The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  Giuliana not only listened with a smile but often intervened in the conversation. She had moved her chair close to her fiancé’s, occasionally she rested her head on his shoulder, laughing loudly when he laughed softly at Angela’s witty remarks. She seemed more serene, Angela was doing well, Roberto didn’t appear to be bored. After a while he said:

  “Where do you find the time to read?”

  “I don’t,” Angela answered. “I used to read when I was a child but not anymore, school eats me alive. My sister reads a lot. And she does, too, she reads.”

  She indicated me with a gracious gesture and a look of affection.

  “Giannina,” said Roberto.

  I corrected him scowling:

  “Giovanna.”

  “Giovanna,” said Roberto, “I remember you well.”

  “It’s easy, I’m just like Aunt Vittoria.”

  “No, that’s not why.”

  “Then why?”

  “I don’t know, but if I think of it I’ll tell you.”

  “There’s no need.”

  And yet there was a need, I didn’t want to be remembered because I was slovenly, ugly, grim, locked in a presumptuous silence. I fixed my eyes on his, and since he looked at me with friendliness and that encouraged me—it was an inane friendliness, gently ironic—I forced myself not to look away, I wanted to see if the kindness gave way to annoyance. I did it with a persistence that until a moment earlier I didn’t know I was capable of, even blinking would have seemed like giving in.

  He continued in the tone of a good-humored professor, he asked how school left me time to read and not Angela: did my teachers not give much homework? I said darkly that my teachers were trained beasts, they recited their lessons mechanically and equally mechanically gave such a quantity of homework that if we students had given it to them, they would never have gotten it done. But I didn’t worry about homework, I read when I felt like it, if a book gripped me I would read day and night, I didn’t care about school. What do you read, he asked, and since I answered vaguely—at my house there’s nothing but books, my father used to make suggestions, but then he left and I choose myself, every so often I pull one out, essays, novels, what I feel like—he insisted that I name at least a few titles, the most recent I had read. So I answered: the Gospels, lying to make an impression, that reading had been several months earlier, now I was reading something else. But I had so much hoped that that moment would arrive and in case it did I had written down all my impressions in a notebook just so I’d be able to list them for him. Now it was happening, and suddenly, with no hesitation, I went on talking, continuing to look him in the face with feigned calm. In reality I was furious inside, furious for no reason, or worse, as if it were precisely the texts of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John that were making me angry, and the anger erased everything around me, the square, the newspaper stand, the entrance to the metro, the bright green of the park, Angela and Giuliana, everything except Roberto. Finally, I stopped and looked down. I had a headache, I tried to control my breath so he wouldn’t notice that I was panting.

  There was a long silence. Only then I realized that Angela was looking at me with pride in her eyes—I was her childhood friend, she was proud of me, she was saying it without words—and I drew strength from it. Giuliana, on the other hand, clung to her fiancé, staring at me in bewilderment, as if there were something unseemly about me and she wanted to warn me with a look. Roberto asked me:

  “So you think the Gospels tell a terrible story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t work. Jesus is the son of God, but he performs pointless miracles, he lets himself be betrayed and ends up on the cross. Not only: he asks his father to spare him the cross, but his father doesn’t lift a finger and doesn’t spare him any torment at all. Why didn’t God come himself to suffer? Why did he dump the poor performance of his own creation on his son? What is doing the will of the father—draining the cup of torments to the dregs?”

  Roberto shook his head slightly, the irony disappeared.

  He said—but here I’m summarizing, I was agitated, I can’t remember clearly:

  “God isn’t easy.”

  “He should think about becoming easy, if he wants me to understand anything.”

  “An easy God isn’t God. He is other from us. We don’t communicate with God, he’s so beyond our level that he can’t be questioned, only invoked. If he manifests himself, he does it in silence, through small precious mute signs that go by completely common names. Doing his will is bowing your head and obligating yourself to believe in him.”

  “I already have too many obligations.”

  The irony reappeared in his eyes, I sensed with pleasure that my roughness interested him.

  “Obligation to God is worth the trouble. Do you like poetry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you read it?”

  “When I can.”

  “Poetry is made up of words, exactly like the conversation we’re having. If the poet takes our banal words and frees them from the bounds of our talk, you see that from within their banality they manifest an unexpected energy. God manifests himself in the same way.”

  “The poet isn’t God, he’s simply someone like us who also knows how to create poems.”

  “But that creation opens your eyes, amazes you.”

  “When the poet is good, yes.”

  “And it surprises you, gives you a jolt.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “God is that: a jolt in a dark room where you can no longer find the floor, the walls, the ceiling. There’s no way to reason about it, to discuss it. It’s a matter of faith. If you believe, it works. Otherwise, no.”

  “Why should I believe in a jolt?”

  “Because of religious spirit.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Think of an investigation like one in a murder mystery, except that the mystery remains a mystery. Religious spirit is just that: a propulsion onward, always onward, to expose what lies hidden.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Mysteries can’t be understood.”

  “Unsolved mysteries scare me. I identified with the three women who go to the grave, can’t find the body of Jesus, and run away.”

  “Life should make you run away when it’s dull.”

  “Life makes me run away when it’s suffering.”

  “You’re saying that you’re not content with things as they are?”

  “I’m saying that no one should be put on the cross, especially by the will of his father. But that’s not how things are.”

  “If you don’t like the way things are, you have to change them.”

  “I should change even creation?”

  “Of course, we are made for that.”

  “And God?”

  “God, too, if necessary.”

  “Careful, you’re blaspheming.”

  For a second I had the impression that Roberto was so struck by my effort to stand up to him that his eyes were wet with emotion. He said:

  “If blasphemy allows me even just a small step forward, I blaspheme.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. I like God, and I would do anything, even what offends him, to be closer to him. For that reason I advise you not to be in a hurry to throw everything up in the air: wait a little, the story of the Gospels says more than what you find in it now.”

  “There are so many other books. I read the Gospels only because you talked about them that time in church and I got curious.”

  “Reread them. They tell about passion and the cross, that is, suffering, the thing that disorients you most.”

  “Silence disorients me.”

  “You, too, were silent for a good half hour. But then, you see, you spoke.”


  Angela exclaimed, amused:

  “Maybe she’s God.”

  Roberto didn’t laugh, and I managed to restrain a nervous giggle in time. He said:

  “Now I know why I remembered you.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You put a lot of force into your words.”

  “You put even more.”

  “I don’t do it on purpose.”

  “I do. I’m proud, I’m not good, I’m often unjust.”

  This time he laughed, but not the three of us. Giuliana in a low voice reminded him that he had an appointment and they couldn’t be late. She said it in the tone of regret of someone who is sorry to leave such nice company; then she got up, hugged Angela, gave me a polite nod. Roberto, too, said goodbye, I felt a shudder when he leaned over and kissed my cheeks. As soon as the fiancés went off on Via Crispi, Angela pulled on my arm.

  “You made an impression,” she exclaimed with enthusiasm.

  “He said I read the wrong way.”

  “It’s not true. He not only listened to you, he argued with you.”

  “Of course, he argues with anybody. But you, you just talked, weren’t you supposed to cling to him?”

  “You said I shouldn’t. And anyway I couldn’t. The time I saw him with Tonino he seemed like an idiot, now he seems magic.”

  “He’s like all of them.”

  I held onto that disdainful tone, even though Angela kept refuting me with phrases like: compare how he treated me and how he treated you, you were like two professors. And she imitated our voices, mocked some moments of the dialogue. I made faces, giggled, but in reality I was pleased with myself. Angela was right, Roberto had talked to me. But not enough, I wanted to talk to him again and again, now, in the afternoon, tomorrow, forever. But that was impossible, and already the gratification was passing, a bitterness returned that made me weary.

  19.

  I quickly got worse. The encounter with Roberto seemed to have served only to demonstrate that the one person I cared about—the one person who in a very brief exchange had made me feel a pleasantly exciting steam inside—had his world elsewhere, could grant me just a few minutes.

  When I got home, I found the apartment on Via San Giacomo dei Capri empty, only the rumbling of the city could be heard, my mother had gone out with one of her most boring friends. I felt alone and, worse, that I had no prospect of redemption. I lay down on the bed to calm myself and tried to sleep. I woke with a start, in my mind the bracelet on Giuliana’s wrist. I was agitated, maybe I’d had a bad dream, I dialed Vittoria’s number. She answered right away but with a hello that seemed to come from the middle of a fight, evidently shouted at the end of a sentence that had been shouted even louder right before the phone rang.

  “It’s Giovanna,” I almost whispered.

  “Fine. And what the fuck do you want?”

  “I wanted to ask you about my bracelet.”

  She interrupted me.

  “Yours? Aha, we’re at that point, you call to tell me it’s yours? Giannì, I’ve been too nice to you, but now I’m done, you stay in your place, get it? The bracelet belongs to someone who loves me, I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear.”

  No, she hadn’t, or at least I didn’t understand. I was frightened, I couldn’t even remember why I’d called, certainly it was the wrong moment. But I heard Giuliana yelling:

  “It’s Giannina? Give me the phone. Be quiet, Vittò, quiet, don’t say another word.”

  Right afterward came the voice of Margherita, mother and daughter were evidently at my aunt’s house. Margherita said something like:

  “Vittò, please, forget it, the child has nothing to do with it.”

  But Vittoria shouted:

  “Did you hear, Giannì, here they call you a child. But are you a child? Yes? Then why do you put yourself between Giuliana and her fiancé? Answer me, instead of being a pain in the ass about the bracelet. Are you worse than my brother? Tell me, I’m listening: are you more arrogant than your father?”

  There was immediately a new cry from Giuliana. She yelled:

  “That’s enough, you’re crazy. Cut out your tongue, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Then she hung up. I stood with the receiver in my hand, incredulous. What was happening. And why had my aunt attacked me in that way. Maybe I had been wrong to say “my bracelet,” I had been out of line. And yet it was the right formulation, she had given it to me. But I had certainly not called her to get it back, I only wanted her to explain why she hadn’t kept it. Why if she loved that bracelet so much did she keep getting rid of it?

  I hung up, went to lie down again. I must have had a really bad dream, which had to do with the picture of Enzo on his grave: I was overcome by anguish. And now there was that pile-up of voices on the phone, I heard them again in my mind, and only then did I understand that Vittoria was angry with me because of the meeting that morning. Evidently, Giuliana had just told her about it, but what had Vittoria seen in that story that made her so furious? Now I would like to have been present and heard word for word what Giuliana said. Maybe, if I, too, had heard her account, I would have understood what really happened in Piazza Amedeo.

  The phone rang again, I started, I was afraid to answer. Then I thought it might be my mother, and I went back to the hall, cautiously picked up the receiver. Giuliana murmured: hello. She apologized for Vittoria, she sniffled, maybe she was crying. I asked:

  “Did I do something wrong this morning?”

  “No, Giannì, Roberto is enthusiastic about you.”

  “Really?”

  “I swear.”

  “I’m glad, tell him that talking to him was really good for me.”

  “No need for me to tell him, you’ll tell him. He wants to get together again tomorrow afternoon, if you can. We’ll go and have coffee, the three of us.”

  The painful grip of my headache became tighter. I muttered:

  “O.K. Is Vittoria still angry?”

  “No, don’t worry.”

  “Will you let me talk to her?”

  “Better not to, she’s a little upset.”

  “Why is she angry with me?”

  “Because she’s crazy, she’s always been crazy, and she’s ruined the lives of all of us.”

  VI

  1.

  The time of my adolescence is slow, made up of large gray blocks and sudden humps of color, green or red or purple. The blocks don’t have hours, days, months, years, and the seasons are indefinite, it’s hot or cold, rainy or sunny. Even the bulges don’t have a definite time, the color counts more than any date. The hue itself, moreover, that certain emotions take on is of unimportant duration, the one who is writing knows. As soon as you look for words, the slowness becomes a whirlwind and the colors get mixed together like the colors of different fruits in a blender. Not only does “time passed” become an empty formula but also “one afternoon,” “one morning,” “one evening” become merely markers of convenience. All I can say is that I really did manage to make up the lost year and without a great effort. I had a good memory—I realized—and learned from books more than from school. Even if I read absentmindedly, I remembered everything.

  That small success improved relations with my parents, who became proud of me again, especially my father. But I got no satisfaction out of it; their shadows were like an irritating pain that wouldn’t go away, an unseemly part of me that had to be cut out. I decided—at first just to distance them ironically and then as a deliberate rejection of the parental bond—to call them by their names. Nella, increasingly malnourished and whiny, was now my father’s widow, even though he was still living, in excellent health and surronded by comforts. She continued to safeguard for him with care the things she had stubbornly prevented him from taking away. She was always available for visits from his ghost, for the phone calls he ma
de from beyond the grave of their married life. And I was convinced that she saw Mariano from time to time only to find out what great matters her ex-husband was occupying himself with. Otherwise, clenching her teeth, she disciplined herself to a long series of daily duties, me among them. But she no longer concentrated on me—and it was a relief—with the determination she put into correcting piles and piles of homework or making love stories hang together. You’re grown up, she said more and more often, you take care of it.

  I was glad to be able to come and go, finally, without too much control. The less she and my father concerned themselves with me, the better I felt. Andrea especially, ah, let him be silent. I was increasingly less able to endure the wise instructions for life that my father felt it his duty to concoct for me when we saw each other in Posillipo, if I was visiting Angela and Ida, or near my school, to eat panzarotti and pastacresciuta together. The wish that there could be a friendship between Roberto and me was miraculously coming true, so that I seemed to be guided and instructed by him, in a way that my father, too absorbed in himself and his misdeeds, had never known how to do. One night, now long ago, in the dim apartment on Via San Giacomo dei Capri, Andrea, speaking rashly, had stripped me of my confidence; Giuliana’s fiancé was kindly, affectionately restoring it. I was so proud of that relationship with Roberto that I occasionally mentioned him to my father, just for the fun of seeing how serious and attentive he became. He asked about him, he wanted to know what sort of person he was, what we talked about, if I had ever told Roberto about him and his work. I don’t know if he really respected Roberto, hard to say, I had long considered Andrea’s words unreliable. Once, I remember, he said earnestly that he was a lucky young man, who had been able to get away in time from a shit city like Naples and construct for himself a prestigious university career in Milan. On another occasion he said to me: it’s good you’re spending time with people who are better than you, it’s the only way to go up and not down. A couple of times, finally, he went so far as to ask me if I could introduce him, he felt the need to get out of the quarrelsome, petty-minded group he’d been stuck in since he was a boy. He seemed to me a small, frail man.