The Lying Life of Adults - Elena Ferrante

Date: 2022-10-30
| repress the threat
Chapter: I


Date: 2022-10-30
| Had Mariano merely been joking or, joking, had he cruelly spoken
| the truth?
Chapter: I


Date: 2022-10-31
| learned to lie to my parents more and more. At first I didn’t
| tell real lies, but since I wasn’t strong enough to oppose their
| always well-ordered world, I pretended to accept it while at the
| same time I cut out for myself a narrow path that I could abandon
| in a hurry if they merely darkened.
Chapter: II


Date: 2022-11-03
| was clutching the scissors, I realized that she was having a hard
| time controlling herself. Her capacity for affection must long
| ago have been used up, probably with the death of Enzo, but her
| capacity for hatred—it seemed to me—had no limit. I had just
| seen how she behaved with poor Rosario Sargente, and she would have
| been capable of hurting even Corrado: imagine then what she would
| do to my mother and especially my father, now that I had told her
| about Mariano. The idea of it made me feel like crying again
Chapter: III


Date: 2022-11-03
| How, I thought, had my father, so hostile to his sister, so different
| from her in every way, convinced himself that a piece of jewelry
| belonging to her, an ornament meant for me, could be suitable not
| for my mother, for example, but for that very elegant second wife
| of his, the descendant of goldsmiths, so wealthy that she had no
| need for jewelry? Vittoria and Costanza were such dissimilar women,
| they diverged in every way. The first had no education, the second
| was extremely cultivated; the first was vulgar, the second refined;
| the first was poor, the second rich. And yet, for me, the bracelet
| pressed them into one another and confused them, confusing me.
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-03
| a loving father who from my first months of life had tried to protect
| me from Aunt Vittoria’s malice, that aunt-witch’s desire to
| take possession of me and make me like her
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-03
| I liked lying more and more, I felt now that praying and telling
| lies provided the same consolation
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-04
| seemed to me so ridiculous to hold that thick, rigid thingy in
| my hand
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-04
| Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many. I nodded,
| unhooked the bracelet, put it in my pocket.
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-05
| Would you spit on a picture of your father?” “Would you?”
| I asked in turn.  “On a picture of my mother, yes.” “Not
| me,” said Ida.  I thought a moment and said: “I would pee on a
| picture of my father.” This hypothesis excited Angela.  “We can
| do it together.” “If you do it,” said Ida, “I’ll watch
| and I’ll write you.” “What does it mean that you’ll write
| us?” I asked.  “I’ll write about you that you pee on a photo
| of Andrea.” “A story?” “Yes.”
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-05
| funicular
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-05
| And I, on the spot, decided to tell her just that. In a brief series
| of statements I went so far as to pretend that my parents had kept
| me from calling her, then I added that the letter told the truth:
| the bracelet was a very dear memory of how she had helped me, saved
| me, put me on the right path. I said it like that, in an emotional
| voice, and I was amazed at how good I was at speaking to her in
| a falsely heartfelt way, at how carefully and effectively I chose
| words, at how I wasn’t like her, but worse.
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-06
| sidewards
Chapter: IV


Date: 2022-11-06
| About one of his words I have no doubt, he uttered it often
| on that occasion, plucking its petals like a daisy. I refer to
| “compunction,” I understood that he was using it in an anomalous
| way. He said that it should be cleansed of the ugly uses that had
| been made of it, he spoke of it as of a needle that had to pull
| the thread through the scattered fragments of our existence. He
| gave it the meaning of an extreme vigilance over oneself, it was
| the knife that would prick conscience to keep it from going to sleep.
Chapter: V


Date: 2022-11-06
| compunction
Chapter: V


Date: 2022-11-07
| That attempt—failed from the start—to get close to my father
| again intensified my desire to see Roberto.
Chapter: V


Date: 2022-11-08
| In church I’d thought I couldn’t live without him, but time was
| passing, I continued to live. That impression of indispensability
| was changing. Indispensable now seemed to me not his physical
| presence—I imagined him far away, in Milan, happy, engaged in
| countless fine and useful things, recognized by everyone for his
| merits—but reorganizing myself around a goal: becoming a person
| who could earn his respect. I now felt him as an authority equally
| indeterminate—would he approve if I acted in such and such a way,
| or would he be opposed—and indisputable.
Chapter: V


Date: 2022-11-08
| Also around then I gave up caressing myself every night before
| going to sleep as a reward for the unbearable effort of existing. It
| seemed to me that the desolate creatures destined for death had a
| single small bit of luck: alleviate the suffering, forget it for
| a moment, setting off between their legs the device that leads to
| a little pleasure.
Chapter: V


Date: 2022-11-14
| Why if she loved that bracelet so much did she keep getting rid
| of it?
Chapter: V


Date: 2022-11-14
| Not only does “time passed” become an empty formula but also
| “one afternoon,” “one morning,” “one evening” become
| merely markers of convenience. All I can say is that I really did
| manage to make up the lost year and without a great effort. I had
| a good memory—I realized—and learned from books more than from
| school. Even if I read absentmindedly, I remembered everything.
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-15
| 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
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-15
| That was the last stage of the long crisis in my house and, at
| the same time, an important moment in my arduous approach to the
| adult world. I learned—just at that moment, when I decided to
| appear cordial, and reply to my mother that the evening was warm,
| and accept Mariano’s habitual kiss on the cheeks as well as the
| usual glance at my breasts—that it was impossible to stop growing
| up. When the two closed the door behind them, I went to the bathroom
| and took a long shower as if to wash them off me.
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-15
| If you looked even just for a moment at those who had the privilege
| of a beautiful, refined face, you discovered that it hid infernos no
| different from those expressed by coarse, ugly faces. The splendor
| of a face, enhanced even by kindness, harbored and promised suffering
| still more than a dull face.
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-15
| “Your father stole the bracelet from his dying mother-in-law to
| give it as a present to the healthy mother of his lover.”
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-16
| I thought back to instructive walks through Naples with my father, to
| his permanent display of knowledge and my role of adoring daughter. I
| wondered, is Roberto nothing but my father as a young man, that is,
| a trap
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-16
| Michela appeared to care only about his attention, and the more
| she talked, the more Giuliana—I saw—withered. It was as if
| her face were wasting away until it was only transparent skin,
| displaying in advance what it would become when illness and old age
| arrived to ruin it. What was crippling her at that moment? Jealousy
| probably. Or maybe not, Michela wasn’t doing anything that could
| make her jealous, no gesture, such as Angela had laid out for me,
| illustrating the strategy of seduction. Probably Giuliana was simply
| disfigured by the suffering caused by the quality of Michela’s
| voice, the efficacy of her phrases, the ability with which she
| could pose questions alternating examples with generalizations. When
| her face seemed to be utterly drained of life, a harsh, aggressive
| voice came out, with a strong dialectal coloring:
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-16
| Being near them didn’t ease my unhappy situation but transformed
| me into the audience of their happiness: something that—it seemed
| to me at that moment—Giuliana in particular was hoping for.
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-16
| ’m still fascinated by how our brain 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 knew clearly that I wanted to go back to Milan
| immediately, at all costs, I knew it with my whole self, but I
| didn’t say it to myself
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-16
| I was a virgin and that night I wanted to lose my virginity with the
| only person who had given me, thanks to his enormous authority as a
| male, a new beauty. It seemed my right, that was how I would enter
| adulthood. But as I got off the train I was scared, that wasn’t
| the way I wanted to grow up. The beauty that Roberto had recognized
| in me too closely resembled the beauty of someone who hurts people
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-16
| I wanted to feel that I was much more than a cute or even very
| beautiful small animal with whom a brilliant male can play a little
| and distract himself.
Chapter: VI


Date: 2022-11-16
| excrescence
Chapter: VII