The devils grip, p.1
The Devil's Grip, page 1
Also by Lina Wolff
Carnality
Many People Die Like You
The Polyglot Lovers
Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs
First published in the Swedish language as Djävulsgreppet in 2022
by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright © Lina Wolff 2022
Translation copyright © Saskia Vogel 2024
Published by agreement with Salomonsson Agency
The cost of this translation was supported by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged.
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text designer: Patrice Sheridan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Wolff, Lina, 1973- author. | Vogel, Saskia, translator.
Title: The devil’s grip : a novel / Lina Wolff; translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.
Other titles: Djävulsgreppet. English
Description: New York : Other Press, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023029952 (print) | LCCN 2023029953 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635424201 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635424218 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PT9877.33.O54 D5513 2024 (print) | LCC PT9877.33.O54 (ebook) | DDC 839.73/8—dc23/eng/20230727
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029952
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029953
Ebook ISBN 9781635424218
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Lina Wolff
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!
—Bram Stoker
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 transf ormation 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 matters 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 pushups, 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.
Day to day, despite the pain he has already begun to inflict on her, cohabitating with him is pleasant. He showers both morning and night, and drops his new shirts off at a laundry service so they stay spotless and crisp. He wears a nice cologne and moisturizes his head with a unisex lotion from a Spanish brand. Him being so neat and tidy now, she comes to think of him as Il pulito. She watches him closely and can find almost nothing about him that irritates her. She observes him, and he observes her. He tells her that she’s so nice and quiet. Quiet as a mouse, he says, he’s always wanted a woman who is as quiet as a mouse, a Minnie Mouse type who isn’t intrusive.
“A Minnie Mouse type?”
“Yes, exactly. The name suits you. Is it all right if I call you Minnie?”
She shrugs. “If I’m Minnie, then you’re Mickey, that goes without saying.”
He looks in the mirror. “Mickey? Can’t you pick something else?”
“Like what?”
“Il toro? Il toro divino?”
They laugh.
“Mickey will do,” she says. “When you say ‘intrusive,’ how do you mean?”
Well, this is what’s so nice about her, he says, she keeps her voice down and he can’t really hear her going about her day in the apartment. Even when she opens and closes the doors and cupboards, she doesn’t make a sound. Well, that’s because she hates noise, she says. She hates noise and noisy people frighten her.
“A delicate princess,” he says.
“A delicate princess? Hardly. I can use a drill and back up a trailer, so when you put it that way, it’s insulting.”
“But, Minnie, you can let yourself be weak with me. Strong women make us men weak. If we don’t have the opportunity to demonstrate our strength, then what will we make of our masculinity?”
She considers what he’s saying.
“Sure,” she replies. “I’ll gladly be a little weak with you. Now that you mention it, I can sense that I’ve wanted to be weak for a long time.”
“You’re perfect,” he says. “Perfect for me.”
This makes her happy, she takes it as a compliment, a compliment that bodes well. What she doesn’t understand in the moment is that this compliment is also a request. A request that she continue to be perfect for him and not—if given the chance—mar the perfection he thinks he perceives. Instead her mind is occupied with thoughts of how to hide her flaws so that she can continue to be the person he says he perceives to be perfect. Deep down, of course, she knows, as does he, that perfection is a chimera. If she were forced to list each of her flaws and quirks, where would she even begin? As for her physical attributes, don’t get her started, but when she puts on weight she goes soft and pasty, the fat expands around her waist and she becomes uniformly thick, like a cylinder, a marshmallow. If she spends too much time in the sun, her face turns red and swells up, her nose and cheeks get blotchy. Her hair has always been stiff and thick, more like a horse’s mane than human hair. Just to mention a few. Then there’s the occasional bout of social anxiety. This affliction puts her at odds in her home country, but it’s an even worse fit in a Latin country where the social arena is where life plays out, where one must dare to stand up, speak up, and let the drama unfold around you. Had he been aware of it, he would have disapproved of her tendency to withdraw from the world and into herself, had he known that, back home, she sometimes wouldn’t leave her apartment for days because she simply couldn’t, and when she did, she’d go out at times when no one else was around. Why did she do this? She doesn’t know. Another quirk, which surfaced in conjunction with the start of her studies to become a translator and the occasional stint as an interpreter, is that when she finds herself in stressful situations she has to recite everything going on inside her in more than one language. If she can’t manage that, if there’s a word she can’t find, she can’t move forward, can’t think of anything else. She becomes paralyzed, because deep down she knows that if she resumes her task before finding the word, a curse might be activated. How did this come to be? She’s not sure about this either, but she knows it to be true, and she also knows that the simple fact of having a thought can sometimes somehow give rise to a miniature reality of said thought, a reality that runs the risk of expanding and taking over one’s own. This is another thing that Il pulito would have disapproved of, her belief in things with no rational explanation. It’s not that she thinks about them all the time, but if she’s being honest, yes, she does believe in things that have no rational explanation. With regard to her social anxiety and the belief that words can curse, she has read enough about psychology in self-help books to know that they could be considered neuroses. Neuroses can be mild and most people suffer from some form of neurosis, but a line is crossed when it becomes problematic to coexist with the neurosis, when the neurosis begins to constitute an obstacle in one’s daily life. Do her neuroses constitute an obstacle in her daily life? She doesn’t think so. After all, she’s living her life, succeeding in most of what she sets out to do. Still, her neuroses can give rise to great unease and undermine her. She considered seeing a psychologist. But when she thought about all the people with real problems, people fleeing war or living in extreme poverty, she no longer felt entitled to her neuroses—as if they were afflictions among others that were the very mark of a delicate princess, and that’s not what she wants to be. She has known shame, privilege, hypersensitivity, and she hates it, the way it all makes her feel sullied. Sullied by wealth and the bizarre spirit of the age, sullied by wealth and idiocy. Nature can be a balm. The trees draw out her heaviness and break it down inside them. But in Florence there is no nature. There are only bare hills, fenced-in vineyards, private hunting grounds, and city. The cypresses that can be seen in the distance beyond the city always belong to somebody. You can’t go to them, you can’t walk among them and inhale their scent or touch their trunks. They simply loom like a backdrop, a tableau, as solemn as they are unreachable. What will life in Florence be like for her in the long run, without the presence of genuine nature to absorb her afflictions? On the other hand, Florence is where Il pulito is, which confers an abundance of benefits that she really can’t refuse.
