“Yes.”
“And this is Enzo, the criminal cop.”
“Yes.”
“And here he and Papa aren’t mad at each other.”
“No, at first they were friends, Enzo used to visit the family.”
“Who’s that lady?”
“Your grandmother.”
“What was she like?”
“Odious.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t love your father, so she didn’t like me, either. She never even wanted to speak to me, or see me, I was always the one who wasn’t part of the family, a stranger. Imagine, she preferred Enzo to your father.”
I examined the picture attentively, I felt a pang. I grabbed a magnifying glass from the pen holder and used it to enlarge the right wrist of my father and Vittoria’s mother.
“Look,” I said, offering her the lens, “grandmother is wearing my bracelet.”
She didn’t take the lens, she bent over the picture in her fishhook-like pose, shook her head, muttered:
“I never noticed.”
“I saw it right away.”
She grimaced with irritation.
“Yes, you saw it right away. While I showed you your father and you didn’t even look at him.”
“I looked and he doesn’t seem so handsome as you say.”
“He’s very handsome, you’re still young and you don’t understand how handsome a very intelligent man can be.”
“I understand perfectly well. But here he looks like Aunt Vittoria’s twin brother.”
My mother accentuated her weary tone.
“Look, he left me, not you.”
“He left both of us, I hate him.”
She shook her head.
“It’s up to me to hate him.”
“Me, too.”
“No, you’re angry now and you’re saying things you don’t think. But in essence he’s a good man. He seems like a lying traitor, but he’s honest and in a certain sense even faithful. His true great love is Costanza, he has stayed with her all these years, and he’ll stay with her until death. The point is, she’s the one he wanted to give his mother’s bracelet to.”
5.
My discovery hurt us both, but we reacted in different ways. Who knows how many times my mother had leafed through that dictionary, how many times she had looked at that image, and yet had never noticed that the bracelet that Mariano’s wife had shown off for years, that she had for years considered a refined object she would have liked to possess, was the same that showed up on the arm of her mother-in-law in that photo. In the image fixed in black and white she had seen only my father when he was a young man. There she had recognized the reasons she loved him and so had kept the photo in the dictionary like a flower that, even when it dries, reminds us of the moment it was given to us. She had never paid attention to the rest and so, when I showed her the bracelet, she must have suffered terribly. But she suffered without letting me see it, controlling her reactions and trying to blur my inopportune gaze with sentimental or nostalgic little speeches. My father good, honest, faithful? Costanza the great love, the true wife? My grandmother who preferred Enzo, the seducer of Vittoria, to her own son? She improvised many stories of that type and jumping from one to the next slowly returned to take shelter in the cult of her ex-husband. Of course, today I can say that if she hadn’t in some way filled the void he left she would have fallen into it and died. But in my eyes the way she had chosen was the more offensive one.
As for me, the picture gave me the audacity to think that I wouldn’t return the bracelet to Vittoria for any reason. The rationales I proposed were very messy. It’s mine, I said to myself, because it was my grandmother’s. It’s mine, I said to myself, because Vittoria appropriated it for herself against my father’s will, because my father appropriated it for himself against Vittoria’s will. It’s mine, I said to myself, because it’s owed to me, it’s owed to me whether Vittoria really gave it to me or whether that’s a lie and my father took it to give to a stranger. It’s mine, I said to myself, because that stranger, Costanza, gave it back to me, and so it’s not right for my aunt to claim it. It’s mine, I concluded, because I recognized it in the picture and my mother didn’t, because I can look pain in the face and endure it and also cause it, while she can’t. I feel sorry for her, she’s not even able to become Mariano’s lover, she doesn’t know how to have fun, she wastes her energy on stupid pages in books for people like her.
I wasn’t like her. I was like Vittoria and my father, who in that picture were physically very similar. So I wrote a letter to my aunt. It came out much longer than the one she had written me, I listed the entire jumble of reasons that I wanted to keep the bracelet. Then I put the letter in the backpack where I carried my schoolbooks and waited for the day when Corrado or Vittoria would reappear.
6.
To my surprise, however, it was Costanza who showed up outside school. I hadn’t seen her since the morning when, compelled by my mother, she had brought me the bracelet. She looked even more beautiful than before, even more elegant, with a faint perfume that my mother had used for years but no longer did. The only detail I didn’t like: her eyes were swollen. She said to me in her husky, seductive voice that she wanted to take me to a little family party, her daughters and I: my father was busy at school for most of the afternoon, but he had called my mother, and she had given her consent.
“Where?” I asked.
“At my house.”
“Why?”
“You don’t remember? It’s Ida’s birthday.”
“I have a lot of homework.”
“Tomorrow is Sunday.”
“I hate studying on Sunday.”
“You’re not willing to make a small sacrifice? Ida always talks about you, she really loves you.”
I gave in, I got in the car, perfumed as much as she was, and we drove toward Posillipo. She asked me about school, and I was very careful not to say that I was still in the first year of high school, even though I didn’t know what they studied in the second, and since she was a teacher I was afraid of making a mistake with every answer. I avoided asking her about Angela, and Costanza right away began to tell me how sorry her daughters were that we didn’t see one another anymore. She said that Angela had dreamed about me recently, a dream in which she lost a shoe and I found it for her or something like that. While she talked I fiddled with the bracelet, I wanted her to notice that I was wearing it. Then I said: it’s not our fault if we don’t see each other anymore. As soon as I said those words, Costanza lost her cordial tone, she muttered: you’re right, it’s not your fault, and stopped talking, as if she had decided that because of the traffic she had to concentrate on driving. But she couldn’t contain herself and added suddenly: don’t think that it’s your father’s fault, there’s no fault in what happened, one does harm without wanting to. And she slowed down, pulled over, said: I’m sorry and—good Lord, I couldn’t bear any more crying—burst into tears.
“You don’t know,” she sobbed, “how badly your father feels, how he worries about you, he doesn’t sleep, he misses you, and Angela and Ida and I also miss you.”
“I miss him, too,” I said uneasily, “I miss all of you, even Mariano. And I know there’s no fault, it happened, no one can do anything about it.”
She dried her eyes with her fingertips, every gesture of hers was light, decorous.
“How wise you are,” she said, “you always had a good influence on my daughters.”
“I’m not wise, but I read a lot of novels.”
“Good, you’re growing up, you have witty answers.”
“No, I’m serious: instead of my own words, phrases from books come to mind.”
“Angela doesn’t read anymore. You know she has a boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have one?”
&n
bsp; “No.”
“Love is complicated, Angela’s starting too soon.”
She made up her reddened eyes, asked me if she looked all right, started off again. She went on, hinting discreetly, to talk about her daughter, she wanted to know, without asking explicit questions, if I was more informed than she was. I got nervous, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I quickly realized that she didn’t know anything about Tonino, not his age, or what he did, not even his name, and for my part I avoided connecting him to Vittoria, Margherita, Enzo, I didn’t even say that he was almost ten years older than Angela. I muttered only that he was very serious, and in order not to say anything else I was on the verge of pretending that I didn’t feel well and wanted to go home. But by now we had arrived, the car was gliding along a tree-lined street, Costanza parked. I was captivated by the light that radiated from the sea and by the splendor of the garden: how much of Naples you could see, how much sky, how much of Vesuvius. So here was where my father lived. Leaving Via San Giacomo dei Capri he hadn’t lost much in altitude and had certainly gained in beauty. Costanza asked me:
“Would you do me a very small favor?”
“Yes.”
“Would you take off the bracelet? The girls don’t know I gave it to you.”
“Maybe everything would be less complicated if you told the truth.”
She said haltingly:
“The truth is difficult, growing up you’ll understand that, novels aren’t sufficient for it. So will you do me that favor?”
Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many. I nodded, unhooked the bracelet, put it in my pocket. She thanked me, we went into the house. I saw Angela again after such a long time, I saw Ida, we quickly found a semblance of friendship, even if all three of us were very changed. You’re so thin, Ida said, your feet are so long, and what big breasts you have, yes, they’re very big, and why are you all dressed in black?
We ate in a sun-filled kitchen, with sparkling furniture and appliances. We three girls began to joke, I got the giggles, and Costanza, seeing us, seemed relieved. Every trace of her tears had disappeared, she was so nice that she concerned herself more with me than with her daughters. At one point, she chided them because they were excitedly telling me in minute detail about a trip to London with their grandparents and wouldn’t let me get a word in. The whole time she looked at me kindly, twice she whispered in my ear: I’m so happy you’re here, what a pretty girl you’ve become. What does she want, I wondered. Maybe she wants to take me away from my mother, too, wants me to come and live in this house. Would I mind? No, maybe not. It was big, very light, full of luxuries. Almost certainly I would be comfortable, if my father didn’t sleep, eat, go to the bathroom in that space exactly as he had done when he lived with us on San Giacomo dei Capri. But that was precisely the obstacle. He lived there, and his presence made it inconceivable that I should live there, resume my friendship with Angela and Ida, eat the food cooked by Costanza’s silent, industrious maid. What I most dreaded—I realized—was the moment my father returned with his bag full of books and kissed that wife on the lips as he had always done with the other and said that he was very tired and yet would joke around with the three of us, would pretend to love us, would take Ida on his lap and help her blow out the candles and sing happy birthday and then, suddenly cool, as he knew how to be, would withdraw into another room, into his new study, whose function was the same as the one on Via San Giacomo dei Capri, and shut himself in, and Costanza would say, just as my mother always had, keep your voices down, please, don’t disturb Andrea, he has to work.
“What’s wrong?” Costanza asked me. “You’ve turned pale, is something wrong?”
“Mamma,” Angela grumbled, “will you leave us alone for a while?”
7.
The three of us spent the afternoon by ourselves and for a good part of the time Angela talked about Tonino. She did her best to convince me that she was really fond of that guy. Tonino didn’t talk much, and he talked sluggishly, but what he said was always important. He let her order him around because he loved her, but he could assert himself with anyone who wanted to put a foot on his head. Tonino came to meet her at school every day—tall, curly-haired, he was so handsome she spotted him in the crowd, he had broad shoulders, his muscles were visible even when he was wearing a jacket. Tonino had a surveyor’s diploma and was already working a little, but he had great aspirations and in secret, without even telling his mother and siblings, he was studying architecture. Tonino was a good friend of Roberto, Giuliana’s fiancé, even though they were very different: she had met him because they had all four of them gone to have a pizza, and what a disappointment, Roberto was so ordinary, even a little boring, it was hard to understand why Giuliana, such a pretty girl, felt so strongly about him, and why Tonino, who was much better-looking and more intelligent than Roberto, had so much respect for him.
I listened, but Angela couldn’t convince me, in fact it seemed to me that she was using her boyfriend to let me know that, in spite of her parents’ separation, she was happy. I asked her:
“Why haven’t you told your mother about him?”
“What does my mother have to do with it?”
“She wanted information from me.”
She was alarmed:
“Did you tell her who he is, did you tell her where I met him?”
“No.”
“I don’t want her to know anything.”
“And Mariano?”
“Even worse.”
“You know that if my father sees him, he’ll make you leave him immediately?”
“Your father is nobody, he can’t say anything, he has no right to tell me what I have to do.”
Ida made ostentatious nods of agreement, she emphasized:
“Our father is Mariano, that’s clear. But my sister and I decided that we aren’t anyone’s daughters: we don’t even consider our mother our mother anymore.”
Angela lowered her voice as we traditionally did when we talked about sex with a rude vocabulary:
“She’s a whore, she’s your father’s whore.”
I said:
“I’m reading a book where a girl spits on a picture of her father and makes her friend do it, too.”
Angela asked:
“Would you spit on a picture of your father?”
“Would you?” I asked in turn.
“On a picture of my mother, yes.”
“Not me,” said Ida.
I thought a moment and said:
“I would pee on a picture of my father.”
This hypothesis excited Angela.
“We can do it together.”
“If you do it,” said Ida, “I’ll watch and I’ll write you.”
“What does it mean that you’ll write us?” I asked.
“I’ll write about you that you pee on a photo of Andrea.”
“A story?”
“Yes.”
I was glad. The two sisters exiling themselves in their own house, that cutting of blood ties, just as I would have wanted to cut them, I liked that, and I also liked their foul language.
“If you like writing stories like that, I can tell you some true things I’ve done,” I said.
“What things?” Angela asked.
I lowered my voice:
“I’m more of a whore than your mother.”
They were extremely interested in my revelation; they insisted that I tell them everything.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Ida asked.
“You don’t need a boyfriend to be a whore. You can be a whore with whoever comes along.”
“And are you a whore with whoever comes along?” Angela asked.
I said yes. I said that I talked to boys about sex in the bad words of dialect, and I laughed a lot, really a lot, and when I had laughed enough the boys pulle
d it out and wanted me to hold it or put it in my mouth.
“How disgusting,” Ida said.
“Yes,” I admitted, “it’s all kind of disgusting.”
“All what?” Angela asked.
“Boys, it’s like being in the toilet of a train.”
“But kisses are lovely,” said Ida.
I shook my head hard.
“Boys get fed up with kissing, they don’t even touch you, they go right ahead and unzip their pants, they’re only interested in you touching them.”
“Not true,” Angela huffed, “Tonino kisses me.”
I was offended that she doubted what I was saying.
“Tonino kisses you, but he doesn’t do anything else.”
“That’s not true.”
“Let’s hear it then: what do you do with Tonino?”
Angela murmured:
“He’s very religious and he respects me.”
“You see? What do you have a boyfriend for if he respects you?”
Angela was silent, she shook her head, she had a flash of impatience.
“I have him because he loves me. Maybe nobody loves you. They even flunked you.”
“Is that true?” asked Ida.
“Who told you?”
Angela hesitated, she already seemed sorry for having given in to the impulse to humiliate me. She muttered:
“You told Corrado and Corrado told Tonino.”
Ida wanted to console me.
“But we didn’t tell anyone,” she said and tried to caress me on the cheek. I pulled away, hissed:
“Only bitches like you study like parrots, get promoted, and are respected by their boyfriends. I don’t study, I get flunked, and I’m a whore.”
8.
It was dark when my father arrived. Costanza seemed irritated, she said to him: why are you so late, you knew Giovanna was here. We had dinner, and he pretended he was happy. I knew him well, he was pretending a cheerfulness he didn’t feel. I hoped that in the past, when he lived with my mother and me, he had never faked it as he was obviously faking it that evening.
The Lying Life of Adults Page 14