The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  “Please, don’t tell Papa.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, then replied in dialect, mean, incomprehensibly mocking:

  “Papa? You think Papa gives a fuck about the ankles of Mariano and Nella under the table?”

  7.

  The time passed very slowly, I kept checking the clock. Ida was having fun with Giuliana, Tonino seemed completely at ease with Angela, I felt like a failure, like a cake made with the wrong ingredients. What had I done. What would happen now. Corrado returned with the water for Vittoria, in no hurry, idly. I found him boring, but at that moment I felt lost and hoped that he would pay even a little attention to me. He didn’t, in fact, he didn’t even wait for my aunt to finish drinking, he vanished among the parishioners. Vittoria followed him with her gaze, she was forgetting that I was there next to her waiting for explanations, advice. Was it possible that she had judged insignificant even that grievous fact I had told her? I watched her closely, she was gruffly demanding from a fat woman in her fifties an excessive amount for a pair of sunglasses, but she didn’t lose sight of Corrado: there was something about his behavior that—it appeared to me—seemed to her more serious than what I had revealed to her. Look at him, she said to me, he’s too sociable, just like his father. And suddenly she called him: Currà. And when he didn’t hear or pretended not to, she abandoned the fat woman whose glasses she was wrapping and, clutching the scissors she used to cut the ribbon for tying up packages and grabbing me with her left hand, dragged me with her through the courtyard.

  Corrado was talking to three or four young men, one of whom was tall and thin and had buck teeth that gave the impression that he was laughing even when there was nothing to laugh at. My aunt, apparently calm, ordered her godson—today that seems to me the right definition for the three children—to return immediately to the stand. He answered playfully: two minutes and I’ll be there, while the boy with the buck teeth seemed to laugh. My aunt turned to him abruptly and said she would cut off his pesce—she used precisely that dialect word, pesce, fish, in a calm voice, brandishing the scissors—if he kept laughing. But the kid didn’t seem to want to stop, and I sensed all Vittoria’s fury, on the verge of exploding. I was worried, she didn’t seem to understand that his buck teeth prevented him from keeping his mouth closed, she didn’t seem to understand that he would laugh even during an earthquake. In fact, suddenly she yelled at him:

  “You’re laughing, Rosà, you dare to laugh?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you’re laughing because you think your father will protect you, but you’re wrong, no one protects you from me. You leave Corrado alone, understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you don’t understand, you’re convinced I can’t do anything to you, but watch out.”

  She pointed the scissors at him and, right before my eyes, and in front of some parishioners who were starting to wonder about that unexpectedly loud tone of voice, pricked the boy in one leg, so that he jumped back, the terrified astonishment of his eyes spoiling the fixed mask of his laugh.

  My aunt pressed him, threatened to prick him again.

  “Get it now, Rosà,” she said, “or do I have to keep going? I don’t give a fuck if you’re the son of attorney Sargente.”

  The young man, whose name was Rosario, and who was evidently the son of that lawyer I didn’t know, raised one hand in a sign of surrender, retreated, went off with his friends.

  Corrado, indignant, started to follow them, but Vittoria stood in front of him with the scissors saying:

  “Don’t you move, because if you make me mad I’ll use these with you, too.”

  I pulled her by the arm.

  “That guy,” I said, frightened, “can’t close his mouth.”

  “He dared to laugh in my face,” Vittoria replied, panting, “and no one laughs in my face.”

  “He was laughing but not on purpose.”

  “On purpose or not, he was laughing.”

  Corrado scowled, he said:

  “Forget it, Giannì, it’s pointless to talk to her.”

  But my aunt gave a cry, she yelled at him, gasping:

  “You shut up, I don’t want to hear a word.”

  She was clutching the scissors, I realized that she was having a hard time controlling herself. Her capacity for affection must long ago have been used up, probably with the death of Enzo, but her capacity for hatred—it seemed to me—had no limit. I had just seen how she behaved with poor Rosario Sargente, and she would have been capable of hurting even Corrado: imagine then what she would do to my mother and especially my father, now that I had told her about Mariano. The idea of it made me feel like crying again. I’d been reckless, the words had spilled out unintentionally. Or maybe not, maybe in some part of me I had long ago decided to tell Vittoria what I had seen, I had already decided when I gave in to the pressure of my friends and arranged that meeting. I could no longer be innocent, behind my thoughts there were other thoughts, childhood was over. I strained, and yet innocence eluded me, the tears that I felt continuously in my eyes hardly proved that I wasn’t guilty. Luckily, Don Giacomo arrived, soothing, and that kept me from crying. Come, come, he said to Corrado, putting an arm around his shoulders, let’s not make Vittoria mad, she’s not well today, help her carry the pastries. My aunt sighed bitterly, placed the scissors on the edge of one of the stands, glanced at the street beyond the courtyard, perhaps to see if Rosario and the others were still there, then said firmly: I don’t want help, and disappeared through the doorway that led to the church.

  8.

  She returned soon afterward carrying two large trays of almond pastries, each with blue and pink icing stripes and a small sugared almond on top. The parishioners fought over them; eating even one was enough to disgust me, my stomach was contracted, my heart pounding in my throat. Don Giacomo brought over an accordion, holding it in both arms as if it were a red-and-white child. I thought he knew how to play, but he delivered it a little awkwardly to Vittoria, who took it without protest—was it the same one I’d seen in the corner at her house?—sat down on a chair, sullenly, and played with her eyes closed, grimacing.

  Angela came up behind me and said cheerfully: your aunt—you see her—is really ugly. At that moment it was very true: Vittoria contorted her face like a devil while she played, and even though she was good and the parishioners applauded, she made a repellent spectacle. She tossed her shoulders, curled her lips, wrinkled her forehead, stretched her trunk backward so far that it seemed to be much longer than her legs, which were spread indecorously. It was a blessing when a white-haired man took over and began to play. But my aunt still wouldn’t calm down, she went to Tonino, grabbed him by one arm and forced him to dance, taking him away from Angela. Now she seemed happy, but maybe it was only the tremendous ferocity she had in her body and wanted to vent by dancing. Seeing her, others danced, too, old and young, even Don Giacomo. I closed my eyes to cancel out everything. I felt abandoned, and for the first time in my life, against everything my parents had taught me, I tried to pray. God, I said, God, please, if you truly can do everything, don’t let my aunt say anything to my father, and I closed my eyes tight, as if squeezing my eyelids could concentrate in the prayer enough force to hurl it up to the Lord in the kingdom of Heaven. Afterward, I prayed that my aunt would stop dancing and return us to Costanza on time, a prayer that was miraculously answered. To my surprise, despite pastries, music, songs, interminable dances, we departed in time to leave behind the hazy Industrial Zone and arrive punctually on the Vomero, on Via Cimarosa, at Angela and Ida’s house. Costanza, too, was punctual, she appeared in a dress even more beautiful than the one of the morning. Vittoria got out of the 500, delivered Angela and Ida, and praised her again, again admired all her things. She admired the dress, the hairstyle, the makeup, the earrings, the necklace, the bracelet, which she touched, almost caressed, asking me: do you like it, Giannì
?

  It seemed to me that she intended to mock her with all that praise, even more than in the morning. We must have grown so in tune that I imagined I could hear in my head, with a destructive energy, her traitorous voice, her vulgar words: what’s the use, bitch, of getting all decked out like this, your husband is fucking the mamma of my niece Giannina, oh, oh, oh. So I prayed again to the Lord God, especially when Vittoria got in the car and we set off. I prayed all the way to San Giacomo dei Capri, an interminable journey during which Vittoria didn’t say a word and I didn’t dare ask her another time: don’t say anything to my father, I beg you; if you want to do something for me, reprimand my mother but keep the secret from my father. I entreated God, even if he didn’t exist: God, don’t let Vittoria say I’m coming up with you, I have to speak to your father.

  To my great astonishment, I was again miraculously heard. How wonderful miracles were and how decisive: Vittoria left me outside without even a mention of my mother, Mariano, my father. She said only, in dialect: Giannì, remember that you’re my niece, that you and I are alike, and if you call me, if you say, Vittoria, come, I’ll hurry right away, I’ll never leave you alone. Her face, after those words, seemed more serene, and I wanted to believe that if Angela had seen it now she would have found it beautiful, just as at that moment it seemed to me. But as soon as I was alone, at home—while, shut in my room, I looked at myself in the closet mirror and confirmed that no miracle would ever be able to erase the face that was coming to me—I gave in and finally wept. I resolved not to spy on my parents anymore, and never to see my aunt again.

  9.

  When I try to assign phases to the continuous flow of life that has passed through me up until today, I’m convinced that I permanently became someone else when, one afternoon, Costanza came to visit without her daughters. Overseen by my mother, who for days had had puffy eyes and a reddened face—due, she said, to the cold wind that blew from the sea and caused the windowpanes and the balcony railings to vibrate—Costanza, her face severe, sallow, gave me her white-gold bracelet.

  “Why are you giving it to me?” I asked, bewildered.

  “She’s not giving it to you,” my mother said, “she’s returning it to you.”

  Costanza’s beautiful mouth quavered for a long moment before she managed to say:

  “I thought it was mine, but it was yours.”

  I didn’t understand, I didn’t want to understand. I preferred to thank her and try to put it on, but I couldn’t manage. In absolute silence Costanza, fingers trembling, helped me.

  “How does it look?” I asked my mother, pretending frivolity.

  “Good,” she said without even a smile and left the room, followed by Costanza, who never came to our house again.

  Mariano, too, disappeared from Via San Giacomo dei Capri, and as a result I saw Angela and Ida less frequently. At first, we talked on the telephone: none of us three understood what was happening. A couple of days before Costanza’s visit, Angela told me that my father and her father had had a fight in the apartment on Via Cimarosa. At the outset, the discussion had seemed very similar to the ones they had on the usual subjects, politics, Marxism, the end of history, economics, the state, but then it had turned surprisingly violent. Mariano had shouted: now get out of my house immediately, I don’t want to see you ever again; and my father, suddenly dissolving his image of the patient friend, had begun yelling the ugliest words in dialect. Angela and Ida were frightened, but no one paid any attention to them, not even Costanza, who at a certain point couldn’t bear to listen to the shouting and said she was going to get some air. At which Mariano shouted, also in dialect: yes, get out, slut, don’t come back, and Costanza slammed the door so hard that it reopened, Mariano had to kick it closed, my father opened it again and ran after Costanza.

  In the following days, all we did was talk on the phone about that fight. Neither Angela nor Ida nor I could understand why Marxism and the other things our parents discussed passionately even before we were born had suddenly caused so many problems. In reality, for different reasons, both they and I understood much more of that scene than we admitted. We intuited, for example, that it had to do with sex, not Marxism, but not the sex that interested and amused us in every circumstance; we felt that, completely unexpectedly, a form of sex was erupting into our lives that wasn’t attractive, that in fact disgusted us, because we dimly perceived that it had to do not with our bodies, or the bodies of our contemporaries, or actors and singers, but with the bodies of our parents. Sex—we imagined—had drawn them into something sticky and repulsive, utterly different from what they themselves had taught us. According to Ida, the words that Mariano and my father had shouted at each other gave the idea of feverish spitting, of threads of mucus that smeared everything, especially our most secret desires. It was for this reason, perhaps, that my friends—very inclined to talk about Tonino, Corrado, and how much they liked those two boys—became sad and began to turn away from that type of sex. As for me, I knew much more about the secret dealings in our families than Angela and Ida, so the effort to avoid understanding what was happening to my father, my mother, Mariano, Costanza was much greater and exhausted me. It was I, in fact, who in distress withdrew and abandoned the telephone confidences. Maybe, more than Angela, more than Ida, I felt that a single wrong word would open a dangerous passage to the reality of the facts.

  In that phase, lies and prayers established themselves solidly in my daily life and again helped a lot. The lies, for the most part, I told myself. I was unhappy, and in school and at home pretended an extreme cheerfulness. I would see my mother’s face in the morning on the verge of losing its features, red around the nose, disfigured by depression, and I would say in a tone of gay affirmation: how nice you look today. As for my father—who had all of a sudden stopped studying as soon as he opened his eyes, whom I found ready to go out early in the morning, or very pale, with dull eyes, in the evening—I constantly presented him with exercises that I had to do for school, even though they weren’t complicated, as if it weren’t obvious that his mind was elsewhere and he had no wish to help me.

  At the same time, although I continued not to believe in God, I devoted myself to prayer as if I did. God—I entreated—let the fight between my father and Mariano be about Marxism and the end of history, let it not be because Vittoria telephoned my father and reported to him what I told her. At first, it seemed to me that the Lord was listening to me yet again. As far as I knew, it was Mariano who had attacked my father and not the opposite, as would surely have happened if Vittoria had used my information to be, in turn, an informer. But I quickly realized that something didn’t add up. Why had my father railed against Mariano in a dialect he never used? Why had Costanza left the house slamming the door? Why had my father, not her husband, run after her?

  Behind my casual lies, my prayers, I lived in apprehension. Vittoria must have told my father everything, and my father had rushed to Mariano’s house to fight about it. Costanza, as a result of that fight, had discovered that her husband was holding my mother’s ankles between his under the table and had in turn made a scene. It must have happened like that. But why had Mariano yelled at his wife, while she, desolate, left the apartment on Via Cimarosa: yes, get out, slut, don’t come back? And why had my father run after her?

  I felt that something was escaping me, something that at times I got a glimpse of and grasped its meaning, and then, as soon as the meaning tried to surface, I drew back. So I constantly returned to the more obscure facts: Costanza’s visit, for example, which had followed the quarrel; my mother’s face, so worn, and her violet eyes that cast suddenly imperious glances at an old friend by whom she had tended to be dominated; Costanza’s remorseful look and the contrite gesture with which she seemed to want to give me a gift, while instead—my mother had explained—it was not a gift but a restitution; the trembling fingers with which Angela and Ida’s mother had helped me put on my wrist the white-
gold bracelet she was so fond of; the bracelet itself, which I now wore day and night. Oh, of those events that took place in my room, of that dense network of glances, gestures, words around a bracelet that without explanation had been given to me and described as mine, I certainly knew more than what I could tell myself. So I prayed, especially at night, when I woke up scared by what I was afraid was about to happen. God, I whispered, God, I know it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have insisted on meeting Vittoria, I shouldn’t have gone against my parents’ wishes; but now that it’s happened put things back in order, please. I truly hoped that God would do that, because if he didn’t, everything would collapse. San Giacomo dei Capri would tumble onto the Vomero and the Vomero onto the entire city, and the entire city would drown in the sea.

  In the dark, I was dying of anguish. I felt such a weight crushing my stomach that I got up in the middle of the night to vomit. I made noise on purpose: sharp feelings in my chest, in my head had wounded me deeply, I hoped that my parents would appear and help me. But they didn’t. And yet they were awake; a strip of light scratched the darkness right outside their bedroom. I deduced from that that they no longer wished to concern themselves with me, and so they never, for any reason, interrupted their nighttime murmuring. At most, a sudden peak broke the monotony, a syllable, half a word that my mother uttered like the tip of a knife on a windowpane, my father like distant thunder. In the morning they were exhausted. We had breakfast in silence, eyes lowered, I couldn’t stand it. I prayed, God, that’s enough, make something happen, anything, good or bad doesn’t matter: let me die, for example, that should shake them up, reconcile them, and afterward let me be resurrected into a family that’s happy again.

  One Sunday, at lunch, a violent internal energy suddenly incited my mind and my tongue. I said in a light tone, showing the bracelet: