Элена Ферранте - The Lying Life of Adults

VII

1.

My mother wasn’t home when I got there. I didn’t eat anything, I got in bed and fell asleep right away. The house in the morning hours seemed empty and silent, I went to the bathroom, went back to bed and fell asleep again. But after a while I woke up with a start, Nella was sitting on the edge of the bed and shaking me.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s enough sleeping.”

“What time is it?”

“One-twenty.”

“I’m really hungry.”

She asked me distractedly about Milan, I told her just as distractedly about the places I’d seen, the Duomo, La Scala, the Galleria, the Navigli. Then she said she had good news: the principal had called my father and told him I had been promoted with excellent grades, including a nine in Greek.

“The principal called Papa?”

“Yes.”

“The principal is stupid.”

My mother smiled, she said:

“Get dressed, Mariano’s in the other room.”

I went into the kitchen barefoot, disheveled, in my pajamas. Mariano, who was already sitting at the table, jumped up, he wanted to congratulate me on my promotion, hugging and kissing me. He confirmed that I was now grown up, more grown up than the last time he’d seen me, and he said: how pretty you’ve gotten, Giovanna, one of these nights we’ll go to dinner just you and me and have a nice chat. Then he turned to my mother in a tone of fake regret and exclaimed: how can it be that this young lady is a friend of Roberto Matese, one of our most promising young men, and talks to him about who knows how many interesting things, while I who’ve known her since she was a child can’t even have a conversation with her. My mother nodded with an expression of pride, but it was clear that she knew nothing about Roberto, so I deduced it was my father who had spoken to Mariano of Roberto as a good friend of mine.

“I barely know him,” I said.

“Is he nice?”

“Very.”

“Is it true he’s Neapolitan?”

“Yes, but not from the Vomero, he’s from down below.”

“Still, he’s Neapolitan.”

“Yes.”

“What’s he working on?”

“On compunction.”

He looked at me in bewilderment.

“Compunction?”

He seemed disappointed and yet curious. Already a remote area of his brain was thinking that perhaps compunction was a subject it was urgent to reflect on.

“Compunction,” I confirmed.

Mariano turned to my mother, laughing:

“You understand, Nella? Your daughter says she barely knows Roberto Matese and then we discover that he has talked to her about compunction.”

I ate a lot; every so often I touched my hair to see if it was solidly planted in my scalp, I caressed it with my fingers, I pulled it a little. At the end of the meal, I jumped up and said I had to go and wash. Mariano, who until that moment had been stringing together sentence after sentence in the conviction that he was entertaining both me and Nella, assumed a worried expression, he said:

“Do you know about Ida?”

I shook my head no, my mother spoke:

“She was failed.”

“If you have time,” said Mariano, “see her. Angela was promoted and yesterday morning left for Greece with a boyfriend of hers. Ida needs company and comfort, all she does is read and write. That’s why she failed: she reads and writes and doesn’t study.”

I couldn’t bear their grieved faces. I said:

“Comfort for what? If you don’t turn it into a calamity, you’ll see that Ida won’t need comfort.”

I shut myself in the bathroom, and when I came out the house was absolutely silent. I put my ear to my mother’s door, not even a sigh. I opened it a little way, nothing. Nella and Mariano had evidently considered me rude and had gone out without even a cry of bye, Giovanna. So I called Ida, my father answered.

“Good for you,” he exclaimed happily, as soon as he heard my voice.

“Good for you: the principal is a spy in your service.”

He laughed with satisfaction.

“She’s a fine person.”

“Of course.”

“I heard you were in Milan, a guest of Matese’s.”

“Who told you?”

He took some time to answer.

“Vittoria.”

I exclaimed, in disbelief:

“You phone each other?”

“More: yesterday she came here. Costanza has a friend who needs care night and day and we thought of her.”

I murmured:

“You’ve made peace.”

“No, peace with Vittoria is impossible. But the years pass, we get older. And then you, slowly, shrewdly, acted as a bridge, good for you. You’re clever, you’re like me.”

“I’ll seduce principals, too?”

“That and much else. How did it go with Matese?”

“Get Mariano to tell you, I already told him.”

“Vittoria gave me his address, I want to write to him. These are disastrous times, right-thinking people have to stay in touch. Do you have his phone number?”

“No. Let me talk to Ida.”

“Not even a goodbye?”

“Bye, Andrea.”

He was silent for a long second.

“Bye.”

I heard him call Ida in the same tone of voice in which years before, when I was wanted on the phone, he called me. Ida arrived right away, she said, despondent, almost in a whisper:

“Give me a reason to get out of this house.”

“Let’s meet in an hour in the Floridiana.”

2.

I waited for Ida at the park entrance. She arrived all sweaty, her brown hair tied in a ponytail, much taller than a few months earlier and thin and frail as a blade of grass. She carried a big, overstuffed black bag and was wearing a miniskirt, also black, and a black-and-white striped T-shirt. She had a very pale face that was leaving childhood behind, a full mouth, large round cheekbones. We looked for a bench in the shade. She said she was happy she’d been failed, she wanted to leave school and only write. I reminded her that I had also been failed, but I hadn’t been happy about it, I had suffered. She responded, eyes defiant:

“You were ashamed, I’m not ashamed.”

I said:

“I was ashamed because my parents were ashamed.”

“I don’t give a damn about my parents’ shame, they have plenty of other things to be ashamed of.”

“They’re scared. They’re afraid we won’t be worthy of them.”

“I don’t want to be worthy, I want to be unworthy, I want to turn out badly.”

She told me that to be as unworthy as possible she had overcome her disgust and had met with a man who for a while had worked in the garden of the house in Posillipo, married, with three children.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Horrible. His saliva was like sewer water and he was constantly saying bad words.”

“But at least you got it over with.”

“Yes, that.”

“But now calm down and try to feel good.”

“How?”

I proposed that we go to Venice to see Tonino. She replied that she would prefer another place, Rome. I insisted on Venice, I understood that it wasn’t the city that was the problem but Tonino. In effect it emerged that Angela had told her about the slap, the rage that had seized that young man and caused him to lose control. He hurt my sister, she said. Yes, I admitted, but I like the effort he makes to behave well.

“He didn’t manage with my sister.”

“But he was much more committed than she was.”

“You want to lose your virginity to Tonino?”

“No.”

“Can I think about it and let you know?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to go someplace where I’m comfortable and can write.”

“You want to write the story of the gardener?”

“I already did, but I won’t read it to you because you’re still a virgin and it would stifle any desire.”