The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  “No, sweetheart, you sit next to me.”

  I was disappointed, I wanted to show off on the seat beside the driver, who was wearing a blue jacket with gold buttons, a blue shirt, and a red tie, and had combed his hair back, which gave him the profile of a strong, dangerous man—plus he had fangs. I insisted with a conciliatory smile:

  “I’ll sit here, thanks.”

  But Corrado said, in an unexpectedly mean voice:

  “Giannì, are you deaf, I told you come here this second.”

  I wasn’t used to that tone, it intimidated me, but I still felt like replying:

  “I’m keeping Rosario company, he’s not your chauffeur.”

  “What does a chauffeur have to do with it, you belong to me, you have to sit where I am.”

  “I don’t belong to anyone, Corrà, and anyway it’s Rosario’s car and I’ll sit where he says.”

  Rosario said nothing, he simply turned to me with his laughing boy’s face, stared at my breasts for a long second, and ran the knuckles of his right hand over the seat next to him. I got in and sat down, closed the door, and he set off with a calculated screeching of the tires. Oh, I had done it, hair in the wind, beautiful Sunday sun in my face, I relaxed. And Rosario was such a good driver, he darted here and there, with the confidence of a racecar champion, and I wasn’t afraid.

  “Is the car yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you rich?”

  “Yes.”

  “Afterward can we go to the Parco della Rimembranza?”

  “We can go wherever you want.”

  Corrado cut in right away, reaching one hand out onto my shoulder and squeezing it:

  “But you’ll do what I tell you to do.”

  Rosario looked in the rearview mirror.

  “Currà, cool it, Giannina does what she likes.”

  “You cool it, I brought her.”

  “So what?” I interjected pushing away his hand.

  “Shut up, this is a conversation between me and Rosario.”

  I said that I would speak how and when I liked, and the whole way I devoted myself to Rosario. I realized that he was proud of his car, and I told him that he drove much better than my father. I goaded him to brag, I took an interest in everything he knew about engines, I went so far as to ask him if in some near future he would teach me to drive the way he did. Finally, taking advantage of the fact that he had his hand on the knob of the gear shift, I placed mine on his, saying: so I’ll help you shift, and on to laughter, I was laughing because I had the giggles, he was laughing because of the shape of his mouth. He was excited by the contact with my hand, I realized. How is it possible, I said to myself, that boys are so stupid, how is it possible that those two, if I merely touch them, if I simply let them touch me, go blind, they don’t see and don’t feel the disgust I feel for myself. Corrado was upset because I wasn’t sitting next to him, Rosario was happy because I was next to him with my hand on his. With a little shrewdness could one make them submit to anything? Were bare thighs, an exposed breast sufficient? Was it enough merely to touch them? Had my mother taken my father like this, as a girl? Had Costanza taken him away from her like this? Had Vittoria also done this with Enzo, taking him away from Margherita? When Corrado, unhappy, touched my neck with his fingers and then caressed the edge of the material beyond which rose the curve of my breast, I let him do it. At the same time I squeezed Rosario’s hand hard for a few seconds. I’m not even pretty, I thought, in amazement, while amid caresses, giggles, allusive if not obscene words, wind and cloud-streaked sky, the car flew, along with the time, and the walls of tufa topped with barbed wire, the abandoned warehouses, the low pale-blue buildings at the end of Via Pascone came into view.

  As soon as I recognized them I felt sick to my stomach, the impression of power vanished: now I had to reckon with my aunt. Corrado, reasserting, mainly to himself, that it was he who commanded me, said:

  “We’ll leave you here.”

  “O.K.”

  “We’ll go to the square, don’t make us wait. And remember you got here by public transit.”

  “How?”

  “Bus, funicular, metro. What you must never say is that we brought you.”

  “O.K.”

  “Listen, be quick about it.”

  I nodded, got out of the car.

  12.

  I walked for a short stretch with my heart racing. I reached Vittoria’s house, rang the bell, and she opened the door. At first I didn’t understand. I had prepared a short speech to deliver firmly, centered on the feelings that had collected around the bracelet and made it absolutely mine. As soon as she saw me, she hit me with a long, aggressive, sorrowful, maudlin monologue that disoriented and intimidated me. The more she talked, the more clearly I realized that giving back the bracelet was nothing more than an excuse. Vittoria was fond of me, she thought I loved her, too, and above all she wanted to chastise me for having disappointed her.

  I hoped—she said in a loud voice, in a dialect that I struggled to understand in spite of my recent efforts to learn it—that you were now on my side, that seeing what sort of people your father and mother really are would allow you to understand who I am, what sort of life I’ve had because of my brother. But no, I waited in vain for you every Sunday. A phone call would have been enough, but no, you didn’t understand, you thought it’s my fault if your family turned out to be shit, and in the end what do you do, look at this, you write me this letter—this letter, to me—to underscore the fact that I didn’t go to school, to underscore the fact that you can write and I can’t. Oh, you really are like your father, no, worse, you don’t respect me, you can’t see what sort of person I am, you don’t have feelings. So give me back the bracelet, it was my dearly beloved mother’s and you don’t deserve it. I was wrong, you don’t have my blood, you’re a stranger.

  So I gathered that if in that endless family quarrel I had chosen the right side, if I had treated her as the only support remaining to me, my only guide for life, if I had welcomed the parish church, Margherita, her children as a sort of permanent Sunday refuge, giving back the piece of jewelry would have been unnecessary. While she was yelling, her eyes were fierce and yet sorrowful, I saw white saliva in her mouth that from time to time stained her lips. Vittoria simply wanted me to admit that I loved her, that I was grateful to her for showing me how mediocre my father was, and so I would love her forever, that out of gratitude I would be her support in old age, and other such things. And I, on the spot, decided to tell her just that. In a brief series of statements I went so far as to pretend that my parents had kept me from calling her, then I added that the letter told the truth: the bracelet was a very dear memory of how she had helped me, saved me, put me on the right path. I said it like that, in an emotional voice, and I was amazed at how good I was at speaking to her in a falsely heartfelt way, at how carefully and effectively I chose words, at how I wasn’t like her, but worse.

  Slowly Vittoria calmed down, and I was relieved. Now I had to find a way of leaving and getting back to the two waiting boys; I hoped she would forget about the bracelet.

  She didn’t say anything else about it, in fact, but insisted that I should go with her to hear Roberto, who was speaking in church. Now I was really in a fix: it was very important to her. She praised Tonino’s friend, I guessed he’d become her pet after he got engaged to Giuliana. You can’t imagine what a good boy he is, she said, intelligent, sensible: afterward we’ll all eat at Margherita’s house, you’ll stay, too. Politely I said that I really couldn’t, I had to go home, and I hugged her as if I really did love her, and who knows, maybe I did, I no longer understood anything about my feelings. I muttered:

  “I’m going, Mamma’s expecting me, but I’ll be back soon.”

  She gave in:

  “All right, I’ll go with you.”

  “No, no, no, there’s no
need.”

  “I’ll take you to the bus stop.”

  “No, I know where the stop is, thanks.”

  There was no way out, she wanted to come with me. I didn’t have the slightest idea where the stop was, I hoped it was someplace far from where Rosario and Corrado were waiting for me. Yet it seemed that we were going precisely in that direction, and the whole way I kept repeating, anxiously: all right, thanks, I can go by myself. But my aunt wouldn’t stop, in fact the more I tried to get away, the more intensely did she look like one who feels that something isn’t right. We turned the corner, finally, and, as I feared, the bus stop was right in the square where Corrado and Rosario were sitting, clearly visible in the car with the top down.

  Vittoria saw the car immediately, a patch of yellow steel sparkling in the sun.

  “You came with Corrado and that shithead?”

  “No.”

  “Swear.”

  “I swear, no.”

  She pushed me backward with a hand to the chest and headed toward the car shouting insults in dialect. But Rosario took off immediately, tires screeching, and she ran after him for a few meters, yelling fiercely, then she took off a shoe and threw it in the direction of the convertible. The car disappeared, leaving her furious, bent double, on the edge of the street.

  “You’re a liar,” she said when, recovering her shoe, she returned to me, still panting.

  “I swear I didn’t.”

  “Now I’ll telephone your mother and we’ll see.”

  “Please don’t do that. I didn’t come with them, but don’t call my mother.”

  I told her that, since my mother didn’t want me to see her but it was very important to me, I had told her I was going to Caserta with my classmates. I was convincing: the fact that I had deceived my mother, just to see her, cheered her.

  “All day?”

  “I have to be back in the afternoon.”

  She searched my eyes with a bewildered expression.

  “So come with me to hear Roberto and then you’ll go.”

  “I’ll risk being late.”

  “You’ll risk getting slapped by me if I find out you’re lying to me and you want to go with those two.”

  I followed her unhappily, praying: God, please, I don’t feel like going to church, let Corrado and Rosario not leave, let them be waiting for me somewhere, get rid of my aunt, I’ll die of boredom in church. The way there was familiar to me by now: empty streets, weeds and garbage, graffiti-covered walls, crumbling apartment buildings. The whole time Vittoria kept an arm around my shoulders, sometimes she pressed me tight against her. She spoke mainly about Giuliana—Corrado worried her, while she had a high regard for that girl and for Tonino—and how sensible she had become. Love—she said, in an inspired tone and using a formula that didn’t belong to her, that in fact baffled and irritated me—is a ray of sun that warms the soul. I was disappointed. Maybe I should have observed my aunt with the same attention with which she had urged me to spy on my parents. Maybe I would have discovered that behind the harshness that had charmed me there was a soft, foolish little woman, tough on the surface, tender underneath. If Vittoria really is that, I thought, discouraged, then she is ugly, she has the ugliness of banality.

  Every time I heard the rumble of a car I looked sidewards, hoping that Rosario and Corrado would reappear and seize me, but also fearing that she would start shouting again and get mad at me. We reached the church, which was surprisingly crowded. I went straight to the holy water font, wet my fingers, crossed myself before Vittoria could make me. There was an odor of breath and of flowers, a polite din, a child’s shrill voice immediately shushed with muffled tones. Behind a table placed at the end of the central nave, I saw the figure of Don Giacomo, standing with his back to the altar, he was saying something emphatically. He seemed pleased by our entrance, gave a sign of greeting without breaking off. I would have happily sat in the back pews, which were empty, but my aunt grabbed my arm and led me along the right nave. We sat in the first rows, next to Margherita, who had saved us a place, and who when she saw me turned red with pleasure. I sat squeezed between her and Vittoria, the one large, soft, the other tense, thin. Don Giacomo was silent, the hum rose in pitch, I was just in time to look around, to recognize Giuliana, surprisingly demure in the front row, and, on her right, Tonino, broad-shouldered, his torso erect. Then the priest said: come, Roberto, what are you doing there, sit beside me, and an impressive silence fell, as if suddenly no one in that space could breathe.

  But maybe that’s not how it went, probably it was I who cancelled out every sound when a tall but stooping young man, thin as a shadow, stood up. It seemed to me that a long gold chain visible only to me was attached to his back, holding him, and he swayed lightly as if he were hanging from the cupola, the tips of his shoes barely grazing the floor. When he reached the table and turned, I had the impression that he had more eyes than face: they were blue, blue in a dark, bony, unharmonious face locked between a great mass of rebellious hair and a thick beard that looked blue.

  I was almost fifteen and until that moment no boy had truly attracted me, least of all Corrado, least of all Rosario. But as soon as I saw Roberto—even before he opened his mouth, even before he was ignited by any feeling, even before he uttered a word—I felt a violent pain in my chest and knew that everything in my life was about to change, that I wanted him, that I would necessarily have to have him, that even if I didn’t believe in God I would pray every day and every night that that would happen, and that only that wish, only that hope, only that prayer could keep me from immediately, now, falling down dead on the ground.

  V

  1.

  Don Giacomo sat at the shabby table at the end of the nave and watched Roberto the whole time with an attitude of concentrated listening, his cheek resting on the palm of his hand. Roberto spoke standing up, in a brusque yet attractive tone, his back to the altar and a large crucifixion with a dark cross and a yellow Christ. I remember almost nothing of what he said, maybe because he was expressing himself from within a culture that was alien to me, maybe because emotion kept me from listening. I have in mind many phrases that are surely his, but I don’t know how to place them in time, I confuse the words of then with those which followed. Yet some are more likely to have been uttered that Sunday. Sometimes, for instance, I’m sure that in the church he discussed the parable of the good trees that bear good fruit, and the bad trees that bear bad fruit and so end up as wood to be burned. Or more often I feel certain that he insisted on the exact calculation of our resources when we plunge into a great undertaking, because it’s wrong to start, let’s say, building a tower if you don’t have the money to build it up to the last stone. Or I think he urged us all to have courage, reminding us that the only way not to waste our life is to lose it through saving others. Or I imagine that he reasoned about the need to be truly fair, merciful, and faithful, without concealing unfairness, a hard heart, infidelity behind respect for conventions. But really I don’t know, time has passed and I can’t decide. For me his talk, from beginning to end, was a flow of enchanting sounds that came from his beautiful mouth, his throat. I stared at his prominent Adam’s apple as if behind that knob vibrated the breath of the first human being of the male sex to come into the world and not, instead, one of the infinite reproductions that crowd the planet. How beautiful and terrible were his pale-blue eyes carved into his dark face, his long fingers, his shining lips. About one of his words I have no doubt, he uttered it often on that occasion, plucking its petals like a daisy. I refer to “compunction,” I understood that he was using it in an anomalous way. He said that it should be cleansed of the ugly uses that had been made of it, he spoke of it as of a needle that had to pull the thread through the scattered fragments of our existence. He gave it the meaning of an extreme vigilance over oneself, it was the knife that would prick conscience to keep it from going to sleep.

  2. />
  As soon as Roberto stopped speaking, my aunt dragged me over to Giuliana. I was struck by how she had changed; her beauty seemed infantile to me. She has no makeup, I thought, she’s not wearing a woman’s colors, and I felt uneasy about my short skirt, my lipstick and heavy eye makeup, my low neckline. I’m out of place, I said to myself, while Giuliana whispered: I’m so happy to see you, did you like him? I murmured a few confused words of compliments for her, enthusiasm for her boyfriend’s words. Let’s introduce her to him, Vittoria interrupted, and Giuliana led us to Roberto.

  “This is my niece,” my aunt said with a pride that increased my embarrassment, “a really smart girl.”

  “I’m not smart,” I almost shouted and held out my hand, hoping that he would at least touch it.

  He took it in his without squeezing it, he said what a pleasure with an affectionate look, while my aunt reproached me: she’s too modest, the opposite of my brother who was always presumptuous. Roberto asked me about school, what I was studying, what I was reading. A few seconds passed, I had the impression his questions weren’t just something to say, I froze. I stammered something about the boredom of classes, about a difficult book I’d been reading for months, it would never end, it was about the search for lost time. Giuliana said to him in a whisper: they’re calling you, but he kept his eyes on mine, he was amazed that I was reading a book both beautiful and complicated, he turned to his fiancée: you said she was smart, but she’s really smart. My aunt was filled with pride, she repeated that I was her niece, and meanwhile a couple of smiling parishioners gestured, pointing to the priest. I wanted to find some words that would strike Roberto to his depths, but my head was empty, I couldn’t find anything. And he was already being dragged away by the very warmth he had inspired, he said goodbye to me with a gesture of regret, and ended up in a large group with Don Giacomo.

  I didn’t dare follow him even with my eyes, I stayed beside Giuliana, who seemed radiant. I thought again of the framed picture of her father in Margherita’s kitchen, the flame of the small flashing light that illuminated his pupils, and I found it disorienting that a young woman could carry in herself the features of that man and yet be beautiful. I envied her: her slim body in a beige dress and her clear face radiated a joyous strength. But when I first met her that energy had been expressed in a loud voice and exaggerated gestures; now instead Giuliana was serene, as if the pride of loving and being loved had tied up with invisible threads her exuberant manner. She said in a forced Italian: I know what happened to you, I’m very sorry, I feel for you. And she took my hand in hers as her boyfriend had just done. But I wasn’t annoyed, I talked to her sincerely about my mother’s suffering, even if my most vigilant self never lost sight of Roberto, I was hoping he would look for me with his gaze. He didn’t, and I realized that he spoke to everyone with the same cordial curiosity he had shown toward me. He didn’t hurry, but detained his interlocutors and behaved in a way that caused those who crowded around just to talk to him—to draw on the kindness of his smile, on the beauty of his face nourished by its lack of harmony—to gradually start talking to others as well. If I went over to him, I thought, he would surely give me room, too, he would lead me into some discussion. But then I would be forced to express myself more articulately, and he would right away realize that it wasn’t true, I’m not smart, I don’t know anything about the things he cares about. So I was gripped by unease, to insist on talking to him would humiliate me, he would say: how ignorant that girl is. And suddenly, while Giuliana was still talking to me, I said to her that I had to go. She insisted that I should come and have lunch at her house: Roberto is staying, too, she said. But now I was frightened, I wanted literally to escape. I left the church quickly.