Элена Ферранте - The Lying Life of Adults

As soon as my parents left the apartment, Mariano and Costanza began to clear the table and ordered us to get ready for bed. But I couldn’t concentrate. What had happened before my eyes, what had I seen: innocent playfulness on Mariano’s part, a premeditated illicit act of his, an illicit act of both? My mother was always so transparent: how could she tolerate that contact under the table, and with a man much less attractive than my father? She had no liking for Mariano—how stupid he is, I’d heard her say a couple of times—and even with Costanza she couldn’t contain herself, she had often asked her, in the tone of a feeble joke, how she could stand a person who could never be quiet. And so what was the meaning of her ankle between his ankles? How long had they been in that position? For a few seconds, a minute, ten minutes? Why hadn’t my mother immediately pulled her leg away? And the distractedness that followed? I was confused.

I brushed my teeth for too long, so that Ida said in a hostile way: that’s enough, you’ll wear them out. It was always like that, as soon as we were in their room she became aggressive. In reality, she was afraid that we two older ones would leave her out, and so she sulked preventively. For the same reason she immediately announced, combatively, that she, too, wanted to sleep in Angela’s bed and not by herself in hers. The two sisters argued for a while—we’re too cramped, go away, no, we’re fine—but Ida wouldn’t give in, she never did. So Angela winked at me, and said to her: as soon as you fall asleep I’m going to sleep in your bed. Fine, Ida exulted, and, satisfied not so much because she would sleep with me all night as because her sister wouldn’t, she tried to start a pillow fight. We counterattacked listlessly, she stopped, settled herself between us, and turned off the light. In the dark she said happily: it’s raining, I love that we’re together, I’m not sleepy, please let’s talk all night. But Angela shushed her, said that she, on the other hand, was sleepy, and after a few laughs there was only the sound of the rain against the windows.

Immediately my mother’s ankle between Mariano’s came to mind. I tried to take the sheen off the image, I wanted to convince myself that it meant nothing, that it was only something playful between friends. I didn’t succeed. If it means nothing, I said to myself, tell Vittoria. My aunt would surely be able to tell me what weight I should give that scene, hadn’t she urged me to spy on my parents? Look, look carefully, she had said. Now I had looked, and I had seen something. I had only to obey her with greater diligence to find out if it was nonsense or not. But I realized right away that never ever would I report to her what I had seen. Even if there was nothing bad, Vittoria would find the bad. I had seen in action—she would explain to me—the desire to fuck, and not the desire to fuck of the educational books that my parents had given me, with bright-colored figures and tidy, elementary captions, but something revolting and at the same time ridiculous, like gargling when you have a sore throat. That I wouldn’t be able to tolerate. But I had only to evoke my aunt, and she was already invading my head with her exciting, repulsive lexicon, and I saw clearly, in the dark, Mariano and my mother entwined in the ways that her vocabulary suggested. Was it possible that the two of them were able to feel that same extraordinary pleasure that Vittoria said she had known and that she hoped for me as the only true gift that life could give me? The mere idea that, if I were to act as an informer, she would use the words she had for herself and Enzo, but degrading them in order to degrade my mother and, through her, my father, convinced me further that the best thing was never to talk to her about that scene.

“She’s sleeping,” Angela whispered.

“Let’s us sleep, too.”

“Yes, but in her bed.”

I heard her moving cautiously in the dark. She appeared at my side, took my hand, I slipped away carefully, followed her to the other bed. We pulled up the covers, it was cold. I thought of Mariano and my mother, I thought of my father when he discovered their secret. I knew clearly that at my house everything would change for the worse, soon. I said to myself: even if I don’t tell her, Vittoria will find out; or maybe she already knows and has just been pushing me to see it with my own eyes. Angela whispered:

“Talk to me about Tonino.”

“He’s tall.”

“Go on.”

“He has deep black eyes.”

“Does he really want to be your boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“If you’re boyfriend and girlfriend will you kiss?”

“Yes.”

“With your tongue?”

“Yes.”

She hugged me tight, and I hugged her as we did when we slept together. We stayed like that, trying to cling as closely as possible to each other, I with my arms around her neck, she with hers around my hips. Slowly an odor of hers arrived that I knew well, it was intense and also sweet, it gave off warmth. You’re squeezing me too tight, I murmured, and she, suffocating a giggle against my chest, called me Tonino. I sighed, I said: Angela. She repeated, this time without laughing, Tonino, Tonino, Tonino, and she added: swear you’ll let me meet him, otherwise we’re not friends anymore. I swore, and we kissed each other with long kisses, caressing each other. Although we were sleepy, we couldn’t stop. It was a serene pleasure, it banished distress, and so to give it up seemed pointless.

III

1.

I watched my mother for days. If the telephone rang and she hurried to answer in too much of a rush and her voice, at first loud, soon became a whisper, I suspected that the caller was Mariano. If she spent too much time attending to how she looked and discarded one dress and then another and still another, and even went so far as to call me to get my opinion on what looked best, I was sure she must be going to a secret tryst with her lover, terminology I had learned by occasionally skimming the proofs of her romance novels.

I discovered then that I could become incurably jealous. Until that moment I had been sure that my mother belonged to me and that my right to have her always available was indisputable. In the puppet theater of my mind my father was mine and legitimately also hers. They slept together, they kissed, they had conceived me according to the ways that had been explained to me around the age of six. Their relationship was for me a given, and just for that reason had never consciously disturbed me. But, incongruously, I felt that outside of that relationship my mother was indivisible and inviolable, she belonged to me alone. Her body I considered mine, mine her perfume, mine even her thoughts, which—I had been sure of it as far back as I could remember—could be occupied only by me. Now, instead, it had become plausible—and here again I used formulas learned from the novels she worked on—that my mother was giving herself to someone outside the family accords, secretly. That other man considered himself authorized to hold her ankle between his under the table, and in unknown places he put his saliva in her mouth, sucked the nipples that I had sucked and—as Vittoria said with a dialectal cadence that I didn’t have but that now more than ever, out of desperation, I would have liked to have—grabbed one buttock, grabbed the other. When she came home breathless because countless duties, work and domestic, harassed her, I saw her eyes full of light, I sensed under her clothes the signs of Mariano’s hands, I perceived all over her, who didn’t smoke, the smoke smell from his fingers, yellow with nicotine. Just touching her soon began to repulse me, and yet I couldn’t bear to lose the pleasure of sitting on her lap, of playing with her earlobes to annoy her and hearing her say stop it, you’re making my ears purple, of laughing together. Why is she doing this: I racked my brains. I didn’t see a single good reason that would justify her betrayal, and so I tried to figure out how I could transport her back to the time before that contact under the dinner table and have her again the way she was when I didn’t even realize how much I cared about her, when, rather, it seemed obvious that she was there, ready for my needs, and that she would always be there.