Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Author:Catherine Lacey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Gioia’s eyes dimmed for a moment, and she lit a second cigarette with the first, then smiled as she confessed that she didn’t really care for Martina, had never trusted her, felt she was using Carla, only she couldn’t tell exactly how or why.

“I apologize,” Gioia said, but I told her not to be sorry, that it was a long time ago, that I didn’t know X until much later, and I knew as well as anyone how difficult she sometimes was.

“But I did believe her at first,” Gioia continued. “We all believed her, even though the story was so crazy … Ah! What a story, really, soap opera stuff … She told us she’d been born in Italy, in a village outside Milan, but that her uncle had kidnapped her when she was two and taken her to America, raised her as if she were his daughter and told everyone that her mother had died in childbirth. She didn’t know any of this, she said, until he confessed on his deathbed—which was one of the details I didn’t find so realistic—he confessed on his deathbed to the whole scam, that her real name was Martina Riggio, that she was Italian, that he was her uncle, not her father, that he didn’t know if her parents were still alive. All this from a dying man! Or so Martina said. If you ask me, people in movies and in books sure do say a lot more on their deathbeds than they do in real life. In real life, dying isn’t the time for confession. Dying is a full-time thing. But … you’re saying I was right after all? She wasn’t born here? She wasn’t kidnapped?”

Yes, I said, Gioia had been right to be suspicious of Martina—of X.

“Because she was born in the Southern Territory?” Gioia asked.

I told her that was true.

“How awful that must have been,” Gioia said. “What gave her away, at least to me—I mean, Carla never doubted her, never—but what seemed odd to me was how Martina said the exact same sentences in the exact same way. She always told her story as if it were memorized, verbatim … And don’t you think that there are times—say, on a really wonderful day—that maybe even the worst memories are fine? Then the opposite, too, a terrible day—your lover leaves you, you can’t zip your pants, your cat runs away—when even the best things in your life seem a bit ugly, don’t they?… So it’s natural, isn’t it? You tell the story of your life differently as it goes along. Otherwise the boredom would kill us … Anyway, Martina—or whoever she was, X—she told everyone she’d been studying Italian for years in America and pinching pennies—that’s the expression she used, ‘pinching pennies’—it was the first time I’d heard it—she’d been saving up to come to Italy to find her real family. Instead, she found Carla, and Carla of course didn’t believe in family, in paternity … I think it was

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