The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  “You want to know something?”

  “What?”

  “In my opinion your aunt doesn’t exist.”

  “Of course she exists.”

  “Then if she exists she’s not the way you say. That’s why you won’t let us meet her.”

  “She’s even better than what I tell you about her.”

  “Then take us to see her,” said Ida, and threw the ball hard at me. To avoid getting hit I flung myself backward on the floor and found myself stretched out between the wall and the open door of the dining room. The table our parents still lingered at was rectangular, set in the middle of the room. From where I was, I saw all four of them in profile. My mother was sitting opposite Mariano, Costanza opposite my father, I don’t know what they were talking about. My father said something, Costanza laughed, Mariano replied. I was lying on the floor and I could see not so much their faces as the outlines of their legs, their feet. Mariano had stretched his under the table, he was talking to my father and at the same time he was squeezing one of my mother’s ankles between his.

  I sat up in a hurry with an obscure sense of shame and threw the ball hard at Ida. But I resisted only a few minutes, and lay down on the floor again. Mariano kept his legs stretched out under the table, but now my mother had pulled hers away and turned with her whole body toward my father. She was saying: it’s November but it’s still warm.

  What are you doing, Angela asked, and she lay down cautiously, gently, on top of me, saying: until a little while ago we fit perfectly and now, look, you’re longer than me.

  11.

  For the rest of the evening I never lost sight of my mother and Mariano. She barely took part in the conversation, exchanged not even a glance with him, stared at Costanza or my father, but as if she had urgent thoughts and didn’t see them. Whereas Mariano couldn’t take his eyes off her. He looked at her feet, at a knee, at an ear with a sullen, melancholy gaze that contrasted with the usual tone of his aggressive chatter. The rare times that they exchanged a word, my mother answered in monosyllables, Mariano spoke to her for no reason in a low voice and in a caressing way I had never heard in him. After a while, Angela began to insist that I spend the night with them. She always did that on these occasions, and in general my mother agreed after a few remarks on the bother I might cause, while my father was always implicitly favorable. But this time the request wasn’t immediately agreed to, my mother hesitated. Then Mariano intervened and, after pointing out that the next day was Sunday, and there was no school, assured her that he would bring me himself to San Giacomo dei Capri before lunch. I heard them negotiating pointlessly, it was taken for granted that I would stay, and I suspected that in that exchange—in my mother’s words there was a feeble resistance, in Mariano’s an urgent request—they were saying something else that to them was clear and escaped the rest of us. When my mother agreed that I would sleep with Angela, Mariano had a serious, almost emotional expression, as if on my staying overnight depended, I don’t know, his university career or the solution of the serious problems that he and my father had been engaged with for decades.

  Shortly before eleven, after much hesitation, my parents decided to go.

  “You don’t have any pajamas,” my mother said.

  “She can wear a pair of mine,” said Angela.

  “And a toothbrush?”

  “She has hers, she left it the last time and I put it away.”

  Costanza intervened with a hint of sarcasm at that anomalous resistance in the face of something completely normal. When Angela stays at your house, she said, doesn’t she wear a pair of Giovanna’s pajamas, doesn’t she have her toothbrush? Yes, of course, my mother gave in uneasily and said: Andrea, let’s go, it’s late. My father got up from the couch with a slightly annoyed expression, he wanted a good-night kiss from me. My mother was distracted and didn’t ask me, she kissed Costanza, instead, on both cheeks, with smacks that she never made and that seemed to me dictated by the need to underline their old pact of friendship. Her eyes were agitated, I thought: what’s wrong, she doesn’t feel well. She was about to head toward the door but, as if she suddenly remembered that she had Mariano right behind her and hadn’t said goodbye, she almost fell back against his chest as if she were fainting, and in that position—while my father was saying goodbye to Costanza, praising the dinner yet again—she turned her head and offered him her mouth. It was an instant, with my heart in my throat I thought they would kiss as in the movies. But he touched her cheek with his lips and she did the same.

  As soon as my parents left the apartment, Mariano and Costanza began to clear the table and ordered us to get ready for bed. But I couldn’t concentrate. What had happened before my eyes, what had I seen: innocent playfulness on Mariano’s part, a premeditated illicit act of his, an illicit act of both? My mother was always so transparent: how could she tolerate that contact under the table, and with a man much less attractive than my father? She had no liking for Mariano—how stupid he is, I’d heard her say a couple of times—and even with Costanza she couldn’t contain herself, she had often asked her, in the tone of a feeble joke, how she could stand a person who could never be quiet. And so what was the meaning of her ankle between his ankles? How long had they been in that position? For a few seconds, a minute, ten minutes? Why hadn’t my mother immediately pulled her leg away? And the distractedness that followed? I was confused.

  I brushed my teeth for too long, so that Ida said in a hostile way: that’s enough, you’ll wear them out. It was always like that, as soon as we were in their room she became aggressive. In reality, she was afraid that we two older ones would leave her out, and so she sulked preventively. For the same reason she immediately announced, combatively, that she, too, wanted to sleep in Angela’s bed and not by herself in hers. The two sisters argued for a while—we’re too cramped, go away, no, we’re fine—but Ida wouldn’t give in, she never did. So Angela winked at me, and said to her: as soon as you fall asleep I’m going to sleep in your bed. Fine, Ida exulted, and, satisfied not so much because she would sleep with me all night as because her sister wouldn’t, she tried to start a pillow fight. We counterattacked listlessly, she stopped, settled herself between us, and turned off the light. In the dark she said happily: it’s raining, I love that we’re together, I’m not sleepy, please let’s talk all night. But Angela shushed her, said that she, on the other hand, was sleepy, and after a few laughs there was only the sound of the rain against the windows.

  Immediately my mother’s ankle between Mariano’s came to mind. I tried to take the sheen off the image, I wanted to convince myself that it meant nothing, that it was only something playful between friends. I didn’t succeed. If it means nothing, I said to myself, tell Vittoria. My aunt would surely be able to tell me what weight I should give that scene, hadn’t she urged me to spy on my parents? Look, look carefully, she had said. Now I had looked, and I had seen something. I had only to obey her with greater diligence to find out if it was nonsense or not. But I realized right away that never ever would I report to her what I had seen. Even if there was nothing bad, Vittoria would find the bad. I had seen in action—she would explain to me—the desire to fuck, and not the desire to fuck of the educational books that my parents had given me, with bright-colored figures and tidy, elementary captions, but something revolting and at the same time ridiculous, like gargling when you have a sore throat. That I wouldn’t be able to tolerate. But I had only to evoke my aunt, and she was already invading my head with her exciting, repulsive lexicon, and I saw clearly, in the dark, Mariano and my mother entwined in the ways that her vocabulary suggested. Was it possible that the two of them were able to feel that same extraordinary pleasure that Vittoria said she had known and that she hoped for me as the only true gift that life could give me? The mere idea that, if I were to act as an informer, she would use the words she had for herself and Enzo, but degrading them in order to degrade my mother and, through her, m
y father, convinced me further that the best thing was never to talk to her about that scene.

  “She’s sleeping,” Angela whispered.

  “Let’s us sleep, too.”

  “Yes, but in her bed.”

  I heard her moving cautiously in the dark. She appeared at my side, took my hand, I slipped away carefully, followed her to the other bed. We pulled up the covers, it was cold. I thought of Mariano and my mother, I thought of my father when he discovered their secret. I knew clearly that at my house everything would change for the worse, soon. I said to myself: even if I don’t tell her, Vittoria will find out; or maybe she already knows and has just been pushing me to see it with my own eyes. Angela whispered:

  “Talk to me about Tonino.”

  “He’s tall.”

  “Go on.”

  “He has deep black eyes.”

  “Does he really want to be your boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’re boyfriend and girlfriend will you kiss?”

  “Yes.”

  “With your tongue?”

  “Yes.”

  She hugged me tight, and I hugged her as we did when we slept together. We stayed like that, trying to cling as closely as possible to each other, I with my arms around her neck, she with hers around my hips. Slowly an odor of hers arrived that I knew well, it was intense and also sweet, it gave off warmth. You’re squeezing me too tight, I murmured, and she, suffocating a giggle against my chest, called me Tonino. I sighed, I said: Angela. She repeated, this time without laughing, Tonino, Tonino, Tonino, and she added: swear you’ll let me meet him, otherwise we’re not friends anymore. I swore, and we kissed each other with long kisses, caressing each other. Although we were sleepy, we couldn’t stop. It was a serene pleasure, it banished distress, and so to give it up seemed pointless.

  III

  1.

  I watched my mother for days. If the telephone rang and she hurried to answer in too much of a rush and her voice, at first loud, soon became a whisper, I suspected that the caller was Mariano. If she spent too much time attending to how she looked and discarded one dress and then another and still another, and even went so far as to call me to get my opinion on what looked best, I was sure she must be going to a secret tryst with her lover, terminology I had learned by occasionally skimming the proofs of her romance novels.

  I discovered then that I could become incurably jealous. Until that moment I had been sure that my mother belonged to me and that my right to have her always available was indisputable. In the puppet theater of my mind my father was mine and legitimately also hers. They slept together, they kissed, they had conceived me according to the ways that had been explained to me around the age of six. Their relationship was for me a given, and just for that reason had never consciously disturbed me. But, incongruously, I felt that outside of that relationship my mother was indivisible and inviolable, she belonged to me alone. Her body I considered mine, mine her perfume, mine even her thoughts, which—I had been sure of it as far back as I could remember—could be occupied only by me. Now, instead, it had become plausible—and here again I used formulas learned from the novels she worked on—that my mother was giving herself to someone outside the family accords, secretly. That other man considered himself authorized to hold her ankle between his under the table, and in unknown places he put his saliva in her mouth, sucked the nipples that I had sucked and—as Vittoria said with a dialectal cadence that I didn’t have but that now more than ever, out of desperation, I would have liked to have—grabbed one buttock, grabbed the other. When she came home breathless because countless duties, work and domestic, harassed her, I saw her eyes full of light, I sensed under her clothes the signs of Mariano’s hands, I perceived all over her, who didn’t smoke, the smoke smell from his fingers, yellow with nicotine. Just touching her soon began to repulse me, and yet I couldn’t bear to lose the pleasure of sitting on her lap, of playing with her earlobes to annoy her and hearing her say stop it, you’re making my ears purple, of laughing together. Why is she doing this: I racked my brains. I didn’t see a single good reason that would justify her betrayal, and so I tried to figure out how I could transport her back to the time before that contact under the dinner table and have her again the way she was when I didn’t even realize how much I cared about her, when, rather, it seemed obvious that she was there, ready for my needs, and that she would always be there.

  2.

  In that phase I avoided calling Vittoria, or seeing her. I justified it by thinking: this way it’s easier to say to Angela and Ida that she’s busy and doesn’t have time even to see me. But the reason was different. I felt like crying all the time, and I knew by now that only with my aunt would I be able to weep in complete freedom, screaming, sobbing. Oh yes, I wanted a moment of release, no words, no confidences, only an expulsion of suffering. But who would assure me that, just as I erupted into tears, I wouldn’t fling in her face her responsibility, wouldn’t yell with all the fury I was capable of that, yes, I had done as she told me, I had looked exactly as she had told me to look, and now I knew that I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have under any circumstances, because I had discovered that my father’s best friend—in essence a repulsive man—was squeezing my mother’s ankle between his while they were having dinner, and that my mother didn’t jump up indignantly, didn’t cry, how dare you, but let him squeeze it? I was afraid, in other words, that, once I started crying, my decision to remain silent would suddenly collapse, and that I absolutely didn’t want. I knew very well that as soon as I told Vittoria she would pick up the telephone and tell my father everything for the joy of hurting him.

  Then what? Gradually I calmed down. I examined yet again what I had really seen, I got rid of the fantasies by force, day by day I tried to drive out the impression that something very serious was about to happen to my family. I felt the need for company, I wanted to distract myself. So I spent even more time with Angela and Ida, and that intensified their demands to meet my aunt. In the end I thought: what will it cost me, what’s the harm? So one afternoon I decided to ask my mother: some Sunday could I bring Angela and Ida to meet Aunt Vittoria?

  My obsessions aside, at that time she was objectively overloaded with work. She raced to school, came home, went out again, came home, shut herself in her room to work until late at night. I took it for granted that she would absently say: all right. Instead, she didn’t seem pleased.

  “What do Angela and Ida have to do with Aunt Vittoria?”

  “They’re my friends, they want to meet her.”

  “You know that Aunt Vittoria won’t make a good impression.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s not a presentable woman.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s enough, I don’t have time now to discuss it. In my opinion you should stop seeing her as well.”

  I was angry, I said I wanted to talk about it with my father. My head was bursting, against my will: you aren’t presentable, not Aunt Vittoria; I’ll tell Papa what you do with Mariano and you’ll pay. Then, without waiting for her usual work of mediation, I ran to my father’s study, feeling—I was surprised at myself, frightened, I couldn’t restrain myself—that I was truly capable of dumping on him what I had seen together with what I had intuited. But when I went into the room and almost shouted, as if it were a question of life and death, that I wanted Angela and Ida to meet Vittoria, he looked up from his papers and said affectionately: there’s no need to shout, what’s going on?

  I immediately felt relieved. I repressed the information I had on the tip of my tongue, I kissed him hard on one cheek, I told him about Angela and Ida’s request, I complained about my mother’s rigid position. He maintained his conciliatory tone and didn’t rule out the initiative, but he repeated his aversion toward his sister. He said: Vittoria is your problem, your private curiosity, and I don’t want to comment on it
, but you’ll see that Angela and Ida won’t like her.

  Surprisingly Costanza, who had never in her life met my aunt, manifested the same hostility, as if she had consulted with my mother. Her daughters had to battle for a long time to get permission, they reported to me what she had proposed: invite her here, or meet her, I don’t know, in a café in Piazza Vanvitelli, long enough to satisfy Giovanna and be done. As for Mariano, he was no less against it: what’s the point of spending a Sunday with that woman, and then, good God, to go down there, a terrible place, there’s nothing interesting to see. But in my eyes he didn’t even have the right to breathe, and so I explained to Angela, lying, that my aunt had said we had to go to her, to her house, or nothing doing. In the end, Costanza and Mariano capitulated, but together with my parents they organized everything in detail. Vittoria would pick me up at nine-thirty; then we would go together to get Angela and Ida; finally, coming home, my friends would be dropped off at their house at two and I at my house at two-thirty.

  Then I telephoned Vittoria, with trepidation: until that moment I hadn’t even consulted her. She was brusque as usual, she scolded me because she hadn’t heard from me for a long time, but in essence she seemed glad that I wanted to bring my friends with me. She said: everything that pleases you pleases me, and she accepted the finicky schedule that had been imposed, even if in the tone of someone who’s thinking: sure, why not, I’ll do what I feel like.

  3.

  So it was that one Sunday, when Christmas decorations were already appearing in the shop windows, Vittoria arrived punctually at my house. I had been waiting for her apprehensively at the front door for a quarter of an hour. She seemed cheerful, she descended to Via Cimarosa in the Fiat 500 at high speed, singing and making me sing, too. We found Costanza waiting with her daughters, all three pretty and tidy, as if in a television ad. When I suddenly realized that my aunt hadn’t even brought the car to the curb and already, a cigarette between her lips, was registering Costanza’s extreme elegance with a mocking look, I said anxiously: