Элена Ферранте - The Lying Life of Adults

As I dried my hair in front of the mirror, I felt like laughing. I had been deceived in everything, not even my hair was beautiful, it was pasted to my skull and I couldn’t give it volume and splendor. As for my face, it had no harmony, just like Vittoria’s. But the mistake had been to make it a tragedy. If you looked even just for a moment at those who had the privilege of a beautiful, refined face, you discovered that it hid infernos no different from those expressed by coarse, ugly faces. The splendor of a face, enhanced even by kindness, harbored and promised suffering still more than a dull face.

Angela, for example, after the episode of the movie and the disappearance of Tonino from her life, grew sad, became mean. She talked to me at length on the phone, accusing me of not being on her side, of having let a man hit her, of having supported Giuliana. I tried to deny it, but it was useless. She said she had told the story to Costanza, and even to my father. Costanza had sided with her, but Andrea had done more: once he understood who Tonino was, whose son he was, where he was born and grew up, he had become very angry, not so much with her as with me. She reported that my father had said literally: Giovanna knows very well what sort of people they are, she should have protected you. But you didn’t protect me, she cried, and I imagined that her sweet harmonious seductive face, there in the house in Posillipo, as she held the white receiver to her ear, had become at that moment uglier than mine. I said to her: please, from now on leave me alone—confide in Andrea and Costanza, they understand you better. And I hung up.

Right afterward I intensified my relations with Giuliana. Angela tried often to make up, she’d say to me: let’s go out together. I always answered, even if it wasn’t true: I have a date, I’m seeing Giuliana. And I let her understand or said explicitly: you can’t come with me, she can’t stand you.

I also reduced to a minimum my relations with my mother. I was curt, saying things like: I won’t be here today, I’m going to Pascone, and when she asked why, I answered, because I feel like it. I behaved like that certainly to feel free from all the old bonds, to make it clear that I didn’t care anymore about the judgment of relatives and friends, their values, their wanting me to be consistent with what they imagined themselves to be.

9.

Undoubtedly, I became closer to Giuliana in order to cultivate my friendship with Roberto, I won’t deny it. But it also seemed to me that Giuliana really needed me, now that Tonino had left without explanation, leaving her alone to fight with Vittoria and her bullying. One afternoon she called me, extremely upset, to tell me that her mother—egged on by my aunt, naturally—wanted her to tell Roberto: either you marry me immediately and we come and live in Naples or the engagement is off.

“But I can’t,” she said desperately, “he’s really busy, he’s doing some work that’s important for his career. I would be crazy to say to him: marry me immediately. And anyway I want to get away from this city, forever.”

She was sick of everything. I advised her to explain Roberto’s problems to Margherita and Vittoria and, after much hesitation, she did that, but the two women weren’t convinced and went on to corrode her brain with countless insinuations. They are ignorant people, she said desperately, and want to persuade me that if Roberto puts his problems as a professor first and our wedding second it means he doesn’t love me enough and is only wasting my time.

That hammering wasn’t without effect; I soon realized that sometimes even Giuliana doubted Roberto. Of course, in general she reacted angrily and got mad at Vittoria, who put terrible ideas in her mother’s head, but, repeated over and over, the terrible ideas were making progress even in her and saddening her.

“You see where I live?” she said one afternoon when I had gone to see her and we were taking a walk on the bleak streets of her neighborhood. “While Roberto is in Milan, he’s always busy, he meets so many intelligent people, and sometimes he has so much to do I can’t even get him on the phone.”

“That’s what his life is.”

“I should be his life.”

“I don’t know.”

She got irritated.

“No? So what is it: studying, talking to women colleagues and women students? Maybe Vittoria is right: he marries me or that’s it.”

Things became more problematic when Roberto told her he had to go to London for ten days for work. Giuliana was more upset than usual, and gradually it became clear that the problem wasn’t so much the sojourn abroad—I knew he had gone away other times, although only for two or three days—as the fact that he wasn’t going by himself. Then I also became alarmed.

“Who’s he going with?”

“With Michela and two other professors.”

“Who’s Michela?”

“Someone who can’t leave him alone.”

“You go, too.”

“Where, Giannì? Where? Don’t think of how you grew up, think of how I grew up, think of Vittoria, think of my mother, think of this shitty place. It’s all easy for you, for me no.”

It seemed unfair: if I made an effort to understand her problems, she had no idea of mine. But I pretended nothing was wrong, I let her vent, I devoted myself to calming her. At the center of my arguments was as usual the rare quality of her fiancé. Roberto wasn’t an ordinary person but a man of great spiritual force, very cultured, faithful. Even if that Michela had designs, he wouldn’t give in. He loves you, I said, and he’ll behave in an honest way.

She burst out laughing, became bitter. The change was so sudden that I thought of Tonino and what had happened in the movie theater. She planted her anxious eyes in mine, abruptly stopped speaking her half-dialectal Italian, moved on to dialect alone.

“How do you know he loves me?”

“It’s not just me who knows it, everyone knows it, surely even this Michela.”

“Men, good or not, you brush against them and they want to fuck.”

“Vittoria told you that, but it’s nonsense.”

“Vittoria says terrible things, but not nonsense.”

“Anyway you have to trust Roberto, otherwise you’ll feel terrible.”

“I already feel really terrible, Giannì.”

At that point, I realized that Giuliana attributed to Michela not only the desire to go to bed with Roberto but the intention of taking him away from her and marrying him. It occurred to me that he, absorbed in his studies, probably didn’t even suspect that she could have those anxieties. And I thought maybe it would be enough to tell him: Giuliana is afraid of losing you, she’s very agitated, reassure her. Or anyway that was the reason I gave myself when I asked for the phone number of her fiancé.

“If you want,” I said, “I’ll talk to him and try to find out how things are with this Michela.”

“You’d do that?”

“Of course.”

“But he mustn’t think you’re calling on my account.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“And you have to report to me everything you say and everything he says.”

“Of course.”

10.

I wrote down the number in one of my notebooks, drawing a rectangle around it with a red crayon. One afternoon, feeling very nervous, I called, taking advantage of the fact that my mother wasn’t home. Roberto seemed surprised, even apprehensive. He must have thought that something had happened to Giuliana, it was his first question. I said she was fine, uttered a jumble of words, and then, suddenly discarding all the preambles I had thought of to give formality to the phone call, I said in an almost threatening tone:

“If you promised to marry Giuliana and you don’t marry her, you’re irresponsible.”