The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  “If you stabbed him, you’d resolve everything.”

  I knew right away that the words were out of place in that climate and I’m sure Giuliana knew it, too. But I’m equally certain that she said those words because they were the only ones that came to mind to cleanly cut the long thread of Michela’s words. There was silence, Giuliana realized she’d said the wrong thing, and her eyes turned glassy, as if she were about to faint. She tried to take her distance from herself by laughing nervously, she said to Roberto, now in a more controlled Italian:

  “Or at least that’s what they’d do where you and I come from, no?”

  Roberto pulled her to him, circling her shoulders, kissed her on the forehead, and began a speech that step by step erased the trivializing effect of his fiancée’s words. They’d do that not only where we come from, he said, but everywhere, because it’s the easiest answer. But naturally he wasn’t in favor of easy answers, none of the young people at that table were. And Giuliana, too, was quick to say, again almost in dialect, that she was against a violent response to violence, but she got all tangled up—I felt great pity for her—and immediately stopped talking, they were all listening to Roberto. To injustice, he said, you must give a firm, stubborn response: you do this to your neighbor and I tell you you mustn’t do it and if you continue to do it I will continue to oppose it, and if you crush me with your force I will rise up again, or if I can’t rise up anymore others will, and still others. He stared at the table as he spoke, and then suddenly he looked up, he looked them in the face one by one with enchanting eyes.

  In the end everyone was convinced that that was the right reaction, Giuliana herself, me. But Michela—and I perceived the surprise among the group—flared up, exasperated, she exclaimed that you can’t respond to an unjust force with weakness. Silence: exasperation, even slight exasperation, was not envisaged at that table. I looked at Giuliana, she was staring angrily at Michela, I was afraid she would lash out at her again, even though the few words of her presumed rival seemed close to her thesis of stabbing. But Roberto was already responding: the just can only be weak, they have courage without force. And suddenly a few lines I’d read recently came to mind, I mixed them up with others, I said softly, almost without intending to: they have the weakness of the fool who stops offering meat and fat to God, who is more than sated, and gives it to his neighbor, to the widow, the orphan, the stranger. That’s all that came out of my mouth, in a calm, even slightly ironic tone. And since my words were immediately taken up approvingly by Roberto, using and developing the metaphor of foolishness, everyone liked them, except perhaps Michela. She gave me an interested glance, and then for no reason Giuliana laughed, a noisy laugh.

  “What is there to laugh about?” Michela asked coldly.

  “I can’t laugh?”

  “Yes, let’s laugh,” Roberto interrupted, using the first person plural even though he hadn’t laughed, “because today we have something to celebrate, Giovanna is sixteen.”

  At that moment the lights went out in the room, and a waiter appeared carrying a big cake with sixteen little candle flames wavering on the whiteness of the icing.

  16.

  It was a wonderful birthday, I felt surrounded by kindness and cordiality. But after a while Giuliana said she was very tired, and we went home. It struck me that, once in the apartment, she didn’t go back to the proprietary tones of the morning, she was spellbound, looking at the darkness outside the living-room window, and let Roberto do everything. He was very thoughtful, gave us clean towels, made a funny speech about how uncomfortable the sofa was and how hard to open. The concierge is the only person who can do it easily, he said, and he had trouble himself, he tried and tried until a double bed all made, with white sheets, spilled out into the middle of the room. I touched the sheets, said: it’s cool, do you have a blanket? He nodded yes, disappeared into the bedroom.

  I said to Giuliana:

  “Which side do you sleep on?”

  Giuliana left the darkness outside the window and said:

  “I’ll sleep with Roberto, so you’ll be comfortable.”

  I was sure that would happen, but just the same I insisted:

  “Vittoria made me swear we’d sleep together.”

  “She made Tonino swear, too, but he didn’t keep the oath. You want to keep it?”

  “No.”

  “I love you,” she said kissing me on the cheek without enthusiasm, while Roberto returned with a blanket and a pillow. Then it was Giuliana who disappeared into the bedroom, and, in case I woke up first and wanted to make breakfast, he showed me where the coffee, biscotti, cups were. The boiler gave off a violent odor of gas, I said:

  “There’s a leak, will we die?”

  “No, I don’t think so, the window frames are terrible.”

  “I’d be sorry to die at sixteen.”

  “I’ve lived here for seven years and I’m not dead.”

  “Who can assure me of that?”

  He smiled, and said:

  “No one. I’m glad you’re here. Good night.”

  Those were the only words we exchanged by ourselves. He joined Giuliana in the bedroom, closed the door.

  I opened my suitcase to get my pajamas, I heard Giuliana crying, he whispered something, she whispered. Then they began to laugh, first Giuliana, then Roberto. I went to the bathroom hoping they would go to sleep right away, I got undressed, brushed my teeth. Door opening, door closing, footsteps. Giuliana knocked, asked: can I come in. I let her in, she had over her arm a blue nightgown with white lace, she asked if I liked it, I praised it. She ran water in the bidet and began to undress. I left in a hurry (how stupid could I be, why did I get myself into this situation), the couch squeaked when I got under the covers. Giuliana crossed the room again in the nightgown that clung to her graceful body. She had nothing on underneath, her breasts were small but firm, shapely. Good night, she said, I answered good night. I turned out the light, put my head under the pillow, pressed it against my ears. What do I know about sex, everything and nothing: what I’ve read in books, the pleasure of masturbation, Angela’s mouth and body, Corrado’s genitals. For the first time, I felt my virginity as a humiliation. What I don’t want is to imagine Giuliana’s pleasure, feel myself in her place. I’m not her. I’m here and not in that room, I don’t want him to kiss me and touch me and penetrate me as Vittoria told me Enzo did, I’m a friend of them both. Yet I was sweating under the covers, my hair was wet, I couldn’t breathe, I pushed the pillow off my head. How yielding and sticky the flesh is, I tried to feel myself as just a skeleton, one by one I classified the noises in the house: wood creaking, refrigerator humming, small clicks perhaps from the boiler, woodworms in the desk. Not a sound came from the bedroom, not a squeaking of springs, not a sigh. Maybe they had confessed to being tired and were already asleep. Maybe they had decided by gestures not to use the bed, in order to avoid any noise. Maybe they were standing up. Maybe they didn’t sigh, didn’t groan, out of discretion. I imagined the joining of their bodies in positions that I had seen only drawn or painted, but as soon as I became aware of those images I banished them. Maybe they didn’t really desire each other, they had wasted the whole day on tourist outings and chat. That was it, no passion, I doubted that one could make love in a silence so absolute: I would have laughed, would have uttered intense words. The bedroom door opened cautiously, I saw Giuliana’s dark silhouette cross the room on tiptoe, heard her shut herself in the bathroom again. The water was running. I cried for a while, I fell asleep.

  17.

  An ambulance siren woke me. It was four in the morning, I struggled to remember where I was, and when I did I immediately thought: I’ll be unhappy my whole life. I lay in bed awake until daylight, organizing in detail the unhappiness that awaited me. I had to stay near Roberto discreetly, I had to make myself loved. I had to learn more and more of the things that were important to him. I had
to get a job that wasn’t too distant from his, teach in the university, maybe in Milan if Giuliana won, in Naples if my aunt won. I had to act so that the relationship of that couple lasted forever, patch up the holes myself, help them bring up their children. In other words I decided conclusively that I would live on their periphery, content with their crumbs. Then, without intending to, I fell asleep again.

  I jumped up at nine, the house was still silent. I went to the bathroom, avoided looking at myself in the mirror, washed, hid myself in the shirt I’d worn the day before. Since muffled voices seemed to be coming from the bedroom, I explored the kitchen, set the table for three, got the moka ready. But the level of the sound coming from the other room didn’t rise, the door didn’t open, neither of the two peeked out. Only, after a while, I thought I heard Giuliana repress a laugh or maybe a sigh. That caused me such suffering that I decided—and maybe it wasn’t a decision but, rather, an act of impatience—to knock on the door, with my knuckles, without hesitation.

  Absolute silence. I knocked again, a demanding rap.

  “Yes?” said Roberto.

  I asked in a jolly tone:

  “Shall I bring you coffee? It’s ready.”

  “We’re coming,” said Roberto, but Giuliana exclaimed, at the same time:

  “How nice, yes, thank you.”

  I heard them laughing because of that divergent simultaneous answer, and even more gaily I promised:

  “Five minutes.”

  I found a tray, arranged on it cups, plates, silverware, bread, biscotti, butter, some strawberry jam that I scraped whitish traces of mold off, and the steaming moka. I did it with a sudden contentment, as if my sole possibility for survival were about to take shape at that moment. And the only thing that scared me was the abrupt tilt of the tray as with my free hand I turned the door handle. I was afraid that the moka, everything, would land on the floor, and though that didn’t happen my contentment vanished, the tray’s precarious equilibrium was transmitted to me. I advanced as if not the tray but I were in danger of landing on the floor.

  The room wasn’t dark, as I expected. There was light, the blind was rolled up, the window half open. The two were in bed, under a light white blanket. But Roberto had his head against the headboard and an expression of embarrassment—an ordinary male, shoulders too broad, narrow chest—while Giuliana, her shoulders bare, her cheek against his chest with its black hairs, one hand that touched his face as if for a just interrupted caress, was joyful. Seeing her like that swept away all my plans. Being near them didn’t ease my unhappy situation but transformed me into the audience of their happiness: something that—it seemed to me at that moment—Giuliana in particular was hoping for. In the few minutes I had taken to get the tray ready they could have dressed, but she must have prevented him, she had slipped away naked, opened the window to change the air, and gone back to bed to assume the pose of the young woman after a night of love, close to him under the sheets, one leg over his two. No, no, my idea of becoming a sort of aunt always ready to rush in, give a hand, wasn’t the worst of poisons. The spectacle of them—for Giuliana it must have been just that: a displaying of herself as if in a movie, a way, probably not at all malicious, of giving a form to her well-being, capitalizing on my entrance, so that I would see her and, seeing her, fix what was momentary, become its witness—that spectacle felt unbearably cruel. And yet I stayed there, sitting on the edge of the bed, prudently on Giuliana’s side, thanking them yet again for the party of the day before, sipping coffee with the two of them, who had released themselves from their embrace, she barely covering herself with the sheet, he finally putting on a shirt, which I myself, at Giuliana’s request, had handed him.

  “How nice you are, Giannì, I won’t ever forget this morning,” she exclaimed and wanted to give me a hug, dangerously unsettling the tray that was resting on a pillow. Roberto, instead, said with detachment, after a sip of coffee, looking at me as if I were a painting he’d been summoned to give an opinion of:

  “You’re very beautiful.”

  18.

  On the way home Giuliana did what she hadn’t done on the way there. While the train moved at a wearyingly slow speed, she kept me in the corridor, between the compartment and the window, talking incessantly.

  Roberto had come with us to the station, and the farewell between them had been painful; they had kissed and kissed some more and clung tightly to each other. I’d been unable to avoid looking at them, they were a couple pleasing to the eye, without a doubt he loved her and she couldn’t do without that love. But the phrase—you’re very beautiful—wouldn’t leave my mind: what a jolt to the heart it had been. My response had been rude, discordant, emotion mangling the vowels: don’t make fun of me. And Giuliana had immediately added, serious: it’s true, Giannì, you’re really beautiful. I muttered: I’m like Vittoria, but they both exclaimed indignantly, he laughing, she striking the air with her hand: Vittoria, what are you talking about, are you crazy? Then, stupidly, I burst into tears. A brief cry, a few seconds, like a cough immediately choked off, which had, however, upset them. He said softly: what’s the matter, calm down, what did we do wrong? And I recovered instantly, ashamed of myself, but that compliment remained intact in my mind, and was still there, in the station, at the track, while I settled the bags in the compartment and they talked through the window up to the last minute.

  The train left, we stayed in the corridor. I said, to set a tone, to drive out Roberto’s voice (you’re very beautiful), to console Giuliana: how he loves you, it must be wonderful to be loved like that. And she, suddenly gripped by despair, began to vent, half in Italian, half in dialect, and never stopped. We were very close—hips touching, she often took my arm, my hand—but in reality separate: I who continued to hear Roberto as he said those three words to me (and I took pleasure in them, they seemed to me the secret magic formula of a resurrection), she who needed to relate in detail what made her suffer. She went on and on, grimacing with anger, with anguish, and I listened to her attentively, I encouraged her to keep talking. But while she suffered, widening her eyes, touching her hair obsessively, wrapping a lock around index and middle fingers and then abruptly freeing the fingers as if they were snakes, I was happy, and always on the point of interrupting her to ask abruptly: do you think Roberto was serious when he said I’m very beautiful?

  Giuliana’s monologue was long. Yes, she said, he loves me, but I love him much much more, because he changed my life, he unexpectedly took me away from the place where I was fated to stay and put me at his side, and now that’s the only place I can be, you understand, if he changes his mind and sends me away, I wouldn’t know how to be me anymore, I don’t even know who I am; while he—he’s always known who he is, he knew it as a child, I remember, you can’t imagine what would happen if he just opened his mouth, you’ve seen the lawyer Sargente’s son, Rosario is mean, no one can touch Rosario, and Roberto, instead, charmed him, the way you do with snakes, and pacified him, if you’ve never seen these things you don’t know what Roberto is, I’ve seen a lot of them, and not only with someone like Rosario, who’s a jerk, think of last night, last night they were all professors, they were the absolute best, and yet you saw, they’re there for him, they’re so intelligent, so polite only to please him, because if he weren’t there they’d tear each other apart, you should hear them as soon as Roberto looks away, jealousy, malice, bad words, obscenities; so, Giannì, there’s no equality between him and me, if I were to die now, on this train, oh yes, Roberto surely would be sorry, Roberto would suffer, but then he’d go on being what he is, while I, I won’t say if he dies—I can’t even think of that—but if he leaves me—you saw how all the women look at him, you saw how pretty, intelligent they are, how much they know—if he leaves me because one of them takes him—Michela, for example, who’s there only to talk to him, she doesn’t give a damn about the others, she’s someone important, who knows what she’ll become, and just
for that she wants him, because with him she could even become, I don’t know, president of the republic—if Michela takes the place I have now, Giannì, I’ll kill myself, I’d have to kill myself, because even if I went on living, my life would be nothing.

  She talked like this more or less for hours, obsessively, opening her eyes wide, twisting her mouth. I listened to the unending murmur in the deserted corridor of the train for that whole time, and, I have to admit, I felt increasingly sorry for her but also a certain admiration. I considered her an adult, I was a girl. Certainly I wouldn’t have been capable of such ruthless lucidity, at the most critical moments I knew how to hide from myself. But she didn’t close her eyes, she didn’t stop up her ears, she outlined her situation with precision. Still, I didn’t do much to console her, I merely repeated every so often a concept that I wanted to acknowledge myself. Roberto, I said, has lived in Milan for a long time, he’s met countless girls like that Michela, and you’re right, it’s obvious that they’re all charmed by him, but it’s with you he wants to live, because you’re absolutely different from the others, so you shouldn’t change, you should stay what you are, that’s the only way he’ll love you forever.