The Lost Daughter (13 page)

“I know you saw me with Gino, but you mustn’t think badly of me.”

“I don’t think badly of anything or anyone.”

“Yes, that’s obvious. As soon as I saw you, I said to myself: I would like to be like that lady.”

“What is it about me in particular?”

“You’re beautiful, you’re refined, it’s clear that you know a great many things.”

“I don’t really know anything.”

She shook her head energetically.

“You have such self-confidence, you’re not afraid of anything. I saw it the moment you arrived on the beach for the first time. I looked at you and hoped that you would look in my direction, but you never did.”

We wandered a little on the garden paths, and she spoke again of the pinewood, of Gino.

“What you saw has no meaning.”

“Now, don’t tell lies.”

“It’s true, I hold him off, and I keep my lips closed. I just want to be a girl again, a little, but pretending.”

“How old were you when Elena was born?”

“Nineteen, Elena is almost three.”

“Maybe you became a mother too soon.”

She shook her head no, insistently.

“I’m happy with Elena, I’m happy with everything. It’s just lately, because of these days. If I find the person who is making my child suffer . . .”

“What will you do,” I said ironically.

“I know what I’ll do.”

I caressed one arm lightly as if to tame her. It seemed to me that she was dutifully mimicking the tone and the formulations of her family, she had even accentuated the Neapolitan cadence to be more convincing, and I felt something like tenderness.

“I’m fine,” she repeated several times, and told me how she had fallen in love with her husband, she had met him in a discotheque, at sixteen. He loved her, adored her and the daughter. She laughed again, nervously.

“He says my breasts are exactly the size of his hand.”

The phrase seemed to me vulgar and I said: “And if he should see you the way I saw you?”

Nina became serious. “He would cut my throat.”

I looked at her, at the child. “What do you expect from me?”

She shook her head and murmured: “I don’t know. To talk a little. When I see you on the beach I think I would like to sit the whole time under your umbrella and talk. But then you’d be bored, I’m stupid. Gino told me that you’re a professor at the university. I was enrolled in literature after high school, but I only took two courses.”

“You don’t work?”

She laughed again.

“My husband works.”

“What does he do?”

She avoided the question with a peevish gesture, and a flash of hostility lighted her eyes. She said: “I don’t want to talk about him. Rosaria is doing the shopping, at any moment she might call me and then my time is up.”

“She doesn’t want you to talk to me?”

She frowned angrily.

“According to her I mustn’t do anything.”

She was silent for a moment, then she said hesitantly:

“May I ask you a personal question?”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Why did you leave your daughters?”

I thought, searching for an answer that might help her.

“I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.”

I realized that she was no longer laughing continuously, now she was paying attention to my every word.

“You didn’t see them for three years.”

I nodded yes.

“And how did you feel without them?”

“Good. It was as if my whole self had crumbled, and the pieces were falling freely in all directions with a sense of contentment.”

“You didn’t feel sad?”

“No, I was too taken up by my own life. But I had a weight right here, as if I had a stomachache. And my heart skipped a beat whenever I heard a child call Mama.”

“You felt bad, then, not good.”

“I was like someone who is taking possession of her own life, and feels a host of things at the same time, among them an unbearable absence.”

She looked at me with hostility. 

“If you felt good why did you go back?” 

I chose my words carefully.

“Because I realized that I wasn’t capable of creating anything of my own that could truly equal them.”

She had a sudden contented smile.

“So you returned for love of your daughters.”

“No, I returned for the same reason I left: for love of myself.”

She again took offense.

“What do you mean?”

“That I felt more useless and desperate without them than with them.”

She tried to dig inside me with her eyes: into my chest, behind my forehead.

“You found what you were looking for and you didn’t like it?”

I smiled at her.

“Nina, what I was looking for was a confused tangle of desires and great arrogance. If I had been unlucky it would have taken me my whole life to realize it. But I was lucky and it took only three years. Three years and thirty-six days.”

She seemed unsatisfied.

“How did it happen that you decided to go back?”

“One morning I discovered that the only thing I really wanted to do was peel fruit, making a snake, in front of my daughters, and then I began to cry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If we have time I’ll tell you.”

She nodded, in an ostentatious way, to let me understand that she would like nothing more than to stay and listen, and meanwhile she realized that Elena had fallen asleep and she gently removed the pacifier, wrapped it in a kleenex, put it in her purse. With a pretty frown she conveyed the tenderness her daughter inspired, and began again:

“And after your return?”

“I was resigned to living very little for myself and a great deal for the two children: gradually I succeeded.”

“So it passes,” she said.

“What.”

She made a gesture to indicate a vertigo but also a feeling of nausea.

“The turmoil.”

I remembered my mother and said:

“My mother used another word, she called it a shattering.”

She recognized the feeling in the word, and her expression was that of a frightened girl.

“It’s true, your heart shatters: you can’t bear staying together with yourself and you have certain thoughts you can’t say.”

Then she asked me again, this time with the mild expression of someone seeking a caress: “Anyway, it passes.”

I thought that neither Bianca nor Marta had ever tried to ask me questions like Nina’s, and in this insistent tone. I looked for words, in order to lie to her by telling the truth.

“With my mother it became a sort of sickness. But that was another time. Today you can live perfectly well even if it doesn’t pass.”

I saw her hesitate, she was about to say something else, she stopped. I felt in her a need to hug me, the same need I, too, was feeling. It was an emotion of gratitude that manifested itself as an urgent need for contact.

“I have to go,” she said and instinctively kissed me on the lips with a light embarrassed kiss.

When she drew back I saw behind her, at the end of the garden, against the stalls and the crowd, Rosaria and her brother, Nina’s husband.

I said softly: “Your sister-in-law and your husband are here.”

There was a spark of irritated surprise in her eyes but she remained calm, she didn’t even turn around.

“My husband?”

“Yes.”

Dialect got the upper hand, and she murmured: what the fuck is he doing here, that shit, he was supposed to come tomorrow night, and she pushed the stroller carefully in order not to wake the child.

“May I telephone you?” she asked.

“When you like.”

She waved a hand cheerfully in a sign of greeting, her husband waved back.

“Come with me,” she said.

I went with her. The two siblings, standing at the entrance to the garden, for the first time struck me with their resemblance. The same height, the same broad face, the same strong neck, the same prominent, fat lower lip. I thought, marveling, that they were handsome: solid bodies firmly planted in the asphalt of the street like plants accustomed to sucking up even the slightest bit of watery fluid. They are strong ships, I said to myself, nothing can hold them back. I, on the other hand, have only restraints. It was the fear I’d had of these people since childhood, and at times disgust, and also my presumption of having a superior destiny, an elevated sensibility, that up to now had kept me from admiring their determination. Where is the rule that makes Nina pretty and Rosaria not. Where is the rule that makes Gino handsome and this threatening husband not. I looked at the pregnant woman and seemed to see, beyond the belly swathed in a yellow dress, the daughter who was feeding on her. I thought of Elena who, worn out, was sleeping in the stroller, of the doll. I wanted to go home.

Nina kissed her husband on the cheek, said in dialect: I’m so happy you came early, and added, when he leaned over to kiss the child: she’s sleeping, don’t wake her, you know lately she’s been tormenting me. Then, indicating me with her hand: you remember the lady, she’s the one who found Lenuccia. The man kissed the child softly on the forehead, she’s sweaty, he said, also in dialect, sure she doesn’t have a fever? And as he rose—I saw the heavy stomach in the shirt—he turned cordially toward me, still in dialect: you’re still here, lucky you who have nothing to do, and Rosaria immediately added seriously, but with better control of her words: the signora works, Tonì, she works even when she’s swimming, she’s not like us, just splashing around, good day, Signora Leda, and they left.

I saw Nina insert an arm under her husband’s, she went off without turning even for a moment. She was talking, laughing. It seemed to me that she had been suddenly pushed—too slight as she was, between husband and sister-in-law—to a distance much greater than that which separated me from my daughters.

Outside the fair area was a chaos of cars, raveled streams of adults and children, either moving away from the stalls or converging on them. I went along the deserted streets. I climbed the stairs to my apartment, the last flight with a sensation of urgency.

The doll was still on the table on the terrace, the sun had dried her dress. I undressed her carefully, taking everything off. I recalled that Marta, as a child, had the habit of sticking things in every little hole she found, as if to hide them and be sure of finding them again. Once I came across tiny pieces of uncooked spaghetti in the radio. I took Nani into the bathroom, I held her by the chest with one hand, head down. I shook her hard, dark drops of water trickled from her mouth.

What had Elena put in there. I had been so happy to learn, when I was pregnant the first time, that life was reproducing in me. I wanted to do everything as well as possible. The women of my family swelled, dilated. The creature trapped in their womb seemed a long illness that changed them: even after the birth they were no longer the same. I, instead, wanted my pregnancy to be under control. I was not my grandmother (seven children), I was not my mother (four daughters), I was not my aunts, my cousins. I was different and rebellious. I wanted to carry my inflated belly with pleasure, enjoying the nine months of expecting, scrutinizing the process, guiding and adapting it to my body, as I had stubbornly done with everything in my life from early adolescence. I imagined myself a shining tile in the mosaic of the future. So I was vigilant, I followed the medical prescriptions rigorously. For the duration of the pregnancy I remained attractive, elegant, active, and happy. I talked to the creature in my belly, I had her listen to music, I read to her in the original the texts I was working on, I translated them for her with an inventive effort that filled me with pride. What later became Bianca was for me Bianca right away, a being at its best, purified of humors and blood, humanized, intellectualized, with nothing that could evoke the blind cruelty of live matter as it expands. I managed to vanquish even the long and violent labor pains I suffered, reshaping them as an extreme test, to be confronted with solid preparation, containing the terror, and leaving of myself—and above all to myself—a proud memory.

I did well. How happy I was when Bianca came out of me and, holding her in my arms for a few seconds, I realized that it had been the most intense pleasure of my life. If I look now at Nani with her head down, vomiting into the sink a brown spray mixed with sand, I find no resemblance to my first pregnancy; even the morning sickness was mild and didn’t last. But then came Marta. She attacked my body, forcing it to turn on itself, out of control. She immediately manifested herself not as Marta but as a piece of living iron in my stomach. My body became a bloody liquid; suspended in it was a mushy sediment inside which grew a violent polyp, so far from anything human that it reduced me, even though it fed and grew, to rotting matter without life. Nani, with her black spittle, resembles me when I was pregnant for the second time.

I was already unhappy, but I didn’t know it. It seemed to me that little Bianca, right after her beautiful birth, had suddenly changed and treacherously taken for herself all my energy, all my strength, all my capacity for imagination. It seemed to me that my husband, too caught up in his fury of accomplishment, didn’t notice that his daughter, now that she was born, had become voracious, demanding, hostile as she had never seemed when she was in my stomach. I gradually discovered that I didn’t have the strength to make the second experience exalting, like the first. My head sank inside the rest of my body, there seemed no prose, verse, rhetorical figure, musical phrase, film sequence, color capable of taming the dark beast I was carrying in my womb. The real breakdown for me was that: the giving up of any sublimation of my pregnancy, the destruction of the happy memory of the first pregnancy, the first birth.

Nani, Nani. The doll, impassive, continued to vomit. You’ve emptied all your slime into the sink, good girl. I parted her lips, with one finger held her mouth open, ran some water inside her and then shook her hard to wash out the murky cavity of her trunk, her belly, to finally get the baby out that Elena had put inside her. Games. Tell the girls everything, starting from their childhood: they’ll take care, later, of inventing an acceptable world. I myself was playing now, a mother is only a daughter who plays, it was helping me think. I looked for my eyebrow tweezers, there was something in the doll’s mouth that wouldn’t come out. Begin again from here, I thought, from this thing. I should have noticed right away, as a girl, this soft reddish engorgement that I’m now squeezing with the metal of the tweezers. Accept it for what it is. Poor creature with nothing human about her. Here’s the baby that Lenuccia stuck in the stomach of her doll to play at making it pregnant like Aunt Rosaria’s. I extracted it carefully. It was a worm from the beach, I don’t know what the scientific name is: the ones amateur fishermen find at twilight, digging in the wet sand, as my older cousins did four decades ago, on the beaches between Garigliano and Gaeta. I looked at them then spellbound by my revulsion. They picked up the worms with their fingers and stuck them on the hooks as bait; when the fish bit, the boys freed them from the iron with an expert gesture and tossed them over their shoulders, leaving them to their death agonies on the dry sand.