom, opened it, took out a jar of moisturizing cream whose surface bore the timid imprint of Amalia’s finger. I erased the trace of hers with my own and used it generously. I rubbed the cream into the skin energetically, smoothing my cheeks. Then, with the powder, I meticulously covered my face.

“You’re a ghost,” I said to the woman in the mirror. She had the face of a person in her forties, she closed first one eye, then the other, drawing a black pencil over each. She was thin, angular, with prominent cheekbones, the skin miraculously unlined. Her hair was cut very short in order to display as little of its black color as possible, although, to my relief, the black was finally fading to gray and preparing to disappear forever. I put on the mascara.

“I don’t look like you,” I whispered as I put on some blusher. And in order not to be contradicted, I tried not to look at her. So, in the mirror, I caught sight of the bidet. I turned to see what was missing from that old-fashioned object, with its giant, encrusted taps, and when I realized it I felt like laughing. Caserta had taken even the blood-stained underpants that I had left on the floor.

The coffee was almost ready when I arrived at Uncle Filippo’s. With only one arm, he managed mysteriously to do everything. He had an antiquated coffee maker of the type in use before the moka espresso maker established itself in every house. It was a metal cylinder with a spout that, disassembled, was divided into four parts: a container for boiling the water, a compartment for the ground coffee, the perforated screw-on top, a pot. When I entered the kitchen, the hot water was already dripping into the pot and an intense smell of coffee was spreading through the apartment.

“How well you look,” he said, but I don’t think he was alluding to the makeup. He had never seemed to me capable of distinguishing between a made-up woman and one who was not. He meant only that I looked particularly good that morning. In fact, while he was sipping the boiling-hot coffee, he added: “Of the three of you, you look most like Amalia.”

I gave a hint of a smile. I didn’t want to alarm him by telling him what had happened to me during the night. Nor did I want to start discussing my resemblance to Amalia. It was seven in the morning and I was tired. Half an hour earlier I had cut across the half-deserted Via Foria, the sounds of the city still so faint that it was possible to hear the birds sing. There was a cool breeze, which seemed fresh, and a foggy light wavering between good weather and bad. But on Via Duomo the sounds intensified, along with the voices of women in their houses; the air became grayer and heavier. I had turned up at Uncle Filippo’s with a big plastic bag in which I had put the contents of my mother’s suitcase and purse, and had surprised him with his trousers unbuttoned and sagging, an undershirt on his bony torso, the stump of his arm bare. He had opened the windows and immediately tidied himself. Then he had begun to press me with offers of nourishment. Did I want fresh bread, did I want milk to dip it in?

I didn’t wait to be persuaded and began to nibble this and that. He had been a widower for six years, he lived alone like all old people without children, and didn’t sleep much. He was happy to have me there, in spite of the early morning hour, and I was happy myself to be there. I wanted a few moments of peace, the things I had left at his house for the past few days, a change of clothes. I intended to go right away to the Vossi sisters’ shop. But Uncle Filippo was eager for company and for talk. He threatened Caserta with horrible deaths. He hoped that he had died a painful death already, during the night. He regretted not having killed him in the past. And then, through a series of connections difficult to disentangle, he began to jump from one family story to another, in a thick dialect. He barely stopped to catch his breath.

After a few attempts I gave up interrupting him. He muttered, he got angry, his eyes became bright with tears, he sniffed. When the monologue turned to Amalia, he went in a few minutes from melancholy praise of his sister to pitiless criticism of the fact that she had abandoned my father. He even forgot to speak of her in the past and began to reproach her as if she were still alive and present or about to emerge from the other room. Amalia, he began to shout, never thinks of the consequences ahead of time: she was always like that, she should have sat down and reflected and waited; instead she woke up one morning and left the house along with you three girls. She shouldn’t have done it, according to Uncle Filippo. I soon realized that he wanted to trace back to that separation twenty-three years earlier his sister’s decision to drown herself.

Ridiculous. I was annoyed but let him go on, especially since every so often he paused and, changing his hostile tone to one of affection, eagerly took from the cupboard more tins: mint candies, old biscuits, some blackberry jam white with mold but according to him still good.

While I tried to refuse these offerings and then in resignation ate, he started off again, confusing dates and facts. Was it ’46 or ’47—he tried to remember. Then he changed his mind and concluded: after the war. It was Caserta who, after the war, had realized that my father’s talent could be used to improve life a little. Without Caserta, it had to be admitted, in all honesty, my father would have continued to paint, for almost nothing, mountains, moons, palm trees, and camels in the neighborhood shops. Instead, Caserta, who was a crafty fellow, black, black as a Moor but with the eyes of a devil, had begun to do business with the American sailors. Not selling women or other goods but in particular pursuing the sailors who were suffering from homesickness. And instead of showing them photographs of women for sale, he worked on them, urging them to take out of their wallets the photographs of the women they had left at home. Once he had transformed the sailors into abandoned and anxious children, he made a deal on the price and brought the photos to my father, who would make oil portraits from them.