Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

each trying to help the other stay on his feet, and in that way rotated, seeking a point of balance. Caserta took advantage of this to dive into the white light of Via Sanfelice, in the sparkling rain, amid the crowd seeking shelter in the entrance to the funicular.
    I gathered what energy I had left and ran after him, into a place thick with people’s breath, muddied by the rain, grimy with plaster dust. The funicular was about to depart and the passengers pushed and shoved one another toward the ticket-taking machines. Caserta was already beyond them and was going down the steps, stopping frequently, craning his neck to look behind him, and then suddenly bringing his flushed face to whoever happened to be walking next to him to whisper something. Or maybe he was talking to himself but in a voice that he tried to keep low, waving his right hand up and down with three fingers extended and thumb and index finger joined. He waited for a few seconds, in vain, for an answer. Finally he started down again.
    I got a ticket and rushed toward the two luminous yellow cars. I couldn’t see which one he had gone into. I went halfway along the second car without finding him, and decided to get on, making my way through the crowd of passengers. The air was heavy and smelled of sweat and wet clothes. I tried to find Caserta. Instead I saw Polledro, who was taking the steps two at a time, followed by my uncle, who was shouting at him. They had just time to get on the first car before the doors closed. After a few seconds they appeared against the rectangle of glass that faced my car: the man from the Vossi shop was looking around in a fury and my uncle was pulling him by one arm. The funicular started off.

14.
    The cars were new, very different from those of my childhood. These preserved only the shape, a parallelogram whose entire structure seemed to have been thrust backward by a violent shove from the front. But when the funicular began to descend into the oblique well before it, the squeaks, the vibrations, the jerks returned. Yet the cars on their steel cables slid down the cliff with a velocity that had little to do with the slow, restful pace, punctuated by jolts and thuds, at which they used to run. The vehicle, which had been a circumspect probe under the skin of the hill, seemed to have become a brutal injection into a vein. And with annoyance I felt that it dimmed the memory of those pleasant trips with Amalia, after she had stopped making gloves, and took me along when she delivered to the wealthy clients of the Vomero the garments she had sewed for them. She had dressed and done her hair with care, in order to seem no less a lady than those she worked for. I, on the other hand, was thin and dirty, or at least felt that way. I sat beside her on the wooden seat and held on my knees, carefully arranged so that it wouldn’t get creased, the garment she was working on or had just finished, wrapped in packing paper that was fastened at the ends with pins. The package rested on my legs and stomach like a case that contained the smell and warmth of my mother. I felt it in every inch of skin touched by the paper. And that contact produced in me a melancholy languor marked by the jerks of the car.
    Now instead I had only an impression of losing altitude, like an aged Alice in pursuit of the White Rabbit. I reacted by detaching myself from the door and making an effort to get to the center of the car. I was in the highest part, in the second compartment. I tried to advance, but the passengers stared at me in irritation, as if there were something ugly in my aspect, and repulsed me antagonistically. I struggled to move, then gave up and looked for Caserta. I could make him out at the end, in the last section, which consisted of a broad platform. He was standing behind a shabby-looking girl of around twenty. I saw him in profile, as I saw the girl. He seemed a peaceful old man in dignified old age, intent on reading a newspaper gray from