Элена Ферранте - The Lying Life of Adults

Breakfast went smoothly, they joked with each other as if I weren’t there and they could gossip about me freely. They said that if I wasn’t sleeping well and couldn’t wait to get to school, surely I was in love, I gave them little smiles that said neither yes nor no. Then my father disappeared into the bathroom, and this time it was I who shouted to him to hurry up. He—I have to say—didn’t waste time, except when he didn’t find clean socks or forgot books he needed and ran back into his study. In short, I remember that it was exactly seven-twenty, my father was at the end of the hall with his bag loaded, I had just given the obligatory kiss to my mother, when the doorbell rang violently.

It was surprising that someone should ring at that hour. My mother quickly shut herself in the bathroom with a vexed expression, and said: open the door, see who it is. I opened it, and found myself facing Vittoria.

“Hi,” she said, “lucky you’re ready, come on, we’ll be late.”

I felt my heart burst in my breast. My mother saw her sister-in-law in the frame of the door and cried—yes, it was really a cry—Andrea, come here, it’s your sister. At the sight of Vittoria—his eyes widening in surprise, his mouth incredulous—he exclaimed: what are you doing here? Fearful of what would happen in a moment, in a minute, I felt weak, I was covered with sweat, I didn’t know what to say to my aunt, I didn’t know how to explain to my parents, I thought I was dying. But it was all over in a moment and in a way as surprising as it was clarifying.

Vittoria said in dialect:

“I’m here to get Giannina, it’s seventeen years today since I met Enzo.”

She added nothing else, as if my parents should understand immediately the good reasons for her appearance and were obliged to let me go without protesting. My mother, however, objected in Italian.

“Giovanna has to go to school.”

My father, instead, without addressing either his wife or his sister, asked me in his cold tone:

“Did you know about this?”

I stood with my head down staring at the floor and he insisted, without changing his tone:

“Did you have a date, do you want to go with your aunt?”

My mother said slowly:

“Are you serious, Andrea, of course she wants to go, of course they had a date, otherwise your sister wouldn’t be here.”

He said only: if that’s the case, go, and with his fingertips signaled to his sister to move aside. Vittoria moved aside—she was a mask of impassivity set atop the yellow patch of a light dress—and my father, looking ostentatiously at his watch, ignored the elevator and took the stairs without saying goodbye, not even to me.

“When will you bring her back,” my mother asked her sister-in-law.

“When she’s tired.”

They coldly negotiated the time and agreed on one-thirty. Vittoria held out her hand, I gave her mine as if I were a child, it was cold. She held me tight, maybe she was afraid I would escape and run home. Meanwhile, with her free hand she called the elevator under the eyes of my mother, who, standing in the doorway, couldn’t bring herself to close the door.

A word more, a word less, that’s how it went.

5.

Our second encounter left an even deeper impression than the first. Just to start with, I discovered that I had a space inside me that could swallow up every feeling in a very short time. The weight of the lie discovered, the disgrace of the betrayal, all the pain for the pain I had surely caused my parents lasted until the moment when, through the glass doors of the iron cage of the elevator, I saw my mother close the door of the apartment. But as soon as I was in the hall and then in Vittoria’s car, sitting next to her as, immediately, she lighted a cigarette with trembling hands, something happened that very often occurred later in my life, sometimes bringing me relief, other times demoralizing me. The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen. The proximity of that threatening and enveloping woman captivated me, and here I was, already observing her every move. Now she was driving a repugnant car that stank of smoke, not with my father’s firm, decisive control or my mother’s serenity but in a way that was either distracted or overanxious, made up of jerks, alarming screeches, abrupt braking, mistaken starts on account of which the engine almost always stalled and insults rained down from impatient drivers to which, with the cigarette between her fingers or her lips, she responded with obscenities that I had never heard uttered by a woman. In other words, my parents were relegated effortlessly to a corner, and the wrong I’d done them by making an arrangement with their enemy vanished from my mind. In the space of a few minutes I no longer considered myself guilty, I felt no worry even about how I would confront them in the afternoon, when all three of us returned to the house on Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Of course, anxiety continued to dig away at me. But the certainty that they would always love me no matter what, the helter-skelter motion of the little green car, the increasingly unknown city that we were crossing, and Vittoria’s jumble of words forced me to an attention, to a tension, that functioned like an anesthetic.

We went up along the Doganella, parked after a violent quarrel with an illegal parking attendant who wanted money. My aunt bought red roses and white daisies, complained about the price, and once the bouquet was made changed her mind and obliged the flower seller to undo it and make two bunches. She said to me: I’ll bring this one, you this one, he’ll be pleased. She alluded naturally to her Enzo, and, from the moment we got in the car, despite the endless interruptions, she did nothing but talk about him with a sweetness that contrasted with her fierce manner of confronting the city. She continued to talk about him even as we went in among the burial niches and monumental tombs, old and new, along paths and stairs that always went down, as if we were in the upper-class neighborhoods of the dead and to find Enzo’s tomb we had to descend. I was struck by the silence, by the gray of the rust-streaked niches, by the smell of rotting earth, by certain dark cross-shaped cracks in the marble that seemed to have been left for the breathing of those who no longer had breath.

Until that moment, I had never been in a cemetery. My father and mother had never taken me, nor did I know if they had ever been, certainly they didn’t go on All Souls’ Day. Vittoria realized this right away and took advantage of it to again fault my father. He’s afraid, she said, he’s always been like that, he’s afraid of illness and death: all proud people, Giannì, all those who think they’re something, pretend that death doesn’t exist. Your father—when your grandmother may she rest in peace died—didn’t even show up at the funeral. And he did the same with your grandfather, two minutes and he was gone, because he’s a coward, he didn’t want to see them dead so he wouldn’t have to feel that he, too, would die.

I tried to respond, but prudently, that my father was very brave, and to defend him I recalled what he had once told me, and that is that the dead are objects that have broken, a television, the radio, the mixer, and the best thing is to remember them as they were when they were working, because the only acceptable tomb is memory. But she didn’t like that answer, and since she didn’t treat me like a child with whom words must be measured, she scolded me, said I was parroting my father’s bullshit, your mother does that, too, and I, too, as a girl, did the same. But once she met Enzo, she had erased my father from her head. E-rased, she articulated and, finally stopping in front of a wall of niches, pointed to one low down that had a small fenced flower bed, a lighted lamp in the shape of a flame, and two pictures in oval frames. This is it, she said, we’re here. Enzo is the one on the left, the other is his mother. But, instead of taking a solemn or remorseful attitude as I expected, she grew angry because some paper and dead flowers had been left a few steps away. She gave a long, unhappy sigh, handed me her flowers, said: wait here, don’t move, in this shit place if you don’t get mad nothing works, and left me.