The Devil's Grip

When she gets to Florence, all the couples making love are what overwhelm her first. Together they stroll through arched passageways in the inner city and above their heads run dark, ancient beams. The place is hot and grandiose, nothing like she imagined it would be when once, many years ago, her train had stalled at the station. Then huge snowflakes fell upon what appeared to be a lethargic, cold, brittle city. But now there are all these lovers in the heat. She hears them through the open windows, through the walls of his apartment. A woman’s scream, then murmuring soon followed by laughter.
“Is that how people have sex here,” she asks, “and around the clock, no less?”
“Yes,” he replies. “Is there anything wrong with that?”
“No,” she says, “not at all.”
It occurs to her that she comes from quite an austere part of the world. It also occurs to her that she has much to learn, and that the man at her side might just be the person to guide her into this new realm. From his terrace the ocher tile roofs spread out before them, and Florence from above appears to be the city of the second chakra. The second chakra is the pelvis, and its color is orange. Orange, ocher, a color in and of this place. Everything seems to be adding up, she thinks. At last it all seems to be adding up.
Sweat clings to their skin like a membrane. She likes the smell of his. She likes everything about him, even though he is so very ugly. He has long, dark, tangled hair, which he draws around his face as if to hide it, but there’s no hiding a face like that. She tucks his hair behind his ears. He’s ashamed, he says. She tells him not to be; his face adds another dimension to his masculinity, and besides, it’s a pleasing discordant contrast to the city’s feminine charm. He gives her a wary, almost shy smile. People they pass on the street look him over, then her, then him again. This is a first for him, he says.
“People are staring because they don’t understand why someone like you would choose to be with someone like me,” he says.
But the women who get it really get it, and their interest manifests in a particularly Latin way. On one occasion they’re sitting on a park bench, and a woman stops for a drink at the nearby water fountain. She stands alongside him and when she bends forward, her bottom hovers a mere half yard from his face. He gives a satisfied smile.
“This is only happening because I’m with you,” he whispers. “They never notice me when I’m on my own.”
Here she already considers the possibility that he’s lying to her, but she pushes such thoughts away. There he is after all, sitting next to her on the bench, arms comfortably stretched along its back and the smell of sweat rising from his armpits.
There’s nothing to worry about. He’s harmless, repulsive to everyone but her. He’s a harmless little fatty. She will look back on this time and state (bitterly) that there is in fact no such thing as a harmless little fatty.

Soon women start checking him out even more often. She sees the pleasure it brings him, and at first she can’t help but smile. After all, she’s responsible for this transformation, she’s the one driving it. Gathering up all his faded, gray T-shirts and throwing them away. Making sure he buys brightly colored linen shirts, deodorant, and new jeans.
“Jeans,” she says, “can make or break a body.”
She explains, for example, that stone-washed jeans can’t be paired with slightly shiny black dress shoes, the kind with a heel that clacks on the cobblestones.
“It makes you look like a salesman who deals in truck steering systems,” she says.
“But that’s pretty much what I am,” he replies. Out of embarrassment, she laughs.
“Right, that is pretty much what you are. But what’s stopping you from saving those nice black shoes for a funeral and otherwise wearing sneakers?”
He listens and learns. Follows her around the shopping center, buying whatever she recommends. She says that a shaved head might suit him, maybe leaving a millimeter or so of dark shag, like Shane in The Walking Dead. He googles it and nods.
“But what about this face?” he asks. “It’ll scare people off.”
“You’ll have a different look about you,” she says. “Like you’re not trying to hide anything, like you’re proud of your more menacing side.”
He obeys. In the mornings she goes running with him through the parks before the heat descends on the city. Slowly his belly fat dwindles. She brings him along to the gym, and while she works her abs on the mat, he’s in front of the mirror toning his biceps.
“Without all that hair, I look like un cazzone, a giant cock, standing here doing dumbbell curls,” he says.
She laughs. She loves it when he’s like this, foulmouthed and sweaty, she’s starved of people who don’t take themselves too seriously. The transformation continues. Salad every night, fruit for breakfast. Plus so much sex that the masculinity is seeping from his pores by the time he leaves the house. In the mornings she stands at the window and watches contentedly (but naively) as her miracle walks out into the world.

Practical mattres require their attention. Sooner rather than later, so they know where they stand.
“Sure thing,” he says. “I’m all ears.”
First and foremost: She’s here on a one-way ticket. No, no return flight. She wasn’t sure how things were going to turn out. What about her job, he says, she must have a job back home? No, she handed in her notice. She couldn’t take it anymore. She hated that job, it was destroying her, gnawing away at her insides with each passing day. Finally the day came when she’d had enough.
“You quit?” he says.
“Precisely.” She took the plunge and went in to see the boss one morning, explaining that she’d had enough of office life, the flesh-colored carpets and the window frames stained brown, and so she handed in her notice.
“But how will you support yourself?” he asks anxiously.
“I have you,” she says. For a moment he looks as horrified as she had hoped he would.
“Me?” he says.
“You’re stable enough, aren’t you?” she asks. “I thought you were the kind of man a person could lean on.”
Fright seems to have arrested his face. “Well, yes, I am, but . . .”
She laughs and tells him not to worry. She has money.
“How much?” he asks.
“Enough so that I don’t have to charge you for all the sex we’re having,” she says.
He coughs nervously. She says that she was only joking. She has plenty of money, it’s more likely that he’ll be the one sponging off of her. He insists that he’s never done anything of the sort. Never sponged off a woman, never quit a job, never had money in the bank “just because.” He says he comes from a line of farmers where, if you didn’t want to work the land anymore, it would be unthinkable to leave that job without securing another first. She shrugs. Different folks, different strokes. Of course, if she ends up staying for a longer time, she’ll have to do something, like take a career-oriented course or translate industrial manuals. She’s always wanted to learn simultaneous interpreting anyway, and there are two schools for that in Florence. Okay, he says. Everything she’s saying sounds good. She can stay with him for a while so she won’t have to think about rent. That is if she wants to stay in Italy for a while, with him. If she takes care of dinner every night, they can call it even.
She walks around his attic apartment, which seems to her like heaven on earth. Two bathrooms, each with a shower. Tile roofs, the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore rising above all else, someone humming a tune down in the courtyard, flowers blazing in the neighbor’s flower boxes. Chilling in the fridge is a bottle of white wine. The crowns of the pine trees in the courtyard stand in sharp relief against the sky, and at twilight the tang of burnt resin wafts through the open bedroom window.

In those early days she walks around with a deep sense of satisfaction. As God created man, she creates this man. Perhaps that’s why things will go so very wrong in the end, because she believes herself to be living in alignment with a narrative that has in fact never existed. Women do not create men, there are no such historical notions, no such legends. As for him, it soon becomes clear that his transformation keeps opening up new doors. Over dinner he takes pleasure in discussing the women who paid attention to him throughout the day. There was one woman who, when making herself a coffee at the machine outside his office, displayed her splendid bottom for him. How was he supposed keep his eyes on his work then? His laughter is genial; he is still so fat that when he laughs it appears genial. She can sense how much he’d like her to be laughing along with him, but she doesn’t. He persists, wanting so badly for her to rejoice in this turn that his life has taken. He shows her a video of himself doing knuckle push-ups, rep after rep, with a big smile on his face.
“Who’s filming you?” she asks.
“Giorgio,” he says.
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
“I don’t know what to say, it was Giorgio,” he reiterates.
“A woman was filming you,” she says.
“How can you tell?” he says.
“By your smile, you’re trying to impress someone. You wouldn’t smile like that at a man.”
He stares at her awhile. “You’re being paranoid,” he says. “I thought you were the kind of person who’d be above it all, like a rose in a field of thistles. Turns out, you’re a little prickly after all.”
“Why don’t you try being straight with me. Roses have thorns too, you know. Go on, tell me who was filming you.”
The truth creeps out. A woman’s name.
“How am I supposed keep a cool head while you’re off at work?” she shouts.
She sees the astonishment, but also the answer, in his eyes. The answer is simple. The answer is that this is not about her keeping her cool. This is about his desire and the heights it can help him attain.