The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  10.

  I moved a few steps away from the telephone just as he came in, after setting the dripping umbrella on the landing, after carefully wiping the soles of his shoes on the mat. He greeted me but uneasily, without the usual cheerfulness, in fact cursing the bad weather. Only after taking off his raincoat did he concern himself with me.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Mamma?”

  “She’s working.”

  “Did you do your homework?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything you didn’t understand and want me to explain?”

  When he stopped next to the telephone to listen to the answering machine, as he usually did, I realized that I had left the address book open to the letter “T.” He saw it, he ran a finger over it, closed it, stopped listening to the messages. I hoped he would resort to some joking remark, which would have reassured me. Instead, he caressed my head with the tips of his fingers and went to my mother. Contrary to his usual practice, he closed the door behind him carefully.

  I waited, listening to them discuss in low voices, a hum with sudden peaks of single syllables: you, no, but. I went back to my room, but I left the door open, I hoped they weren’t fighting. At least ten minutes passed, finally I heard my father’s footsteps again in the hall, but not in the direction of my room. He went to his, where there was another telephone, and I heard him telephoning in a low voice, a few indistinguishable words and long pauses. I thought—I hoped—that he had serious problems with Mariano, that he must be discussing the usual things that were important to him, words I’d heard forever, like politics, value, Marxism, crisis, state. When the phone call ended, I heard him in the hall again, but this time he came to my room. In general he would go through innumerable ironic formalities before entering: may I come in, where can I sit, am I bothering you, sorry, but on that occasion he sat down on the bed and without preliminaries said in his coldest voice:

  “Your mother has explained to you that I wasn’t serious, I didn’t mean to hurt you, you don’t resemble my sister in the least.”

  I immediately started crying again, I stammered: it’s not that, Papa, I know, I believe you, but. He didn’t seem moved by my tears, he interrupted me, saying:

  “You don’t have to explain. It’s my fault, not yours, it’s up to me to fix it. I just telephoned your aunt—Sunday I’ll take you to see her. All right?”

  I sobbed:

  “If you don’t want to, let’s not go.”

  “Of course I don’t want to, but you do and we’ll go. I’ll drop you off at her house, you’ll stay as long as you want, I’ll wait outside in the car.”

  I tried to calm down, I stifled my tears.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  We were quiet for a moment, then he made an effort to smile at me, he dried my tears with his fingers. But he couldn’t do it unaffectedly, he slid into one of his long, agitated speeches, mixing high and low tones. Remember this, Giovanna, he said. Your aunt likes to hurt me. I’ve tried in every way to reason with her, I helped her, I encouraged her, I gave her as much money as I could. It was useless, she’s taken every word of mine as bullying, every kind of help she has considered a wrong. She’s proud, she’s ungrateful, she’s cruel. So I have to tell you this: she will try to take your affection away from me, she’ll use you to wound me. She’s already used our parents that way, our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles and cousins. Because of her, nobody in our family loves me. And you’ll see that she’ll try to get you, too. That possibility—he said, tense as I had almost never seen him—is intolerable to me. And he begged me—he really begged me, he joined his hands and waved them back and forth—to calm my anxieties, anxieties with no basis, but not to listen to her, to put wax in my ears like Odysseus.

  I hugged him tight, as I hadn’t in the past two years, ever since I’d wanted to feel grown up. But to my surprise, to my annoyance, I smelled on him an odor that didn’t seem like his, an odor I wasn’t used to. It gave me a sense of estrangement that provoked suffering mixed incongruously with satisfaction. It was clear to me that though until that moment I had hoped that his protection would last forever, now, instead, I felt pleasure at the idea that he was becoming a stranger. I was euphoric, as if the possibility of evil—what he and my mother in their couple’s language claimed to call Vittoria—gave me an unexpected exuberance.

  11.

  I pushed that feeling away, I couldn’t bear the guilt. I counted the days that separated me from Sunday. My mother was attentive, she wanted to help me get as much homework done for Monday as possible so that I could face the encounter without the worry of having to study. And she didn’t confine herself to that. One afternoon she came into my room with the street atlas, sat down beside me, showed me Via San Giacomo dei Capri and, page by page, the whole journey to Aunt Vittoria’s house. She wanted me to understand that she loved me and that she, like my father, only wanted me to be happy.

  But I wasn’t satisfied with that small topographical lesson and in the days that followed devoted myself secretly to maps of the city. I moved with my index finger along San Giacomo dei Capri, reached Piazza Medaglie d’Oro, descended by Via Suarez and Via Salvator Rosa, reached Museo, traversed all of Via Foria to Piazza Carlo III, turned onto Corso Garibaldi, took Via Casanova, reached Piazza Nazionale, turned onto Via Poggioreale, then Via della Stadera, and, at the Pianto cemetery, slid along Via Miraglia, Via del Macello, Via del Pascone and so on, with my finger veering into the Industrial Zone, the color of scorched earth. All those street names, and others, became in those hours a silent mania. I learned them by heart as if for school, but not unwillingly, and I waited for Sunday with increasing agitation. If my father didn’t change his mind, I would finally meet Aunt Vittoria.

  But I hadn’t reckoned with the tangle of my feelings. As the days laboriously passed, I surprised myself by hoping—especially at night, in bed—that for some reason the visit would be postponed. I began to wonder why I had forced my parents in that way, why I had wanted to make them unhappy, why I hadn’t considered their worries important. Since all the answers were vague, the yearning began to diminish, and meeting Aunt Vittoria soon seemed to me a request both extravagant and pointless. What use would it be to know in advance the physical and moral form that I would likely assume. I wouldn’t be able to get rid of the face or the chest anyway, and maybe I wouldn’t even want to, I would still be me, a melancholy me, an unfortunate me, but me. That wish to know my aunt should probably be inserted into the category of small challenges. In the end, wasn’t it ultimately just another way to test my parents’ patience, as I did when we went to a restaurant with Mariano and Costanza and I always ended up ordering, with the attitude of an experienced woman, and charming little smiles addressed mainly to Costanza, what my mother had advised me not to order because it cost too much. I then became even more unhappy with myself, maybe this time I had overdone it. The words my mother had used when she told me about her sister-in-law’s hatreds returned to mind, I thought again of my father’s worried speech. In the dark, their aversion for that woman was added to the fear instilled by her voice on the telephone, that fierce “hello” with its dialectal cadence. So Saturday night I said to my mother: I don’t feel like going anymore, this morning I got a lot of homework for Monday. But she answered: now the appointment is set, you don’t know how angry your aunt will be if you don’t go, she’d blame your father. And since I wasn’t convinced, she said that I had already fantasized too much, and even if I backed off now, the next day I would have second thoughts and we’d be right where we started. She concluded, with a smile: go and see what and who Aunt Vittoria is, so you’ll do all you can not to be like her.

  After days of rain, Sunday was beautiful, with a blue sky and occasional little white clouds. My father made an effort to return to our usual lighthearted relationship
, but when he started the car he became silent. He hated the ring road and got off it quickly. He said he preferred the old streets, and as we made our way into another city, made up of rows of small bleak apartment buildings, faded walls, industrial warehouses and sheds, gashes of green overflowing with garbage of every sort, deep puddles filled by the recent rain, putrid air, he became increasingly somber. But then he seemed to decide that he couldn’t leave me in silence, as if he had forgotten about me, and for the first time mentioned his origins. I was born and grew up in this neighborhood here—he said with a broad gesture that embraced, beyond the windshield, walls of tufa, gray, yellow, and pink apartment buildings—my family was poor, we didn’t even have two cents to rub together. Then he drove into an even bleaker neighborhood, stopped, sighed with irritation, pointed to a brick building whose façade was missing large patches of plaster. Here’s where I lived, he said, and where Aunt Vittoria still lives. I looked at him, frightened; he noticed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t go.”

  “I won’t move.”

  “What if she keeps me?”

  “When you’re tired, you’ll say: I have to go now.”

  “What if she doesn’t let me go?”

  “I’ll come and get you.”

  “No, don’t, I’ll come.”

  “All right.”

  I got out of the car, went through the entrance. There was a strong odor of garbage mixed with the aroma of Sunday sauces. I didn’t see an elevator. I climbed up uneven, broken steps, beside walls showing broad white wounds, one so deep it seemed like a hole dug out to hide something. I avoided deciphering obscene sayings and drawings. I had other urgencies. My father had been a child and a boy in this building? I counted the floors, on the third I stopped, there were three doors. The one on my right was the only one that displayed a surname, and pasted to the wood was a strip of paper on which was written in pen: Trada. I rang the bell, held my breath. Nothing. I counted slowly to forty: my father had told me some years earlier that whenever you’re in a state of uncertainty you should do that. When I got to forty-one I rang again, the second electrical charge seemed exaggeratedly loud. A shout in dialect reached me, an explosion of hoarse sounds, and goddammit, what’s the hurry, I’m coming. Then decisive steps, a key that turned four times in the lock. The door opened, a woman dressed all in blue appeared, tall, with a great mass of very black hair arranged on her neck, as thin as a post, and yet with broad shoulders and a large chest. She held a lighted cigarette between her fingers, she coughed and said, moving back and forth between Italian and dialect:

  “What’s the matter, you’re sick, you have to pee?”

  “No.”

  “So why’d you ring twice?”

  I murmured:

  “I’m Giovanna, aunt.”

  “I know you’re Giovanna, but if you call me aunt again, you’d better turn right around and get out of here.”

  I nodded yes, I was frightened. I looked for a few seconds at her face, without makeup, then stared at the floor. Vittoria seemed to me to have a beauty so unbearable that to consider her ugly became a necessity.

  II

  1.

  I learned to lie to my parents more and more. At first I didn’t tell real lies, but since I wasn’t strong enough to oppose their always well-ordered world, I pretended to accept it while at the same time I cut out for myself a narrow path that I could abandon in a hurry if they merely darkened. I behaved like that especially with my father, even though his every word had in my eyes a dazzling authority, and it was exhausting and painful to try to deceive him.

  It was he who, even more than my mother, hammered into my head that you shouldn’t ever lie. But after that visit to Vittoria lying seemed unavoidable. As soon as I came out of the entrance door I decided to pretend that I was relieved, and I ran to the car as if I had escaped a danger. When I got in, my father started the car, glancing bitterly at the building of his childhood, and pulled away too suddenly, which caused him instinctively to extend an arm to keep me from hitting my forehead against the windshield. He waited for me to say something soothing, and a part of me wanted nothing more, I suffered seeing him upset; yet I was obliged to be silent, I was afraid that even a wrong word would make him angry. After a few minutes, keeping one eye on the street, one on me, he asked how it had gone. I said that my aunt had questioned me about school, had offered me a glass of water, had wanted to know if I had friends, had had me tell her about Angela and Ida.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she ask about me?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “About your mother?”

  “Not her, either.”

  “For a whole hour you talked only about your friends?”

  “Also about school.”

  “What was that music?”

  “What music?”

  “Music at a very high volume.”

  “I didn’t hear any music.”

  “Was she nice?”

  “A little rude.”

  “Did she say nasty things?”

  “No, but she’s not very nice.”

  “I warned you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is your curiosity satisfied now? Do you realize she doesn’t look like you at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come here, give me a kiss, you’re beautiful. Do you forgive me for the stupid thing I said?”

  I said I had never been mad at him and let him give me a kiss on the cheek even though he was driving. But immediately afterward I pushed him away laughing, I protested: you scratched me with your beard. Although I had no desire for our games, I hoped we would start joking around and he would forget about Vittoria. Instead he replied: think of how your aunt scratches with her mustache, and what immediately came to mind was not the faint dark down on Vittoria’s lip but the down on mine. I said softly:

  “She doesn’t have a mustache.”

  “She does.”

  “No.”

  “All right, she doesn’t. The last thing we need is for you to get an urge to go back and see if she has a mustache.”

  I said seriously:

  “I don’t want to see her again.”

  2.

  That wasn’t a lie, either, I was scared to see Vittoria again. But already as I uttered that sentence I knew on what day, at what hour, in what place I would see her again. In fact, I hadn’t parted from her, I had her every word in my head, every gesture, every expression of her face, and they didn’t seem things that had just happened, it all seemed to be still happening. My father kept talking, to show me how much he loved me, while I saw and heard his sister, I hear and see her even now. I see her when she appeared before me dressed in sky blue, I see her when she said to me in that rough dialect: close the door, and had already turned her back, as if all I could do was follow her. In Vittoria’s voice, or perhaps in her whole body, there was an impatience without filters that hit me in a flash, as when, holding a match, I turned on the gas and felt on my hand the flame shooting out of the burner. I closed the door behind me, I followed her as if she had me on a leash.

  We took a few steps into a place that smelled of smoke, without windows, the only light coming from an open door. Her figure moved out of sight beyond the door, I followed her into a small kitchen whose extreme orderliness struck me immediately, along with the smell of cigarette butts and filth.

  “You want some orange juice?”

  “I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “You want it or not?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She ordered me to a chair, changed her mind, saying it was broken, ordered me to another. Then, to my surprise, she didn’t take out of the refrigerator—a yellowish-white refrigerator—an orange drink in a
can or a bottle, as I expected, but picked out from a basket a couple of oranges, cut them, and began to squeeze them into a glass, without a squeezer, by hand, with the help of a fork. Without looking at me she said:

  “You didn’t wear the bracelet.”

  I got nervous:

  “What bracelet?”

  “The one I gave you when you were born.”

  As far as I could remember, I had never had a bracelet. But I sensed that for her it was an important object and my not having worn it could be an affront. I said:

  “Maybe my mother had me wear it when I was little, until I was one or two, then I grew up and it didn’t fit anymore.”

  She turned to look at me, I showed her my wrist to prove that it was too big for a newborn’s bracelet, and to my surprise she burst out laughing. She had a big mouth with big teeth, and when she laughed her gums showed. She said:

  “You’re smart.”

  “I told the truth.”

  “Do I scare you?”

  “A little.”

  “It’s good to be afraid. You need to be afraid even when there’s no need, it keeps you alert.”