The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  “How did Enzo die?”

  “Of a terrible illness.”

  “When?”

  “A few months after things ended between us.”

  “He died of grief?”

  “Yes, of grief. Your father made him get sick, your father who was the cause of our separation. He killed him.”

  I said:

  “And then why didn’t you get sick and die? Didn’t you feel the pain?”

  She stared me straight in the eyes, so that I immediately lowered my gaze.

  “I suffered, Giannì, I’m still suffering. But suffering didn’t kill me, first so that I would go on always thinking of Enzo; second, out of love for his children and also Margherita, because I am a good woman and I felt a duty to help her bring up those three kids, for whom I worked and work as a maid in the houses of the wealthy of half of Naples, from morning to night; third, out of hate, hate for your father, hate that makes you go on even when you don’t want to live any longer.”

  I pressed her:

  “How was it that Margherita wasn’t angry when you took her husband, but rather let you help her, you who’d stolen him from her?”

  She lighted a cigarette, inhaled deeply. While my father and mother didn’t blink in the face of my questions, but evaded them when they were embarrassed and sometimes consulted with each other before answering, Vittoria got irritated, cursed, displayed her impatience openly, but answered, explicitly, as no adult had ever done with me. You see I’m right, she said, you’re intelligent, an intelligent little slut like me, but also a bitch, you act like a saint but you like turning the knife in the wound. Steal her husband, exactly, you’re right, that’s what I did. Enzo I stole, I took him away from Margherita and the children, and I would have died rather than give him back. That, she exclaimed, is a terrible thing, but if love is very strong, sometimes you have to do it. You don’t choose, you realize that without the ugly things the good ones don’t exist, and you act that way because you can’t help it. As for Margherita, yes, she was angry, she took her husband back, screaming and hitting, but later when she realized that Enzo was sick, sick with an illness that had erupted inside in a few weeks of rage, she became depressed, she said to him go, go back to Vittoria, I’m sorry, if I’d known you’d get sick I would have sent you back to her before. But now it was too late, and so we went through his illness together, she and I, up to the last minute. What a person Margherita is, a wonderful woman, sensible, I’d like you to meet her. As soon as she understood how much I loved her husband, and how much I was suffering, she said: all right, we loved the same man, and I understand you, how could one not love Enzo. So enough, I had these children with Enzo, if you want to love them, too, I have nothing against it. Understand? Do you understand the generosity? Your father, your mother, their friends, all those important people, do they have this greatness, do they have this generosity?

  I didn’t know what to say, I murmured only:

  “I’ve ruined your anniversary, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to tell the story.”

  “You haven’t ruined anything, in fact you’ve made me happy. I’ve talked about Enzo, and whenever I talk about him I don’t remember only the grief, but also how happy we were.”

  “That’s what I want to know more about.”

  “The happiness?”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes became more inflamed.

  “You know what happens between men and women?”

  “Yes.”

  “You say yes but you know nothing. They fuck. You know that word?”

  I was startled.

  “Yes.”

  “Enzo and I did that thing eleven times altogether. Then he went back to his wife and I never did it again with anyone. Enzo kissed me and touched me and licked me all over, and I touched him and kissed him all the way to his toes and caressed him and licked and sucked. Then he put his dick inside me and held my ass with both hands, one here and one there, and he thrust it into me with such force that it made me cry out. If you, in all your life, don’t do this thing as I did it, with the passion I did it with, the love I did it with, and I don’t mean eleven times but at least once, it’s pointless to live. Tell your father: Vittoria said that if I don’t fuck the way she fucked with Enzo, it’s pointless for me to live. You have to say it just like that. He thinks he deprived me of something, with what he did to me. But he didn’t deprive me of anything, I’ve had everything, I have everything. It’s your father who has nothing.”

  Those words of hers I’ve never been able to erase. They came unexpectedly, I would never have imagined that she could say them to me. Of course, she treated me like an adult, and I was glad that from the start she had abandoned the proper way to speak to a girl of thirteen. But still, what she said was so surprising that I was tempted to put my hands over my ears. I didn’t, I didn’t move, I couldn’t even avoid her gaze, which sought in my face the effect of the words. It was, in short, physically—yes, physically—overwhelming, her speaking to me like that, there, in the cemetery, in front of the portrait of Enzo, without worrying that someone might hear her. Oh what a story, oh to learn to speak like that, outside of every convention of my house. Until that moment no one had displayed to me—just to me—an adherence to pleasure so desperately carnal, I was astounded. I had felt a warmth in my stomach much stronger than what I felt when Vittoria had made me dance. Nor was there anything comparable in the warmth of certain secret conversations I had with Angela, in the languor that some of our recent hugs provoked in me, when we locked ourselves in the bathroom of her house or mine. Listening to Vittoria, I not only desired the pleasure she said she had felt; it seemed to me that that pleasure would be impossible if it weren’t followed immediately by the grief that she still felt and by her unfailing fidelity. Since I said nothing, she gave me worried looks, muttered:

  “Let’s go, it’s late. But remember these things: did you like them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it: you and I are alike.”

  She stood up, refreshed, folded the chair, then stared for a moment at the bracelet with the blue leaves.

  “I gave you one,” she said, “much more beautiful.”

  6.

  Seeing Vittoria soon became a habit. My parents, surprising me—but maybe, if I think about it, completely consistent with their choices in life and the upbringing they had given me—didn’t reproach me either together or separately. They refrained from saying: you should have told us you had an appointment with Aunt Vittoria. They refrained from saying: you plotted to skip school and keep it secret from us, that’s bad, you behaved stupidly. They refrained from saying: the city is very dangerous, you can’t go around like that, at your age anything could happen. Above all, they refrained from saying: forget about that woman, you know she hates us, you are not to see her anymore. Instead, they did the opposite, especially my mother. They wanted to know if the morning had been interesting. They asked me what impression the cemetery had made. They smiled, amused, as soon as I started describing how badly Vittoria drove. Even when my father asked me—but almost absently—what we had talked about and I mentioned—but almost without intention—the fight about the inheritance of the house and Enzo, he didn’t get upset, he responded concisely: yes, we quarreled, I didn’t share her choices, it was clear that this Enzo wanted to get possession of our parents’ apartment, under the uniform he was a crook, he went so far as to threaten me with a pistol and then, to try to prevent my sister’s ruin, I had to tell his wife everything. As for my mother, she added only that her sister-in-law, despite her nasty character, was a naïve woman and rather than get angry one should feel sorry for her, because her naïveté had ruined her life. Anyway, she said later, when we were alone, your father and I trust you and your good sense, don’t disappoint me. And since I had just told her that I would like to know the other aunts and uncles Vittoria had mentioned, and po
ssibly my cousins, who must be my age, my mother sat me on her lap, said she was glad I was curious, and concluded: if you want to see Vittoria again go ahead, the crucial thing is that you tell us.

  We confronted the question of other possible meetings and I immediately assumed a cautious tone. I said that I had to study, that skipping school had been a mistake, that if I was really going to see my aunt, I would do it on Sundays. Naturally, I never mentioned how Vittoria had talked to me about her love for Enzo. I intuited that if I had reported just one of those words they would have gotten angry.

  A less anxious period began. At school things had improved in the last part of the year, I was promoted with a respectable average, and vacation began. In accordance with an old custom, we spent two weeks in July at the beach in Calabria with Mariano, Costanza, Angela, and Ida. And we also spent the first ten days of August with them at Villetta Barrea, in Abruzzo. The time flew by, and the new school year began. I was starting the first year of high school, not in the high school where my father taught or the one where my mother taught but at a school on the Vomero. Meanwhile my relationship with Vittoria didn’t fade but, rather, solidified. Already before the summer vacation, I’d begun to telephone her: I felt the need for her rough tone, I liked being treated as if I were her age. During our stay at the beach and in the mountains, I’d start talking about her as soon as Angela and Ida boasted about their rich grandparents and other wealthy relatives. And in September, with permission from my mother and father, I saw her a couple of times. Then, during the fall, since there were no particular tensions at my house, our meetings became a routine.

  At first, I thought that thanks to me there might be a rapprochement between the siblings, and I went so far as to convince myself that my task was to bring about a reconciliation. But that didn’t happen. Instead, a rite of extreme coldness was established. My mother drove me to her sister-in-law’s house, but she brought something to read or to correct and waited in the car; or Vittoria came to get me at San Giacomo dei Capri, but she didn’t knock at our door by surprise as she’d done the first time; I met her in the street. My aunt never said: ask your mother if she wants to come up, I’ll make her a coffee. My father was careful not to say: have her come up, sit a while, we’ll have a little chat and then you’ll go. Their mutual hatred remained intact, and I soon gave up any attempt at mediation. I began instead to say to myself explicitly that that hatred was an advantage for me: if my father and his sister made peace, my encounters with Vittoria wouldn’t be exclusive, I might be downgraded to niece, and certainly I would lose the role of friend, confidante, accomplice. Sometimes I felt that if they stopped hating each other I would do something to make them start again.

  7.

  Once, without any warning, my aunt brought me to meet her and my father’s other siblings. We went to see Uncle Nicola, who worked on the railroad. Vittoria called him the eldest brother, as if my father, who was the firstborn, had never existed. We went to see Aunt Anna and Aunt Rosetta, housewives. Aunt Anna was married to a printer at the newspaper Il Mattino, Aunt Rosetta to a postal worker. It was a sort of exploration of blood relations, and Vittoria herself, in dialect, said of that journey: we’re going to meet your blood. We traveled through Naples in the green Fiat 500, going first to Cavone, where Aunt Anna lived, then to the Campi Flegrei, where Uncle Nicola lived, then to Pozzuoli, to Aunt Rosetta.

  I realized that I barely remembered these relatives, maybe I had never actually known their names. I tried to hide it, but Vittoria noticed and immediately started saying mean things about my father, who had deprived me of the affection of people certainly without education, not smooth talkers, but warm-hearted. How important to her the heart was, coinciding in her gestures with her large breasts, which she struck with her broad hand and gnarled fingers. It was in those situations that she began to suggest to me: look at what we’re like and what your father and mother are like, then tell me. She insisted forcefully on that matter of looking. She said I had blinders like a horse, I looked but didn’t see the things that could disturb me. Look, look, look, she hammered into me.

  In fact, I let nothing escape me. Those relatives, their children a little older than me or my age, were a pleasant novelty. Vittoria flung me into their houses without warning, and yet aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews welcomed me with great familiarity, as if they knew me well and had been simply waiting, over the years, for my visit. The apartments were small, drab, furnished with objects that I had been brought up to judge crude if not vulgar. No books, only at Aunt Anna’s house did I see some mysteries. They all spoke to me in a cordial dialect mixed with Italian, and I made an effort to do the same, or at least I made room in my hypercorrect Italian for some Neapolitan cadences. No one mentioned my father, no one asked how he was, no one charged me with saying hello to him, evident signs of hostility, but they tried in every way to make me understand that they weren’t angry with me. They called me Giannina, as Vittoria did and as my parents never had. I loved them all, I had never felt so open to affection. And I was so relaxed and funny that I began to think that that name assigned to me by Vittoria—Giannina—had miraculously brought forth from my same body another person, more pleasant or anyway different from the Giovanna by which I was known to my parents, to Angela, to Ida, to my classmates. They were happy occasions for me, and I think also for Vittoria, who instead of displaying the aggressive sides of her character was, during those visits, good-natured. Above all, I noticed that brother, sisters, sister- and brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews treated her tenderly, as one does an unfortunate person one loves dearly. Uncle Nicola especially was kind to her, he remembered that she liked strawberry gelato and as soon as he discovered that I liked it, too, he sent one of his children to buy some for everyone. When we left, he kissed me on the forehead and said:

  “Luckily you’ve got nothing of your father in you.”

  I was learning to hide from my parents what was happening to me. Or, rather, I perfected my method of lying by telling the truth. Naturally I didn’t do it lightly, it pained me. When I was at home and heard them moving about the rooms with the familiar footsteps that I loved, when we had breakfast together, had lunch, dinner, my love for them prevailed, I was always on the point of crying: Papa, Mamma, you’re right, Vittoria hates you, she’s vengeful, she wants to take me away from you to hurt you, hold on to me, forbid me to see her. But as soon as they started with their hypercorrect sentences, with those controlled tones of theirs, as if truly every word concealed others, truer, from which they excluded me, I secretly called Vittoria, I made dates.

  By now only my mother questioned me politely about what happened.

  “Where did you go?”

  “To Uncle Nicola’s house, he says hello to you.”

  “How did he seem to you?”

  “A little dumb.”

  “Don’t talk like that about your uncle.”

  “He’s always laughing for no reason.”

  “Yes, I remember he does that.”

  “He’s not at all like Papa, not even a little.”

  “It’s true.”

  I was soon involved in another important visit. My aunt took me—as usual without warning—to see Margherita, who lived not far from her house. That whole area revived the agonies of childhood. The peeling walls upset me, the abandoned-looking low buildings, the gray-blue or yellowish colors, the fierce dogs that would chase the 500 for a stretch, barking, the smell of gas. Vittoria parked, she headed toward a wide courtyard surrounded by pale-blue buildings, went through a door, and only when she set off up the stairs turned to tell me: this is where Enzo’s wife and children live.

  We reached the third floor and instead of ringing—first surprise—Vittoria opened the door with her own key. She said aloud: it’s us, and there was immediately an enthusiastic shout in dialect—oh, I’m so glad—that announced the appearance of a small round woman, dressed all in black, with a beautiful
face that, along with her blue eyes, seemed drowned in a circle of rosy fat. She welcomed us to the dark kitchen, introduced me to her children, two boys over twenty, Tonino and Corrado, and a girl, Giuliana, who could have been eighteen. She was slender, very beautiful, dark, wearing a lot of eye makeup, her mother must have looked like that as a young woman. Tonino, too, the oldest, was handsome, he had an air of strength but seemed very shy, he turned red just shaking my hand and barely spoke a word to me. Corrado, the only expansive one, seemed identical to the man I had seen in the photo at the cemetery: the same wavy hair, same low forehead, same lively eyes, same smile. When I saw on a kitchen wall a photo of Enzo in his policeman’s uniform, his pistol at his side, a photo much bigger than the one in the cemetery—it was in an ornate frame and in front of it a red light was burning—and noticed that he had a long trunk and short legs, that son seemed to me a living ghost. I don’t know how many silly things he said to me, in a relaxed, charming way, a burst of ironic compliments, and I was amused, I was pleased that he made me the center of attention. But Margherita found him impolite, she murmured several times: Currà, you’re rude, leave the child alone, and ordered him in dialect to stop it. Corrado was silent, staring at me with bright eyes, while his mother fed me sweets, the lovely Giuliana, with her full figure and vivid colors, said a thousand flattering things in a shrill voice, and Tonino overwhelmed me with quiet courtesies.