Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante Page A

the rain. He held it in his left hand, folded in fourths, and with his right he held onto the polished metal grip. But I soon realized that, swaying with the movement of the car, he was getting ever closer to the girl’s body. Now his back was arched, his legs were slightly spread, his stomach leaned against her buttocks. There was nothing that justified that contact. In spite of the crowding, he had enough space behind him to position himself at a proper distance. But, even when the girl turned with barely concealed rage and then pushed her way forward to escape him, the old man didn’t desist. He waited a few seconds before regaining the few inches he had lost, then again joined the blue material of his trousers to her jeans. He received a timid elbow in the ribs but continued impassively to pretend to read, and in fact pressed his stomach against her with greater determination.
    I turned to look for my uncle. I saw him in the other car, intent, openmouthed. Polledro, next to him in the crowd, was beating on the glass. Maybe he was trying to attract Caserta’s attention. Or mine. He no longer had the irritating air that I had seen in the shop. He seemed a humiliated and anxious boy, forced to be present behind a window at a spectacle that made him suffer. My gaze went from him to Caserta: I was disoriented. It seemed to me that they had the same red plastic mouth, stiff with tension. But I couldn’t stabilize that impression. The funicular stopped, with a rocking motion, and I saw that the girl moved in a hurry toward the exit. Caserta, as if stuck to her, followed with back arched and legs spread, to the astonishment and nervous laughs of his traveling companions. The young woman jumped out of the car. The old man hesitated a moment, stopped, and looked up. I thought that he was recalled by Polledro’s now frantic pounding. Instead, as if he had always known exactly where I was, he picked me out in the crowd, which was now pointing to him with murmurs of disapproval, and, turning to me with a slightly suggestive look, let me understand that the pantomime he had been enacting had to do with me. Then abruptly he slipped out of the car, like a rebel actor who has decided to stop following the script.
    I realized that Polledro, too, was trying to get out. I, in turn, tried to reach the door, but I was too far away and was pushed back by the current of people getting on. The funicular started off again. I looked up and realized that the man from the Vossi sisters’ shop hadn’t made it, either. But Uncle Filippo had.

15.
    In the faces of the old it’s difficult to trace the lineaments of their youth. At times we can’t even imagine that they had a youth. I realized, as the funicular continued its descent, that a little earlier, with the movement of my gaze from Polledro to Caserta and vice versa, I had composed a third man, who was not Caserta or Polledro. He was a young man, olive-skinned, with black hair and a camel overcoat. That ectoplasm, which immediately dissolved, was the result of a shift of somatic features, as if my gaze had caused an accidental confusion between the cheekbones of Caserta and those of the floorwalker from the Vossi shop, between the mouth of one and that of the other. I reproached myself. I had done too many things that I shouldn’t have: I had started running, I had given into anxiety, my frenzy had been excessive. I tried to calm myself.
    A few minutes later the station of Chiaia appeared, a dimly lighted concrete bunker. I prepared to get out but I still felt unsettled. Now, in my head, Amalia was, in her turn, staring at that fanciful somatic composition I had made. I resigned myself. She stood there, demanding, in a corner of the old station of forty years earlier. I arranged her better in the background, as if I were working on a puzzle that was not yet identifiable from its details: only her loosened hair, a dark profile in front of three painted wooden figures that perhaps had been