The First True Lie: A Novel by Marina Mander Read Free Book Online Page A

can’t even imagine. It’s horrible because it’s thanks to daydreams that I’ve always made it through okay. Teachers say I have a vivid imagination.
    “Imagination is a great resource in times like these. Perhaps you’re unaware of this because you don’t read newspapers, but at times reality is stranger than fantasy. So it becomes necessary to be even more fantastic in order to make it in life.”
    But now I don’t know what to imagine.
    I try to imagine that this is happening to someone else, because it’s a bit like that: I’m inside what’s happening but also outside. I want to disappear but at the same time I don’t. I don’t feel like shutting myself up in the wardrobe anymore because now everything is like a closed wardrobe, but also like an open one—there’s no point in hiding inside the apartment anymore. I can whine and wipe my nose on the tablecloth, the napkins, my pajamas, the curtains in the living room. Everything is old. It all smells like an old wardrobe. Wide open and sealed shut at the same time. I can do everything and I don’t want to do anything—I only want to go back to how it was. I bury my nose in the last piece of toilet paper. I make myself a Nutella sandwich. The bottle of milk is empty. I drink tap water, which tastes like chlorine.
    During the winter the days are short, but today seems to go on forever and ever.
    I don’t even know if I should give up hope or not.
    “Hope is the last to die.”
    Or the second to last?
    Mama seems more and more dead.
    I should study the history of hominids, those slouching, hairy creatures in our textbooks, walking in single file until one straightens up and marches ahead like a soldier,
forward
march.
    With a hominid around maybe Mama would feel less lonely.
    “Why is it you can’t make up your mind to find a decent man? I say this for your son’s sake as well, because you can’t do it all alone.”
    “I’m tired of falling in love, tired of falling out of love, tired of fucking. I don’t even remember how to make love anymore.”
    “That’s love! Right now things seem one way to you, but that’s not necessarily the way things are. Look at me, I’ve been falling in and out of love since I was fifteen. Every time, I say never again, may I be struck down if I fall for it again. Then I meet another one and it’s another round, another race. If you find one who knows what he’s about, you’ll see how quickly you’ll change your mind.”
    “No, for me it’s different. To fall in love you need to want it, and I just want to sleep.”
    Mama lights another cigarette and curls a lock of hair around her finger. Giulia just sits there with her nose in the air, contemplating the smoke as it curls around itself, in search of inspiration or else the right moment to slip away.
    Sometimes Giulia invites her out to dinner with friends and Mama invents an excuse, which is usually me.
    “Sorry, this evening I really have to stay home with him. You know how he is…”
    Other times Mama says she suffers from loneliness:
    “Loneliness is a whistling that worms itself into your head. It’s the echo of ships that have already sailed, that you can no longer reach, not even if you swim.”
    She told me:
    “Once a ship or a train departs, there’s nothing else you can do. You’re left gazing after a gleam of light on the horizon, slowly fading into the fog, the way a memory fades into the dull gray of the present.”
    She said:
    “That’s how I feel, like I’m on the shore, or in an empty station, having arrived to life too late.”
    Mama feels lonely even though she’s never alone, because I’m always here with her; but it must not be enough. In order not to feel so lonely she went to talk to a man with a beard who listened to her once a week in a house full of books that were full of complicated ideas. I flipped through a few of them while I was in the waiting room. I wonder, though, what do you get out of paying someone to listen to