The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  “Don’t get out, I’ll let my friends in and we’ll go.”

  But she didn’t even hear me, she laughed, she muttered in dialect:

  “Did she sleep like that or is she going to an early-morning reception?”

  Then she got out of the car and greeted Costanza with a cordiality so exaggerated that it seemed clearly fake. I tried to get out, but the door was defective, and while I was struggling with it I observed in great agitation Costanza smiling politely, with Angela on one side and Ida on the other, while Vittoria was saying something, cutting the air with broad gestures. I hoped she wasn’t using curse words, and meanwhile I managed to open the door. I rushed out in time to hear my aunt, half in Italian, half in dialect, complimenting my friends:

  “Pretty, pretty, pretty. Like their mother.”

  “Thank you,” said Costanza.

  “And these earrings?”

  She began to praise Costanza’s earrings—she touched them with her finger—then moved on to her necklace, her dress, she touched everything for a few seconds, as if she were standing before a decorated mannequin. I was afraid, at one point, that she would pull up the hem of Costanza’s dress to examine her stockings more closely, to look at her underpants, she would have been capable of it. But suddenly she calmed down, as if an invisible noose had tightened around her throat to remind her to compose herself, and she paused with a serious expression on the bracelet Costanza had on her wrist, a bracelet I knew well, it was the one that Angela and Ida’s mother especially liked. It was of white gold, with a flower whose petals were diamonds and rubies, splendid precisely in the sense that it gave off light; even my mother envied it.

  “It’s really beautiful,” Vittoria said, holding Costanza’s hand and touching the bracelet with her fingertips with what seemed to me sincere admiration.

  “Yes, I like it, too.”

  “You’re very attached to it?”

  “I’m fond of it, I’ve had it for years.”

  “Well, watch out, it’s so pretty some thug’ll pass by and grab it off you.”

  Then she let go of her hand as if a sudden impulse of disgust had replaced the praise and returned to Angela and Ida. She said in a false tone that they were much more precious than all the bracelets in the world, and she got in the car while Costanza ordered: girls, be good, don’t make me worry, I’ll be waiting for you here at two, and, since my aunt didn’t answer, and in fact had got in the driver’s seat without saying goodbye, and with one of her most glowering looks, I shouted with feigned cheer from the window, yes, Costanza, at two, don’t worry.

  4.

  We drove off, and Vittoria, with her usual inexpert yet reckless driving, took us on the ring road and then all the way down to Pascone. She wasn’t kind to my friends; during the journey she kept reprimanding them because their voices were too loud. I yelled, too, the engine made a racket and it was natural to raise your voice, but she took it out only on them. We tried to control ourselves, she got angry just the same, she said that her head hurt, she ordered us not to even breathe. I guessed that something had irked her, maybe she didn’t like the two girls, it was hard to say. We went much of the way without saying a word, I beside her, Angela and Ida on the very uncomfortable back seat. Until, out of the blue, my aunt herself broke the silence, but a hoarse, mean voice came out, as she asked my friends:

  “You’re not baptized, either?”

  “No,” Ida said readily.

  “But,” Angela added, “Papa said if we want to we can be baptized when we grow up.”

  “What if you die in the meantime? You know you’ll go to limbo?”

  “Limbo doesn’t exist,” said Ida.

  “Nor Paradise, purgatory, or hell,” Angela added.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Papa.”

  “And where does he think God puts those who sin and those who don’t sin?”

  “God doesn’t exist, either,” said Ida.

  “And sin doesn’t exist,” Angela explained.

  “That’s what Papa told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Papa is a shit.”

  “You shouldn’t say bad words,” Ida admonished her.

  I intervened so that Vittoria wouldn’t lose patience for good.

  “Sin exists: it’s when there’s no friendship, there’s no love, and you waste something good.”

  “You see?” said Vittoria. “Giannina understands and you don’t.”

  “It’s not true, I understand, too,” Ida said nervously. “Sin is a bitterness. We say ‘What a sin’ when something we like falls on the floor and breaks.”

  She waited to be praised, but the praise didn’t arrive, my aunt said only: a bitterness, eh? I thought it was unfair to behave like that with my friend, she was younger but very smart, she devoured difficult books, and I liked the observation. So I repeated “What a sin” once or twice, I wanted Vittoria to hear it clearly, what a sin, what a sin. My anguish increased, but without a precise cause. Maybe I was thinking of how everything had turned brittle, right before that terrible remark of my father’s about my face, when I’d gotten my period, when my chest had swelled, who knows. What to do. I’d given too much importance to the words that wounded me, too much weight to this aunt, oh to be a little child again, six, seven, maybe eight, or even younger, and erase all the steps that had led me to the ankles of Mariano and my mother, to being shut up now in this ramshackle car, constantly at risk of hitting other cars, of going off the road, so that maybe in a few minutes I’d be dead, or gravely injured, and would lose an arm, a leg, or be blind for the rest of my life.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, and I knew it was an infraction, in the past I had ventured only once to ask a question like that and Vittoria had replied irritably: where I want to go. In this situation, though, she seemed to respond willingly. She didn’t look at me, she looked at Angela and Ida in the rearview mirror and said:

  “To church.”

  “We don’t know any prayers,” I warned her.

  “That’s bad, you have to learn them, they’re useful.”

  “But for now we don’t know them.”

  “Now it doesn’t matter. Now we’re not going to say prayers, we’re going to the parish flea market. If you don’t know how to pray, surely you know how to help sell.”

  “Yes,” Ida exclaimed happily, “I’m good at it.”

  I felt relieved.

  “Did you organize it?” I asked Vittoria.

  “The whole parish but mainly my children.”

  For the first time in my presence, she defined as hers Margherita’s three children, and she did it with pride.

  “Corrado, too?” I asked.

  “Corrado is a piece of shit, but he does what I say, otherwise I’ll break his legs.”

  “And Tonino?”

  “Tonino is good.”

  Angela couldn’t contain herself and let out a shout of enthusiasm.

  5.

  I had rarely entered a church and only when my father wanted to show me one that in his opinion was particularly beautiful. According to him the churches of Naples were elegant structures, richly endowed with works of art, and shouldn’t be left in the state of neglect they were in. On one occasion—I think we were in San Lorenzo but I wouldn’t swear to it—he reprimanded me because I had started running up and down the naves and then, when I couldn’t find him, had called him with a terrified shout. He said that people who don’t believe in God, as, in fact, he and I didn’t, should nevertheless, out of respect for believers, behave politely: you don’t have to wet your fingers in the holy water font, you don’t have to make the sign of the cross, but you should take off your hat even if the weather is cold, not speak in a loud voice, not light a cigarette or go in smoking. Vittoria, on the other hand, lighted cigarette in her mouth, dragged us into a church that was g
ray-white outside, shadowy inside, saying in a loud voice: make the sign of the cross. We didn’t, she noticed, and, one after the other—Ida first, me last—she took our hand and guided it to forehead, chest, and shoulders, saying with irritation: in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Then, as her bad mood got worse, she dragged us down a dimly lit nave, grumbling: you’ve made me late. Coming to a door with an excessively shiny doorknob, she opened it without knocking and closed it behind her, leaving us alone.

  “Your aunt is mean and she’s very ugly,” Ida whispered.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is,” Angela said in a serious tone.

  I felt the tears coming, I struggled to hold them back.

  “She says she and I are identical.”

  “Really,” said Angela, “you’re not ugly and you’re not mean.”

  Ida specified:

  “You’re only that way sometimes, but hardly ever.”

  Vittoria reappeared with a short young man who had a handsome, cordial face. He wore a black pullover, gray pants, and, around his neck on a leather cord, a wooden cross without the body of Jesus.

  “This is Giannina, and these are her two friends,” said my aunt.

  “Giacomo,” the young man introduced himself; he had a refined voice, without dialect.

  “Don Giacomo,” Vittoria corrected him, annoyed.

  “Are you the priest?” Ida asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t say prayers.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You can pray even without saying prayers.”

  I was curious.

  “How?”

  “You just have to be sincere. Join your hands and say: my God, please, protect me, help me, et cetera.”

  “Do you pray only in church?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “And God hears you even if you don’t know anything about him and you don’t even believe he exists?”

  “God listens to everyone,” the priest answered kindly.

  “Impossible,” said Ida, “there’d be such a racket he wouldn’t understand a thing.”

  My aunt gave her a slap with the tips of her fingers and scolded her, because you can’t say to God: it’s impossible—for him everything is possible. Don Giacomo caught the unhappiness in Ida’s eyes and caressed her in the exact spot where Vittoria had hit her, while in a near whisper he said that children can say and do what they like, since they’re still innocent anyway. Then, to my surprise, he mentioned a Roberto who—I quickly understood—was the one who’d been talked about some time ago at Margherita’s house, that is, the young man from that area who now lived and studied in Milan, the friend of Tonino and Giuliana. Don Giacomo called him our Roberto and cited him with affection, because it was he who had pointed out to him that hostility toward children isn’t rare, that even the holy apostles had shown it, not understanding that you have to become a child to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Jesus, in fact, reproaches them, he says: what are you doing, don’t send away the little children, let them come to me. Here the priest turned meaningfully to my aunt—our discontent should never touch children, he said, and I thought that he, too, must have noted in Vittoria an unusual distress—while he kept one hand on Ida’s head. Then he continued with a few heartfelt phrases about childhood, innocence, youth, the dangers of the streets.

  “You don’t agree?” he asked my aunt, soothing, and she turned purple as if he had caught her not listening.

  “With whom?”

  “With Roberto.”

  “He spoke well but without thinking of the consequences.”

  “One speaks well precisely when one doesn’t think of the consequences.”

  Angela, curious, whispered to me:

  “Who is this Roberto?”

  I knew nothing about Roberto. I would have liked to say: I know him very well, he’s great; or, using Corrado’s words, no, he’s a pain in the ass. Instead, I signaled her to be quiet, annoyed as I always was when my belonging to the world of my aunt was revealed as superficial. Angela was obediently silent, but not Ida, she asked the priest:

  “What’s Roberto like?”

  Don Giacomo laughed, he said that Roberto had the beauty and intelligence of those who have faith. Next time he comes—he promised us—I’ll have you meet him, but now let’s go sell, come on, otherwise the poor will complain. So we passed through a doorway into a kind of courtyard where, under an L-shaped portico decorated with gilded festoons and multicolor Christmas lights, there were stands crammed with used objects. Margherita, Giuliana, Corrado, Tonino, and others I didn’t know were decorating and arranging things, and welcoming with ostentatious gaiety the possible buyers for charity, people who—to look at them—appeared only slightly less poor than how I imagined the poor.

  6.

  Margherita praised my friends, called them pretty little ladies, and introduced them to her children, who welcomed them cordially. Giuliana chose Ida as her helper, Tonino wanted Angela, I stood listening to Corrado, who was chatting, trying to joke with Vittoria, but she was treating him badly. I couldn’t bear it for long, and my mind wandered, so with the excuse that I wanted to see what was for sale I walked among the stands, absently touching this or that. There were many homemade sweets, but mainly eyeglasses, bundles of papers, an old telephone, glasses, cups, books, a coffeepot, all well-worn objects, touched over the years by hands that by now were probably hands of the dead, poverty being sold to poverty.

  People were arriving now, and I heard someone say to the priest the word “widow”—there’s the widow, too, they said—and since they were looking toward the stalls supervised by Margherita, her children, and my aunt, I thought for a while that they were referring to Margherita. But gradually I realized that they meant Vittoria. There’s the widow, they said, today we’ll have music and dancing. And I didn’t understand if they uttered widow with scorn or with respect: certainly it surprised me that they associated my aunt, who was unmarried, with both widowhood and entertainment.

  I looked at her carefully, from a distance. She was standing erect behind one of the stalls, and her narrow chest with the large breasts seemed to jump out from the piles of dusty objects. She didn’t seem ugly, I didn’t want her to be, and yet Angela and Ida had said she was. Maybe it’s because today something has gone wrong, I thought. Her eyes were troubled, she gestured in her aggressive way or, unexpectedly, let out a shout and moved for a few moments to the rhythm of the music that came from an old record player. I said to myself: yes, she’s angry because of some business of her own that I don’t know about, or she’s worried about Corrado. We two are made like that, when we have good thoughts we’re pretty, but we turn ugly with mean ones, we have to get them out of our heads.

  I wandered idly through the courtyard. I had wanted that morning to drive out the anguish, but it wasn’t working. My mother and Mariano were too big a weight, it hurt my bones as if I had the flu. I could see that Angela was happy and lighthearted, she was pretty, she was laughing with Tonino. Everyone at that moment appeared to me handsome and good and just, especially Don Giacomo, who, with the sun on him, welcomed the parishioners kindly, shaking hands, not avoiding hugs. Was it possible that only Vittoria and I were grim, tense? My eyes were burning, my mouth was very bitter, I was afraid that Corrado—I was standing beside him again, partly to help him sell, partly to look for relief—would smell my heavy breath. Maybe the acid yet sweetish taste came not from the back of my throat but from the objects on the tables. I felt very sad. And the whole time the Christmas market went on it was depressing to see myself reflected in my aunt, who sometimes greeted the parishioners with an artificial brightness, sometimes stared into space, eyes wide. Yes, she was feeling at least as badly as I was. Corrado said to her: what’s wrong, Vittò, you’re sick, you’ve got an ugly face, and she answered: yes, I’m sick at heart, I’m sick in my chest
, I’m sick to my stomach, I have a terrible face. And she tried to smile with her wide mouth, but she couldn’t, so, turning very pale, she said to him: go get me a glass of water.

  While Corrado went to get the water I thought: she’s sick inside and I’m exactly like her, she’s the person I feel closest to. The morning was passing, I would return to my mother and father, and I didn’t know how long I could stand the disorder at home. So, just as when my mother opposed me and I ran to my father to tell on her, so an urgent need to vent suddenly rose up in my breast. It was intolerable that Mariano should hug my mother, hold her tight, while she had on the clothes I knew, while she put on the earrings and other jewelry I had played with as a child and that I sometimes wore myself. The jealousy increased, creating hideous images. I couldn’t bear the intrusion of that malicious stranger, and finally, unable to resist, I made a decision without realizing I’d made it, and said impulsively, in a voice that arrived like shattering glass: aunt (even though she had ordered me never to call her that), aunt, I have to tell you something, but it’s a secret that you mustn’t tell anyone, swear you won’t. She replied weakly that she would never swear, never, the only oath she had taken was the oath to love Enzo forever, and that she would maintain until death. I was desperate, I told her that if she didn’t swear I couldn’t talk. Screw you then, she muttered, the nasty things you don’t say to anyone become dogs that eat your head at night while you’re sleeping. And so, frightened by that image, needing consolation, a moment later I pulled her aside and told her about Mariano, my mother, what I had seen mixed with what I had imagined. Then I begged her: