Элена Ферранте - The Lying Life of Adults

Slowly Vittoria calmed down, and I was relieved. Now I had to find a way of leaving and getting back to the two waiting boys; I hoped she would forget about the bracelet.

She didn’t say anything else about it, in fact, but insisted that I should go with her to hear Roberto, who was speaking in church. Now I was really in a fix: it was very important to her. She praised Tonino’s friend, I guessed he’d become her pet after he got engaged to Giuliana. You can’t imagine what a good boy he is, she said, intelligent, sensible: afterward we’ll all eat at Margherita’s house, you’ll stay, too. Politely I said that I really couldn’t, I had to go home, and I hugged her as if I really did love her, and who knows, maybe I did, I no longer understood anything about my feelings. I muttered:

“I’m going, Mamma’s expecting me, but I’ll be back soon.”

She gave in:

“All right, I’ll go with you.”

“No, no, no, there’s no need.”

“I’ll take you to the bus stop.”

“No, I know where the stop is, thanks.”

There was no way out, she wanted to come with me. I didn’t have the slightest idea where the stop was, I hoped it was someplace far from where Rosario and Corrado were waiting for me. Yet it seemed that we were going precisely in that direction, and the whole way I kept repeating, anxiously: all right, thanks, I can go by myself. But my aunt wouldn’t stop, in fact the more I tried to get away, the more intensely did she look like one who feels that something isn’t right. We turned the corner, finally, and, as I feared, the bus stop was right in the square where Corrado and Rosario were sitting, clearly visible in the car with the top down.

Vittoria saw the car immediately, a patch of yellow steel sparkling in the sun.

“You came with Corrado and that shithead?”

“No.”

“Swear.”

“I swear, no.”

She pushed me backward with a hand to the chest and headed toward the car shouting insults in dialect. But Rosario took off immediately, tires screeching, and she ran after him for a few meters, yelling fiercely, then she took off a shoe and threw it in the direction of the convertible. The car disappeared, leaving her furious, bent double, on the edge of the street.

“You’re a liar,” she said when, recovering her shoe, she returned to me, still panting.

“I swear I didn’t.”

“Now I’ll telephone your mother and we’ll see.”

“Please don’t do that. I didn’t come with them, but don’t call my mother.”

I told her that, since my mother didn’t want me to see her but it was very important to me, I had told her I was going to Caserta with my classmates. I was convincing: the fact that I had deceived my mother, just to see her, cheered her.

“All day?”

“I have to be back in the afternoon.”

She searched my eyes with a bewildered expression.

“So come with me to hear Roberto and then you’ll go.”

“I’ll risk being late.”

“You’ll risk getting slapped by me if I find out you’re lying to me and you want to go with those two.”

I followed her unhappily, praying: God, please, I don’t feel like going to church, let Corrado and Rosario not leave, let them be waiting for me somewhere, get rid of my aunt, I’ll die of boredom in church. The way there was familiar to me by now: empty streets, weeds and garbage, graffiti-covered walls, crumbling apartment buildings. The whole time Vittoria kept an arm around my shoulders, sometimes she pressed me tight against her. She spoke mainly about Giuliana—Corrado worried her, while she had a high regard for that girl and for Tonino—and how sensible she had become. Love—she said, in an inspired tone and using a formula that didn’t belong to her, that in fact baffled and irritated me—is a ray of sun that warms the soul. I was disappointed. Maybe I should have observed my aunt with the same attention with which she had urged me to spy on my parents. Maybe I would have discovered that behind the harshness that had charmed me there was a soft, foolish little woman, tough on the surface, tender underneath. If Vittoria really is that, I thought, discouraged, then she is ugly, she has the ugliness of banality.

Every time I heard the rumble of a car I looked sidewards, hoping that Rosario and Corrado would reappear and seize me, but also fearing that she would start shouting again and get mad at me. We reached the church, which was surprisingly crowded. I went straight to the holy water font, wet my fingers, crossed myself before Vittoria could make me. There was an odor of breath and of flowers, a polite din, a child’s shrill voice immediately shushed with muffled tones. Behind a table placed at the end of the central nave, I saw the figure of Don Giacomo, standing with his back to the altar, he was saying something emphatically. He seemed pleased by our entrance, gave a sign of greeting without breaking off. I would have happily sat in the back pews, which were empty, but my aunt grabbed my arm and led me along the right nave. We sat in the first rows, next to Margherita, who had saved us a place, and who when she saw me turned red with pleasure. I sat squeezed between her and Vittoria, the one large, soft, the other tense, thin. Don Giacomo was silent, the hum rose in pitch, I was just in time to look around, to recognize Giuliana, surprisingly demure in the front row, and, on her right, Tonino, broad-shouldered, his torso erect. Then the priest said: come, Roberto, what are you doing there, sit beside me, and an impressive silence fell, as if suddenly no one in that space could breathe.

But maybe that’s not how it went, probably it was I who cancelled out every sound when a tall but stooping young man, thin as a shadow, stood up. It seemed to me that a long gold chain visible only to me was attached to his back, holding him, and he swayed lightly as if he were hanging from the cupola, the tips of his shoes barely grazing the floor. When he reached the table and turned, I had the impression that he had more eyes than face: they were blue, blue in a dark, bony, unharmonious face locked between a great mass of rebellious hair and a thick beard that looked blue.

I was almost fifteen and until that moment no boy had truly attracted me, least of all Corrado, least of all Rosario. But as soon as I saw Roberto—even before he opened his mouth, even before he was ignited by any feeling, even before he uttered a word—I felt a violent pain in my chest and knew that everything in my life was about to change, that I wanted him, that I would necessarily have to have him, that even if I didn’t believe in God I would pray every day and every night that that would happen, and that only that wish, only that hope, only that prayer could keep me from immediately, now, falling down dead on the ground.

V

1.

Don Giacomo sat at the shabby table at the end of the nave and watched Roberto the whole time with an attitude of concentrated listening, his cheek resting on the palm of his hand. Roberto spoke standing up, in a brusque yet attractive tone, his back to the altar and a large crucifixion with a dark cross and a yellow Christ. I remember almost nothing of what he said, maybe because he was expressing himself from within a culture that was alien to me, maybe because emotion kept me from listening. I have in mind many phrases that are surely his, but I don’t know how to place them in time, I confuse the words of then with those which followed. Yet some are more likely to have been uttered that Sunday. Sometimes, for instance, I’m sure that in the church he discussed the parable of the good trees that bear good fruit, and the bad trees that bear bad fruit and so end up as wood to be burned. Or more often I feel certain that he insisted on the exact calculation of our resources when we plunge into a great undertaking, because it’s wrong to start, let’s say, building a tower if you don’t have the money to build it up to the last stone. Or I think he urged us all to have courage, reminding us that the only way not to waste our life is to lose it through saving others. Or I imagine that he reasoned about the need to be truly fair, merciful, and faithful, without concealing unfairness, a hard heart, infidelity behind respect for conventions. But really I don’t know, time has passed and I can’t decide. For me his talk, from beginning to end, was a flow of enchanting sounds that came from his beautiful mouth, his throat. I stared at his prominent Adam’s apple as if behind that knob vibrated the breath of the first human being of the male sex to come into the world and not, instead, one of the infinite reproductions that crowd the planet. How beautiful and terrible were his pale-blue eyes carved into his dark face, his long fingers, his shining lips. About one of his words I have no doubt, he uttered it often on that occasion, plucking its petals like a daisy. I refer to “compunction,” I understood that he was using it in an anomalous way. He said that it should be cleansed of the ugly uses that had been made of it, he spoke of it as of a needle that had to pull the thread through the scattered fragments of our existence. He gave it the meaning of an extreme vigilance over oneself, it was the knife that would prick conscience to keep it from going to sleep.