"I know. You called me."
"She wouldn't leave. I didn't want to call the police. I didn't want a scene."
"You told me that," said Michael. "That's fine. Can we have some privacy?"
"Well — " She then spoke fervently in Italian.
"That's not going to happen," he said in English and then switched to Italian. Gabriele had already understood little words from the entreaty of Michae'ls mother like "money" and "bad women" and could extrapolate that mama was worried about a potential extortion and blackmail of her baby.
"Whatever! I give up," said the exasperated woman in English and then started to leave.
"I'm pleased to have met you," said Gabriele. "I hope that we can become further acquainted and that I may one day secure your trust." Her words were formal and archaic like a nineteenth century novel. If subconsciously done to impress others, they impressed no one. The woman stared at her with that apathetic and supercilious hardness that they, who identified wealth as a unique DNA of a more developed species, always did.
When his mother had left the room he closed the door, and then tried to camouflage the obdurate hardness of his apathetic eyes with a contrived smile. Closure was nonetheless in those eyes. They were hard and hallowed and they were permanently enclosed like tinctured and opaque glass windows. How, she remonstrated against herself, had she debased herself by knocking on a door of this family home and why did she stay here with him whose orbs were like slammed doors in one's face. How was it that she continued to knock? He smiled since there was every chance that she could rectify herself in his eyes through discomfort and contrition. Seated with this nemesis, he gained pleasure at the thought that she had been allowed to squirm in a seat for over an hour the way her son had waited and squirmed in the principal's office while dreading the forthcoming paddling.
"I tried to call you," said Gabriele, "but I think you were trying to avoid me."
"Possibly," he said. He could have told her lies that his mobile telephone was not functional or he could have prevaricated beyond the emphatic use of perhaps. Instead, he had made a truthful statement. She thought that she had to give him points for at least that; but as she pondered this he pulled out a cigar, lit it, and blew the smoldering flames into her face. That face turned red in anger and hate. It just bit a lower lip as an arm fanned away the smoke. These were hard gestures that were in part flailing against the personal life sucking her into its vortex of winds, and in part a protest of a man's insolence toward this womanly weakness that he correctly presumed to ooze within her. He saw hate in eyes harder than his own and finding not only them erotic but also the breath that was trying to extricate itself from the inhalation of smoke, he wanted to exercise against her will. He wanted to use her as if she were the gravity and the bar by which he might do pull-ups to claim masculine strength and virile complacency. He wanted to toss her onto a mattress and rape her like any gentleman.