Элена Ферранте - The Lying Life of Adults

Now, sitting at the table next to her, I hoped that her good influence would drive her husband’s words out of my head. Instead, they lasted for the whole dinner—I have hair that makes me look like a broom, I have a grim face—intensifying my nervousness. I went back and forth between wanting to have fun by whispering dirty expressions in Angela’s ear and a bad mood that wouldn’t go away. As soon as we finished dessert, we left our parents to their conversation and shut ourselves in my room. There I asked Ida, without turning around:

“Do I have a scowl on my face? Do you think I’m getting ugly?”

They looked at each other, they answered almost simultaneously:

“Not at all.”

“Tell the truth.”

I realized that they were hesitant, Angela decided to speak:

“A little, but not physically.”

“Physically you’re pretty,” Ida emphasized, “only you look a little bit ugly because you’re anxious.”

Angela said, kissing me:

“It happens to me, too. When I’m anxious I turn ugly, but then it goes away.”

7.

That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—Angela and Ida had said—and if the worries go away you can be pretty again. I wanted to believe that, and I made an effort to have untroubled days. But I couldn’t force myself to be calm, my mind would suddenly blur, and that obsession began again. I felt an increasing hostility toward everyone that was difficult to repress with false good humor. And I soon concluded that my worries were not at all transient, maybe they weren’t even worries but bad feelings that were spreading through my veins.

Not that Angela and Ida had lied to me about that, they weren’t capable of it: we had been brought up never to tell lies. With that connection between ugliness and anxieties, they had probably been talking about themselves, and their experience, using the words that Mariano—our heads contained a lot of concepts we heard from our parents—had used, in some circumstance or other, to comfort them. But Angela and Ida weren’t me. Angela and Ida didn’t have in their family an Aunt Vittoria whose face their father— their father —had said they were starting to take on. Suddenly one morning at school I felt that I would never go back to being the way my parents wanted me, that cruel Mariano would notice it, and my friends would move on to more suitable friendships, and I would be left alone.

I was depressed, and in the following days the bad feelings regained strength; the only thing that gave me a little relief was to stroke myself continuously between my legs, numbing myself with pleasure. But how humiliating it was to forget myself like that, by myself; afterward I was even more unhappy, sometimes disgusted. I had a very pleasant memory of a game I played with Angela, on the couch at my house, when, in front of the television, we would lie facing each other, entwine our legs, and silently, without negotiations, without rules, settle a doll between the crotch of my underpants and the crotch of hers, so that we rubbed each other, writhing comfortably, pressing the doll—which seemed alive and happy—hard between us. That was another time, the pleasure didn’t seem like a nice game anymore. Now I was all sweaty, I felt deformed. And so day after day I was repossessed by the desire to examine my face, and went back even more relentlessly to spending time in front of the mirror.

This led to a surprising development: as I looked at what appeared to me defective, I started to want to fix it. I studied my features and, pulling on my face, thought: look, if I just had a nose like so, eyes like so, ears like so, I’d be perfect. My features were slight flaws that made me sad, touched me. Poor you, I thought, how unlucky you’ve been. And I had a sudden enthusiasm for my own image, so that once I went as far as to kiss myself on the mouth just as I was thinking, forlornly, that no one would ever kiss me. So I began to react. I moved slowly from the stupor in which I spent the days studying myself to the need to fix myself up, as if I were a piece of good-quality material damaged by a clumsy worker. I was I—whatever I I was—and had to concern myself with that face, that body, those thoughts.

One Sunday morning I tried to improve myself with my mother’s makeup. But when she came into my room she said, laughing: you look like a Carnival mask, you have to do better. I didn’t protest, I didn’t defend myself, I asked her as submissively as I could:

“Will you teach me to put on makeup the way you do it?”

“Every face has its own makeup.”

“I want to be like you.”

She was glad to do it, complimented me, and then made me up very carefully. We spent some really lovely hours, joking, laughing with each other. Usually she was quiet, self-possessed, but with me—only with me—ready to become a child again.

Eventually my father appeared, with his newspapers; he was happy to find us playing like that.

“How pretty the two of you are,” he said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Absolutely, I’ve never seen such gorgeous women.”

And he shut himself in his room; on Sunday he read the papers and then studied. But as soon as my mother and I were alone she asked me, as if that space of a few minutes had been a signal, in a voice that was always a little weary but seemed to know neither irritation nor fear:

“Why did you go looking in the box of pictures?”

Silence. She had noticed, then, that I had been rummaging through her things. She realized that I had tried to scrape off the black of the marker. How long ago? I couldn’t keep from crying, even though I fought back the tears with all my strength. Mamma, I said between my sobs, I wanted, I believed, I thought—but I was unable to say a thing about what I wanted, believed, thought. I gasped, sobbing, but she couldn’t soothe me, and as soon as she said something with a smile of sympathy—there’s no need to cry, you just have to ask me, or Papa, and anyway you can look at the photos when you like, why are you crying, calm down—I sobbed even harder. Finally, she took my hands, and it was she herself who said gently:

“What were you looking for? A picture of Aunt Vittoria?”

8.

I understood at that point that my parents knew that I had heard their conversation. They must have talked about it for a long time, maybe they had even consulted with their friends. Certainly, my father was very sorry and in all likelihood had delegated my mother to convince me that the sentence I’d heard had a meaning different from the one that might have wounded me. Surely that was the case—my mother’s voice was very effective in mending operations. She never had outbursts of rage, or even of annoyance. When, for example, Costanza teased her about all the time she wasted preparing her classes, correcting the proofs of silly stories and sometimes rewriting entire pages, she always responded quietly, with a transparency that had no bitterness. And even when she said, Costanza, you have plenty of money, you can do what you like, but I have to work, she managed to do it in a few soft words, without any evident resentment. So who better than her to remedy the mistake? After I calmed down, she said, in that voice, we love you, and she repeated it once or twice. Then she started on a speech that until then she had never made.

She said that both she and my father had made many sacrifices to become what they were. She said: I’m not complaining, my parents gave me what they could, you know how kind and affectionate they were, this house was bought at the time with their help; but your father’s childhood, adolescence, youth—those for him were truly hard times, because he had nothing at all, he had to climb a mountain with his bare hands, and it’s not over, it’s never over, there is always some storm that knocks you down, back to where you started. So finally she came to Vittoria and revealed to me that, non-metaphorically, the storm that wanted to knock my father down off the mountain was her.