“I was joking when I said he liked me, Tonino never liked me.”
“I know, I asked him before saying yes, and he swore that he never liked you. He loved me from the moment he saw me, all he thinks about is me.”
Then, as if the distress behind the chatter had built up pressure and broken through the dam, she burst into tears, said sorry, and hung up.
How much we all cried, I couldn’t stand any more tears. In June my mother went to see what I had been up to in school and discovered that I hadn’t been promoted. She knew, of course, that I was doing very poorly, but failure seemed extreme to her. She wanted to talk to the teachers, she wanted to talk to the principal, she dragged me with her as if I were the proof that an injustice had been done. It was torture for both of us. The teachers had a hard time remembering me, but they showed the records of bad grades, they proved to her that I had had an excessive number of absences. She was upset, especially about the absences. She murmured: where did you go, what did you do. I said: I was at the Floridiana. This girl, the literature professor interrupted at one point, evidently has no talent for classical studies. I didn’t answer, but I would have liked to shout that, now that I was grown up, now that I was no longer a puppet, I didn’t feel I had a talent for anything: I wasn’t intelligent, I wasn’t capable of good intentions, I wasn’t pretty, I wasn’t even nice. My mother—too much eye makeup, too much powder on her cheeks, the skin on her face drawn, like a veil—answered for me: she has talent, she’s very talented, except this year she was a little lost.
As soon as we were outside she started blaming my father: it’s his fault, he left, he’s the one who should have been keeping an eye on you, helping and encouraging you. She continued at home, and since she didn’t know how to track down her guilty husband, the next day she looked for him at school. I don’t know what happened between them, but that night my mother said:
“We won’t tell anyone.”
“What?”
“That you weren’t promoted.”
I felt even more humiliated. I discovered that I wanted people to know, that failure, after all, was my only mark of distinction. I hoped that my mother would tell her colleagues at school, the people she corrected proofs and wrote for, and that my father—my father especially—would tell those who respected and loved him: Giovanna isn’t like me and her mother, she doesn’t learn, she doesn’t work hard, she’s ugly inside and out like her aunt, maybe she’ll go and live with her, in the Macello neighborhood, in the Industrial Zone.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it’s pointless to make a drama out of it, it’s just a small setback. You’ll repeat a year, you’ll study and become the best in the class. Agreed?”
“Yes,” I answered unwillingly and was about to go to my room, but she held me back.
“Wait, remember not to say anything, even to Angela and Ida.”
“Were they promoted?”
“Yes.”
“Did Papa ask you not to tell them?”
She didn’t answer, she bent over her work, she looked even thinner to me. I understood that they were ashamed of my failure, maybe it was the only feeling they still had in common.
3.
There were no vacations that summer, my mother didn’t take one, I don’t know about my father, we didn’t see him until the following year, in late winter, when she summoned him to ask him to make their separation legal. But that didn’t bother me, I spent the entire summer pretending not to notice that my mother was in despair. I remained indifferent even as she and my father began to discuss dividing their things and quarreled furiously when he started in with: Nella, I urgently need the notes that are in the first drawer of the desk, and my mother yelled that she would prevent him—forever, in any way—from taking from the house a single book, a notebook, even just the pen he usually used and the typewriter. Whereas I was hurt, humiliated by that order: don’t tell anyone you weren’t promoted. For the first time my parents seemed petty, just as Vittoria had painted them, and so I avoided, any way I could, talking to Angela and Ida or seeing them: I was afraid they would ask how I’d done in school or, I don’t know, how things were going in my second year of high school, when in reality I was repeating the first. I liked lying more and more, I felt now that praying and telling lies provided the same consolation. But having to resort to fabrication to keep my parents from being shamed, and to cover up the fact that I hadn’t inherited their abilities, wounded me, depressed me.
One time when Ida called I made my mother say I wasn’t there, even though in that phase of a lot of reading and even more movies I would have been happier to talk to her than to Angela. I preferred absolute isolation: if it had been possible, I wouldn’t have spoken even to my mother. At school now, I dressed and made myself up to look like a dissolute woman among respectable kids, and I kept everyone at a distance, even the teachers, who tolerated my sullen behavior only because my mother had found a way of letting them know that she, too, was a teacher. At home, when she wasn’t there, I played loud music and sometimes danced furiously. The neighbors frequently came to protest, but when they rang I didn’t open the door.
One afternoon when I was alone and letting loose, the doorbell rang. I looked through the peephole, sure that it was angry neighbors, and saw Corrado on the landing. I decided not to open the door even then, but I realized that he must have heard my footsteps in the hall. He stared into the eye of the peephole with his usual boldness, maybe he even heard my breath on the other side of the door, and his serious expression turned into a broad, reassuring smile. I remembered the photograph of his father I had seen at the cemetery, the one in which Vittoria’s lover was laughing with satisfaction, and I thought that they shouldn’t put pictures of the dead laughing in cemeteries, luckily Corrado’s smile was on a living person. I let him in mainly because my parents had always ordered me not to let anyone in in their absence, and I didn’t regret it. He stayed for an hour, and for the first time since that long crisis began a lightheartedness came over me that I’d thought was no longer possible.
When I met Margherita’s children, I had appreciated Tonino’s self-possession, the beautiful Giuliana’s lively responses, but Corrado’s somewhat spiteful talk annoyed me, the way he ridiculed everyone, even Aunt Vittoria, with cracks that weren’t funny. That afternoon, instead, no matter what came out of his mouth—in general unquestionably stupid—I bent over laughing, with tears in my eyes. It was something new that later became a characteristic of mine: I begin with a laugh made out of nothing and then I can’t stop, laughter turns into giggles. That afternoon the culmination was the word “dimwit.” I had never heard the word and when he said it I thought it was funny and burst out laughing. Corrado realized it and with his Italianized dialect began saying it continuously—that dimwit, this dimwit—to denigrate sometimes his brother Tonino, sometimes his sister Giuliana, while my laughter satisfied and incited him. Tonino, in his view, was a dimwit because he was going out with my friend Angela who was even more of a dimwit. He asked his brother: have you kissed her? Sometimes. And do you feel her up? No, because I respect her. You respect her? So you’re a dimwit, only a dimwit gets a girlfriend and then respects her, why the fuck do you have a girlfriend if you’re gonna respect her? You’ll see, if Angela’s not a dimmer dimwit than you, she’ll say: Tonì, please, don’t respect me anymore or I’ll leave you. Ha ha ha.
I had so much fun that afternoon. I liked the casual way Corrado talked about sex, I liked the way he mocked the relationship between his brother and Angela. He seemed to know a lot, through direct experience, of what goes on between boyfriend and girlfriend, and every so often he’d mention the dialect word for some sexual practice and in dialect explain to me what it meant. Even if I didn’t understand very well because I hadn’t really mastered that vocabulary, I let out prudent, constricted little laughs, to then laugh wholeheartedly only when, one way or other, he went back t
o saying dimwit again.
He was incapable of distinguishing between serious and facetious, everything about sex seemed comic to him. I understood that for him kissing was funny but also not kissing, touching but also not touching. Funniest of all, according to him, were his sister Giuliana and Roberto, Tonino’s very intelligent friend. Those two, who had loved each other since they were little without telling each other, had finally got engaged. Giuliana was madly in love with Roberto, for her he was the handsomest, most intelligent, most courageous, most just, and furthermore he believed in God much more than Jesus Christ did, even though Jesus was God’s son. All the sanctimonious types of Pascone not to mention the ones in Milan, the city where Roberto had studied, were of the same opinion as Giuliana, but, Corrado told me, there were also many other people with a head on their shoulders who didn’t share all that enthusiasm. Among those, he and his friends had to be included, for example Rosario, the guy with the buck teeth.
“Maybe you’re all wrong, maybe Giuliana’s right,” I said.
He took a serious tone, but I immediately realized it was fake.
“You don’t know Roberto, but you know Giuliana, you were at the parish church and you saw the dances they do, Vittoria playing the accordion, the sort of people who are there. So you tell me: do you trust what they think or what I think?”
I was already laughing, I said:
“What you think.”
“And so in your opinion, objectively, what is Roberto?”
“A dimwit,” I almost shouted, and laughed uncontrollably, by now the muscles of my face hurt from laughing.
The more we talked that way, the more intense became a pleasant sense of breaking the rules. I had let into the empty house that kid who had to be at least six or seven years older than me, I had agreed to joke around with him, for almost an hour, about sexual things. Gradually, I felt ready for every other possible transgression, and he guessed it, his eyes sparkled, he said: you want to see something. I shook my head no, but laughing, and Corrado laughed, too, pulled down his zipper, murmured, give me your hand and I’ll let you touch it. But since I was laughing and didn’t give him my hand, he took it, politely. Squeeze, he said, no, that’s too hard, good, like that, you’ve never touched the dimwit, right. He said it just to make me giggle again, and I laughed, I whispered, That’s enough, my mother might come back, and he replied: We’ll let her touch it, too, the dimwit. Oh how we laughed, it seemed to me so ridiculous to hold that thick, rigid thingy in my hand, I pulled it out myself, I thought, he hasn’t even kissed me. I thought it while he said to me: put it in your mouth, and I would even have done that, just then I would have done anything he asked me merely to laugh, but from his pants came a strong toilet odor that disgusted me, and at the same time he said suddenly, that’s enough, took it out of my hand, and stuck it back in his underpants, with a hoarse groan that unnerved me. I saw him sink back against the chair for a few seconds, eyes closed, then he shook himself, pulled up his zipper, jumped to his feet, looked at the clock, and said:
“I have to run, Giannì, but we had so much fun we have to see each other again.”
“My mother doesn’t let me go out, I have to study.”
“It’s pointless for you to study, you’re already smart.”
“I’m not smart, I failed, I’m repeating the year.”
He looked at me in disbelief.
“Come on, that’s impossible. I never flunked and they flunk you? That’s not fair, you should rebel. You know, I really wasn’t cut out for school. They gave me a machinist’s diploma because I’m a nice guy.”
“You’re not a nice guy, you’re an idiot.”
“You’re saying you had fun with an idiot?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re an idiot, too?”
“Yes.”
Only when he was already on the landing did Corrado tap himself on the forehead and exclaim: I was about to forget something important, and he pulled out of his pants pocket a worn envelope. He said that was what he had come for, Vittoria sent it to me. Luckily, he had remembered, if he had forgotten it my aunt would have shrieked like a frog. He said frog to make me laugh at a senseless comparison, but this time I didn’t. As soon as he gave me the envelope and disappeared down the stairs, my anguish returned.
The envelope, all creased and dirty, was sealed. I opened it in a hurry, before my mother came home. It was only a few lines, and still there were a lot of spelling mistakes. Vittoria said that since I had not kept in touch with her, since I didn’t answer the phone, I had proved that, exactly like my father and mother, I was incapable of feeling affection for my relatives, and therefore I should give back the bracelet. She would send Corrado to get it.
4.
I began to wear the bracelet again for two reasons: first, since Vittoria wanted it back, I wanted to show it off in class at least for a while and let it be understood that my situation as a repeater said nothing about the girl I was; second, because my father, as the separation approached, was trying to re-establish contact with me, and when he appeared at school I wanted him to see it on my wrist to let him understand that, if he ever invited me to Costanza’s house, I would certainly wear it. But neither my classmates nor my father seemed to notice, the first out of envy, the second because simply mentioning it probably embarrassed him.
My father generally showed up outside school with a friendly manner, and we went together to eat panzarotti and pastacresciuta in a shop not far from the funicular. He asked me about my teachers, my classes, my grades, but I had the impression that the answers didn’t interest him, even if he put on an attentive expression. Besides, that subject was quickly exhausted, he didn’t go on to anything else, I didn’t venture questions about his new life, and we ended up in silence.
The silence saddened me, irritated me; I felt that my father was giving up on being my father. He looked at me when he thought I was distracted and didn’t notice, but I did notice and felt that his gaze was bewildered, as if he had trouble recognizing me, all in black from head to toe, with heavy makeup; or maybe as if I had become too well known to him, better known than when I had been his beloved daughter—he knew that I was two-faced and devious. When we got to the house, he became cordial again, kissed me on the forehead, said: say hello to Mamma. I waved goodbye again and, as soon as the door closed behind me, imagined despondently that he was relieved, accelerating noisily as he departed.
Often, on the stairs or in the elevator, I started singing to myself some Neapolitan songs that I hated. I pretended to be a singer, I bared my neck and shoulders slightly and halfheartedly repeated lines that seemed especially absurd to me. On the landing, I would compose myself, open the door with the key, and, going in, find my mother, who, in turn, had just come home from school.
“Papa says hello.”
“Good for him. Have you eaten?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Panzarotti and pastacresciuta.”
“Tell him, please, that you can’t always eat panzarotti and pastacresciuta. Apart from anything else, they’re bad for him, too.”
The sincere tone of that last phrase and similar ones that occasionally escaped her surprised me. After the long period of despair something in her was changing, maybe the substance itself of the despair. By now she was skin and bones, she smoked more than Vittoria, her shoulders were increasingly rounded, and when she sat at her work she looked like a hook cast to catch some sort of elusive fish. And yet, for some time now, instead of worrying about herself she’d seemed worried about her ex-husband. Sometimes I was convinced that she considered him near death or even already dead, though no one realized it yet. Not that she had stopped blaming him in every possible way, but she mixed bitterness with apprehension, she hated him and yet seemed to fear that outside her guardianship he would soon lose his health and his life. I didn’t know what to do. Her p
hysical appearance concerned me, but the progressive loss of any other interest that wasn’t the time spent with her husband made me angry. When I skimmed the stories she corrected and often rewrote there was always an extraordinary man who for one reason or another had died. And if a friend came by the house—in general teachers from the high school where she taught—I often heard her say things like: my ex-husband has many faults, but on this matter he is absolutely right, he says that, he thinks this. She quoted him frequently and with respect. But not only that. When she discovered that my father had begun to write with some frequency for Unità, she who generally bought the Repubblica went to buy that paper, too, and showed me the byline, marked certain sentences, cut out the articles. I thought that if a man had done to me what he had done to her, I would bash in his chest and tear out his heart, and I was sure that she, too, in all that time, must have dreamed of such destruction. But now, increasingly, a bitter sarcasm alternated with a quiet cult of memory. One evening I found her putting the family photos in order, including the ones she kept shut in the metal box. She said:
“Come look at this, look how handsome your father is here.”
She showed me a black-and-white snapshot I’d never seen, although earlier I had rummaged everywhere. She had pulled it out of the Italian dictionary she’d had since high school, a place where it would never have occurred to me to look for pictures. My father must not have known about it, either, since in it, not blotted out, was Vittoria when she was still a girl and who else but—I recognized him immediately—Enzo. There was more: between my father and my aunt on one side, and Enzo on the other, a tiny woman was sitting in a chair, not yet old but not young, with an expression that to me looked harsh. I murmured:
“Here Papa and Aunt Vittoria look happy, look how she’s smiling at him.”
The Lying Life of Adults Page 13