The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  That was it, a little speech uttered with slightly artificial distress. Otherwise, I slipped into a silent monologue of my own that developed parallel to hers. I’m not, I thought, beautiful, I never will be. Roberto perceived that I felt ugly and lost, and he wanted to console me with a comforting lie, that’s probably the reason he said that. But what if he had really seen some beauty in me that I don’t know how to see, if he really liked me? Of course, he said you’re very beautiful in Giuliana’s presence, so without innuendo. And Giuliana agreed, she didn’t see any innuendo, either. But if on the other hand the innuendo were well hidden in the words, escaping even him? And if now, at this moment, it emerged, and Roberto, thinking back, were asking himself: why did I say that, what was my intention? Yes, what was his intention? I have to get to the bottom of this, it’s important. I have his number, I’ll call him, I’ll say: do you really think I’m very beautiful? Be careful what you say: my face has already changed, and because of my father I turned ugly; don’t you, too, play with changing me, making me become beautiful. I’m tired of being exposed to other people’s words. I need to know what I really am and what sort of person I can be, help me. There, that’s the sort of speech he should like. But what’s the purpose of it? What do I really want from him, just now, while this girl is showering me with her suffering? Do I want him to assure me that I’m pretty, prettier than anyone, even his fiancée? Do I want that? Or more, still more?

  Giuliana was grateful for my patient listening. She took my hand, she was moved, she praised me—oh how smart you were, you gave Michela a punch in the face with half a sentence, Giannì, you have to help me, you have to help me always, if I have a daughter I’ll name her for you, she has to be intelligent like you—and she wanted me to swear to support her in every way. I swore, but it wasn’t enough, she imposed a real pact: at least until she was married and had gone to live in Milan, I had to make sure that she didn’t lose her head and convince herself of things that weren’t true.

  I agreed, and she seemed calmer; we decided to stretch out in the berths. I fell asleep right away, but a few kilometers from Naples, when it was day, I felt someone shaking me. I came out of my half sleep and saw her holding out her wrist with frightened eyes:

  “My God, Giannì, I don’t have the bracelet.”

  19.

  I got out of the berth:

  “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know where I put it.”

  She dug in her purse, in her suitcase, and couldn’t find it. I tried to calm her:

  “You must have left it at Roberto’s house.”

  “No, I had it here, in the pocket of my purse.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything.”

  “Did you have it in the pizzeria?”

  “I remember that I wanted to put it on but maybe I didn’t.”

  “I think you had it.”

  We went on like that until the train entered the station. Her nervousness infected me. I began to be afraid that the clasp had broken and she had lost it, or that it had been stolen in the metro or even that it had been taken off her while she was sleeping by one of the other passengers in the compartment. We both knew Vittoria’s fury and took it for granted that if we returned without the bracelet she would give us a bad time.

  Once we got off the train, Giuliana went to a telephone, dialed Roberto’s number. While the phone rang she combed her hair with her fingers, muttering under her breath: he’s not answering. She stared at me, she repeated: he’s not answering. After a few seconds, she said in dialect, with her frenzy of self-destruction breaking down the wall between suitable and unsuitable words: he must be fucking Michela and doesn’t want to interrupt. But finally Roberto answered, and she switched right away to an affectionate tone of voice, muffling her anguish but continuing to twirl her hair. She told him about the bracelet, she was silent for a moment, murmured docilely: O.K., I’ll call you in five minutes. She hung up, she said in a rage: he has to finish fucking. Stop it, I said, irritated, calm down. She nodded, ashamed of herself, she apologized, saying Roberto didn’t know anything about the bracelet, now he was going to look. I stayed with the bags, she began walking back and forth, still nervous, aggressive with the men who looked at her or made obscene remarks.

  “Is it five minutes?” she almost yelled at me.

  “It’s ten.”

  “Couldn’t you have told me?”

  She hurried to put the token in the phone. Roberto answered right away, she listened, exclaimed: thank goodness. Roberto’s voice even reached me, but indistinct. While he talked, Giuliana whispered to me in relief: he found it, I left it in the kitchen. She turned her back to say some words of love, but I heard them just the same. She hung up, seemed pleased, but it didn’t last, she muttered: how can I know for sure that as soon as I leave Michela doesn’t jump in his bed? She stopped beside the stairs that led to the metro, we would say goodbye there, we were going in opposite directions, but she said:

  “Wait a minute, I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to hear Vittoria’s interrogation.”

  “Don’t answer.”

  “She’ll torment me anyway because I don’t have that fucking bracelet.”

  “You’re too anxious, you can’t live like that.”

  “I’m always anxious about something. You want to know what occurred to me now, just while I’m talking to you?”

  “Tell me.”

  “If Michela goes to Roberto’s house? If she sees the bracelet? If she takes it?”

  “Apart from the fact that Roberto wouldn’t let her, you know how many bracelets Michela can afford? What do you think she cares about yours, you don’t even like it.”

  She stared at me, twisted a lock of hair around her fingers, and said:

  “But Roberto likes it, and everything Roberto likes she likes.”

  She was about to let go of the hair with that mechanical gesture she’d been performing for hours, but there was no need, the hair was still around her fingers. She looked at it with an expression of horror. She murmured:

  “What’s happening?”

  “You’re so agitated you tore your hair out.”

  She looked at the lock, she had turned all red.

  “I didn’t tear it out, it came out by itself.”

  She grabbed another lock, she said:

  “Look.”

  “Don’t pull.”

  She pulled and another lock of long hair remained between her fingers, the blood that had rushed to her face drained and she became extremely pale.

  “Am I dying, Giannì, am I dying?”

  “You don’t die if some hair falls out.”

  I tried to soothe her, but she was as if overwhelmed by all the anguish she’d felt from childhood till now: father, mother, Vittoria, the incomprehensible shouting of the adults around her, and now Roberto and that anguish of not deserving him and losing him. She wanted to show me her head, she said: move my hair aside, look. I did, there was a small patch of white scalp, an insignificant empty spot in the middle of her head. I went down with her, to her track.

  “Don’t say anything to Vittoria about the bracelet,” I advised her, “just tell her about our tour of Milan.”

  “And if she asks me?”

  “Stall for time.”

  “And if she wants to see it right away?”

  “Tell her you lent it to me. Meanwhile get some rest.”

  I managed to persuade her to get on the train for Gianturco.

  20.

  I’m still fascinated by how our brain elaborates strategies and carries them out without revealing them. To say that it’s a matter of the unconscious seems to me approximate, maybe even hypocritical. I knew clearly that I wanted to go back to Milan immediately, at all costs, I knew it with my whole self, but I didn’t say it to myself. And wi
thout ever confessing the purpose of my new, tiring journey I feigned its necessity, its urgency, I claimed noble reasons for departing an hour after I arrived: to relieve Giuliana’s state of anguish by recovering the bracelet; to say to her fiancé what she was silent about, which was that right away, before it was too late, he had to marry her and take her away from Pascone, without bothering about moral or social debts or other nonsense; to protect my adult friend, deflecting my aunt’s angers onto me, still a girl.

  So it was that I bought a new ticket and called my mother, informing her, without acknowledging her complaint in response, that I would be staying another day in Milan. The train was about to leave when I realized that I hadn’t told Roberto. I called him as if what, with another convenient expression, we call fate were being fulfilled. He answered right away, and frankly I don’t know what we said, but I’d like to report that it went like this:

  “Giuliana urgently needs the bracelet, I’m about to leave.”

  “I’m sorry, you must be tired.”

  “It doesn’t matter, I’m glad to come back.”

  “What time do you arrive?”

  “At 22:08.”

  “I’ll come to meet you.”

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  But it’s a pretend dialogue, meant to crudely outline a sort of tacit accord between Roberto and me: you told me I’m very beautiful, and so, as soon as I got off one train, look, though I’m dead tired, I’m returning on another, with the excuse of that magic bracelet, which—you know better than I do—is magic only because of the chance it offers us to sleep together tonight, in the same bed I saw you in yesterday morning with Giuliana. I suspect, however, that there was no real dialogue, but only a blunt statement of the sort I was in the habit of making at the time.

  “Giuliana needs the bracelet urgently. I’m about to get on the train, I’ll be arriving in Milan tonight.”

  Maybe he said something, maybe not.

  21.

  I was so tired that in spite of the crowded compartment, the chatter, the slammed doors, the loudspeaker announcements, the long whistles, the jangling, I slept for hours. The problems began when I woke up. I immediately touched my head, convinced that I was bald, I must have had a bad dream. But whatever I had dreamed had vanished, leaving only the impression that my hair was coming out in clumps, more than Giuliana’s, not my real hair but the hair my father had praised when I was a child.

  I kept my eyes closed, half asleep. Giuliana’s extreme physical closeness seemed to have infected me. Her desperation was now mine, too, she must have transmitted it to me, my body was wearing out the way hers had. Frightened, I forced myself to wake up completely, but Giuliana with her torments stayed fixed in my mind just as I was traveling toward her fiancé.

  I was irritated, I couldn’t bear my fellow passengers, I went out into the corridor. I tried to console myself with quotations on the power of love, which, even if you wanted to, are impossible to avoid. They were lines of poetry, sentences from novels, words read in books I had liked and transcribed in my notebooks. But Giuliana wouldn’t fade, especially that gesture that left locks of hair in her hand, a part of herself that came off almost gently. Without any obvious connection I said to myself: even if I don’t have the face of Vittoria yet, soon that face will lay itself on my bones and never go away.

  It was an ugly moment, maybe the worst of those ugly years. I was standing in a corridor identical to the one where I had spent much of the previous night listening to Giuliana, who, to be sure of my attention, took my hand, pulled my arm, continuously jostled my body with hers. The sun was setting, the bluish countryside was pierced by the rumble of the moving train, another night was descending. Suddenly I was able to say to myself clearly that I didn’t have noble intentions, I wasn’t making that new journey to recover the bracelet, I didn’t intend to help Giuliana. I was going to betray her, I was going to take the man she loved. I, much sneakier than Michela, intended to drive her out of the place that Roberto had offered her at his side and destroy her life. I felt authorized to do it because a young man who seemed to me extraordinary, more extraordinary than I considered my father when he had let slip that I was starting to get Vittoria’s face, had said, on the contrary, that I was beautiful. But now—as the train was about to enter Milan—I had to admit that, just because, proud of that praise, I was going to do what I had in mind, and just because I had no intention of being stopped by anyone, my face could only be a copy of Vittoria’s. Betraying Giuliana’s trust, I would in fact become like my aunt when she destroyed Margherita’s life, and, why not, like her brother, my father, when he destroyed my mother’s. I felt guilty. I was a virgin and that night I wanted to lose my virginity with the only person who had given me, thanks to his enormous authority as a male, a new beauty. It seemed my right, that was how I would enter adulthood. But as I got off the train I was scared, that wasn’t the way I wanted to grow up. The beauty that Roberto had recognized in me too closely resembled the beauty of someone who hurts people.

  22.

  I thought I had understood, on the phone, that he would meet me on the platform as he had Giuliana and me, but I didn’t find him there. I waited a little, I phoned. He was sorry, he was convinced that I was coming to his house, he was working on an essay that he had to deliver the next day. I was depressed, but I didn’t say anything. I followed his directions, took the metro, got to his house. He greeted me cordially. I hoped he would kiss me on the mouth, he kissed me on the cheeks. He had set the table for dinner, made by the helpful concierge, and we ate. He didn’t mention the bracelet, he didn’t mention Giuliana, nor did I. He talked as if he needed me to clarify his ideas on the subject he was working on, and I had taken the train again purposely to listen to him. The essay was about compunction. He kept calling it training to prick your conscience, traversing it with needle and thread as if it were a piece of fabric out of which you’re making a garment. I listened, he used the voice that had enchanted me. And I was again seduced—I’m in his house, among his books, that is his desk, we’re eating together, he’s talking to me about his work—I felt I was she who was necessary to him, exactly what I wanted to be.

  After dinner he gave me the bracelet, but he did it as if it were toothpaste, a towel, and still made no reference to Giuliana: as if he’d eliminated her from his life. I tried to conduct myself the way he did, but I couldn’t do it, I was overwhelmed by the thought of Vittoria’s goddaughter. I knew much better than he did what physical and mental condition she was in, far from that beautiful city, far from that apartment, down, down, down on the edge of Naples, in the dreary house with the big photograph of Enzo in uniform. And yet we had been together in that room a few hours before, I had seen her in the bathroom while she dried her hair and masked her distress in the mirror, while she sat beside him in the restaurant, while she clung to him in the bed. Was it possible that now she seemed dead, I was there and she wasn’t? Is it so easy—I thought—to die in the life of the people we can’t live without? And on the thread of those thoughts, while he was talking about something or other in a sweetly ironic way—I was no longer listening, I caught only some words: sleep, sofa bed, the crushing darkness, staying awake until dawn, and at times Roberto’s voice seemed the most beautiful among my father’s voices—I said discouraged:

  “I’m really tired and scared.”

  He said:

  “You can sleep with me.”

  My words and his couldn’t fit together, they seemed to be two consecutive remarks but they weren’t. Spilling out into mine was the madness of that exhausting journey, Giuliana’s despair, the fear of making an unforgivable mistake. In his was the end point of an allusive walk around the difficulty of opening the sofa bed. As soon as I realized it, I answered:

  “No, I’ll be fine here.”

  And, in demonstration, I curled up on the couch.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”r />
  He said:

  “Why did you come back?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  A few seconds passed, he was standing, looking at me from above, sympathetically, I was on the couch, staring at him from below, confused. He didn’t lean over me, he didn’t caress me, he said nothing but good night and withdrew into his room.

  I settled myself on the couch without getting undressed, I didn’t want to deprive myself of the armor of my clothes. But soon I had a desire to wait for him to fall sleep, to go and get in his bed with my clothes on, just to be near him. Until I met Roberto I had never felt a need to be penetrated, at most I had felt some curiosity, immediately distanced by the fear of pain in a part of the body so delicate I was afraid that, touching it, I would scratch myself. After seeing him in the church I had been overwhelmed by a desire as violent as it was confused, an excitement that resembled a joyful tension, and that, while it certainly hit my genitals, as if swelling them, then spread out through my whole body. Nor, after we met at Piazza Amedeo and the occasional brief encounters that followed, had I ever imagined that he could enter me; rather, if I reflected on it, the rare times I’d had fantasies of that sort it had seemed to me a vulgar act. Only in Milan, when, the morning before, I had seen him in bed with Giuliana, I had had to admit that, like every man, he, too, had a penis, limp or erect, he put it inside Giuliana like a piston and would have been willing to put it inside me. But even that affirmation hadn’t been decisive. Certainly, I had made the new journey with the idea that there would be that penetration, that the erotic scenario vividly drawn by my aunt long ago would concern me. Yet the need that impelled me required something different, and now, in my half sleep, I realized it. In the bed, next to him, I wanted to enjoy his respect, I wanted to discuss compunction, God who is sated while so many of his creatures are dying of hunger and thirst; I wanted to feel that I was much more than a cute or even very beautiful small animal with whom a brilliant male can play a little and distract himself. I fell asleep thinking sorrowfully that that, precisely that, would never happen. Having him inside me would have been easy, he would have penetrated me even now, in sleep, without surprise. He was convinced that I had returned for that type of betrayal and not for betrayals that were much more ferocious.