The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  “Papa, Aunt Vittoria gave me this, right?”

  My mother took a sip of wine, my father didn’t look up from his plate, he said:

  “In a certain sense, yes.”

  “And why did you give it to Costanza?”

  This time he raised his eyes, stared at me coldly, without saying anything.

  “Answer her,” my mother ordered him, but he didn’t obey. Then she almost shouted: “For fifteen years your father has had another wife.”

  Spots of red burned her face, her eyes were frantic. I realized that it must have seemed a terrible revelation to her, she already regretted having made it. But I wasn’t surprised nor did it seem to me any sort of wrong, rather I had the impression of having always known it and for a moment I was sure that everything could be healed. If the thing had been going on for fifteen years it could go on forever, the three of us just had to say it’s fine like that and peace would return, my mother in her room, my father in his study, the meetings, the books. And so, as if to help them move toward this reconciliation, I said to my mother:

  “And you, too, you have another husband.”

  My mother turned pale, she murmured:

  “Me no, I assure you, I don’t.”

  She denied it with such desperation that, maybe because all that suffering hurt me too much, I felt like repeating, in falsetto: I assure you, I assure you, and I laughed. The laugh escaped against my will, I saw the rage in my father’s eyes and I was afraid of it, I was ashamed. I would have liked to explain to him: it wasn’t a real laugh, Papa, but a contraction I couldn’t help, it happens, I saw it recently on the face of a boy named Rosario Sargente. But the laugh wouldn’t be erased, it changed into a frozen smile, I felt it on my face and couldn’t get rid of it.

  My father got up slowly, moved to leave the table.

  “Where are you going?” my mother said alarmed.

  “To sleep,” he said.

  It was two in the afternoon: usually at that hour, especially on Sunday or when he had the day off from school, he shut himself in to study and went on until dinnertime. Instead he yawned, to let us know that he really was sleepy. My mother said:

  “I’m coming to sleep, too.”

  He shook his head, and we both read in his face that the usual lying down with her in the same bed had become intolerable to him. Before he left the kitchen, he said to me, in a tone of surrender that for him was very rare:

  “There’s nothing to be done about it, Giovanna, you really are like my sister.”

  IV

  1.

  It took my parents almost two years to decide to separate, even though during that time they lived under the same roof only for brief periods. My father disappeared for weeks without warning, leaving me with the fear that he had taken his life in some dark, squalid place in Naples. I discovered only later that he went to live happily in a beautiful house in Posillipo that Costanza’s parents had given their daughter, who was now permanently fighting with Mariano. When my father reappeared he was affectionate and courteous, he seemed to want to return to my mother and me. But after a few days of reconciliation my parents began fighting about everything. There was one thing, however, about which they were always in agreement: for my own good I shouldn’t ever see Vittoria again.

  I didn’t object, I was of the same opinion. And on the other hand, my aunt, from the moment the crisis exploded, hadn’t been seen or heard from. I guessed that she was waiting for me to seek her out: she, the servant, believed that she had me forever in her service. But I had promised myself not to stand by her anymore. I was exhausted, she had unloaded on me all of herself, her hatreds, her need for revenge, her language, and I hoped that from the mixture of fear and fascination I’d felt toward her at least the fascination was fading.

  But one afternoon Vittoria began tempting me again. The telephone rang, I answered and heard her at the other end saying: hello, is Giannina there, I want to talk to Giannina. I hung up, holding my breath. But she phoned again and again, every day at the same time, never on Sunday. I forced myself not to answer. I let the phone ring, and if my mother was home and she went to answer, I yelled: I’m not here for anyone, imitating the imperative tone in which she sometimes shouted the same formula from her room.

  I’d hold my breath, pray with my eyes closed that it wasn’t Vittoria. And, fortunately, it wasn’t, or at least if it was my mother didn’t tell me. Instead, the phone calls gradually became less frequent, until I thought she had given up and I began to answer the phone without anxiety. But, unexpectedly, Vittoria erupted again, shouting from the other end of the line: hello, you’re Giannina, I want to talk to Giannina. But I didn’t want to be Giannina anymore, and I always hung up. Of course, sometimes I heard suffering in her weary voice, I felt pity, and I became curious to see her, to question her, to provoke her. Sometimes when I was especially depressed I was tempted to cry: yes, it’s me, explain to me what happened, what did you do to my father and mother. But I always kept silent, cutting off the call, and I got used to not naming her even to myself.

  Eventually, I also decided to separate from her bracelet. I stopped wearing it, put it in a drawer in my bedside table. But, whenever I remembered it my stomach hurt, I broke into a sweat, I had thoughts that wouldn’t go away. How was it possible that my father and Costanza had loved each other for so long—even before my birth—without either my mother or Mariano knowing? And how had my father fallen in love with the wife of his best friend not as the victim of a fleeting infatuation but—I said to myself—in a deliberate way, so that his love still endured? And Costanza, so refined, so well brought up, so affectionate, a visitor in our house as long as I could remember, how had she been able to hold on to my mother’s husband for fifteen years right before her eyes? And why had Mariano, who had known my mother forever, only in recent times squeezed her ankle between his under the table, and—as by now was clear, my mother swore to me over and over—without her consent? What happened, in other words, in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles?

  The anxiety was so intense that to these and other questions I never sought true answers. I repressed them as soon as they surfaced, and even today I have a hard time returning to them. The problem, I began to suspect, was the bracelet. Evidently, it was as if impregnated with the moods of that affair, and though I was careful not to open the drawer I’d put it in, it imposed itself anyway, as if the glitter of its stones, its gold, scattered afflictions. How was it possible that my father, who seemed to love me without limits, had taken away my aunt’s gift and given it to Costanza? If the bracelet originally belonged to Vittoria, and therefore was a sign of her taste, of her idea of beauty and elegance, how could Costanza like it so much that she had kept it and worn it for thirteen years? How, I thought, had my father, so hostile to his sister, so different from her in every way, convinced himself that a piece of jewelry belonging to her, an ornament meant for me, could be suitable not for my mother, for example, but for that very elegant second wife of his, the descendant of goldsmiths, so wealthy that she had no need for jewelry? Vittoria and Costanza were such dissimilar women, they diverged in every way. The first had no education, the second was extremely cultivated; the first was vulgar, the second refined; the first was poor, the second rich. And yet, for me, the bracelet pressed them into one another and confused them, confusing me.

  Today I think it was thanks to this obsessive brooding that I slowly managed to remove myself from my parents’ suffering, to convince myself that their reciprocal accusations, their pleading with each other, their mutual contempt left me completely indifferent. But it took months. At first I floundered as if I were drowning and, terrified, I looked for something to hold on to. Sometimes, especially at night, when I woke up feeling distraught, I thought that, even though my father was the declared e
nemy of every form of magic, he had feared that that object, given its source, could magically hurt me, and so he had removed it from the house for my well-being. That idea soothed me, it had the advantage of restoring a loving father who from my first months of life had tried to protect me from Aunt Vittoria’s malice, that aunt-witch’s desire to take possession of me and make me like her. But it didn’t last long as, sooner or later, I ended up asking myself: if he loved Costanza to the point of betraying my mother, to the point of separating from her and me, why did he give her a maleficent bracelet? Maybe—I fantasized in my half sleep—because he liked the bracelet so much and giving it to her kept him from throwing it into the sea. Or because, bewitched by the object himself, before getting rid of it he had wanted to see it at least once on Costanza’s wrist, and it was that desire that had lost him. Costanza had seemed to him still more beautiful than she already was, and the enchanted bracelet, binding him to her forever, prevented him from continuing to love only my mother. To protect me, in other words, my father had ended up subjecting himself to the evil magic of his sister (I often went so far as to imagine that Vittoria had foreseen every detail of that wrong move of his), and that had ruined the whole family.

  The return to childish fairy tales just as I felt I was truly emerging from childhood had for a while the advantage of reducing to the minimum not only my father’s responsibility but mine, too. If, in fact, Vittoria’s magic arts were at the origin of all the wrongs, the current drama had begun when I was just born, and so I had no guilt, the obscure force that had led me to seek out and meet my aunt had been at work for some time, I had nothing to do with it, I, like the small children of Jesus, was innocent. But this picture faded, too, sooner or later. Curse or not, the fact was that thirteen years ago my father had judged beautiful the object that his sister had given me, and its beauty had been ratified by a refined woman like Costanza. As a result, an incongruous juxtaposition of vulgarity and refinement again became central, even in the fairy-tale world I was constructing; and that further absence of clear boundaries, at a moment when I was losing every old orientation, confused me even more. My aunt, who was vulgar, became a woman of taste. My father and Costanza, people of taste, became—as the wrongs they had done my mother and even the hateful Mariano also demonstrated—vulgar. So sometimes before falling asleep I imagined an underground tunnel that put in communication my father, Costanza, and Vittoria, even against their will. Despite all their claims to being different, they seemed to be made of the same clay. My father, in my imagination, grasped Costanza’s buttocks and pulled her toward himself just as Enzo had done in the past with my aunt and certainly with Margherita. So he had caused suffering for my mother, who wept as in the fairy tales, filling jars and jars with tears until she lost her reason. And I, who had stayed with her, would have a dull life, without the amusement that he could give me, without his intelligence about the things of the world, qualities that Costanza, Ida, and Angela would get the benefit of instead.

  This was the atmosphere when, coming home from school one day, I discovered that the bracelet was painfully meaningful not only for me. I opened the door of the house with my keys, I found my mother in my room, standing in front of the night table, lost in thought. She had taken the bracelet out of the drawer and was holding it in her hand, staring at it, as if it were the necklace of Harmonia and she wanted to pierce the surface to arrive at its properties as a maleficent object. I noticed then that her shoulders were rounded, she had become thin and hunched.

  “Don’t you wear it anymore?” she asked noticing my presence but without turning.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You know it wasn’t Vittoria’s but your grandmother’s?”

  “Who told you that?”

  She said that she had telephoned Vittoria and had learned from her that her mother had left it to her when she was dying. I looked at her in bewilderment. I thought there was no reason ever to speak to Vittoria, because she was unreliable and dangerous, but evidently the ban concerned only me.

  “Is it true?” I asked, showing skepticism.

  “Who knows, almost everything that comes from your father’s family, including your father, is false.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Yes.”

  To get to the bottom of the matter she had assailed my father—is it true the bracelet was your mother’s, is it true she left it to your sister?—and he had stammered that he was very fond of that piece of jewelry, he remembered it on his mother’s wrist, and so, when he found out that Vittoria wanted to sell it, he had given her some money and taken it.

  “When did my grandmother die?” I asked.

  “Before you were born.”

  “Then Aunt Vittoria told a lie, she didn’t give me the bracelet.”

  “That’s what your father says.”

  I sensed that she didn’t believe him, and since I had believed Vittoria and still believed her, although unwillingly, I didn’t believe him, either. But, against my will, here was the bracelet already following the path of a new story full of consequences. In my mind, the object in a few seconds became an essential part of the fights between brother and sister, a further fragment of their hatreds. I imagined my grandmother lying there gasping for breath, eyes wide, mouth open, and my father and Vittoria, on the edge of her death agony, fighting over the bracelet. He tore it off, took it away in a storm of insults and curses, throwing bills in the air. I asked:

  “In your view, Papa, at least at first, took the bracelet from Vittoria to give to me when I grew up?”

  “No.”

  That monosyllable, so sharp, hurt me, I said:

  “But he didn’t take it to give to you, either.”

  My mother nodded yes, she put the bracelet back in the drawer, and, as if her strength were about to fail, lay down on my bed sobbing. I felt uneasy, for months she who never cried had been crying all the time, and I would have liked to as well, but I restrained myself, why didn’t she? I caressed her shoulder, I kissed her hair. It was very clear now that, however he had come into possession of that piece of jewelry, my father’s objective had been to hook it around Costanza’s slender wrist. The bracelet, however you looked at it, in whatever type of story you inserted it—a fairy tale, an interesting or boring story—showed only that our body, agitated by the life that writhes within, consuming it, does stupid things that it shouldn’t do. And even if I could accept that in general—for Mariano, for example, and even for my mother and for me—I would never have imagined that stupidity could ruin even superior people like Costanza, like my father. I reflected for a long time on all that, I fantasized about it, at school, on the street, at lunch, at dinner, at night. I looked for meanings to get around that impression of scant intelligence in people who had so much of it.

  2.

  In that couple of years many significant things happened. When my father, after repeating that I really was like his sister, disappeared from home for the first time, I thought he had left because of the revulsion I inspired. Grieved, resentful, I decided that I wouldn’t study. I didn’t open a book, I stopped doing my homework, and as the winter passed I became more and more alien to myself. I eliminated any habits that he had imposed: reading the newspaper, watching the television news. I went from wearing white or pink to black, my eyes were black, my lips, every item of clothing was black. I was in a daze, indifferent to the teachers’ reproaches, unmoved by my mother’s complaints. Instead of studying I read novels, watched movies on TV, deafened myself with music. The main thing was, I lived mutely, a few words and that was all. I’d never had friends, apart from the long tradition with Angela and Ida. But from the moment they, too, were swallowed up by the tragedy of our families, I was completely alone, my voice whirling aimlessly in my head. I laughed to myself, I made faces, I spent a lot of time on the steps behind the high school or at the Floridiana, on the paths bordered by trees and hedges that I had
once walked with my mother, with Costanza, with Angela, with Ida still in her carriage. I liked plunging stupefied into that long-ago happy time as if I were already old, staring beyond the low wall, without seeing it, into the gardens of Villa Santarella, or sitting on a bench in the Floridiana looking out at the sea and the whole city.

  Angela and Ida reappeared late and only on the telephone. It was Angela who called me, very excited, saying she wanted to show me the new house in Posillipo as soon as possible.

  “When are you coming?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your father said you’ll stay with us a lot.”

  “I have to keep my mother company.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.”

  Having confirmed that I still loved her, she changed her tone, became more anxious, and confided to me some secrets of her own, even though she must have understood that I didn’t want to hear them. She said that my father would become a kind of father to them, because after the divorce he would marry Costanza. She said that Mariano not only didn’t want to see Costanza anymore but not them, either, and that was because—he had yelled it one night and she and Ida had heard—he had no doubt that their real father was mine. Finally, she revealed that she had a boyfriend but I shouldn’t tell anyone: the boyfriend was Tonino. He called her often, they met in Posillipo, had taken a lot of walks to Mergellina, and less than a week ago had declared their love for each other.

  Even though the phone call was long, I said almost nothing. I didn’t even utter a word when she whispered ironically that, since perhaps we were sisters, I would become Tonino’s sister-in-law. Only when Ida, who must have been there beside her, cried to me, forlornly, it’s not true that we’re sisters, your father is nice but I want mine, I said softly: I agree with Ida, and even if your mother and my father get married, you’ll still be Mariano’s daughters and I’ll be Andrea’s. I kept to myself my irritation at her letting me know that she was going out with Tonino. I muttered only: