Not that Angela and Ida had lied to me about that, they weren’t capable of it: we had been brought up never to tell lies. With that connection between ugliness and anxieties, they had probably been talking about themselves, and their experience, using the words that Mariano—our heads contained a lot of concepts we heard from our parents—had used, in some circumstance or other, to comfort them. But Angela and Ida weren’t me. Angela and Ida didn’t have in their family an Aunt Vittoria whose face their father—their father—had said they were starting to take on. Suddenly one morning at school I felt that I would never go back to being the way my parents wanted me, that cruel Mariano would notice it, and my friends would move on to more suitable friendships, and I would be left alone.
I was depressed, and in the following days the bad feelings regained strength; the only thing that gave me a little relief was to stroke myself continuously between my legs, numbing myself with pleasure. But how humiliating it was to forget myself like that, by myself; afterward I was even more unhappy, sometimes disgusted. I had a very pleasant memory of a game I played with Angela, on the couch at my house, when, in front of the television, we would lie facing each other, entwine our legs, and silently, without negotiations, without rules, settle a doll between the crotch of my underpants and the crotch of hers, so that we rubbed each other, writhing comfortably, pressing the doll—which seemed alive and happy—hard between us. That was another time, the pleasure didn’t seem like a nice game anymore. Now I was all sweaty, I felt deformed. And so day after day I was repossessed by the desire to examine my face, and went back even more relentlessly to spending time in front of the mirror.
This led to a surprising development: as I looked at what appeared to me defective, I started to want to fix it. I studied my features and, pulling on my face, thought: look, if I just had a nose like so, eyes like so, ears like so, I’d be perfect. My features were slight flaws that made me sad, touched me. Poor you, I thought, how unlucky you’ve been. And I had a sudden enthusiasm for my own image, so that once I went as far as to kiss myself on the mouth just as I was thinking, forlornly, that no one would ever kiss me. So I began to react. I moved slowly from the stupor in which I spent the days studying myself to the need to fix myself up, as if I were a piece of good-quality material damaged by a clumsy worker. I was I—whatever I I was—and had to concern myself with that face, that body, those thoughts.
One Sunday morning I tried to improve myself with my mother’s makeup. But when she came into my room she said, laughing: you look like a Carnival mask, you have to do better. I didn’t protest, I didn’t defend myself, I asked her as submissively as I could:
“Will you teach me to put on makeup the way you do it?”
“Every face has its own makeup.”
“I want to be like you.”
She was glad to do it, complimented me, and then made me up very carefully. We spent some really lovely hours, joking, laughing with each other. Usually she was quiet, self-possessed, but with me—only with me—ready to become a child again.
Eventually my father appeared, with his newspapers; he was happy to find us playing like that.
“How pretty the two of you are,” he said.
“Really?” I asked.
“Absolutely, I’ve never seen such gorgeous women.”
And he shut himself in his room; on Sunday he read the papers and then studied. But as soon as my mother and I were alone she asked me, as if that space of a few minutes had been a signal, in a voice that was always a little weary but seemed to know neither irritation nor fear:
“Why did you go looking in the box of pictures?”
Silence. She had noticed, then, that I had been rummaging through her things. She realized that I had tried to scrape off the black of the marker. How long ago? I couldn’t keep from crying, even though I fought back the tears with all my strength. Mamma, I said between my sobs, I wanted, I believed, I thought—but I was unable to say a thing about what I wanted, believed, thought. I gasped, sobbing, but she couldn’t soothe me, and as soon as she said something with a smile of sympathy—there’s no need to cry, you just have to ask me, or Papa, and anyway you can look at the photos when you like, why are you crying, calm down—I sobbed even harder. Finally, she took my hands, and it was she herself who said gently:
“What were you looking for? A picture of Aunt Vittoria?”
8.
I understood at that point that my parents knew that I had heard their conversation. They must have talked about it for a long time, maybe they had even consulted with their friends. Certainly, my father was very sorry and in all likelihood had delegated my mother to convince me that the sentence I’d heard had a meaning different from the one that might have wounded me. Surely that was the case—my mother’s voice was very effective in mending operations. She never had outbursts of rage, or even of annoyance. When, for example, Costanza teased her about all the time she wasted preparing her classes, correcting the proofs of silly stories and sometimes rewriting entire pages, she always responded quietly, with a transparency that had no bitterness. And even when she said, Costanza, you have plenty of money, you can do what you like, but I have to work, she managed to do it in a few soft words, without any evident resentment. So who better than her to remedy the mistake? After I calmed down, she said, in that voice, we love you, and she repeated it once or twice. Then she started on a speech that until then she had never made.
She said that both she and my father had made many sacrifices to become what they were. She said: I’m not complaining, my parents gave me what they could, you know how kind and affectionate they were, this house was bought at the time with their help; but your father’s childhood, adolescence, youth—those for him were truly hard times, because he had nothing at all, he had to climb a mountain with his bare hands, and it’s not over, it’s never over, there is always some storm that knocks you down, back to where you started. So finally she came to Vittoria and revealed to me that, non-metaphorically, the storm that wanted to knock my father down off the mountain was her.
“Her?”
“Yes. Your father’s sister is an envious woman. Not envious the way others might be, but envious in a very terrible way.”
“What did she do?”
“Everything. But above all she refused to accept your father’s success.”
“In what sense?”
“Success in life. How hard he worked at school and university. His intelligence. What he has constructed. His degree. His job, our marriage, the things he studies, the respect that surrounds him, the friends we have, you.”
“Me, too?”
“Yes. There is no thing or person that for Vittoria isn’t a kind of personal insult. But what offends her most is your father’s existence.”
“What kind of work does she do?”
“She’s a maid, what should she do, she left school in fifth grade. Not that there’s anything bad about being a maid, you know how good the woman is who helps Costanza in the house. The problem is that she also blames her brother for this.”
“Why?”
“There’s no why. Especially if you think that your father saved her. She could have ruined herself even further. She was in love with a married man who already had three children, a criminal. Well, your father, as the older brother, intervened. But she put that, too, on the list of things she’s never forgiven him for.”
“Maybe Papa should have minded his own business.”
“No one should mind his own business if a person is in trouble.”
“Yes.”
“But even helping her was always difficult, she repaid us as destructively as possible.”
“Aunt Vittoria wants Papa to die?”
“It’s terrible to say, but it’s true.”
“And there’s no way to make peace?”
“No. To make peace, your father, in Aunt Vittori
a’s eyes, would have to become a mediocre man like the ones she knows. But since that’s not possible, she set the family against us. Because of her, after your grandparents died we couldn’t have a real relationship with any of the relatives.”
I didn’t respond in a meaningful way, I merely uttered a few cautious or monosyllabic phrases. But at the same time I thought with revulsion: so I am taking on the features of a person who wants my father dead, my family ruined, and the tears flowed again. Noticing, my mother tried to stop them. She hugged me, murmured: there’s no need to feel bad, is the meaning of what your father said clear now? Eyes lowered, I shook my head energetically. So she explained to me softly, in a tone that was suddenly amused: for us, for a long time, Aunt Vittoria has been not a person but a locution. Sometimes, when your father isn’t nice, I scold him jokingly: be careful, Andrea, you just put on the face of Vittoria. And then she shook me lovingly, repeated: it’s a playful expression.
I muttered darkly:
“I don’t believe it, Mamma, I’ve never heard you talk like that.”
“Maybe not in your presence, but in private, yes. It’s like a red signal, we use it to say: look out, it would be all too easy for us to lose everything we wanted for our life.”
“Me, too?”
“No, what are you talking about, we’ll never lose you. You are the person who matters most in the world to us, we want all the happiness possible for your life. That’s why Papa and I are so insistent about school. Now you’re having some little difficulties, but they’ll pass. You’ll see how many great things will happen to you.”
I sniffled, she wanted to blow my nose with a handkerchief as if I were still a child, and maybe I was, but I avoided it, and said:
“What if I stopped studying?”
“You’d become ignorant.”
“So?”
“So ignorance is an obstacle. But you’ve already gotten back on track with studying, haven’t you? It’s a pity not to cultivate one’s intelligence.”
I exclaimed:
“I don’t want to be intelligent, Mamma, I want to be beautiful, like the two of you.”
“You’ll be much more beautiful.”
“Not if I’m starting to look like Aunt Vittoria.”
“You’re so different, that won’t happen.”
“How can you say that? Who can I ask, to find out if it’s happening or not?”
“There’s me, I’ll always be here.”
“That’s not enough.”
“What are you proposing.”
I almost whispered:
“I have to see my aunt.”
She was silent for a moment, then she said:
“For that you have to talk to your father.”
9.
I didn’t take her words literally. I assumed that she would talk to him about it first and that my father, as soon as the next day, would say, in the tone I loved best: here we are, at your orders, if the little queen has decided that we have to go meet Aunt Vittoria, this poor parent of hers, albeit with a noose around his neck, will take her. Then he would telephone his sister to make a date, or maybe he would ask my mother to do it, he never concerned himself in person with what annoyed or irritated or grieved him. Then he would drive me to her house.
But that’s not what happened. Hours passed, days, and we scarcely saw my father. He was always tired, always torn between school, some private lessons, and a demanding essay that he was writing with Mariano. He left in the morning and returned at night, and in those days it was always raining: I was afraid he’d catch cold, get a fever and have to stay in bed till who knows when. How is it possible—I thought—that a man so small, so delicate, has fought all his life with Aunt Vittoria’s malice? And it seemed even more implausible that he had confronted and kicked out the married delinquent with three children who intended to be the ruin of his sister. I asked Angela:
“If Ida fell in love with a delinquent who was married with three children, what would you, the older sister, do?”
Angela answered without hesitation:
“I’d tell Papa.”
But Ida didn’t like that answer, she said to her sister:
“You’re a snitch, and Papa says a snitch is the worst thing there is.”
Angela, miffed, answered:
“I’m not a snitch, I’d only do it for your own good.”
“So if Angela is in love with a delinquent who’s married with three children, you won’t tell your father?”
Ida, as an inveterate reader of novels, thought about it and said:
“I would tell him only if the delinquent is ugly and mean.”
There, I thought, ugliness and meanness are more important than anything else. And one afternoon when my father was out at a meeting I cautiously returned to the subject with my mother:
“You said we would see Aunt Vittoria.”
“I said you had to talk about it with your father.”
“I thought you talked to him.”
“He’s very busy right now.”
“Let’s go the two of us.”
“Better if he takes care of it. And then it’s almost the end of the school year, you have to study.”
“You two don’t want to take me. You’ve already decided not to.”
My mother assumed a tone similar to the one she’d used until a few years earlier when she wanted to be left alone and would propose some game that I could play by myself.
“Here’s what we’ll do: you know Via Miraglia?”
“No.”
“And Via della Stadera?”
“No.”
“And the Pianto cemetery?”
“No.
“And Poggioreale?”
“No.”
“And Via Nazionale?”
“No.”
“And Arenaccia?”
“No.”
“And the whole area that’s called the Industrial Zone?”
“No, Mamma, no.”
“Well, you have to learn, this is your city. Now I’ll give you the map, and after you’ve done your homework you study the route. If it’s so urgent for you, one of these days you can go by yourself, to see Aunt Vittoria.”
That last phrase confused me, maybe it hurt me. My parents wouldn’t even send me by myself to buy bread down the street. And when I was supposed to meet Angela and Ida, my father or, more often, my mother drove me to Mariano and Costanza’s house and then came to pick me up. Now, suddenly, they were prepared to let me go to unknown places where they themselves went unwillingly? No no, they were simply tired of my complaining, they considered unimportant what to me was urgent, in other words they didn’t take me seriously. Maybe at that moment something somewhere in my body broke, maybe that’s where I should locate the end of my childhood. I felt as if I were a container of granules that were imperceptibly leaking out of me through a tiny crack. And I had no doubt that my mother had already talked to my father and, in agreement with him, was preparing to separate me from them and them from me, to explain to me that I had to deal with my unreasonable, perverse behavior by myself. If I looked closely behind her kind yet weary tone, she had just said: you’re starting to annoy me, you’re making my life difficult, you don’t study, your teachers complain, and you won’t stop this business about Aunt Vittoria, ah, what a fuss, Giovanna, how can I convince you that your father’s remark was affectionate, that’s enough now, go and play with the atlas and don’t bother me anymore.
Now, whether that was the truth or not, it was my first experience of privation. I felt the painful void that usually opens up when something we thought we could never be separated from is suddenly taken away from us. I said nothing. And when she added: close the door, please, I left the room.
I stood for a while in front of the closed door, dazed, waiting for her to give me
the street atlas. She didn’t, and so I retreated almost on tiptoe to my room to study. But, naturally, I didn’t open a book; my head began to pound out, as if on a keyboard, plans that until a moment before had been inconceivable. There’s no need for my mother to give me the map, I’ll get it, I’ll study it, and I’ll walk to Aunt Vittoria’s. I’ll walk for days, for months. How that idea seduced me. Sun, heat, rain, wind, cold, and I who was walking and walking, through countless dangers, until I met my own future as an ugly, faithless woman. I’ll do it. Most of those unknown street names that my mother had listed had stayed in my mind, I could immediately find at least one of them. Pianto especially went around and around in my head. A cemetery whose name meant weeping must be a very sad place, and so my aunt lived in an area where one felt pain or perhaps inflicted it. A street of torments, a stairway, thorn bushes that scratched your legs, wild, mud-spattered stray dogs with enormous drooling jaws. I thought of looking for that place in the street atlas, and I went to the hall, where the telephone was. I tried to pull out the atlas, which was squeezed between massive telephone books. But as I did so I noticed on top of the pile the address book in which my parents had written down the numbers they habitually used. How could I not have thought of that. Probably Aunt Vittoria’s number was in the address book, and if it was there, why wait for my parents to call her? I could do it myself. I took the book, went to the letter “V,” found no Vittoria. So I thought: she has my last name, my father’s last name, Trada, and I immediately looked at the “T”s; there it was, Trada Vittoria. The slightly faded handwriting was my father’s, the name appeared amid many others, like a stranger.
For seconds my pulse raced, I was exultant, I seemed to be facing the entrance to a secret passage that would carry me to her without other obstacles. I thought: I’ll phone her. Right away. I’ll say: I’m your niece Giovanna, I need to meet you. Maybe she’ll come get me herself. We’ll set a day, a time, and meet here at the house, or down at Piazza Vanvitelli. I made sure that my mother’s door was closed, I went back to the telephone, I picked up the receiver. But just as I finished dialing the number and the phone was ringing, I got scared. It was, if I thought about it, after the photographs, the first concrete initiative I’d taken. That I was taking. I have to ask, if not my mother, my father, one of them has to give me permission. Prudence, prudence, prudence. But I had hesitated too long, a thick voice like that of one of the smokers who came to our house for long meetings said: hello. She said it with such determination, in a tone so rude, with a Neapolitan accent so aggressive, that that “hello” was enough to terrorize me and I hung up. I was barely in time. I heard the key turning in the lock, my father was home.
The Lying Life of Adults Page 3
