The Noble Liar
We often have to lie to someone so as not to worry, disappoint or offend them. We call this a “noble lie”.
I had a motive of my own as well: not to spoil people’s opinion of me.
Some of them perhaps thought me cleverer, kinder, cooler and more honest than I am, and it would have been unpleasant for them to discover otherwise.
Below I describe a few incidents with which I try to prove my thesis that any lie, even the noblest of lies, can, even after quite some time, lead to undesirable consequences.
Incident 1:
One rainy evening I was driving home. The rain was heavy and my wipers were old. On a downhill bend, followed by a junction with a main road, the other drivers and I were “crawling” along and looking more at the main road than ahead.
I lightly bumped the chap in front of me, but there was a nasty sound. The other driver got out of his car, ready to give me a good hiding. I apologised at once and we had a look. Because of the slope, my headlight had hit one of his rear bumpers and broken, while his car had absolutely nothing wrong with it.
The next morning I had to drive my wife to work. All evening I wondered how to keep her from finding out that I was to blame for the broken headlight. In her view, I drove fast and carelessly. If I told her the story as it really was, she wouldn’t believe me and would comment something along the lines of:
“With the way you drive, I’m amazed you haven’t smashed the car to bits by now, and yourself with it!”
How, I ask you, could I have confessed with a clear heart?
As we approached the car, I started kicking some imaginary bits of glass on the tarmac and repeating: “Idiot! Idiot!” My wife looked at me in surprise, and I realised that she might never have noticed the broken headlight at all. Inside the car she saw everything: dust on the dashboard, a full ashtray, dirty seats and floor mats, but on the outside, as a rule, nothing. But it was in for a penny, in for a pound.
“What are you doing?”
“Can’t you see the broken glass on the tarmac? Obviously someone reversed into us in the night and smashed my right headlight. Go and find him now!”
She gave a start and noticed that our car looked like a Cyclops. She looked it over and declared:
“Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. If you ask me, some cretin did it on purpose, with a stone. You don’t usually park here. I really hate that attitude, punishing someone for parking in ‘your’ spot. Nobody pays for any of the spaces here, but that one thought it was his!”
After a short pause, she added angrily:
“May the arm of whoever broke your headlight wither away!”
Incident 2:
One day I had decided to work from home on a work problem that required my utmost concentration. As always, in the morning, on her way out to work, already at the door, my wife remembered something:
“And today, will you finally fix that blasted toilet cistern! Sometimes it flushes, but most of the time it doesn’t! I pour a bucket into it like it’s a village outhouse! And do the shopping too!”
“I’ve already wrestled with it, but I think it’s beyond repair. All right, I’ll come home early from work, do the shopping and call a plumber, let’s hope he can fix it.”
I didn’t want my wife to have the unpleasant feeling that she was off to work while I sat at home. It’s a long story, but sometimes you work more productively at home, especially if you’re a programmer. Where to start?
Heroically, I decided to save the family budget a bit of money and fix the cistern myself. Since my wife has no faith in my plumbing skills, I would tell her I had called in a professional.
So first I go and do the shopping.
I come back and fix the cistern myself.
I sit down and get on with my work.
When my wife comes back, I’ll announce that the repaired cistern is the plumber’s handiwork.
After the shopping I got to work on the cistern. The float, which was supposed to move freely up and down a rod, was stuck at the top. I was delighted: there was the cause!
I pushed it up and down a few times, the way you do with a baby boy’s willy at bath time. I closed the lid and immersed myself in my work, but every half hour I gave the cistern a test flush and it “sang”: it flushed, even more than before.
It was time for my wife to come home from work. Feeling suitably guilty, I warmed up the stew, aired the flat and washed the dishes.
I tidied up a bit, made the place cosy, and even made a little salad. Good thing I hadn’t called a plumber! Am I cack-handed or something?
My wife came home and praised me for the cosiness, then asked in her own particular style:
“You haven’t fixed the cistern, have you?”
I told her about the Odyssey of the plumber who, after a great deal of struggle, had managed it in the end. He had asked me for 70, but I had given him only 60 leva. In my head I gave myself a round of applause. As a finale, I shared:
“I’ve had a busy day today: work, shopping, cistern.”
I mused aloud about how on some days everything just goes your way.
A little later she said, somewhat dreamily:
“If only you were like this every day!”
You have to agree that my noble lie was even in the interests of our love.
She went to the toilet. A little later I heard the sound of a bucket being poured from in there.
When she came back, I asked her mockingly:
“Out of sheer habit you didn’t flush the cistern, but poured water into it with the bucket, eh?”
She gave me a sullen look and said:
“Go and flush it yourself!”
I went to check: she was right. It had got stuck again. Annoyed, I kicked the cistern and it immediately flushed perfectly normally. I’m not the kind of man who would call her over to show her how to give it a kick at the bottom.
My wife, however, was already standing behind me and said angrily:
“That man has done you over! He took 60 leva off you. Showed you once or twice that it works and you fell for it. But that’s no way to do business!” And once again she passed a stern judgement:
“May that slob’s business go down the drain!”
Incident 3:
I was driving my wife to work. As a rule, she gets very irritated by unnecessary honking, and so do I.
More than once she had told me that if it were up to her, she would ban horns. She has a very sharp sense of justice. If I ever become prime minister, I’ll definitely open a brand new “Ministry of Irregularities” for her.
A car in front of me was dithering. The lights were about to turn red; I drove this route every day. Someone was coming up behind me and, taking advantage of this, I blasted the horn. My wife reacted at once:
“Why are you beeping like some idiot?”
“It wasn’t me. I hate horns too! The bloke behind is obviously very wound up!”
She turned round and gave him the middle finger, and the driver leapt out of his car. I made it through the lights, and he was left standing there, waving his arms about, all middle fingers.
My wife declared: “I hope the one with the horn goes deaf!”
Incident 4:
One Sunday morning my wife decided to dye her hair. Until then she had always done it herself, but this time she had a stiff neck and asked me to apply it. She had prepared a paste which I was to spread evenly over her hair.
She expressed doubt as to whether I would manage. Offended, I started applying it. Wherever I put the comb, she was unhappy: “Not there!”
However I applied it with the brush: “Not like that, like this!”
She repeated that it was especially important for the dye not to be layered on thick in some places and not at all in others.
In my view, it was more important that there were no “not at all” places, so I applied more.
My wife insisted that I first lift a strand of hair with the comb, then apply it at the roots, but only where necessary, and very thinly at that!
I wanted it to be over as soon as possible and I was laying it on thick, I admit. The bowl of paste was out of her line of sight. When I told her it had run out, she protested.
For short hair like hers there should even have been some left over. I offered to mix up a bit more, but she refused. She mused aloud that this was a dye she had never used before. She had made the mixture according to the instructions, which I believed completely. If they tell her 80 mg, she couldn’t do it like me, just by eye.
She ordered me to inspect her hair from every angle and only comb it through a little until its colour became completely even, and to tell her immediately when that happened.
According to the instructions, it would be at the fifth minute. At the ninth minute I still didn’t dare confirm it, in case the dye “hadn’t taken yet”. She _d_ashed to the bathroom, and I realised I had lied to her both about the thin application and about the even colour.
I hadn’t stuck strictly to her instructions. She came back to the kitchen, dried herself, looked in the mirror and asked:
“Have you ever seen a crow or a raven? Well, that’s exactly what I look like. Black as black can be! And the leaflet said the colour was natural chestnut! I knew I shouldn’t buy dyes I haven’t personally tried! I used to pay 5 leva for a dye, and for this one I paid a whole 12 leva!” Her verdict followed immediately:
“May those swine at the company go bald!”
Years after these stern but fair sentences were passed, I decided I needed to take some time off. The reason was that several problems had piled up on me at once:
My left arm had come out of its socket and at Pirogov hospital they had a hard time putting it back.
My business was going under.
I was hard of hearing.
I had gone bald.
Thinking over my problems, I arrived at their common denominator. According to the sentence my wife had pronounced after each of the incidents above:
The one who broke my headlight: may his arm wither away.
The plumber: may his business go down the drain.
The one beeping the horn: may he go deaf.
Those swine at the hair dye company: may they go bald.
Her sentences had all come crashing down on me, the real culprit.
As a rule, my wife forgave people their mistakes, it was only normal, but in the cases above she had been a stricter judge.
It wouldn’t be surprising if she had suspected me all along and only wanted to give me a fright. Before falling asleep, I made a solemn promise to myself that I would never again even think of lying, not even nobly, at least not to her.
