The Lying Life of Adults

I'm not wise, but I read a lot of novels.

I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.

Is it so easy—I thought—to die in the life of the people we can’t live without?

I feel ugly, like I’m a bad person, and yet I’d like to be loved.

...the dead are objects that have broken, a television, the radio, the mixer, and the best thing is to remember them as they were when they were working, because the only acceptable tomb is memory.

One night my mother said to me: “Your father is younger than you. You’re growing up and he’s still a child. He’ll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games. If you don’t keep an eye on him, he gets hurt. I should have understood him as a girl, but then he seemed to me a grown man.

it's good to be afraid. You need to be afraid even when there's no need, it keeps you alert. The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen. Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.

That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—

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.

I looked for a few seconds at her face, without makeup, then stared at the floor. Vittoria seemed to me to have a beauty so unbearable that to consider her ugly became a necessity.

I’m still fascinated by how our brains elaborates strategies and carries them out without revealing them. To say that it’s a matter of the unconscious seems to me approximate, maybe even hypocritical.

I walked back home, slowly. I couldn’t get that expression—unable to see straight—out of my mind. Everything seems in order, hello, see you soon, make yourself at home, what can I give you to drink, could you lower the volume a little, thank you, you’re welcome. But there’s a black veil that can drop at any moment. It’s a sudden blindness, you don’t know how to keep your distance, you crash into things. Does it happen only to some people or to everybody that, once a certain level is passed, they can’t see straight anymore? And was it truer when you saw everything clearly or when the strongest and deepest feelings—hatred, love—blinded you?

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?

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

The hue itself, moreover, that certain emotions take on is of unimportant duration, the one who is writing knows. As soon as you look for words, the slowness becomes a whirlwind and the colors get mixed together like the colors of different fruits in a blender.

Non riuscivo più a essere innocente, dietro i pensieri c'erano altri pensieri, l'infanzia era finita.

Due anni prima di andarsene di casa mio padre disse a mia madre che ero molto brutta. La frase fu pronunciata sottovoce, nell’appartamento che, appena sposati, i miei genitori avevano acquistato al Rione Alto, in cima a San Giacomo dei Capri. Tutto - gli spazi di Napoli, la luce blu di un febbraio gelido, quelle parole - è rimasto fermo. Io invece sono scivolata via e continuo a scivolare anche adesso, dentro queste righe che vogliono darmi una storia mentre in effetti non sono niente, niente di mio, niente che sia davvero cominciato o sia davvero arrivato a compimento: solo un garbuglio che nessuno, nemmeno chi in questo momento sta scrivendo, sa se contiene il filo giusto di un racconto o è soltanto un dolore arruffato, senza redenzione.

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... At my house, it was a duty to hide your feelings, not to seem impolite. Whereas she, after seventeen years-- what seemed an eternity to me-- was still in despair, wept in front of the tomb, spoke to the marble, addressed bones she couldn't even see, a man who no longer existed.

Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.

As we talked I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.

We two are made like that, when we have good thoughts we’re pretty, but we turn ugly with mean ones, we have to get them out of our heads.

a bitter sarcasm alternated with a quiet cult of memory.

Reparei que ela movia o corpo ritmicamente, pequenos movimentos dos pés, dos flancos, dos ombros. Fixei os olhos nas suas costas, perplexa. “A primeira vez que vi Enzo foi num baile e dançámos esta música”, ouvi-a dizer. “Há quanto tempo?” “Dezassete anos neste 23 de maio.” “Já passou muito tempo.” “Não passou um minuto sequer.

Não me agrada que estejas mal, eu também estou mal, a mãe também está mal, e é um bocado ridículo, não te parece, que todo esse mal signifique que tu nos queres bem.

If Vittoria really is that, I thought, discouraged, then she is ugly, she has the ugliness of banality.