Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante Page B

there a little less than half a century earlier, advertising clothes. Meanwhile I exited from the car, practically pushed down the steps by impatient passengers. I felt cold in spite of the warm damp air, like that of a greenhouse or a catacomb.
    Now Amalia had definitely appeared in full, young and lithe, in a station that, like her, was no longer there. I stopped to give her time to stand and stare, spellbound, at the figures: perhaps a sophisticated couple with a German shepherd on a leash. Yes. They were of cardboard and wood, six feet tall, less than half an inch thick, with supports behind their backs. I chose details at random to color and clothe them. The man, it seemed to me, wore a jacket and checked pants, a camelhair overcoat, a perfectly fitting felt hat; one gloved hand held the other glove. The woman wore perhaps a dark suit with a long scarf of a blue material with a delicately colored pattern: on her head she wore a hat with feathers, and her eyes were deep-set behind the veil. The dog was sitting on his hind feet, ears pricked, close to his master’s legs. The three of them, looking healthy and content, stood there in the station, which at that time was gray and dusty, and partitioned by a black grating. A few steps away broad shafts of light fell from between the stairs above, making the green (or red?) of the funicular gleam when it slid slowly out of the tunnel in the hill.
    I began to descend the stairway toward the bars of the turnstile. The rest happened in a very brief but extraordinarily dilated lapse of time. Polledro took me by one hand, awkwardly, just under the wrist. I was certain that it was he even before I turned. I heard him asking me to stop. I didn’t. He told me that we knew each other well, that he was the son of Nicola Polledro. Then, in case that information wasn’t enough, he added: “The son of Caserta.”
    I stopped. I even left Amalia standing in front of those figures, her mouth half-open, white teeth lightly veined by lipstick, hesitating between an ironic comment and an expression of wonder. The wood-and-cardboard couple let themselves be admired with detachment, on the left at the foot of the steps. I, who felt that I was present at her side even though I couldn’t see myself, thought that the couple were images of the owners of the funicular. People who came from far away: they were so anomalous, so out of place, so different in their magical absorption that they seemed from another country. Forty years earlier, I must have considered them a possibility of flight, the proof that other places existed where we could go, Amalia and I, whenever we wanted. I thought certainly that my mother, too, so intent, was studying how to run away with me. But then the suspicion dawned that she was standing there for other reasons: perhaps only to study the woman’s clothes and the way she carried herself. Probably she wanted to re-create them in the clothes she sewed. Or learn to dress that way herself, and stand that way, casually, waiting for the funicular. Now, after many decades, I felt, grieving, that there, in that corner of that station, I had not in any way managed to think her thoughts from within her, from within her breath. Already at that point her voice could say to me only: do this, do that. But I could no longer be part of the cavity that conceived those sounds and decided which ones should sound in the external world and which should remain sounds without sound. This pained me.
    Polledro’s voice arrived like a jolt against that grief. The station of forty years earlier gave a shudder. The figures turned out to be of colored dust and dissolved. After many years, clothing and poses of that sort had disappeared from the world. The couple had been removed, along with their dog, as if, after waiting in vain, they had grown annoyed and had decided to return to their castle of somewhere or other. I had trouble keeping Amalia standing in front of that void. Furthermore, a