“She doesn’t know. Ida, you tell her.”
Ida said unwillingly: “That you have a scowl on your face. He says it to me, too.”
Mariano was that sort of person. He and my father had known each other since their university days, and because they’d stayed friends he had always been present in my life. A little heavy, completely bald, with blue eyes, he had impressed me since I was a small child because his face was too pale and slightly puffy. When he showed up at our house, which was often, he would talk with his friend for hours and hours, inserting into every sentence a bitter discontent that made me nervous. He taught history at the university and contributed regularly to a prestigious Neapolitan journal. He and Papa argued constantly, and even though we three girls understood little of what they were saying, we had grown up with the idea that they had assigned themselves a very difficult task that required study and concentration. But, unlike my father, Mariano didn’t merely study day and night, he also railed loudly against numerous enemies—people in Naples, Rome, and other cities—who wanted to prevent them from doing their work properly. Angela, Ida, and I, even if we weren’t able to state a position, were always for our parents and against those who didn’t like them. But, in the end, in all their discussions the only thing that had interested us since childhood was the bad words in dialect that Mariano uttered against people who were famous at the time. That was because the three of us—especially me—were not only forbidden to use swear words but also, more generally, to utter a syllable in Neapolitan. A useless ban. Our parents didn’t prohibit us from doing anything, but even when they did, they were indulgent. So, under our breath, just for fun, we repeated to each other the names and last names of Mariano’s enemies accompanied by the obscene epithets we had heard. But while Angela and Ida found that vocabulary of their father’s merely amusing, I couldn’t separate it from an impression of spite.
Wasn’t there always something malevolent in his jokes? Wasn’t there that evening as well? I was grim, I had a scowl on my face, I was a sorghum broom? Had Mariano merely been joking or, joking, had he cruelly spoken the truth? We sat down at the table. The adults started a tedious conversation about some friends or other who were planning to move to Rome, we suffered our boredom in silence, hoping that dinner would be over quickly so we could take refuge in my room. The whole time I had the impression that my father never laughed, my mother barely smiled, Mariano laughed a lot, and Costanza, his wife, not too much but heartily. Maybe my parents weren’t having fun like Angela and Ida’s because I had made them sad. Their friends were happy with their daughters, while they were no longer happy with me. I was grim, grim, grim, and just seeing me there at the table kept them from feeling happy. How serious my mother was and how pretty and happy Angela and Ida’s mother. My father was now pouring her some wine, he spoke to her with polite aloofness. Costanza taught Italian and Latin; her parents were very wealthy and had given her an excellent upbringing. She was so elegant that sometimes my mother seemed to be studying her, in order to imitate her, and, almost without realizing it, I did the same. How was it possible that that woman had chosen a husband like Mariano? The brilliance of her jewelry, the colors of her clothes, which always looked perfect, dazzled me. Just the night before I had dreamed that with the tip of her tongue she was lovingly licking my ear like a cat. And the dream had brought me comfort, a sort of physical well-being that for several hours after I woke up had made me feel safe.
Now, sitting at the table next to her, I hoped that her good influence would drive her husband’s words out of my head. Instead, they lasted for the whole dinner—I have hair that makes me look like a broom, I have a grim face—intensifying my nervousness. I went back and forth between wanting to have fun by whispering dirty expressions in Angela’s ear and a bad mood that wouldn’t go away. As soon as we finished dessert, we left our parents to their conversation and shut ourselves in my room. There I asked Ida, without turning around:
“Do I have a scowl on my face? Do you think I’m getting ugly?”
They looked at each other, they answered almost simultaneously:
“Not at all.”
“Tell the truth.”
I realized that they were hesitant, Angela decided to speak:
“A little, but not physically.”
“Physically you’re pretty,” Ida emphasized, “only you look a little bit ugly because you’re anxious.”
Angela said, kissing me:
“It happens to me, too. When I’m anxious I turn ugly, but then it goes away.”
7.
That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—Angela and Ida had said—and if the worries go away you can be pretty again. I wanted to believe that, and I made an effort to have untroubled days. But I couldn’t force myself to be calm, my mind would suddenly blur, and that obsession began again. I felt an increasing hostility toward everyone that was difficult to repress with false good humor. And I soon concluded that my worries were not at all transient, maybe they weren’t even worries but bad feelings that were spreading through my veins.
Not that Angela and Ida had lied to me about that, they weren’t capable of it: we had been brought up never to tell lies. With that connection between ugliness and anxieties, they had probably been talking about themselves, and their experience, using the words that Mariano—our heads contained a lot of concepts we heard from our parents—had used, in some circumstance or other, to comfort them. But Angela and Ida weren’t me. Angela and Ida didn’t have in their family an Aunt Vittoria whose face their father—their father—had said they were starting to take on. Suddenly one morning at school I felt that I would never go back to being the way my parents wanted me, that cruel Mariano would notice it, and my friends would move on to more suitable friendships, and I would be left alone.
I was depressed, and in the following days the bad feelings regained strength; the only thing that gave me a little relief was to stroke myself continuously between my legs, numbing myself with pleasure. But how humiliating it was to forget myself like that, by myself; afterward I was even more unhappy, sometimes disgusted. 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.
This led to a surprising development: as I looked at what appeared to me defective, I started to want to fix it. I studied my features and, pulling on my face, thought: look, if I just had a nose like so, eyes like so, ears like so, I’d be perfect. My features were slight flaws that made me sad, touched me. Poor you, I thought, how unlucky you’ve been. And I had a sudden enthusiasm for my own image, so that once I went as far as to kiss myself on the mouth just as I was thinking, forlornly, that no one would ever kiss me. So I began to react. I moved slowly from the stupor in which I spent the days studying myself to the need to fix myself up, as if I were a piece of good-quality material damaged by a clumsy worker. I was I—whatever I I was—and had to concern myself with that face, that body, those thoughts.