The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  The priest answered:

  “Drive out pride, which is always lurking.”

  “And then?”

  “Treat others with kindness and a sense of fairness.”

  “And then?”

  “Then the thing that at your age is most difficult: honor your father and mother. But you have to try, Giannì, it’s important.”

  “My father and mother I don’t understand anymore.”

  “When you grow up you’ll understand them.”

  They all said I would understand when I grew up. I answered:

  “Then I won’t grow up.”

  We said goodbye at the funicular, and I haven’t seen him since. I didn’t dare ask about Roberto, I didn’t ask if Vittoria had talked about me, if she had told him what had happened in my house. I said only, ashamed of myself:

  “I feel ugly, like I’m a bad person, and yet I’d like to be loved.”

  But I said it too late, in a whisper, when he had already turned away.

  6.

  That encounter helped me, and I tried first of all to change my relationship with my parents. Honoring them was out of the question, but maybe, yes, I could at least look for ways to get a little closer to them.

  With my mother things started out pretty well, even though it wasn’t easy to get my aggressive tone under control. I never talked to her about the phone call she had made to Vittoria, but every so often I’d yell orders, rebukes, recriminations, betrayals. As usual, she didn’t react, she remained impassive, as if she had the ability to become deaf on command. But slowly I modified my attitude. I observed her from the hall, carefully dressed, with her hair combed, even when she didn’t have to go out and no one was coming, and the sight of her bony back, of a person consumed by suffering, bent for hours over her work, softened me. One night, spying on her, I likened her to my aunt. No question they were enemies, no question in terms of upbringing and cultivation there was no comparison. But hadn’t Vittoria remained bound to Enzo even though he’d been dead for so long? And hadn’t her faithfulness seemed to me a mark of greatness? I was suddenly surprised to think that my mother was showing an even nobler soul, and I reflected on that idea for hours.

  Vittoria’s love had been returned, her lover had loved her always. My mother instead had been betrayed in the vilest way, and yet she had managed to hold on to her feeling intact. She was neither able nor willing to think of herself without her ex-husband, in fact it seemed to her that her life still had meaning only if my father deigned to be in touch by phone and bestow it. Her acquiescence suddenly began to appeal to me. How could I attack and insult her for that dependency? Was it possible that I had taken for weakness the strength—yes, the strength—of her way of loving absolutely?

  Once I said to her in a matter-of-fact tone:

  “Since you like Mariano, take him.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? Mariano is repulsive to me.”

  “And Papa?”

  “Papa is Papa.”

  “Why don’t you ever say anything bad about him?”

  “What I say is one thing and what I think is another.”

  “You let yourself go in your thoughts?”

  “A little, but then I end up going back to all the years when we were happy, and I forget I hate him.”

  It seemed to me that that phrase—I forget I hate him—captured something true and alive, and that was precisely the way I tried to reconsider my father. I hardly ever saw him now, I didn’t go to the house in Posillipo, I had eliminated Angela and Ida from my life. And, however much I tried to understand why he had left my mother and me and had gone to live with Costanza and her daughters, I couldn’t. In the past I had considered him far superior to my mother, but now I felt he had no greatness of soul, even in a negative sense. The rare times he came by to take me to school I was very attentive to the way he complained, but only to repeat to myself that those complaints were false. He wanted to make me believe that he wasn’t happy or anyway that he was just slightly less unhappy than when he lived in the apartment on Via San Giacomo dei Capri. I didn’t believe him, naturally, but I studied him and thought: I have to put aside my feelings of the present, I have to think of when I was a child and adored him; because if Mamma continues to be attached to him in spite of everything, if she can reach the point where she forgets she hates him, maybe his exceptionality wasn’t only an effect of childhood. So I made a considerable effort to give him back some virtues. But not out of affection: it seemed to me that I had no feelings for him. I tried only to convince myself that my mother had loved a person of some substance, and so, when I saw him, I tried to be cordial. I talked to him about school, about some silliness involving the teachers, and even complimented him sometimes, on his explanation of a difficult passage from a Latin writer, say, or on his haircut.

  “Luckily, this time they didn’t cut it too short. Did you change barbers?”

  “No, there’s one near the house, it’s not worth it. And then what do I care about my hair, it’s already white, yours that’s young and beautiful is what counts.”

  I ignored the allusion to the beauty of my hair, I found it out of place. I said:

  “It’s not white, you just have a little gray at the temples.”

  “I’m getting old.”

  “When I was little you were much older, you’ve gotten young again.”

  “Suffering doesn’t make you younger.”

  “You obviously haven’t felt enough of it. I know you’re back in touch with Mariano.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mamma.”

  “It’s not true, but we meet sometimes, when he comes to see his daughters.”

  “Do you fight?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s not right?”

  There wasn’t anything that wasn’t right, he just wanted me to understand that he missed me, and that my absence was painful to him. Sometimes he acted the part so well that I forgot I didn’t believe him. He was still handsome, he hadn’t gotten thin like my mother, he didn’t have rashes on his skin: falling into the net of his loving voice, sliding again into childhood, confiding in him was easy. One day, while as usual we were eating panzarotti and pastacresciuta after school, I said impulsively that I wanted to read the Gospels.

  “Why?”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s very good.”

  “What if I become a Christian?”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  “What if I get baptized?”

  “The important thing is that it not be a whim. If you have faith, it’s fine.”

  No opposition, then, but I immediately repented that I had told him of my intention. To think of him as an authoritative person, worthy of love, now, after Roberto, seemed intolerable. What did he have to do with my life anymore? I didn’t want in any way to restore to him authority and affection. If I ever read the Gospels, I would do it for the young man who had spoken in church.

  7.

  That attempt—failed from the start—to get close to my father again intensified my desire to see Roberto. I couldn’t resist and decided to phone Vittoria. She answered in a voice that was depressed, hoarse from cigarettes, and this time she didn’t attack or insult me, but she wasn’t affectionate, either.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know how you’re doing.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Can I come see you one Sunday?”

  “To do what?”

  “To say hello. Plus I was glad to meet Giuliana’s fiancé: if he’s back in this area, I’d happily come and see him.”

  “They’re not doing anything in church anymore, they want to get rid of the priest.”

  She didn’t give me time to tell her I’d run into Don Giacomo and knew all about it. She sw
itched into very heavy dialect, she was mad at everyone, the parishioners, the bishops, the cardinals, the Pope, but also at Don Giacomo and even Roberto.

  “The priest overdid it,” she said. “He was like medicine: first he cured us, then came the side effects, and now we feel much worse than before.”

  “And Roberto?”

  “Roberto takes the easy way out. He comes, throws things into disarray, and leaves, you don’t see him for months. Either he’s in Milan or he’s here, and that’s not something that’s good for Giuliana.”

  “Love, yes,” I said, “love does no harm.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Love is good, it overcomes even long absences, it stands up to everything.”

  “You don’t know anything, Giannì, you speak in Italian but you don’t know anything. Love is opaque like the glass in the bathroom window.”

  That image struck me, I immediately had the impression that it contradicted the way she had recounted her romance with Enzo. I praised her, I said I wanted to talk to her more, I asked:

  “Sometime when you all have lunch together—you, Margherita, Giuliana, Corrado, Tonino, Roberto—can I come, too?”

  She was irritated, she turned aggressive.

  “Better for you to stay home: that, according to your mother, is the place for you.”

  “But I’d like to see all of you. Is Giuliana there? I’ll make arrangements with her.”

  “Giuliana is at her house.”

  “And Tonino?”

  “You think Tonino eats, sleeps, and shits here?”

  She hung up abruptly, rude, vulgar as usual. I would have liked an invitation, a definite date, the certainty that even in six months, in a year, I would see Roberto again. That hadn’t happened, and yet I felt pleasantly agitated. Vittoria had said nothing clear about the relationship between Giuliana and Roberto, but I had understood that there were some stumbling blocks. Of course, one couldn’t depend on my aunt’s assessment, in all likelihood what disturbed her was exactly what made the couple happy. Yet I fantasized that with perseverance, with patience, with the best intentions, I could become a kind of mediator between them and my aunt: that is, a person who could speak everybody’s language. I looked for a copy of the Gospels.

  8.

  I didn’t find one at home, but I hadn’t reckoned with the fact that with my father it was enough to mention a book, because he immediately got it for me. A few days after our conversation, he appeared outside school with an edition of the Gospels with commentary.

  “Reading isn’t enough,” he said. “Texts like these have to be studied.”

  His eyes lit up as he uttered that statement. His true existential condition was revealed as soon as he was dealing with books, ideas, lofty questions. At that moment, it became clear that he was unhappy only when his head was empty and he couldn’t hide from himself what he had done to my mother and me. When, instead, he devoted himself to great thoughts supported by meticulously annotated books, he was happy, he lacked nothing. He had transferred his life to Costanza’s house and lived there in comfort. His new study was a large luminous room with a window overlooking the sea. He had resumed the meetings with all the people I remembered from childhood, apart from Mariano, naturally, but the fiction of a return to order was now solidified, and you could predict that soon Mariano, too, would return to the debates. So the only thing that spoiled my father’s days was the empty moments when he found himself face to face with his offenses. But it didn’t take much to sneak away, and that request of mine was surely a good opportunity, it must have given him the impression that things were returning to normal even with me.

  In fact, he promptly followed the commented edition with an old volume of the Gospels in Greek—the translations are good but the original text is crucial—and then, without a break, he pressed me to ask my mother to help him resolve some very boring matters of certificates or some such thing. I took the book, I promised to talk to her. When I did she got huffy, grumpy, sarcastic, but gave in. And although she spent the days in school or correcting homework and proofs, she found the time to wait in long lines at the windows of various agencies, fighting with lazy bureaucrats.

  It was then that I noticed how I myself had changed. I was barely indignant at my mother’s subservience when from my room I heard her announce to him on the phone that she had done it. I wasn’t furious when, her voice burned by too many cigarettes, by drinking gin at night, she softened and invited him to come by and get the documents that she had tracked down at the registry office, the copies she had had made at the national library, the certificates she had obtained for him from the university. I wasn’t even too hostile when, one night, my father showed up, looking discouraged, and they talked in the living room. I heard my mother laugh once or twice, then that was it, she must have realized that it was a laugh from the past. In other words, I didn’t think: if she’s stupid so much the worse for her; now I seemed to understand her feelings. My attitude toward my father fluctuated more. I hated his opportunism. And I darkened when he called to me to say hello, and casually asked:

  “So? Are you studying the Gospels?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I don’t like the story.”

  He gave me an ironic smile:

  “That’s interesting, you don’t like the story.”

  He kissed me on the forehead and in the doorway said:

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Talk about it with him, never, ever. What could I say to him. I had begun to read with the idea that these were fables that would lead me to a love of God like Roberto’s. I felt a need for it, my body was so tense that the nerves sometimes seemed like high-tension wires. But those texts didn’t follow the course of a fable, they unfolded in real places, the people had real jobs, they were people who had really existed. And ferocity stood out more than any other feeling. Finishing one gospel, I began the next, and the story seemed even more terrible. Yes, it was a disturbing story. I read and became agitated. We were all serving a Lord who kept us under surveillance to see what we chose, good or evil. What an absurdity, how could one accept such a servile condition? I hated the idea that there was a Father in Heaven and we children were below, in the mud, in the blood. What sort of father was God, what sort of family that of his creatures: it frightened and at the same time infuriated me. I hated that Father who had created such frail beings, continuously exposed to suffering, so easily perishing. I hated the fact that he was watching how we puppets dealt with hunger, thirst, illness, terror, cruelty, pride, even the good sentiments that, always at risk of bad faith, concealed betrayal. I hated the fact that he had a son born of a virgin mother and subjected him to the worst, like the unhappiest of his creatures. I hated that the son, although he had the power to work miracles, used that power for games that were scarcely effective, not for anything that really improved the human condition. I hated that the son tended to mistreat his mother and didn’t have the courage to stand up to his father. I hated that the Lord God let his son die, suffering atrocious torture, and didn’t deign to respond to his cry for help. Yes, it was a story that depressed me. And the final resurrection? A horribly mutilated body that returned to life? I had a horror of the resurrected, I couldn’t sleep at night. Why have the experience of death if you are going to return to life for eternity? And what was the sense of eternal life in a crowd of resuscitated dead people? Was it really a reward, or was it a condition of intolerable horror? No, no, the Father who lived in Heaven was exactly like the unloving father of the chapters in Matthew and Luke, the one who gives stones, snakes, and scorpions to the son who is hungry and asks for bread. If I were to talk about it with my father, I would be at risk of coming out with: this Father, Papa, is worse than you. So I found myself justifying all of his creatures, even the worst. Their condition was harsh, and when they nevertheless succeeded in expressing, from within their sludge, truly great sentiments
I was on their side. On my mother’s side, for example, not her ex-husband’s. He used her and then thanked her with mawkish flattery, taking advantage of her capacity for sublime feeling.

  One night my mother said to me:

  “Your father is younger than you. You’re growing up and he’s still a child. He’ll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games. If you don’t keep an eye on him, he gets hurt. I should have understood him as a girl, but then he seemed to me a grown man.”

  She’d been mistaken and yet she held tight to her love. I looked at her with affection. I wanted to love like that, too, but not a man who didn’t deserve it. She asked me:

  “What are you reading?”

  “The Gospels.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s a guy I like, and he knows them really well.”

  “Are you in love?”

  “No, are you crazy, he has a girlfriend: I just want to be his friend.”

  “Don’t tell Papa, he’ll want to start discussing it and he’ll ruin the reading for you.”

  But I didn’t run that risk, I’d already read it all, down to the last line, and if my father interrogated me, I would respond with generic phrases. I hoped, one day, to talk about it in depth with Roberto, and to make appropriate observations. In church I’d thought I couldn’t live without him, but time was passing, I continued to live. That impression of indispensability was changing. Indispensable now seemed to me not his physical presence—I imagined him far away, in Milan, happy, engaged in countless fine and useful things, recognized by everyone for his merits—but reorganizing myself around a goal: becoming a person who could earn his respect. I now felt him as an authority equally indeterminate—would he approve if I acted in such and such a way, or would he be opposed—and indisputable.

  Also around then I gave up caressing myself every night before going to sleep as a reward for the unbearable effort of existing. It seemed to me that the desolate creatures destined for death had a single small bit of luck: alleviate the suffering, forget it for a moment, setting off between their legs the device that leads to a little pleasure. But I was convinced that, if Roberto knew, he would regret having tolerated beside him, even just for a few minutes, a person who was in the habit of giving herself pleasure on her own.