Here, I thought, is what Roberto has done: he has transformed a girl from a poor neighborhood into a young woman you’d find in a poem. At one point, I exclaimed:
“You’ve really changed, you look even more beautiful than when I saw you in church.”
“Thank you.”
“It must be love,” I ventured, it was a phrase I’d often heard from Costanza, from my mother.
She laughed, denied it, said:
“If by love you mean Roberto, no, it’s not about Roberto.”
She herself had felt the need to change and had made a great effort that was ongoing. First, she tried to explain in general terms the urge to please those we respect, those we love, but then, step by step, the attempt to express herself in the abstract got tangled up, and she went on to tell me that Roberto liked everything about her, whether she stayed the same as she had always been since childhood, or whether she changed. He imposed nothing, hair like this, dress like that, nothing.
“You,” she said, “I feel you’re worried, you think he’s one of those types who are always at their books and intimidate you and lay down the law. He’s not like that, I remember him as a child, he wasn’t someone who studied a lot, in fact he never studied the way those scholars study. You always saw him on the street playing ball, he learns distractedly, he’s always done ten things at once. He’s like an animal that can’t distinguish between good things and poisonous ones, everything is fine with him, because—I’ve seen it—he transforms every element just by touching it and in a way that leaves you amazed.”
“Maybe he also does that with people.”
She laughed, a nervous laugh.
“Yes, good for you, also with people. Let’s say that, being near him, I felt and feel the need to change. Naturally, the first to notice that I was changing was Vittoria, she can’t bear it if we don’t depend on her in every way, and she got angry, she said I was getting foolish, I wasn’t eating and was turning into a broomstick. But my mother’s glad, she’d like me to change even more and Tonino to change, and Corrado. One night she said to me secretly, so Vittoria wouldn’t hear: when you go to Milan with Roberto, take your brothers, don’t stay here, no good can come of it. But nothing escapes Vittoria, Giannì, she hears even what’s said in a low voice or isn’t even said. So instead of getting mad at my mother, the last time Roberto came to Pascone she confronted him and said: you were born in these houses, you grew up on these streets, Milan came later, it’s here you have to return. He listened to her, as always—he’s the kind of person who listens even to leaves in the wind—and then he said something tactful about accounts that should never be left open, and added that in the meantime, however, he had some to close in Milan. He’s like that: he listens to you, and then he goes his own way, or anyway all the ways that interest him, maybe even including the path that you suggest to him.”
“So you’ll get married and live in Milan?”
“Yes.”
“And then Roberto will quarrel with Vittoria?”
“No: I will break with Vittoria, Tonino will break with her, Corrado will break with her. But not Roberto, Roberto does what he has to do and doesn’t break with anyone.”
She admired him, what she most liked about him was his benevolent determination. I felt that she relied on him completely, considered him her savior, who would get her away from her place of birth, her insufficient schooling, the frailty of her mother, the power of my aunt. I asked her if she went to Milan to see Roberto often and she darkened, she said it was complicated, Vittoria didn’t want her to. She’d been three or four times and only because Tonino had gone with her, those few stays had been enough to make her love the city. Roberto had lots of friends, some very important. He insisted on introducing her to all of them and took her everywhere, to this one’s house, to an appointment with that one. It was all wonderful, but she also felt very anxious. After those experiences, her heart wouldn’t stop racing. On every occasion she wondered why Roberto had chosen her, who was stupid and ignorant, and didn’t know how to dress, when Milan had the cream of the crop of extraordinary young women. And also in Naples, she said, you, you’re a proper girl. Not to mention Angela, she expresses herself so well, she’s pretty, she’s elegant. But me? what am I, what do I have to do with him?
I felt pleasure in the superiority she was attributing to me, yet I told her it was nonsense. Angela and I talked the way our parents had brought us up, and our mothers chose our clothes, or anyway we chose them according to their taste, which we thought was ours. The fact was, rather, that Roberto had wanted her and only her, because he was in love with what she was, so he would never trade her for other women. You’re so pretty, so vivacious, I exclaimed, the rest can be learned, you’re already learning it: I’ll help you if you want, so will Angela, we’ll help you.
We turned back, I walked with her to the metro at Piazza Cavour.
“You mustn’t feel embarrassed with Roberto,” she repeated, “really, he’s very down to earth, you’ll see.”
We embraced, I was glad about the friendship that was starting. But I also discovered that I was on Vittoria’s side. I wanted Roberto to leave Milan, to settle in Naples. I wanted my aunt to prevail and compel the future spouses to live in, I don’t know, Pascone, so that I could weld my life to theirs and see them when I wanted, even every day.
16.
I made a mistake: I told Angela that I had seen Giuliana and was going to see Roberto soon, too. She didn’t like that. She who had spoken ill of Tonino and well of Giuliana abruptly changed her mind: she said that Tonino was a good guy and that his sister was a harpy and tormented him. It didn’t take much to figure out that she was jealous: she couldn’t bear that Giuliana had talked to me without going through her.
“Better not to see her anymore,” she said one evening when we went out for a walk. “She’s grown up and treats us like little girls.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. At first, with me, she pretended that I was the teacher and she the student. She clung to me, she said: how nice, if you marry Tonino we’ll be related. But she’s a phony. She ingratiates her way in, she acts like a friend, and instead she’s looking after her own interests. Now she’s focused on you, I’m not enough for her anymore. She’s used me and thrown me aside.”
“Don’t exaggerate. She’s a nice girl, she can be your friend as much as mine.”
I had to work hard to soothe her, and I didn’t completely succeed. As we talked I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction. She wanted to end it with Tonino but not with Giuliana, whom she was fond of; she didn’t want Giuliana to be attached to me, excluding her; she didn’t want Roberto to disturb, even as a ghost, our eventual close trio; she wanted me, even as part of that eventual trio, to have her at the front of my mind and not the other. Finally, since I wouldn’t agree, she stopped being malicious about Giuliana and began to talk about her as a victim of her fiancé.
“Everything Giuliana does she does for him,” she said.
“And isn’t that lovely?”
“You think it’s lovely to be a slave?”
“I think it’s lovely to love.”
“Even if he doesn’t love her?”
“How do you know he doesn’t love her?”
“She says so, she says it can’t be that he loves her.”
“Everyone who loves is afraid of not being loved.”
“If someone makes you live in anguish the way Giuliana lives, what pleasure is there in loving?”
“How do you know she’s anguished?”
“I saw them together once, with Tonino.”
“So?”
“Giuliana can’t bear the idea of him not liking her anymore.”
“It must be the same for him.”
“He’s in Milan, you know how many wo
men he has.”
That last remark was particularly upsetting to me. I didn’t even want to think of the possibility that Roberto had other women. I preferred him devoted to Giuliana and faithful until death. I asked her:
“Is Giuliana afraid of being cheated on?”
“She never said so but I think she is.”
“The time I saw him he didn’t seem the type who cheats.”
“Did your father seem like someone who would cheat? And yet he did: he cheated on your mother with my mother.”
I reacted harshly.
“My father and your mother are liars.”
She had a bewildered expression.
“You don’t like what I’m saying?”
“No. It’s a pointless comparison.”
“Maybe. But I’d like to test this Roberto.”
“How?”
Her eyes lighted up, she half closed her mouth, arched her back, thrusting her chest forward. Like this, she said. She wanted to talk to him with that expression on her face and in that provocative pose. In fact, she would wear something very low-cut and a miniskirt and would nudge Roberto often with her shoulder and lean her bosom against his arm and put a hand on his thigh and take his arm when they walked. Oh, she said, visibly disgusted, what shits men are, you do just a couple of those things and whatever age they are they go mad, whether you’re skin and bones or fat or have pimples and fleas.
This rant made me mad. She had begun with our girlish talk and now suddenly was speaking with a grown woman’s vulgarity. I said, struggling to restrain a threatening tone:
“Don’t you dare do those things with Roberto.”
“Why?” She was surprised. “It’s for Giuliana. If he’s a good guy, fine, but if not that’s how we’ll save her.”
“In her place I wouldn’t want to be saved.”
She looked at me as if she couldn’t understand. She said:
“I was joking. Promise me one thing?”
“What?”
“If Giuliana calls you, call me right away, I want to be at this get-together with Roberto, too.”
“O.K. But if she says that’ll make her fiancé uncomfortable, I can’t do anything.”
She went silent, she lowered her gaze, and when, a fraction of a second later, she raised it again, her eyes held a painful request for clarity.
“It’s all over between us, you don’t love me anymore.”
“No, I love you and will until I die.”
“Then give me a kiss.”
I kissed her on the cheek. She wanted my mouth, I avoided her.
“We’re not children anymore,” I said.
She went unhappily toward Mergellina.
17.
Giuliana called one afternoon to make a date for the following Sunday in Piazza Amedeo; Roberto would be there, too. I felt that the moment so longed for, so intensely imagined, had truly arrived, and again, even more violently, I was afraid. I stammered, I talked about all the homework I had, she said laughing: Giannì, calm down, Roberto won’t eat you, I want him to see that I have friends who study, who speak well, do me this favor.
I retreated, confused, and, just to find something that would complicate things to the point of preventing the meeting, I brought up Angela. I had already decided almost without admitting it that, if Giuliana really intended to have me meet her fiancé, I wouldn’t say anything to Angela, I wanted to avert more annoyance and tension. But sometimes thoughts release a latent force, seize on images against your will, thrust them before your eyes for a fraction of a second. I thought surely that the figure of Angela, once evoked, would not be welcomed by Giuliana and would lead her to say: all right, let’s put it off to another time. But in my mind there was more: I imagined my friend in her low-cut blouse, batting her eyelashes, opening her lips into an O, arching her back; and suddenly it seemed that setting her beside Roberto, leaving her free to disrupt and disconnect that couple, could become a tidal wave. I said:
“There’s a problem: I told Angela we were going to see each other and probably Roberto as well.”
“So?”
“She wants to come.”
Giuliana was silent for a long moment, then said:
“Giannì, I love Angela, but she’s not an easy type, she always wants to be in the middle.”
“I know.”
“What if you didn’t say anything about this date?”
“Impossible. One way or another she’ll find out that I met your fiancé and she won’t speak to me anymore. Better to forget it.”
More seconds of silence, then she agreed:
“O.K., have her come, too.”
From that point on my heart raced. The fear that I might seem ignorant and unintelligent to Roberto kept me from sleeping and brought me within a step of calling my father to ask him questions about life, death, God, Christianity, Communism, so that I could use his answers, which were always crammed with knowledge, in a possible conversation. But I resisted, I didn’t want to contaminate Giuliana’s fiancé, of whom I preserved an image as of a heavenly apparition, with my father’s earthly small-mindedness. And then my obsession with my appearance intensified. How would I dress? Was there some way of improving myself at least a little?
Unlike Angela, who since she was a child had cared a lot about clothes, I, during that long period of crisis, had provocatively abandoned the desire to make myself pretty. You’re ugly—I had concluded—and an ugly person is ridiculous if she tries to beautify herself. So my only mania remained cleanliness, and I washed constantly. Otherwise I bundled myself in black, hiding, or, contrarily, put on heavy makeup, wore bright colors, made myself vulgar on purpose. But for that occasion I tried and tried to see if I could find a middle ground that would make me acceptable. Since I was never happy with myself, in the end all I cared about was that the colors I chose wouldn’t clash, and, after yelling to my mother that I was going out with Angela, I went through the door, hurried down along San Giacomo dei Capri.
I’ll be sick from the tension, I thought as the funicular descended at its usual jangling slow pace toward Piazza Amedeo, I’ll stumble, I’ll hit my head, I’ll die. Or I’ll get mad and rip someone’s eyes out. I was late, sweaty, kept straightening my hair with my fingers in fear that it was pasted to my skull the way Vittoria’s sometimes was. When I reached the piazza, I immediately saw Angela, who beckoned me, she was sitting outside a café, already sipping something. I went over and sat down with her; there was a tepid sun. There they are, the couple, she said in a low voice, and I understood that the couple were behind me. I not only forced myself not to turn, but, instead of getting up, as Angela was already doing, I stayed seated. I felt Giuliana’s hand resting lightly on my shoulder—hi, Giannì—I looked out of the corner of my eye at her manicured fingers, the sleeve of her brown jacket, a bracelet just sticking out. Angela was already uttering the first cordial remarks, now I, too, would have liked to say something, respond to the greeting. But the bracelet half covered by the sleeve of the jacket was the one I had given back to my aunt and I was so surprised I didn’t even say hi. Vittoria, Vittoria, I didn’t know what to think, she really was the way my parents had described her. She had taken it from me, her niece, and now, even though it seemed that she couldn’t do without it, she had given it to her goddaughter. How brightly the bracelet shone on Giuliana’s wrist, how it gained value.
18.
That second encounter with Roberto confirmed to me that I remembered almost nothing of the first. I finally stood up, he was several steps behind Giuliana. He seemed very tall, over six feet, but when he sat down he folded himself in as if he were piling up all his limbs and compressing them on the chair so as not to seem hulking. I had in mind a man of average height and yet here he was, powerful yet small, a person who could expand or shrink at will. He certainly was handsome, much more than I remembered: black hair, broad
forehead, sparkling eyes, high cheekbones, chiseled nose, and the mouth, oh the mouth, with regular white teeth that were like a patch of light on his dark skin. But his behavior disoriented me. For most of the time we spent at that table he exhibited not a single one of the gifts as a speaker that he had displayed in church and that had made such a deep impression on me. He resorted to brief remarks, to barely communicative gestures. Only his eyes were those of his talk before the altar, attentive to every detail, slightly ironic. Otherwise I got the idea of one of those shy teachers who emanate good humor and sympathy, don’t make you anxious, and not only ask their little questions politely, with clarity and precision, but, after listening to the answers without interrupting you, without commenting, say with a kind smile: you can go.
Unlike Roberto, Giuliana was nervously talkative. Introducing us to her fiancé, she bestowed on each of us an abundance of wonderful qualities, and, although she was sitting in the shade, seemed luminous as she spoke. I forced myself to ignore the bracelet, even though I couldn’t help every so often seeing it sparkle on her slender wrist and thinking: maybe that’s the magic source of her light. Not her words, they were opaque. Why is she talking so much, I wondered, what’s worrying her, certainly not our beauty. Contrary to my predictions, Angela, while she was certainly as pretty as usual, hadn’t overdone it with her clothes: her skirt was short but not too short, she wore a tight shirt but not low cut, and though she flashed smiles, and appeared self-assured, she did nothing especially seductive. As for me, I was a sack of potatoes—I felt I was, I wanted to be, a sack of potatoes—gray, compact, the protrusion of my bosom buried under a jacket, and I managed very well. It surely wasn’t our physical aspect that worried her, since there was no competition between her and us. I was convinced instead that what made her anxious was the possibility that we wouldn’t be up to it. Her declared intention was to show us off to her fiancé as her friends from good families. She wanted him to like us because we were girls from the Vomero, high-school students, decent people. In other words she had summoned us there to bear witness to the fact that she was eliminating Pascone from herself, she was preparing to live respectably with him in Milan. And I think it was that—not the bracelet—that intensified my irritation. I didn’t like being put on display, I didn’t want to feel the way I did when my parents would make me show their friends how good I was at doing this, at saying that, and, as soon as I saw that I was obliged to be at my best, I became obtuse. I sat silently, my head empty, I even looked ostentatiously at my watch a couple of times. The result was that Roberto, after a few polite remarks, ended up concentrating on Angela in classic professorial tones. He asked her: how is your school, what condition is it in, do you have gym, how old are your teachers, how are their classes, what do you do in your free time, and she talked, on and on, in her confident little student’s voice, and smiled, and laughed, saying amusing things about her classmates, her teachers.
The Lying Life of Adults Page 21