Элена Ферранте - The Lying Life of Adults

The night journey to Milan was very boring. I tried to make conversation with Giuliana, but, especially after I told her that I would be sixteen the next day, she seemed embarrassed, an embarrassment she’d displayed the moment she arrived at the station with an enormous red suitcase and overstuffed purse, and realized that I had only a small suitcase with a few essentials. I’m sorry she said, to drag you with me and ruin the day, and that brief exchange was it, we couldn’t find the right tone or the ease that leads to intimacy. At one point, I announced that I was hungry and wanted to explore the train to find something to eat. Giuliana listlessly took out of her bag some good things her mother had prepared, but she ate only a few mouthfuls of frittata di pasta ; I ate the rest. The compartment was crowded, we settled ourselves uncomfortably in the berths. She seemed dulled by anguish, I heard her tossing and turning, she never went to the bathroom.

But at least an hour before we arrived she shut herself in for a long time and returned with her hair fixed and light makeup put on; she had even changed her clothes. We stood in the corridor, outside a pale day was dawning. She asked if anything was excessive or out of place. I reassured her, and at that point she seemed to relax a little, and spoke to me with an affectionate candor.

“I envy you,” she said.

“Why.”

“You don’t fix yourself up, you’re happy the way you are.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. You have something inside that’s only yours and it’s enough for you.”

“I don’t have anything, you have everything.”

She shook her head, murmured:

“Roberto says you’re really intelligent, that you have a great sensibility.”

My face was burning.

“He’s wrong.”

“It’s true. When Vittoria didn’t want to let me go, he’s the one who suggested that I ask you to come with me.”

“I thought my aunt had decided.”

She smiled. Of course, she’d made the decision, nothing was done without Vittoria’s consent. But the idea had come from Roberto; Giuliana without mentioning her fiancé had talked to her mother, and Margherita had consulted with Vittoria. I was overwhelmed—so it was he who wanted me in Milan—and I answered Giuliana, who now wanted to talk, in monosyllables, I couldn’t calm down. Soon I would see him again and the whole day I would be with him, in his house, at lunch, at dinner, sleeping. Gradually, I became less agitated, I said:

“Do you know how to get to Roberto’s house?”

“Yes, but he’s coming to meet us.”

Giuliana checked her face again, then took out of her purse a leather pouch, shook it, my aunt’s bracelet slid out onto the palm of her hand.

“Shall I wear it?” she asked.

“Why not?”

“I’m always worried. Vittoria gets angry if she doesn’t see it on my wrist. But then she’s afraid I’ll lose it, she harasses me and I get scared.”

“Be careful. Do you like it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

There was a long, embarrassed pause.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Not even Tonino told you?”

“No.”

“My father stole it from my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who at the time was very sick, to give to Vittoria’s mother.”

“Stole it? Your father, Enzo?”

“Yes, he took it secretly.”

“And Vittoria knows?”

“Of course she knows.”

“And your mother?”

“She told me.”

I thought of the photo of Enzo in the kitchen, the one in the policeman’s uniform. He watched over the two women even in death, armed with his pistol. He kept them together in the cult of his image, wife and lover. What power men have, even the most small-minded, even over courageous and violent women like my aunt. I said, unable to contain my sarcasm:

“Your father stole the bracelet from his dying mother-in-law to give it as a present to the healthy mother of his lover.”

“You got it, that’s right. There’s never been money in my house, and he was a man who liked to make a good impression on those he still didn’t know, but he didn’t hesitate to harm those whose affection he’d already won. My mother suffered a lot because of him.”

I said without thinking:

“Vittoria, too.”

But right afterward I felt the full truth, the full weight of those two words, and it seemed to me that I understood why Vittoria had that ambiguous attitude toward the bracelet. Formally she wanted it, but in substance she tended to get rid of it. Formally, it was her mother’s, but in substance it wasn’t. Formally, it was supposed to be a present for some celebration or other for his new mother-in-law, but in substance Enzo had stolen it from his old mother-in-law, who was dying. Ultimately, that piece of jewelry was the proof that my father wasn’t all wrong about his sister’s lover. And, more generally, it was evidence that the incomparable idyll recounted by my aunt must have been anything but an idyll.

Giuliana said with scorn:

“Vittoria doesn’t suffer, Giannì, Vittoria makes people suffer. For me this bracelet is a permanent sign of bad times and pain. It makes me anxious, it brings bad luck.”

“Objects aren’t guilty, I like it.”

Giuliana assumed an expression of ironic unease:

“I would have bet on it, Roberto likes it, too.”

I helped her hook it on her wrist, the train was coming into the station.

14.

I recognized Roberto even before Giuliana did, he was standing in the crowd on the platform. I raised a hand so that he would pick us out in the parade of travelers, and he immediately raised his. Giuliana hurried, dragging her suitcase, Roberto went toward her. They embraced as if they wanted to crush each other, mixing fragments of their bodies, but they exchanged only a light kiss on the mouth. Afterward he took my hand in his and thanked me for coming with Giuliana: without you, he said, who knows when we would have seen each other again. Then he took from his fiancée the big suitcase and the bag, I followed a few steps behind with my paltry suitcase.

He’s a normal person, I thought, or maybe one of his many good qualities is that he knows how to be normal. In the bar in Piazza Amedeo, and the other times I’d met him, I’d felt I was dealing with a professor of great depth who was concerned with I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but certainly complex branches of knowledge. Now I saw his hip pressed to Giuliana’s, the way he kept leaning over to kiss her, and he was an ordinary fiancé of twenty-five such as you’d see on the street, in a movie, on television.

As we were about to descend a grand pale yellow staircase he wanted to take my suitcase, too, but I prevented him with determination, and so he continued to concern himself affectionately with Giuliana. I didn’t know anything about Milan. We rode the metro for at least twenty minutes, and then it was a quarter of an hour’s walk to the house. We climbed old dark stone stairs to the fifth floor. I felt proudly silent, alone with my bag, while Giuliana was free of burdens, talkative, and finally happy in every movement.

We came to a landing where there were three doors. Roberto opened the first and led us into an apartment that I liked immediately, despite a faint odor of gas. Unlike the apartment on San Giacomo dei Capri, tidy and chained to my mother’s sense of order, here there was an impression of clean disorder. We crossed a hall with piles of books on the floor and entered a large room with unusual old furniture, a desk covered with folders, a table, a faded red couch, overflowing bookshelves, a television set sitting on a plastic cube.

Roberto, speaking mainly to me, apologized, said that even though the concierge tidied up every day, the house was structurally not very welcoming. I tried to say something ironic, I wanted to continue in the bold tone that—I was now sure—he liked. But Giuliana wouldn’t let me speak, she said: forget the concierge, I’ll take care of it, you’ll see how nice it will be, and she threw her arms around his neck, clinging to him with the same energy she had put into the meeting at the station, this time giving him a long kiss. I immediately turned away, as if looking for a place to put my suitcase; a moment later she gave me precise instructions with a proprietary air.