I found the box in the bottom of the wardrobe, but first I decided to re-examine conscientiously the albums that showed the two of them as fiancés, the two of them as bride and groom frowning at the center of a small wedding party, the two of them as an always happy couple, and, finally, me, their daughter, photographed an excessive number of times, from birth to now. I lingered in particular on the wedding pictures. My father was wearing a visibly rumpled dark suit and was scowling in every image; my mother, beside him, not in a wedding dress but in a cream-colored suit, with a veil the same shade, had a vaguely excited expression. I already knew that among the thirty or so guests were some friends from the Vomero they still saw and my mother’s relatives, the good grandparents from Museo. But still I looked and looked again, hoping for a figure even in the background that would lead me somehow or other to a woman I had no memory of. Nothing. So I moved on to the box and after many attempts managed to get it open.
I emptied the contents onto the bed: all the pictures were black and white. The ones of my parents’ separate teenage years were in no order: my mother, smiling, with her classmates, with her friends, at the beach, on the street, pretty and well dressed, was mixed in with my father, preoccupied, always by himself, never on vacation, pants bunching at the knees, jackets whose sleeves were too short. The pictures of childhood and early adolescence had instead been put in order in two envelopes, the ones from my mother’s family and those from my father’s. My aunt—I told myself—must inevitably be among the latter, and I went on to look at them one by one. There weren’t more than about twenty, and it struck me immediately that in three or four of those images my father, who in the others appeared as a child, a boy, with his parents, or with relatives I’d never met, could be seen, surprisingly, next to a black rectangle drawn with a felt-tipped pen. I immediately understood that that very precise rectangle was a job that he had done diligently and secretly. I imagined him as, using a ruler that he had on his desk, he enclosed a portion of the photo in that geometric shape and then carefully went over it with the marker, attentive not to go outside the fixed margins. I had no doubts about that painstaking work: the rectangles were deletions and under that black was Aunt Vittoria.
For quite a while I sat there not knowing what to do. Finally, I made up my mind, went to the kitchen and found a knife, and delicately scraped at a tiny section of the part of the photograph that my father had covered. I soon realized that only the white of the paper appeared. I felt anxious and stopped. I knew that I was going against my father’s will, and any action that might further erode his affection frightened me. The anxiety increased when at the back of the envelope I found the only picture in which he wasn’t a child or a teenager but a young man, smiling, as he rarely was in the photos taken before he met my mother. He was in profile, his gaze was happy, his teeth were even and very white. But the smile, the happiness weren’t directed toward anyone. Next to him were two of those precise rectangles, two coffins in which, at a time surely different from the cordial moment of the photo, he had enclosed the bodies of his sister and someone else.
I focused on that image for a long time. My father was on a street and was wearing a checkered shirt with short sleeves; it must have been summer. Behind him was the entrance to a shop, all you could see of the sign was –RIA; there was a display window, but you couldn’t tell what it displayed. Next to the dark patch appeared a bright white lamppost with well-defined outlines. And then there were the shadows, long shadows, one of them cast by an evidently female body. Although my father had assiduously eliminated the people next to him, he had left their trace on the sidewalk.
Again I began to scrape off the ink of the rectangle, very gently, but I stopped as soon as I realized that here, too, only the white appeared. I waited a moment or two and then started again. I worked lightly, hearing my breathing in the silence of the house. I stopped for good only when all I managed to get out of the area where once Vittoria’s head must have been was a spot, and you couldn’t tell if it was the residue of the pen or a trace of her lips.
5.
I put everything back in order and tried to repress the threat that I looked like the sister my father had obliterated. Meanwhile I became more and more distracted, and my aversion for school increased, scaring me. Still, I wanted to go back to being a good girl, the way I’d been until a few months earlier: it was important to my parents, and I thought that if I could get excellent grades again I would be pretty again, too, and good. But I couldn’t; in class my mind wandered, at home I wasted my time in front of the mirror. In fact looking at myself became an obsession. I wanted to know if my aunt really was peeking out through my body, and since I didn’t know what she looked like I searched for her in every detail that marked a change in myself. Thus, features that I hadn’t noticed before became evident: thick eyebrows, eyes that were too small and dull brown, an exaggeratedly high forehead, thin hair—not at all beautiful, or maybe not beautiful anymore—that was pasted to my head, big ears with heavy lobes, a short upper lip with a disgusting dark fuzz, a fat lower lip, teeth that still looked like baby teeth, a pointed chin, and a nose, oh what a nose, how gracelessly it extended toward the mirror, widening, how dark the caverns on the sides. Were these elements of Aunt Vittoria’s face or were they mine and only mine? Should I expect to get better or get worse? Was my body—the long neck that seemed as if it might break like the filament of a spider web, straight bony shoulders, breasts that continued to swell and had dark nipples, thin legs that came up too high, almost to my armpits—me or the advance guard of my aunt, her, in all her horror?
I studied myself and at the same time observed my parents. How lucky I had been, I couldn’t have had better ones. They were good-looking and had loved each other since they were young. My father and mother had told me the little I knew of their romance, he with his usual playful distance, she sweetly emotional. They had always felt such pleasure in being with each other that the decision to have a child had come relatively late, given that they had married very young. When I was born my mother was thirty and my father had just turned thirty-two. I had been conceived amid countless anxieties, expressed by her aloud, by him to himself. The pregnancy had been difficult, the birth—June 3, 1979—torturous, my first two years of life the practical demonstration that my entering the world had complicated their lives. Worried about the future, my father, a teacher of history and philosophy in the most prestigious high school in Naples, an intellectual fairly well known in the city, beloved by his students, to whom he devoted not only the mornings but entire afternoons, had started giving private lessons. Worried, on the other hand, about the present—my constant nighttime crying, rashes that vexed me, stomachaches, ferocious tantrums—my mother, who taught Latin and Greek in a high school in Piazza Carlo III and corrected proofs of romance novels, had gone through a long depression, becoming a poor teacher and a very distracted proofreader. These were the problems I had caused when I was born. But then I had become a quiet and obedient child, and my parents had slowly recovered. The phase in which they tried in vain to spare me from the evils that all human beings are exposed to had ended. They had found a new equilibrium, thanks to which, even if love for me came first, second place was again occupied by my father’s studies and my mother’s jobs. So what to say? They loved me, I loved them. My father seemed to me an extraordinary man, my mother a really nice woman, and the two of them were the only clear figures in a world that was otherwise confused.
A confusion that I was part of. Sometimes I imagined that a violent struggle between my father and his sister was taking place in me, and I hoped that he would win. Of course—I reflected—Vittoria had already prevailed once, at the moment of my birth, since for a while I had been an intolerable child; but then—I thought with relief—I turned into a good little girl, so it’s possible to get rid of her. I tried to reassure myself that way and, in order to feel strong, forced myself to see my parents in myself. But especially at night, before
going to bed, I would look at myself in the mirror yet again, and it seemed I had lost them long ago. I should have had a face that synthesized the best of them and instead I was getting the face of Vittoria. I was supposed to have a happy life and instead an unhappy period was starting, utterly without the joy of feeling the way they had felt and still did.
6.
I tried to find out, after a while, if the two sisters, Angela and Ida, my trusted friends, were aware of any deterioration, and if Angela, in particular, who was the same age as me (Ida was two years younger), was also changing for the worse. I needed a gaze that would evaluate me, and it seemed to me that I could count on them. We had been brought up in the same way by parents who had been friends for decades and had the same views. All three of us, to be clear, had not been baptized, all three didn’t know any prayers, all three had been precociously informed about the functioning of our bodies (illustrated books, educational videos with animated cartoons), all three knew that we should be proud of being born female, all three had gone to first grade not at six but at five, all three always behaved in a responsible manner, all three had in our heads a dense network of advice useful for avoiding the traps of Naples and the world, all three could turn to our parents at any time to satisfy our curiosities, all three read a lot, and, finally, all three had a sensible disdain for consumer goods and the tastes of our contemporaries, even though, encouraged by our teachers, we were well informed about music, film, television programs, singers, and actors, and in secret wanted to become famous actresses with fabulous boyfriends with whom we shared long kisses and genital contact. Of course, the friendship between Angela and me was closer, since Ida was younger, but she could surprise us, and in fact read more than we did and wrote poems and stories. And so, as far as I remember, there were no conflicts between them and me, and if there were we could speak to each other frankly and make peace. So, considering them reliable witnesses, I questioned them cautiously a couple of times. But they didn’t say anything unpleasant: in fact, they seemed to appreciate me quite a bit, and for my part I thought they seemed to keep getting prettier. They were well proportioned, so carefully modeled that just the sight of them made me feel a need for their warmth, and I hugged and kissed them as if I wanted to fuse them to myself. But one night when I was feeling down they happened to come for dinner at San Giacomo dei Capri with their parents, and things got complicated. I wasn’t in a good mood. I felt especially out of place, gangling, lanky, pale, coarse in every word and gesture, and therefore ready to pick up allusions to my deterioration even when there weren’t any. For example Ida asked, pointing to my shoes:
“Are they new?”
“No, I’ve had them forever.”
“I don’t remember them.”
“What’s wrong with them.”
“Nothing.”
“If you noticed them now, it means that now something’s wrong.”
“No.”
“Are my legs too thin?”
We went on like that for a while, they reassuring me, I digging into their reassurances to find out if they were serious or hiding behind good manners the ugly impression I’d made. My mother intervened in her weary tone, saying: Giovanna, that’s enough, you don’t have skinny legs. I was ashamed and shut up immediately, while Costanza, Angela and Ida’s mother, emphasized, you have lovely ankles, and Mariano, their father, exclaimed, laughing: excellent thighs, they’d be delicious roasted with potatoes. He didn’t stop there, but kept teasing me, joking constantly—he was that person who thinks he can bring good cheer to a funeral.
“What’s wrong with this girl tonight?”
I shook my head to indicate that nothing was wrong, and tried to smile but couldn’t; his way of being funny made me nervous.
“Such nice hair, what is it, a sorghum broom?”
Again I shook my head no, and this time I couldn’t hide my annoyance, he was treating me as if I were a child of six.
“It’s a compliment, sweetheart: sorghum is a plump plant, part green, part red, and part black.”
I responded darkly:
“I’m not plump, or green, or red, or black.”
He stared at me in bewilderment, smiled, spoke to his daughters.
“Why is Giovanna so grim tonight?”
“I’m not grim.”
“Grim isn’t an insult, it’s the manifestation of a state of mind. You know what it means?”
I was silent. He again turned to his daughters, pretending to be despondent.
“She doesn’t know. Ida, you tell her.”
Ida said unwillingly: “That you have a scowl on your face. He says it to me, too.”
Mariano was that sort of person. He and my father had known each other since their university days, and because they’d stayed friends he had always been present in my life. A little heavy, completely bald, with blue eyes, he had impressed me since I was a small child because his face was too pale and slightly puffy. When he showed up at our house, which was often, he would talk with his friend for hours and hours, inserting into every sentence a bitter discontent that made me nervous. He taught history at the university and contributed regularly to a prestigious Neapolitan journal. He and Papa argued constantly, and even though we three girls understood little of what they were saying, we had grown up with the idea that they had assigned themselves a very difficult task that required study and concentration. But, unlike my father, Mariano didn’t merely study day and night, he also railed loudly against numerous enemies—people in Naples, Rome, and other cities—who wanted to prevent them from doing their work properly. Angela, Ida, and I, even if we weren’t able to state a position, were always for our parents and against those who didn’t like them. But, in the end, in all their discussions the only thing that had interested us since childhood was the bad words in dialect that Mariano uttered against people who were famous at the time. That was because the three of us—especially me—were not only forbidden to use swear words but also, more generally, to utter a syllable in Neapolitan. A useless ban. Our parents didn’t prohibit us from doing anything, but even when they did, they were indulgent. So, under our breath, just for fun, we repeated to each other the names and last names of Mariano’s enemies accompanied by the obscene epithets we had heard. But while Angela and Ida found that vocabulary of their father’s merely amusing, I couldn’t separate it from an impression of spite.
Wasn’t there always something malevolent in his jokes? Wasn’t there that evening as well? I was grim, I had a scowl on my face, I was a sorghum broom? Had Mariano merely been joking or, joking, had he cruelly spoken the truth? We sat down at the table. The adults started a tedious conversation about some friends or other who were planning to move to Rome, we suffered our boredom in silence, hoping that dinner would be over quickly so we could take refuge in my room. The whole time I had the impression that my father never laughed, my mother barely smiled, Mariano laughed a lot, and Costanza, his wife, not too much but heartily. Maybe my parents weren’t having fun like Angela and Ida’s because I had made them sad. Their friends were happy with their daughters, while they were no longer happy with me. I was grim, grim, grim, and just seeing me there at the table kept them from feeling happy. How serious my mother was and how pretty and happy Angela and Ida’s mother. My father was now pouring her some wine, he spoke to her with polite aloofness. Costanza taught Italian and Latin; her parents were very wealthy and had given her an excellent upbringing. She was so elegant that sometimes my mother seemed to be studying her, in order to imitate her, and, almost without realizing it, I did the same. How was it possible that that woman had chosen a husband like Mariano? The brilliance of her jewelry, the colors of her clothes, which always looked perfect, dazzled me. Just the night before I had dreamed that with the tip of her tongue she was lovingly licking my ear like a cat. And the dream had brought me comfort, a sort of physical well-being that for several hours after I woke up had made m
e feel safe.
Now, sitting at the table next to her, I hoped that her good influence would drive her husband’s words out of my head. Instead, they lasted for the whole dinner—I have hair that makes me look like a broom, I have a grim face—intensifying my nervousness. I went back and forth between wanting to have fun by whispering dirty expressions in Angela’s ear and a bad mood that wouldn’t go away. As soon as we finished dessert, we left our parents to their conversation and shut ourselves in my room. There I asked Ida, without turning around:
“Do I have a scowl on my face? Do you think I’m getting ugly?”
They looked at each other, they answered almost simultaneously:
“Not at all.”
“Tell the truth.”
I realized that they were hesitant, Angela decided to speak:
“A little, but not physically.”
“Physically you’re pretty,” Ida emphasized, “only you look a little bit ugly because you’re anxious.”
Angela said, kissing me:
“It happens to me, too. When I’m anxious I turn ugly, but then it goes away.”
7.
That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—Angela and Ida had said—and if the worries go away you can be pretty again. I wanted to believe that, and I made an effort to have untroubled days. But I couldn’t force myself to be calm, my mind would suddenly blur, and that obsession began again. I felt an increasing hostility toward everyone that was difficult to repress with false good humor. And I soon concluded that my worries were not at all transient, maybe they weren’t even worries but bad feelings that were spreading through my veins.
The Lying Life of Adults Page 2