The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

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.

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.

And then there were the shadows, long shadows, one of them cast by an evidently female body. Although my father had assiduously eliminated the people next to him, he had left their trace on the sidewalk.

That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me.

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.

Vittoria seemed to me to have a beauty so unbearable that to consider her ugly became a necessity.

She pushed me away forcefully, and, suddenly deprived of her warmth, I muffled a cry, as if I’d felt a sharp pain somewhere but was ashamed to show myself weak. It seemed wonderful that after that dance with Enzo she hadn’t liked anyone else. And I thought she must have preserved every detail of her unique love, so that maybe, dancing with me, she had relived it moment by moment in her mind. I thought it was thrilling, I wanted to love, too, immediately, in that absolute way. Surely she had a memory of Enzo so intense that her bony organism, her chest, her breath had transmitted a little love into my stomach.

Just to start with, I discovered that I had a space inside me that could swallow up every feeling in a very short time.

The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen. The proximity of that threatening and enveloping woman captivated me, and here I was, already observing her every move.

If Enzo was an ugly man, well, his ugliness suddenly moved me, or rather the word lost meaning, dissolved in the gurgle of the water. What truly counted was the capacity to inspire love, even if one was ugly, even if spiteful, even if stupid.

At that point she took her hands away from her face, sliding them slowly over her skin: a painful movement that was intended to wipe away the tears and at the same time deliberately show me her grief, without embarrassment but, rather, as a medal.

Listening to Vittoria, I not only desired the pleasure she said she had felt; it seemed to me that that pleasure would be impossible if it weren’t followed immediately by the grief that she still felt and by her unfailing fidelity.

Then she whispered in dialect: sorry, I’m not angry with you but with your father; then she stuck a hand under my skirt and patted me lightly, again and again, with the palm of her hand, between my thigh and my bottom.

So I ended up looking for small real anomalies and inflating them slightly. But even then I was uneasy. I wasn’t a truly affectionate daughter and I wasn’t a truly loyal spy.

and I wanted to believe that if Angela had seen it now she would have found it beautiful, just as at that moment it seemed to me. But as soon as I was alone, at home—while, shut in my room, I looked at myself in the closet mirror and confirmed that no miracle would ever be able to erase the face that was coming to me—I gave in and finally wept. I resolved not to spy on my parents anymore, and never to see my aunt again.

In reality, for different reasons, both they and I understood much more of that scene than we admitted. We intuited, for example, that it had to do with sex, not Marxism, but not the sex that interested and amused us in every circumstance; we felt that, completely unexpectedly, a form of sex was erupting into our lives that wasn’t attractive, that in fact disgusted us, because we dimly perceived that it had to do not with our bodies, or the bodies of our contemporaries, or actors and singers, but with the bodies of our parents. Sex—we imagined—had drawn them into something sticky and repulsive, utterly different from what they themselves had taught us.

What happened, in other words, in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles?

As a result, an incongruous juxtaposition of vulgarity and refinement again became central, even in the fairy-tale world I was constructing; and that further absence of clear boundaries, at a moment when I was losing every old orientation, confused me even more. My aunt, who was vulgar, became a woman of taste. My father and Costanza, people of taste, became—as the wrongs they had done my mother and even the hateful Mariano also demonstrated—vulgar.

The bracelet, however you looked at it, in whatever type of story you inserted it—a fairy tale, an interesting or boring story—showed only that our body, agitated by the life that writhes within, consuming it, does stupid things that it shouldn’t do.

looked for meanings to get around that impression of scant intelligence in people who had so much of it.

It’s mine, I concluded, because I recognized it in the picture and my mother didn’t, because I can look pain in the face and endure it and also cause it, while she can’t.

But she couldn’t contain herself and added suddenly: don’t think that it’s your father’s fault, there’s no fault in what happened, one does harm without wanting

I was glad. The two sisters exiling themselves in their own house, that cutting of blood ties, just as I would have wanted to cut them, I liked that, and I also liked their foul language.

“Only bitches like you study like parrots, get promoted, and are respected by their boyfriends. I don’t study, I get flunked, and I’m a whore.”

I don’t know, we perform acts that seem like acts but in fact they’re symbols, you know what symbols are, that’s something I should explain to you, good becomes evil without your realizing it, you understand, I didn’t wrong you, you were a newborn, I would have wronged Costanza, in my mind I had already given her the bracelet long before.

I never understood how a man so devoted to reflection and study, capable of conceiving the most gleaming sentences, could at times, when he was overwhelmed by emotions, make such muddled speeches.

But there was something else. A very violent need for degradation was growing inside me—a fearless degradation, a yearning to feel heroically vile—and it seemed to me that Corrado had sensed that need and was ready to support it without a fuss.

Love—she said, in an inspired tone and using a formula that didn’t belong to her, that in fact baffled and irritated me—is a ray of sun that warms the soul. I was disappointed. Maybe I should have observed my aunt with the same attention with which she had urged me to spy on my parents. Maybe I would have discovered that behind the harshness that had charmed me there was a soft, foolish little woman, tough on the surface, tender underneath. If Vittoria really is that, I thought, discouraged, then she is ugly, she has the ugliness of banality.

“When you’re made to do things you don’t want to and you obey, it works on your mind, it works on everything.” “Obedience is a skin disease?” He looked at me for a moment in bewilderment, he smiled. “Good for you, it’s exactly that, a skin disease. And you are a good cure, don’t change, always say what comes to your mind. A little more conversation with you and I bet I’ll improve.” I said impulsively:

“When you grow up you’ll understand them.” They all said I would understand when I grew up. I answered: “Then I won’t grow up.”

These were moments when everything seemed to have a secret depth and it was up to me to discover it. But it didn’t last. Although I tried to resist, what prevailed was a sense of annoyance at everything, a tendency to scathing judgments, an urge to quarrel. I don’t want to be like that, I said to myself, especially in a state of half sleep, and yet I was that, and realizing that it was the only way I could express myself—harsh, mean—sometimes pushed me not to rectify things but, with a treacherous pleasure, to do worse.

Deep self loathing

“Now I know why I remembered you.” “What did I do?” “You put a lot of force into your words.” “You put even more.” “I don’t do it on purpose.” “I do. I’m proud, I’m not good, I’m often unjust.”

Even the bulges don’t have a definite time, the color counts more than any date. The hue itself, moreover, that certain emotions take on is of unimportant duration, the one who is writing knows.

That morning something suddenly occurred to me that seemed intolerable and yet funny: neither Vittoria nor my father nor I could cut out our common roots, and so, depending on the situation, it was always ourselves we ended up loving or hating.

How attached I’d been to my birthday as a child, and yet this time it had gone right out of my mind. I had the impression that I had wronged myself even more than my mother. I couldn’t assign myself value, I was becoming a background figure, a shadow beside Giuliana, the ugly chaperone of the princess who goes to the prince. For that role was I willing to give up a long, pleasant family tradition, candles to blow out, surprising presents?

idyll

Oh, if I really could get lost, I thought at one point, leave myself somewhere, like an umbrella, and never have anything more to do with me.

The beauty that Roberto had recognized in me too closely resembled the beauty of someone who hurts people.