The Lying Life of Adults
ALSO BY
ELENA FERRANTE
The Days of Abandonment
Troubling Love
The Lost Daughter
The Beach at Night
Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey
Incidental Inventions
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND
(The Neapolitan Quartet)
My Brilliant Friend
The Story of a New Name
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The Story of the Lost Child
Elena Ferrante
THE LYING LIFE
OF ADULTS
Translated from the Italian
by Ann Goldstein
Europa Editions
214 West 29th Street
New York, N.Y. 10001
www.europaeditions.com
info@europaeditions.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,
real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Edizioni e/o
First Publication 2020 by Europa Editions
Translation by Ann Goldstein
Original title: La vita bugiarda degli adulti
Translation copyright © 2020 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo © Dmitriy Bilous/Getty Images
ISBN 9781609455927
THE LYING LIFE
OF ADULTS
I
1.
Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a frigid February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.
2.
I loved my father very much; he was an unfailingly courteous man. A refined manner perfectly matched a body so slender that his clothes seemed a size too large, and this, to my eyes, gave him a look of inimitable elegance. His features were delicate, and nothing—deep-set eyes with long lashes, impeccably engineered nose, full lips—spoiled their harmony. With me he had an air of cheerfulness on every occasion, whatever his mood or mine, and he never shut himself in his study—he was always studying—unless he got at least a smile out of me. He especially liked my hair, but it’s hard to say, now, when he started praising it, maybe when I was two or three. Certainly, during my childhood we had conversations like this:
“What lovely hair, so fine, so shiny—will you give it to me?”
“No, it’s mine.”
“How about a little generosity.”
“If you want I can lend it to you.”
“Excellent, then I just won’t give it back to you.”
“You already have yours.”
“What I have I took from you.”
“That’s not true, you’re lying.”
“Check for yourself: yours was too pretty and I stole it.”
I would check but just to play along, I knew he would never steal it. And I laughed, I laughed a lot; I had much more fun with him than with my mother. He always wanted something of mine, my ear, my nose, my chin: they were so perfect, he said, he just couldn’t live without them. I loved that tone, which proved to me over and over again how indispensable I was to him.
Naturally, my father wasn’t like that with everyone. At times, when he was really caught up in something, he tended to frantically mash together sophisticated arguments and uncontrolled emotions. At other times, instead, he was curt, resorting to brief, extremely precise phrases, so dense that no one could refute them. These were two fathers very different from the one I loved, and I had started to discover their existence at the age of seven or eight, when I heard him arguing with the friends and acquaintances who on occasion came to our house for meetings that could become very heated, on issues I knew nothing about. In general, I stayed with my mother in the kitchen and paid little attention to the squabbling just a little ways off. But sometimes, when my mother was busy and closed herself in her room, I was left alone in the hall playing or reading—mostly reading, I would say, because my father read a lot, and my mother, too, and I loved being like them. I didn’t listen to the arguments, I broke off my game or my reading only when there was a sudden silence and those alien voices of my father’s arose. From then on he would dominate, and I waited for the meeting to end to find out if he had gone back to his usual self, the one with the gentle and affectionate tones.
The night he made that statement he had just learned that I wasn’t doing well in school. It was something new. I had always done well, since first grade, and only in the past two months had started doing badly. But it was very important to my parents that I be successful in school, and at the first poor grades my mother, especially, was alarmed.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to study.”
“I do study.”
“And so?”
“Some things I remember and some I don’t.”
“Study until you remember everything.”
I studied until I was exhausted, but the results continued to be disappointing. That afternoon, in fact, my mother had gone to talk to the teachers and had returned very unhappy. She didn’t scold me, my parents never scolded me. She merely said: the mathematics teacher is the one who is most dissatisfied, but she says that if you want to you can do it. Then my mother went into the kitchen to make dinner, and meanwhile my father came home. All I could hear from my room was that she was giving him a summary of the teachers’ complaints, and I understood that she was bringing up as an excuse the changes of early adolescence. But he interrupted her, and in one of the tones that he never used with me—even giving in to dialect, which was completely banned in our house—let slip what he surely wouldn’t have wanted to come out of his mouth:
“Adolescence has nothing to do with it: she’s getting the face of Vittoria.”
I’m sure that if he’d known I could hear him he would never have used a tone so far removed from our usual playful ease. They both thought the door of my room was closed, I always closed it, and they didn’t realize that one of them had left it open. So it was that, at the age of twelve, I learned from my father’s voice, muffled by the effort to keep it low, that I was becoming like his sister, a woman in whom—I had heard him say as long as I could remember—ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.
Here someone might object: maybe you’re exaggerating, your father didn’t say, literally, Giovanna is ugly. It’s true, it wasn’t in his nature to utter such brutal words. But I was going through a period of feeling very fragile. I’d begun menstruating almost a year earlier, my breasts were all too visible and embarrassed me, I was afraid I smelled bad and was always washing, I went to bed lethargic and woke up lethargic. My only comfort at that time, my only certainty, was that he absolutely adored me, all of me. So that when he compared me to Aunt Vittoria it was worse than if he’d said: Giovanna used to be pretty, no
w she’s turned ugly. In my house the name Vittoria was like the name of a monstrous being who taints and infects anyone who touches her. I knew almost nothing about her. I had seen her only a few times, but—and this is the point—all I remembered about those occasions was revulsion and fear. Not the revulsion and fear that she in person could have provoked in me—I had no memory of that. What frightened me was my parents’ revulsion and fear. My father always talked about his sister obscurely, as if she practiced shameful rites that defiled her, defiling those around her. My mother never mentioned her, and in fact when she intervened in her husband’s outbursts tended to silence him, as if she were afraid that Vittoria, wherever she was, could hear them and would immediately come rushing up San Giacomo dei Capri, striding rapidly, although it was a long, steep street, and deliberately dragging behind her all the illnesses from the hospitals in our neighborhood; that she would fly into our apartment, on the sixth floor, smash the furniture, and, emitting drunken black flashes from her eyes, hit my mother if she so much as tried to protest.
Of course I intuited that behind that tension there must be a story of wrongs done and suffered, but I knew little, at the time, of family affairs, and above all I didn’t consider that terrible aunt a member of the family. She was a childhood bogeyman, a lean, demonic silhouette, an unkempt figure lurking in the corners of houses when darkness falls. Was it possible, then, that without any warning I should discover that I was getting her face? I? I who until that moment had thought that I was pretty and assumed, thanks to my father, that I would remain so forever? I who, with his constant affirmation, thought I had beautiful hair, I who wanted to be loved as he loved me, as he had accustomed me to believing I was loved, I who was already suffering because both my parents were suddenly unhappy with me, and that unhappiness distressed me, tarnishing everything?
I waited for my mother to speak, but her reaction didn’t console me. Although she hated all her husband’s relatives and detested her sister-in-law the way you detest a lizard that runs up your bare leg, she didn’t respond by yelling at him: you’re crazy, my daughter and your sister have nothing in common. She merely offered a weak, laconic: what are you talking about, of course she isn’t. And I, there in my room, hurried to close the door so as not to hear anything else. Then I wept in silence and stopped only when my father came to announce—this time in his nice voice—that dinner was ready.
I joined them in the kitchen with dry eyes, and had to endure, looking at my plate, a series of suggestions for improving my grades. Afterward I went back to pretending to study, while they settled in front of the television. My suffering wouldn’t end or even diminish. Why had my father made that statement? Why had my mother not forcefully contradicted it? Was their displeasure due to my bad grades or was it an anxiety that was separate from school, that had existed for years? And him, especially him, had he spoken those cruel words because of a momentary irritation I had caused him, or, with his sharp gaze—the gaze of someone who knows and sees everything—had he long ago discerned the features of my ruined future, of an advancing evil that upset him and that he himself didn’t know how to respond to? I was in despair all night. In the morning I was convinced that, if I wanted to save myself, I had to go and see what Aunt Vittoria’s face was really like.
3.
It was an arduous undertaking. In a city like Naples, inhabited by families with numerous branches that even when they were fighting, even when the fights were bloody, never really cut their ties, my father lived in utter autonomy, as though he had no blood relatives, as if he were self-generated. I had often had dealings with my mother’s parents and her brother. They were all affectionate people who gave me lots of presents, and until my grandparents died—first my grandfather and a year later my grandmother: sudden deaths that had upset me, had made my mother cry the way we girls cried when we hurt ourselves—and my uncle left for a job far away, we had seen them frequently and happily. Whereas I knew almost nothing about my father’s relatives. They had appeared in my life only on rare occasions—a wedding, a funeral—and always in a climate of such false affection that all I got out of it was the awkwardness of forced contact: say hello to your grandfather, give your aunt a kiss. In those relatives, therefore, I had never been much interested, also because after those encounters my parents were tense and forgot them by mutual consent, as if they’d been involved in some second-rate performance.
It should also be said that if my mother’s relatives lived in a precise place with an evocative name, Museo—they were the Museo grandparents—the space where my father’s relatives lived was undefined, nameless. I knew only one thing for certain: to visit them you had to go down, and down, keep going down, into the depths of the depths of Naples, and the journey was so long it seemed to me that we and my father’s relatives lived in two different cities. And for a long time that appeared to be true. We lived in the highest part of Naples, and to go anywhere we had inevitably to descend. My father and mother went willingly only as far as the Vomero, or, with some annoyance, to my grandparents’ house in Museo. And their friends were mainly in Via Suarez, Piazza degli Artisti, Via Luca Giordano, Via Scarlatti, Via Cimarosa, streets that were well known to me because many of my schoolmates lived there as well. Not to mention that they all led to Villa Floridiana, a park I loved, where my mother had brought me for fresh air and sunshine when I was an infant, and where I had spent pleasant hours with my friends of early childhood, Angela and Ida. Only after those place names, all happily colored by plants, fragments of the sea, gardens, flowers, games, and good manners, did the real descent begin, the one my parents considered irritating. For work, for shopping, for the need that my father, in particular, had for study, encounter, and debate, they descended daily, usually on the funiculars, to Chiaia, to Toledo, and from there went on to Piazza Plebiscito, the Biblioteca Nazionale, to Port’Alba and Via Ventaglieri and Via Foria, and, at most, Piazza Carlo III, where my mother’s school was. I knew those names well, too—my parents mentioned them frequently but didn’t often take me there, and maybe that’s why the names didn’t give me the same happiness. Outside of the Vomero, the city scarcely belonged to me, in fact the farther it spread on that lower ground, the more unknown it seemed. So it was natural that the areas where my father’s relatives lived had, in my eyes, the features of worlds still wild and unexplored. For me not only were they nameless but, from the way my parents referred to them, I felt they must be difficult to get to. The times we had to go there, my mother and father, who usually were energetic and willing, seemed especially weary, especially anxious. I was young, but their tension, their exchanges—always the same—stayed with me.
“Andrea,” my mother would say in a tired voice, “get dressed, we have to go.”
But he went on reading and underlining books with the same pencil he used to write in a notebook he had beside him.
“Andrea, it’s getting late, they’ll be angry.”
“Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“And the child?”
“The child, too.”
My father then abandoned books and notebooks, leaving them open on the desk, put on a clean shirt, his good suit. But he was taciturn, tense, as if he were rehearsing mentally the lines of an inevitable role. My mother, meanwhile, who wasn’t ready at all, kept checking her own appearance, mine, my father’s, as if only the proper clothing could guarantee that we would all three return home safe and sound. In sum, it was obvious that, on each of those occasions, they believed they had to defend themselves from people and places of which they said nothing to me, so as not to upset me. But still I noticed the anomalous anxiety, or, rather, I recognized it, it had always been there, perhaps the only memory of distress in a happy childhood. What worried me were sentences like this, uttered in an Italian that, for one thing, seemed—I don’t know how to say it—splintered.
“Remember, if Vittoria says something, pretend you didn’t hear.”
“You mean if she acts crazy I say nothing?”
“Yes, keep in mind Giovanna’s there.”
“All right.”
“Don’t say all right if you don’t mean it. It’s a small effort. We’re there half an hour and we come home.”
I remember almost nothing of those forays. Noise, heat, distracted kisses on the forehead, dialect voices, a bad smell that we probably all gave off out of fear. That climate had convinced me over the years that my father’s relatives—howling shapes of repulsive unseemliness, especially Aunt Vittoria, the blackest, the most unseemly—constituted a danger, even if it was difficult to understand what the danger was. Was the area where they lived considered risky? Were my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins dangerous, or just Aunt Vittoria? Only my parents seemed to be informed, and now that I felt an urgency to know what my aunt was like, what sort of person she was, I would have to ask them in order to get to the bottom of it. But even if I asked them, what would I find out? Either they would silence me with a phrase of good-humored refusal—you want to see your aunt, you want to visit her, what’s the point?—or they would be alarmed and try not to mention her anymore. So I thought that, at least for a start, I’d have to find a picture of her.
4.
I took advantage of an afternoon when they were both out and went to rummage in a dresser in their bedroom where my mother kept the albums containing, in an orderly arrangement, the photographs of herself, my father, and me. I knew those albums by heart. I had often leafed through them: they mostly documented my parents’ relationship and my almost thirteen years of life. And so I knew that, mysteriously, there were a lot of pictures of my mother’s relatives, very few of my father’s, and, among those few, not a single one of Aunt Vittoria. Still, I remembered that somewhere in that dresser was an old metal box that held random images of my parents before they met. Since I’d hardly ever looked at them, and always with my mother, I hoped to find in there some pictures of my aunt.