An excerpt from The Iguana

Unexpectedly calm and unafraid, she stood before his eyes. With a kerchief wrapped around her head and several times around her neck, she was dragging a huge grey broom distractedly about the guest room. Rather than cleaning she might have been scattering dust and disorder out of spite. Her small dry eyes, moreover, seemed oddly fixed and unresponsive.

The Count's first impulse was to approach her and take her in his arms, telling her what he intended to do for her and that starting right now she was forever to think of him as her servant and her daddy and she'd bear his name and have all of his money; but then he looked at her better, and something held him back. He suspected—from the out-sized kerchief, her general listlessness, that way of dragging the broom, vexatiously making a mess rather than cleaning—that the creature was scheming to gain by subterfuge what he spontaneously wanted to give her; she was deliberately playing on his feelings. At any other time he would have laughed, but now (though not without a thought to her future reeducation and how best to lift her up from such a sad state of corruption), he went rigid and drew himself tall:

"Look there, you're only scattering dust about," he began. "Who could have possibly have taught you to sweep up like that? It would be better not to do it at all." His voice had managed to turn cold and impersonal, whereas the attitude in his eyes was curiously timid.

The Iguana, as tired servants or irritated children will often do, pretended not to have heard him and continued in her hesitant, disorderly way to push the dust about on the floor from one place to another. At that point the Count indeed approached her and took the broom from her hands; in fact, he literally cast it away, telling her with a tremor in his voice that she was never again to touch such a thing. Then—since her steady, will-less gaze was simply more than he could stand and he wanted to make up with her—he took her by a shoulder and guided her over to the table, where he put down his packets of authentic money and opened the largest, which was the one that held the emerald. The eyes of the beast immediately flared with a sparkle and a softening that just as quickly disappeared, but not before the Count had understood that she wasn't totally unacquainted with the value of money. This too was something of which he would have to heal her. Now, however, he wanted to see her smile.

Anna Maria Ortese, in her The Iguana, translated by Henry Martin, McPherson & Company, 1987.