The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

  During that visit both Margherita and Vittoria often glanced at the man in the frame. Just as frequently they mentioned him, in partial phrases such as: you know how amused Enzo would be, you know how angry he’d be, you know how much he would have liked. Probably for nearly twenty years they’d acted like that, a couple of women recalling the same man. I looked at them, studied them. I imagined Margherita young, resembling Giuliana, and Enzo like Corrado, and Vittoria with my face, and my father—even my father—as he was in the photo that was locked in the metal box, the one where in the background you could read RIA. Certainly, on those streets there had been a pasticceria, a salumeria, a sartoria—pastry shop, grocery, dressmaker’s, who knows—and they had been passed by and passed again and had even been photographed, maybe before the young predator Vittoria took away from the beautiful tender Margherita the husband with wolf-like teeth, or maybe even afterward, during their secret relationship, and then never again, when my father had been the informer, and there had been only pain and fury. But time had gone by. Now both my aunt and Margherita had a calm, quiet tone, and yet I couldn’t help thinking that the man in the photo must have clutched Margherita’s buttocks exactly as he had clutched my aunt’s when she stole him, with the same skilled force. The thought made me blush to the point where Corrado said: are you thinking of something nice, and I almost shouted no, but I couldn’t get rid of those visions, and I went on imagining that there, in the dark kitchen, the two women had told each other countless times, in detail, acts and words of the man they had shared, and that they must have struggled before finding a balance between good feelings and bad.

  Also that sharing of the children couldn’t have been entirely untroubled. Probably it wasn’t even now. I quickly noticed, in fact, at least three things: first, Corrado was Vittoria’s favorite and the other two were annoyed by that; second, Margherita was dominated by my aunt, she’d say something and then glance at her to see if she agreed, and if she didn’t Margherita took back what she’d said; third, all three children loved their mother, sometimes they seemed to protect her from Vittoria, and yet they had toward my aunt a sort of wary devotion, they respected her as if she were the tutelary divinity of their existence and they feared her. The nature of their relations became completely clear when, I don’t know how, it emerged that Tonino had a friend, Roberto, who had grown up there in Pascone and at around fifteen had moved to Milan with his family. But the young man would arrive this evening, and Tonino had invited him to sleep at their house. This made Margherita angry.

  “What were you thinking, where can we put him.”

  “I couldn’t say no.”

  “Why? Do you owe him something? What favor did he do you?”

  “None.”

  “So?”

  They argued for a while: Giuliana was on Tonino’s side, Corrado on his mother’s. All of them—I understood—had known Roberto for a long time; he and Tonino had been schoolmates, and Giuliana insisted passionately that he was a good, modest, very intelligent person. Only Corrado disliked him. He turned to me, correcting his sister:

  “Don’t believe it, he’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Wash your mouth out, when you talk about him,” Giuliana raged, while Tonino said aggressively:

  “Better than your friends.”

  “My friends will beat the shit out of him if he says things like he said the other time,” Corrado responded.

  There was a moment of silence. Margherita, Tonino, and Giuliana turned toward Vittoria, and even Corrado broke off with the expression of one who would like to eat his words. My aunt took another moment, then she intervened in a tone that I didn’t yet know, threatening and at the same time pained, as if her stomach hurt:

  “Who are these friends of yours, let’s hear.”

  “No one,” Corrado said with a nervous laugh.

  “Are you talking about the son of Sargente, the lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Are you talking about Rosario Sargente?”

  “I said no, it’s no one.”

  “Currà, you know I’ll break every bone in your body if you so much as say hello to that ‘no one.’ ”

  The atmosphere became so tense that Margherita, Tonino, and Giuliana seemed on the point of minimizing the conflict with Corrado themselves, just to protect him from my aunt’s anger. But Corrado wouldn’t give in, he went back to disparaging Roberto.

  “Anyway he’s gone to Milan and has no right to tell us how we should behave here.”

  Since her brother wouldn’t give in and so was being unfair to my aunt, too, Giuliana got angry again:

  “You’re the one who should shut up, I could listen to Roberto forever.”

  “Because you’re an idiot.”

  “That’s enough, Currà,” his mother reproached him. “Roberto is good as gold. But, Tonì, why does he have to sleep here?”

  “Because I invited him,” said Tonino.

  “So? Tell him you made a mistake, the house is small and there’s no room.”

  “Rather, tell him,” Corrado interrupted again, “that he shouldn’t show his face in the neighborhood, it’s better for him.”

  Tonino and Giuliana, exasperated, turned to Vittoria at the same time, as if it were up to her to settle the thing one way or another. And it struck me that Margherita herself turned to her as if to say: Vittò, what should I do? Vittoria said in a low tone: your mother is right, there’s no room, let’s say Corrado comes to sleep at my house. The eyes of Margherita, Tonino, Giuliana lighted up with gratitude. Corrado instead scowled, tried again to denigrate the guest, but my aunt hissed: quiet. The boy made a gesture of raising his arms in a sign of surrender, but reluctantly. Then, as if he knew he owed Vittoria a more palpable gesture of submission, he went up behind her and kissed her repeatedly, noisily, on the neck and on one cheek. She, sitting next to the kitchen table, acted annoyed, said in dialect: Holy Madonna, Currà, how clingy you are. Were those three young people in some way her blood, too, and therefore mine? I liked Tonino, Giuliana, Corrado, I also liked Margherita. What a pity to be the last to arrive, not to speak the language they spoke, not to have true intimacy.

  8.

  Vittoria, as if she had perceived that sense of estrangement, at times seemed to want to help me get over it, at others accentuated it purposely. Madonna, she’d exclaim, look, we have the same hands, and she’d put hers next to mine, and her thumb would bump against my thumb. That bump filled me with emotion, I would have liked to hug her tight, or stretch out next to her with my head on her shoulder, hear her breath, her rough voice. But, more often, as soon as I said something that seemed wrong to her, she chided me, saying, like father like daughter; or she made fun of the way my mother dressed me. You’re grown up, feel those tits you have, you can’t go out dressed like a little doll, you should rebel, Giannì, they’re ruining you. Then she started up her refrain: look at them, your parents, look at them carefully, don’t let them fool you.

  This was very important to her, and every time we met she insisted that I report to her how I’d spent my days. But since I stuck to generic information, she soon got annoyed, teased me cruelly, or laughed noisily, throwing open her big mouth. She was exasperated that all I told her was how much my father studied, how respected he was, that an article of his had been published in a famous journal, and that my mother adored him because he was so handsome and intelligent, that they were both so smart, and that my mother proofread and often rewrote love stories written just for women, she knew everything, she was really nice. You love them, Vittoria said angrily, bitterly, because they’re your parents, but if you can’t understand that they’re shitty people you’ll become shit like them and I won’t want to see you anymore.

  To please her, I once told her that my father had many voices and that he modulated them according to circumstances. He had the voice of affection, the imperious voice, the cold voice, all
of which spoke a beautiful Italian, but he also had the voice of contempt, which spoke Italian but sometimes dialect as well, and he used it with anyone who irritated him, especially dishonest shopkeepers, drivers who didn’t know how to drive, people who were rude. As for my mother, I said that she was somewhat dominated by a friend named Costanza, and at times was annoyed by Costanza’s husband, Mariano, a friend who was like a brother to my father but joked in a cruel way. Vittoria didn’t appreciate even those more specific confidences, though; on the contrary, she said they were gossip without substance. I discovered that she remembered Mariano, she called him an imbecile, anything but a friend who was like a brother. That phrase made her angry. Andrea, she said in a very harsh tone, doesn’t know the meaning of “brother.” I remember that we were in her house, in the kitchen, and outside, on the dreary street, it was raining. I must have had a forlorn expression, my eyes teared, and this, to my surprise, to my pleasure, softened her in a way that nothing had before. She smiled at me, she pulled me to her, sat me on her lap and kissed me hard on one cheek, nibbling at it. Then she whispered in dialect: sorry, I’m not angry with you but with your father; then she stuck a hand under my skirt and patted me lightly, again and again, with the palm of her hand, between my thigh and my bottom. She said in my ear, yet again: look at them carefully, your parents, otherwise you’re lost.

  9.

  The frequency of those sudden explosions of affection bursting out of a tonality that was almost always displeased increased and made her increasingly necessary to me. The dead time between our encounters passed unbearably slowly, and in the interval in which I didn’t see her or couldn’t telephone her I felt the need to talk about her. So I ended up by confiding even more in Angela and Ida, after demanding oaths of extreme secrecy. They were the only ones with whom I could boast of my relationship with my aunt, but at first they scarcely listened to me, they immediately wanted to tell me cute stories and anecdotes about their eccentric relatives. But they soon had to give in, there was no comparison between those relatives and Vittoria, who—as I told it—was completely outside their experience. Their aunts and cousins and grandmothers were wealthy ladies of the Vomero, Posillipo, Via Manzoni, Via Tasso. Whereas I placed my father’s sister imaginatively in a neighborhood of cemeteries, wastelands, fierce dogs, gas flares, skeletons of abandoned buildings, and I said: she had an unhappy and unique love, he died of grief, but she’ll love him forever.

  Once I confided to them in a very low voice: when Aunt Vittoria talks about how they loved each other, she uses “fuck,” she told me how much and how she and Enzo fucked. Angela was struck above all by that last point, she questioned me at length, and maybe I exaggerated my answers, I had Vittoria say things I’d fantasized myself for a long time. But I didn’t feel guilty, the substance was true, my aunt had talked to me like that. You don’t know—I said, becoming emotional—what a great friendship she and I have: we’re really close, she hugs me, kisses me, she’s always telling me we’re alike. I said nothing, naturally, about the fights she had had with my father, the arguments about the inheritance of a miserable apartment, about the betrayal that had come out of it—that all seemed too degrading. Instead, I told them about how after Enzo’s death, Margherita and Vittoria had lived in a spirit of admirable cooperation and had taken care of the children as if they had taken turns giving birth to them, first one, then the other. That image, I have to say, came to me by chance, but I expressed it even better in the later stories, to the point where I believed myself that both of them had made Tonino, Giuliana, and Corrado. Especially with Ida, almost without realizing it, I came close to giving the two women the capacity to fly through night skies or invent magic potions as they gathered enchanted herbs in the Capodimonte woods. Certainly, I told her that Vittoria talked to Enzo at the cemetery, and he gave her advice.

  “Do they talk the way you and I are talking?” Ida asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So he’s the one who wanted your aunt to be a second mamma to his children.”

  “For sure. He was a policeman, he could do what he wanted, he even had a pistol.”

  “It’s like my mamma and your mamma were mammas of all three of us?”

  “Yes.”

  Ida was distressed, but Angela was excited. The more I told and retold these stories, elaborating them, the more they exclaimed: how wonderful, they make me cry. Their interest increased in a particular way when I began to talk about how entertaining Corrado was, how beautiful Giuliana, the fascination of Tonino. I myself was amazed at the warmth with which I described Tonino. That I liked him was a discovery for me, too: at the time, he hadn’t made a great impression, in fact he had seemed to me the least substantial of the three. But I talked so much about him, I invented so well, that when Ida, the expert in novels, said to me: you’re in love, I admitted—mainly to see how Angela would react—that it was true, I loved him.

  So a situation was created in which my friends continuously asked me for new details about Vittoria, Tonino, Corrado, Giuliana, and their mother, and I didn’t have to be asked twice to provide them. Up to a certain point, everything went well. Then they started asking if they could meet at least Aunt Vittoria and Tonino. I immediately said no, it was something of mine, my invention, that as long as it lasted made me feel good: I had gone too far, the reality would be poor in comparison. And then I intuited that my parents’ approval was fake, already I was making a huge effort to keep things in balance. A wrong move would be enough—Mamma, Papa, can I take Angela and Ida to see Aunt Vittoria?—and in a flash bad feelings would ignite. But Angela and Ida were curious, they insisted. I was disoriented during that autumn, squeezed between the pressures of my friends and Vittoria’s. The former wanted to verify that the world I was entering really was more exciting than the one we lived in; the second seemed close to pushing me away from that world, from her, unless I admitted that I was on her side and not my father and mother’s. So I now felt colorless to my parents, colorless to Vittoria, not showing a truthful face to my friends. It was in that atmosphere that, almost without realizing it, I began seriously to spy on my parents.

  10.

  What I found out about my father was an unsuspected attachment to money. I caught him several times accusing my mother, in a low but insistent voice, of spending too much and on useless things. Otherwise, his life was the same as ever: school in the morning, study in the afternoon, meetings at night at our house or someone else’s. As for my mother, when it came to money I often heard her reply, also in a low voice: it’s money that I earn, I can spend some of it on myself. But the new fact was that although she had always had a blandly ironic attitude toward my father’s meetings, which, especially to tease Mariano, she called “plots to straighten out the world,” she suddenly began to take part in them, not only when they were held at our house but also, to the explicit annoyance of my father, when they were held at other people’s houses. So I often spent the evenings on the telephone with Angela or Vittoria.

  From Angela I learned that Costanza didn’t have the same curiosity as my mother about the meetings, and that even if they were at her house she preferred to go out or watch television or read. I ended up reporting to Vittoria—although with some uncertainty—both those fights about money and my mother’s sudden interest in my father’s evening activities. She unexpectedly praised me:

  “You finally realized how attached your father is to money.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was for money that he ruined my life.”

  I didn’t respond, I was just glad I’d finally found some information that satisfied her. She pressed me:

  “What does your mother buy?”

  “Clothes, underwear. And a lot of lotions.”

  “A real bitch,” she exclaimed, pleased.

  I understood that Vittoria required events and behaviors of that type, not only to confirm the fact that she was right and my father and mother wron
g but also as a sign that I was learning to look beyond appearances, to understand.

  That she was pleased by spying of that type basically encouraged me. I didn’t want to stop being their daughter, as she seemed to demand, the bond with my parents was strong and I dismissed the idea that my father’s attention to money or my mother’s small extravagances could make me not love them. The risk was rather that, wanting to gratify Vittoria and solidify the intimacy between us, and having nothing to recount, I would begin almost inadvertently to invent. But, luckily, the lies that came to mind were exaggerated, I attributed crimes so novelistic to my family that I restrained myself, I was afraid that Vittoria would say: you’re a liar. So I ended up looking for small real anomalies and inflating them slightly. But even then I was uneasy. I wasn’t a truly affectionate daughter and I wasn’t a truly loyal spy.

  One night we went to dinner at Mariano and Costanza’s house. As we drove down Via Cimarosa a mass of black clouds that extended fringelike fingers struck me as a bad omen. In my friends’ big apartment, I was immediately cold; the radiators weren’t working yet, and I kept on a wool jacket that my mother considered very elegant. Although at our hosts’ house there were always good things to eat—they had a silent maid who cooked very well, I looked at her and thought of Vittoria, who worked in apartments like this—I barely tasted the food because I was worried about getting the jacket dirty: my mother had told me to take it off. Ida, Angela, and I were bored; it took an eternity filled with Mariano’s chatter to get to dessert. Finally, the moment arrived to ask if we could leave the table, and Costanza allowed us to go. We went into the hall and sat on the floor. Ida began throwing a red rubber ball to annoy Angela and me, while Angela was asking me when I would let her meet my aunt. She was especially insistent, and said: