Troubling Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

out.
    On the telephone, just before, Uncle Filippo had said to me some things that I already knew in a confused way: he spoke of them and I knew. They could be summed up thus: Caserta was a contemptible man. As a boy he had been a friend of his and of my father. After the war, they had had some profitable business dealings: he had seemed a clear-headed, sincere young man. But he had eyed my mother. And not only her: he was already married, he had a son, but he bothered all the women in the neighborhood. When he went too far, my uncle and my father had taught him a lesson. And Caserta with his wife and child had gone to live in another place. My uncle had concluded in a threatening dialect: “He wouldn’t get her out of his head. So we made the desire get out forever.”
    Silence. I had seen blood between cries and insults. Ghosts upon ghosts. Antonio, the child who held my hand, had gone down into the darkest part of the basement. For an instant I felt the domestic violence of my childhood and adolescence return to my eyes and ears as if it were oozing along a thread that joined us. But I realized for the first time that now, after so many years, it was what I wanted.
    “I’m coming over,” Uncle Filippo had suggested.
    “What do you think a man of seventy can do to me?”
    He was confused. Before hanging up I had promised that I would call him back if I heard from Caserta again.
    Now I was waiting on the landing. At least an hour passed. The glow of lights in the stairwell from the other floors allowed me to check, once I got used to the dark, the whole area. Nothing happened. Finally around four in the morning the elevator jerked abruptly and the light went from green to red. The car slid down. 
    With a leap I was at the railing: I saw it glide past the fifth floor and stop at the fourth. The doors opened and closed. Then silence again. Even the echo of the vibrations emitted by the steel cables disappeared.
    I waited a little, maybe five minutes; then I went cautiously down one flight. There was a dim yellow light: the three doors that faced the landing led to the offices of an insurance company. I went down another flight, slipping around the dark, still elevator car. I wanted to look inside but I didn’t, taken by surprise: the door of my mother’s house was wide open, the lights were on. Right on the threshold was Amalia’s suitcase and beside it her black leather purse. I was about to rush instinctively toward those objects when behind me I heard the click of the elevator’s glass doors. The light illumined the car, revealing an old man, well groomed, his dark, fleshless face handsome in its way beneath a mass of white hair. He was sitting on one of the wooden benches and was so still that he seemed like an enlargement of an old photograph. He stared at me for a second with a friendly, slightly melancholy look. Then the car rose upward with a rumble.
    I had no doubts. The man was the same one who had reeled off the litany of obscenities during Amalia’s funeral. But I hesitated to follow him up the stairs: I thought I should but I felt as if attached to the floor, like a statue. I stared at the elevator cables until the car stopped with a clatter of the doors as they rapidly opened and closed. A few seconds later the car slid past me again. Before it disappeared toward the ground floor the man showed me, with a smile, the garbage bag that contained my mother’s underwear.

7.
    I was strong, lean, quick, and decisive; not only that, I liked being confident of being so. But I don’t know what happened in that situation. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the shock of finding open that door that I had diligently closed. Maybe I was dazed by the house with the lights on, by my mother’s suitcase and purse in full view in the doorway. Or maybe it was something else. It was the repulsion I felt at perceiving that the image of that old man beyond the arabesqued glass of the elevator had seemed for a moment to