The Lying Life of Adults

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Elena Ferrante

The Lying Life of Adults

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 selfgenerated. 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. ...................................

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