I have never been honest with myself. It’s an attribute that has always disturbed me. I can’t accept even the most basic truths. What I am good at is coming up with excuses; it’s easy for me to invent excuses. And Giuseppe Trevisani, wonderful guy, is my favorite excuse of all. Many years ago, Trevisani, a translator, wrote an ending to a short story that, when I read it at the age of sixteen, led me to believe that the evil I felt inside me might actually be the mark of an exceptional character.
I’m saying this now, today, to set things straight, but I honestly know nothing about Trevisani: if he’s dead or alive; if he was born in Treviso, as his last name would suggest, or in some southern city like Molfetta; if, when he wrote the line that proved so fundamental to me, he had a mustache or a beard or was clean-shaven; if he worked at night or during the day, and where, in which city, on what street, in which building, on what floor. On the other hand, my ignorance is irrelevant: I have no use now, nor have I ever, for the true Trevisani. The Trevisani in question here is a figure I invent each time I mention his name: a young man from Lecce, who worked, during the period of interest to me—the postwar boom years—in Turin. This Trevisani has a bushy black mustache, an olive complexion, and a broad forehead. His shirt collar is frayed, and there’s a hole in the right elbow of his sweater. He speaks English perfectly, one of the privileges of being a young man of around twenty. He sits at a worm-eaten desk in a freezing-cold garret on Via Ormea, not far from the central train station, smoking one Nazionale after the other, saying the lines out loud, softly, with a slight Pugliese accent: She held a . . . cat . . . against her body.
It’s the details that count; it doesn’t matter if they’re banal—they lead to a sense of trust. Everything has to be real, first and foremost, for me. To be, not to seem. If I believe, then other people will, too. And so I believe. I like believing. This is why I’m never honest about anything, least of all with myself. The most elaborate—and the most fragile—lie I’ve ever come up with is me.
Keep in mind that I’m talking about the most common of lies here, and not about the artful deception that some people say is the foundation of literature. I was young when I discovered this aspect of the imagination. If I remember correctly, I was eight or nine when I consciously began to tell tall tales: one here, one there—soon enough I realized how much pleasure my stories brought, both to me and to others. By the age of ten, I had a devoted audience of cousins and friends, boys and girls, most of them my age, but some were older—even twelve or thirteen—who couldn’t wait to hear my tales. They would gather around, slack-jawed with amazement, on those long summer days or winter nights of 1951, 1952, and 1953. And don’t think for a moment that I was some kind of precocious raconteur of classic fairy tales; not once did I say something like “And then Little Red Riding Hood said goodbye to her mother and set off into the forest.” The stories I told were always about me. What did I care about others, whether tin soldiers or sailors of the seven seas? The only thing I wanted was to put myself smack dab in the middle of some extraordinary situation and be taken seriously. And, as far as the latter goes, I was almost always successful.
It probably sounds as though I had a happy childhood. Not in the least. The last thing my mother wanted was for me to tell lies. My father already told far too many, making her scream with rage and pain. Seeing her despair hurt me in turn, and I was terrified when my father, instead of apologizing, broke everything in sight and threatened to do awful things to her, himself, all of us. I listened in, I spied on them, I swore to myself that I’d never lie the way he did. But it was hopeless; the pleasure of lying always won out. One day, after playing football in the piazza, I came home all sweaty. What happened to you? my mother asked, concerned. I was playing football, Ma, and thanks to me we won! I scored a goal! I went on to tell her about the game in great detail—what an exceptional player I was, how I had scored. My mother listened attentively and with growing interest, and even became emotional. Madonna mia, she said, you really did play well. At that point, I stopped—I couldn’t do it, I shouldn’t, not to her. All the happiness I’d initially felt transformed into regret, and intolerable pain filled my head and chest. What was I saying? How could I deceive my mother, who cared so deeply about the truth? Why did she even believe me, she who was usually so cautious? And why did I enjoy it so much, when I knew what had actually happened? I burst into tears. It’s not true, Ma, I stammered. I didn’t score. I’m terrible at football. They made me goalie, and I couldn’t even stop a single goal. I cried because I was sorry about lying but also because my sorriness had spoiled the pleasure of feeling as though the lie were the truth.
Maybe it was then that I started to suspect I was flawed. While trying to find a way of correcting my flaw, I did everything possible to conceal it, so that no one would notice. I never looked within to see exactly where I was defective, which only added to my anxiety. I tried to keep my darkness in check, but I did not succeed. All good intentions failed; lies fell from my lips not because I chose to tell them but because, while I was telling them, my understanding that they were lies faded, and they suddenly rang true. Oh, it was a mess. Then, when I was around twelve, I realized that I felt miserable when I stuck to everyday facts and happy when I told a fiction that had me at its center. I couldn’t fight it, that was just how it was: good things felt bad, and bad things felt good. Kids would gather around me to listen, and I’d come back to life. Whatever my flaw was, no one seemed to notice it, and soon enough I forgot about it. While telling my stories, I felt as though everything else ceased to exist. There were no witnesses and the only voice I heard was my own; it was as if I had artfully managed to change time and, with it, my body, my age, my location, even the season.
Once, I told my cousins a story about a mysterious grotto situated in a field not far from my home. What made my lies unique was that they never took place in faraway lands, like America or Asia or the North Pole. With me as their protagonist, they unfolded where I lived, in the courtyard of my building or down the street or in nearby fields, and they included people who actually existed. That particular tale must have been especially convincing, because my cousins made me promise to show them the cave and all its splendid mysteries. I agreed. They lived on the other side of town, at the far end of Via Taddeo dei Sassi, and rarely came over anyway. But, regardless of whether they’d be back or not, I began to look for the grotto; the more I talked about it, the more I believed that it existed. All I needed for proof was to see the hint of a cleft in the earth, just a few centimetres deep. I found it, and that dark hollow became real, as did its many dangers and rewards. I thought about it constantly: at school, at home, and in bed at night before falling asleep.
Especially in bed. Suspended between sleep and wakefulness, my body felt like the movie projector at Cinema Stadio. I could see the tenebrous cavern and the glint of coins and jewels inside it. Words came to my mind that illuminated the images, and the images trailed jangling verbs behind them. The more time I spent in my secret grotto, the less I feared the moment when I’d have to show it to my cousins. Actually, each time I gathered them around me, I had new mysteries to add, new adventures to tell: the entrance to the grotto was marked by a peacock feather; a woman as beautiful as Deborah Kerr lived in the grotto; I snuck out of my house every night and slept in her arms until dawn.
My cousins, boys and girls both, couldn’t wait to come over to my house. I’ll cut to the chase; I’ve told this story a thousand times. The opportunity arose on some holiday or another—I can’t recall now if it was Easter, Christmas, or someone’s saint day—and I wasn’t the slightest bit worried. Sure, I realized that I should have been, as this was an irrefutable test of reality, and yet I felt no apprehension whatsoever. Initially, back when I started telling this lie, the verity of my cousins had been a little depressing: they existed and the grotto did not. But, as time passed and as I built on the details, my presence within the fiction became more real than theirs in reality, and they realized this, too: they wanted in, wanted to be part of it. I found this exhilarating. I believed that if they were real then my cave was more real, and that there was enough room in my tale for them, too. In short, I never feared for a moment that my cousins would be precluded from exploring all the nooks and crannies of the deep cavern that I had situated not far from my home: just across the street, to the right, over a barbed-wire fence, at the foot of a grassy knoll, and a few steps from a pear tree. And so I led them into the field and to the mound of earth with its slight indentation—a shadowy depression where the soil was slightly darker than in full sunlight, marked by a white chicken feather.
I scrambled up onto a nearby boulder and, with a grand and silent gesture that broke my chain of words, pointed to the entrance of the mysterious grotto; the reality was apparent and required no further embellishment. There was an extended moment of tension between what had long existed in my mind and what was quickly becoming clear to them. Then came the discontentment, and with it the first grumblings of disappointment. I lost face. Siproprinustrùnz, my oldest cousin, Franco, said with disgust, by which he meant: you’re stupid and your joke is even stupider. I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t a joke, that I wasn’t making fun of them, that, sure, according to my mother, I might be a liar, but in my mind I really had descended into a cave and really had slept with Deborah Kerr on very real piles of golden coins. They insulted me and ran off. Only my cousin Maria remained. She walked over to me and took my hand. Then she started to cry.
She cried and cried and cried; it was hard for her to stop. This was the first time that my storytelling had made someone else cry. In the course of my adult life, such scenes have occurred often, and in far more dramatic fashion. I have used lies (lofty sentiments, soothing tones, a mild manner, warm availability, and the modest way in which I describe my generous, if not heroic, actions) to build strong connections: friendships, amorous relationships, collegial bonds. For as long as the lies have held up, so has the fabric of a good life. Once people are caught in the mendacious web of my sensitivities and sympathies and my deep humanity, they have a hard time living without my artificial presence. They have the impression that life with me is not just more tolerable but at times even beautiful, while without me things would start to corrode—life itself would become corrosive. Even I, believing the liar within, have been afraid of the self-hatred and suffering I would experience if I stopped telling lies. As a result, whenever it has become apparent—because of my fatigue or distraction or impatience—that I was lying, there has been stabbing pain, along with hostile accusations, tears, rage, and even cruel words like those my mother directed at me shortly before she died: Aldo, Alduccio, you scare me.
Little Maria didn’t accuse me of anything. Her tears stemmed from a sense of disorientation that disoriented even me. I gasped for breath, felt a heavy weight on my chest, broke into an icy sweat. To alleviate her pain, I tried telling her more lies. They came compulsively, and she seemed willing to believe them if for no other reason than to regain a sense of calm. But her weeping and over-all discomposure were so real that I failed to be convincing. She wanted to keep believing me, but I suddenly felt ill and could no longer believe myself. That was when I realized that my evil ways could do great harm, and that any well-being I derived from my lies would eventually have to battle with my sense of guilt. Enough. I had to stop. I had to learn to stick to the facts.
I grew into a confused teen-ager, scared to tell my stories and yet unable to stop. Then, one spring afternoon, at a bookstall on Via Foria, I bought a cheap, well-worn copy of Hemingway’s “Forty-nine Stories,” translated into Italian. I read them all in a matter of days and liked many of them. But one in particular, “Cat in the Rain,” stood out. I felt as if it had been written just for me. It’s the story of a young American husband and wife who are stuck in a hotel room in Italy while outside it’s pouring rain. The man lies on the bed and reads, while the woman grows bored. Then she sees a cat outside and decides that she wants it. She goes out to get it with a hotel maid, who carries an umbrella for her. But the cat has disappeared, and the woman can’t find it. She returns to the room, unhappy with herself and with everything around her. And then comes that ending, which back then I read so many times I knew it by heart:
Oh, my lord, I read those final lines over and over without paying any attention to the punctuation, letting one line flow into the next. I was especially impressed by the figure of the padrone, the hotelkeeper, a very tall and elderly man, who managed to come up with the most wonderful and unexpected thing: in lieu of a real cat, he had the maid bring the unhappy woman a large majolica cat. I could be like him, I told myself. That’s the kind of man I could become, someone who knows when to say to the maid, Here, take this to the lady.
And, to some degree, that was exactly what happened. Thanks to majolica cats, I ended up with a wife, several lovers, two children, a decent career in a meaningless field not even worth mentioning, a lot of money, a lot of satisfaction, a lot of mental breakdowns, a number of guilt trips, and my fair share of suffering. Even when things shattered, I kept on inventing, in order to keep moving forward. For years, decades even, that faux feline impervious to the rain was my secret excuse. What was I doing with all my lies? I was providing myself and others with majolica cats. If life doesn’t give you what you want, what’s wrong with ignoring the facts and replacing them with majolica cats? And, besides, what are facts, if not an endless series of majolica cats? When you take a memory and touch it up, isn’t the result a majolica cat? When you build a story around a chosen success or tragedy, aren’t you creating majolica cats? And we—with our refined voices, careful gestures, studied gaits, hair styles, beards, with all our forms of grooming and the habits that we rely on to shape and present ourselves—aren’t we all majolica cats? And in the moments when we are most ourselves, at our most genuine, don’t we still meow in artificial ways? For decades, whenever the majolica shattered into a thousand pieces, and scorn and anger and sadness filled the air, Hemingway’s cat helped me feel less divided, less tormented, less guilty. What’s so wrong with that? All I did was provide myself and others with carefully articulated simulations of what we wished we could have been and never would have without the lies. When, many years ago, my wife finally saw me for who I really was (lucky her—I still have no idea who I really am), in terms of my sympathies, my work, and our children, her reaction was far worse than little Maria’s had been all those years before. When the gentle world I had wrapped her in by falling in love with her suddenly cracked, so did she; she lost all sense of reason, withered, and never got over it.
I have never been particularly fond of reality, although I have pretended to love real life, to take a concerned interest in it and show it great humanity. All lies. In fact, despite the apparent contradictions, I have always been more interested in fictional life and seen reality as a humiliating nuisance. Thanks to Hemingway’s story, I’ve felt astonishment, at times even indignation, when people who once adored and appreciated me suddenly felt as though the ground were giving way beneath them, when they were no longer grateful for the majolica cats that had once appeased them. Naturally, I’ve always avoided asking myself—and definitely won’t begin now—why my lies eventually crumble while other people’s last a lifetime, resisting even facts. What can I say? There’s something wrong with me. I simply don’t know how—except through pretending—to show sensitivity, support, or love for either a single individual or the human species, or how to marvel at the wonders of nature. Perhaps that’s what makes my lies defective and disjointed. And, anyway, if I were a sufficiently sensitive person, capable of awe and of showing love, why would I need to tell lies? The problem is that I’ve always wanted to be more than I am—better, in other words—but I’ve never been capable of it. This is where the pain comes from.
Enough! I have nothing to complain about. I’ve lived my life and, despite the lies, it’s been a full one. Only once did I feel truly lost. It was when I learned that the ending of the story that had proved so useful to me for most of my life was written not by Hemingway but by Giuseppe Trevisani. While Hemingway wrote that the padrone of the hotel sent the American lady “a big tortoiseshell cat,” Trevisani, sitting in his cold attic on Via Ormea, decided that “a big tortoiseshell cat” could only mean a large cat made of majolica. How long did my confusion last? A minute, maybe. As long as a dizzy spell. And then I said to myself, Who cares about Hemingway? Too bad for him—I’ve no idea what use I can make of his tortoiseshell cat. An alley cat in a Rapallo hotel room? I think not. I choose Trevisani, I love his translation, and I’m deeply grateful to him for it. For as long as I live, that old Italian padrone will continue to send the inconsolable young woman in her hotel room a majolica cat. Even though I know full well that in reality, where everything shatters sooner or later, the couple’s relationship will only get worse, and no lie will ever save them. ♦
(Translated, from the Italian, by Oonagh Stransky.)
