Free Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

space of the bar had the effect of a cotton ball in my mouth. The intense smell of coffee and the loud voices of the customers and barmen drove me back toward the door, while my uncle was already shouting, with his hand in the inside pocket of his jacket, “I’ll pay!” I sat down at a table on the sidewalk, amid the squeal of brakes, an odor of imminent rain and of gas, overcrowded buses moving at a walk, people hurrying by and bumping against the table. “I’ll pay,” Uncle Filippo repeated in a lower voice, even though we hadn’t ordered and I doubted that a waiter would ever appear. Then he settled onto the chair and began to praise himself. “I have always been the energetic type. No money? No money. No arm? No arm. No women? No women. What’s essential is the mouth and the legs: to speak when you want and to go where you want. Am I right or not?”
    “Yes.”
    “Your mother is like that, too. We are a family that doesn’t get discouraged. When she was little, she was constantly bruising herself but she never cried: our mother had taught us to blow on the hurt and say: it will pass. Even when she was working and pricked herself with a needle, she kept this habit of saying: it will pass. Once, the sewing-machine needle pierced the nail of her index finger, came out the other side, went up and in again, three or four times. Well, she stopped the pedal, then started it up, but just enough so she could get the needle out, bandaged the finger, and went back to work. I never saw her sad.”
    That was all I heard. It seemed to me that I was sinking up to my neck into the window behind me. Even the red wall of the UPIM store across the street seemed freshly coated, the paint still wet. I let the sounds of Via Scarlatti get louder, until they covered his voice. I saw his lips moving, in profile, soundless; they seemed made of rubber, manipulated by two fingers inside. He was seventy and had no reason to be satisfied with himself, but he tried to be, and perhaps he really was when he started off on that ceaseless chatter which was rapidly produced by the almost imperceptible movements of his lips. For a moment I thought with horror of males and females as living organisms, and I imagined the work of a burin polishing us like ivory, reducing us until we were without holes and without excrescences, all identical and without identity, with no play of somatic features, no weighting of small differences.
    My mother’s wounded finger, pierced by the needle before she was ten, was more familiar to me than my own fingers precisely because of that detail. It was purple, and the nail appeared to sink into the crescent. For a long time I’d wanted to lick it and suck it, more than her nipples. Maybe she had even let me when I was still very small. On the pad of the finger there was a white scar: the wound had become infected, it had had to be lanced. Around it I could smell the odor of her old Singer, which had the shape of an elegant animal, half dog half cat, and the odor of the cracked leather cord that transmitted the action of the pedal from the big wheel to the small one, the needle that went up and down from the animal’s muzzle, the thread that ran through its nostrils and ears, the spool that rotated on the pivot fixed to its back. I could smell the oil that was used to grease it, the black paste of oil mixed with dust that I scratched away with a nail and secretly ate. I intended to make a hole in my finger, too, to make her see that it was risky to deny me what I didn’t have.
    There were too many stories of the infinite, minuscule differences that made her unreachable, and all together turned her into a being desired in the external world at least as much as I desired her. There had been a time when I imagined biting off that distinctive finger, because I couldn’t find the courage to offer mine to the mouth of the Singer. Anything in her that had not been conceded to me I wanted to eliminate from her body. Thus