Free Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante Page A

nothing more would be lost or dispersed far from me, because finally everything had been lost already.
    Now that she was dead, someone had scraped away her hair and had disfigured her face to fit my body. It had happened after years in which, out of hatred, out of fear, I had wanted to eliminate every root I had in her, even the deepest: her gestures, the inflections of her voice, her way of taking a glass or drinking from a cup, her method of putting on a skirt, as if it were a dress, the arrangement of the objects in her kitchen, in her drawers, how she did her most intimate washing, her taste in food, her dislikes, her enthusiasms, and the language, the city, the rhythms of her breath. All of it remade, so that I could become me and detach myself from her.
    On the other hand I hadn’t wanted or been able to root anyone in me. Soon I would lose even the possibility of having children. No human being would ever detach itself from me with the anguish with which I had detached myself from her, only because I had never been able to attach myself to her definitively. There would not be anyone more or less between me and another aspect of myself. I would remain me until the end, unhappy, discontent with what I had furtively taken from the body of Amalia. Little, too little, the booty I had managed to seize, tearing it from her blood, her belly, and the measure of her breath, to hide in my body, in the capricious matter of the brain. Insufficient. What an ingenuous and careless sort of makeup, to try to call “I” this forced flight from a woman’s body, although I had carried away from it less than nothing! I was no I. And I was confused: I didn’t know if what I had been discovering and telling myself, ever since she ceased to exist and couldn’t refute it, horrified me or gave me pleasure.

13.
    Maybe I came to because of the rain on my face. Or because Uncle Filippo, standing beside me, shook me by the arm with the only hand he had. The fact is that I felt a kind of electric shock and realized that I had fallen asleep. 
    “It’s raining,” I mumbled while my uncle continued to tug at me furiously. He was shrieking as if beside himself, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I felt weak and frightened, I couldn’t get up. People were rushing around, looking for shelter. Men shouted or laughed loudly and, running, bumped dangerously into the little table. I was afraid that they would knock me over. One sent the chair that had just been occupied by Uncle Filippo flying. “Nice weather,” he said, and went into the bar. 
    I tried to stand, thinking that my uncle wanted to pull me up. Instead he let go of my arm, stumbled through the crowd, and started yelling astonishing insults from the edge of the sidewalk, pointing with his outstretched arm to the other side of the street, beyond the cars and the packed buses with the rain drumming on their roofs.
    I got up, carrying the bag and the purse. I wanted to see whom he was getting mad at, but the traffic created a compact wall of steel plates, and the rain was coming down harder and harder. So I crept along the wall of the building to avoid getting soaked and meanwhile found a gap between the stopped cars and buses. Through it I saw Caserta against the red patch of the UPIM. He was bent almost double, but walking quickly, and looking back continuously as if afraid of being followed. He bumped into passersby but did not seem to realize it, nor did he slow down: leaning forward, his arms swinging, at every collision he pirouetted on himself without stopping, as if he were a silhouette attached to a fulcrum that, by means of a secret mechanism, was rolling rapidly along the pavement. From a distance it seemed that he was singing and dancing but perhaps he was only cursing, gesticulating.
    I began to hurry, in order not to lose sight of him, but to do so I was soon forced to abandon any attempt at shelter and move into the open, into the rain, since all the