The Lost Daughter (15 page)

I got up, wandered around the apartment, went out on the terrace. The night was still echoing with the sounds of the fair. Suddenly, clearly, I felt the thread that stretched between that girl and me: we hardly knew each other, and yet the bond strengthened. Perhaps she wanted me to refuse her the keys, so that she could refuse herself a dangerous outlet for her restlessness. Or she wanted me to give her the keys, so that she could feel in that gesture the authorization to take the risk of flight, the road to a future different from the one that was already written for her. Anyway, she wanted the experience, the wisdom, the rebel force that in her imagination she attributed to me—she wanted me to put these at her service. She needed me to take care of her, to follow her step by step, sustaining her in the choices that, whether I gave her the keys, or refused, I would nevertheless have pushed her to make. It seemed to me, when at last the sea and the town had grown silent, that the problem was not the demand for some hours of love with Gino in my house but her giving herself to me so that I might concern myself with her life. The beam from the lighthouse was, at fixed intervals, casting an unbearable light on the terrace, so I got up and went back inside.

I ate some grapes, in the kitchen. Nani was on the table. She seemed to have a clean fresh look, but also an indecipherable expression,
tohu-bohu
, without the light of a clear order, of a truth. When had Nina chosen me, on the beach. How had I entered her life. By pushes and shoves, certainly; chaotically. I had assigned her the role of perfect mother, of successful daughter, but I had complicated her existence by taking the doll away from Elena. I had seemed to her a free woman, independent, refined, courageous, with no hidden corners, but I had composed my answers to her anxious questions as exercises in reticence. By what right, why. Our similarities were superficial, she ran risks much greater than those I had run twenty years earlier. As a girl I had been endowed with a strong sense of myself, I was ambitious, I had detached myself from my family with the same bold force with which we free ourselves from someone who is tugging on us. I had left my husband and my daughters at a moment when I was sure I had the right, was in the right, not to mention that Gianni, though desperate, hadn’t persecuted me, he was a man sensitive to the needs of others. In the three years without my daughters I had never been alone, there was Hardy, a prestigious man, he loved me. I had felt sustained by a small world of friends, men and women who, even when they argued with me, breathed the same culture, understood my ambitions and my depressions. When the weight in the pit of my stomach became unbearable and I went back to Bianca and Marta, some people had silently withdrawn from my life, some doors had been closed forever, my ex-husband had decided that it was his turn to flee and had gone to Canada, but no one had thrown me out, branding me as contemptible. Nina, however, had not even one of the defenses that I had erected before the break. The world in the meantime had not improved; in fact it had become crueler for women. She—she had said—for much less than what I had done years before risked having her throat cut.

I carried the doll to the bedroom. I gave her a pillow to lean against, I settled her on the bed the way people used to do in certain houses in the south, so that she was sitting up, arms spread, and I lay down beside her. I thought of Brenda, the English girl I had met for just a few hours in Calabria, and I realized suddenly that the role Nina was pushing me into was the same I had given her. Brenda had appeared on the highway for Reggio Calabria and I had endowed her with a power that I wanted in my turn to have. She perhaps had realized it and, at a distance, with a minimal gesture, had helped me, leaving me then to take responsibility for my life. I could do the same. I turned off the light.

I woke late, ate something, decided not to go to the beach. It was Sunday and the preceding Sunday had left a bad memory. I set myself up on the terrace with my books and notebooks.

I was quite satisfied with the work I was doing. My academic life had never been easy, but recently, certainly through my own fault—over the years my disposition had worsened, I had become obstinate, at times irascible—things had been further complicated, it was urgent that I get back to serious study. The hours ran by without distractions. I worked as long as there was light, disturbed only by the damp heat, some wasps.

While I was watching a TV movie—it was almost midnight—the cell phone rang. I recognized Nina’s number, answered. She asked me, all in one breath, if she could come see me tomorrow, at ten in the morning. I gave her the address, turned off the television, and went to bed.

The next day I went out early to have a copy of the keys made. I came back at five minutes before ten, the phone rang while I was still on the stairs. Nina said that ten was impossible, she hoped to be able to come by around six.

She has decided, I thought, she won’t come. I prepared my bag for the beach but then decided against it. I didn’t feel like seeing Gino, and the spoiled, violent children of the Neapolitans annoyed me. I had a shower, put on a two-piece bathing suit, and lay in the sun on the terrace.

The day slipped by slowly between showers, sun, fruit, work. Every so often I thought of Nina, looked at the clock. By summoning her I had made everything more difficult for her. At first she must have counted on the fact that I would give the keys to Gino and would make an arrangement with him for the day, the hours when I would leave the apartment. But from the moment I asked to speak directly to her, she had begun to hesitate. I imagined that she didn’t feel she could address to me directly a request for complicity.

But at five, while I was still in my bathing suit, in the sun, with my hair wet, the buzzer rang. It was she. I waited in the doorway for her to come up the stairs. She appeared in her new hat, out of breath. I said come in, I was on the terrace, I’ll be dressed in a moment. She shook her head no, energetically. She had left Elena with Rosaria with the excuse that she had to go to the pharmacy for some nose drops that would clear up the child’s stuffy nose. She has trouble breathing, she said, she’s always in the water and has a cold. I felt that she was very agitated.

“Sit down for a moment.”

She freed the hat from the pin, she laid both objects on the table in the living room, and I thought, looking at the black amber, the long shining shaft, that she had worn the hat just to show me that she was using my gift. 

“It’s lovely here,” she said.

“Do you really want the keys?”

“If it’s all right with you.”

We sat on the sofa. I told her I was surprised, I reminded her gently that she had claimed she was happy with her husband and Gino was only a game. She confirmed everything, uneasily. I smiled.

“And so?”

“I can’t take it anymore.”

I searched for her gaze, she didn’t look away, I said all right. I took the keys from my purse, placed them on the table beside the pin and the hat.

She looked at the keys, but she didn’t seem happy. She said:

“What do you think of me?”

I took the tone that I usually use with my students.

“I think that this way you’re risking everything. You should return to your studies, Nina, graduate and find a job.”

She made a grimace of disappointment.

“I know nothing and I’m worth nothing. I got pregnant, I gave birth to a daughter, and I don’t even know how I’m made inside. The only true thing I want is to escape.”

I sighed.

“Do what you feel you want to do.”

“Will you help me?”

“I am.”

“Where do you live?”

“Florence.”

She laughed in her usual way, nervously. 

“I’ll come to see you.”

“I’ll leave you my address.”

She was about to take the keys, but I rose and said:

“Wait, I have to give you something else.”

She looked at me with a hesitant smile, she must have thought it was another gift. I went to the bedroom, I took Nani. I came back and she was playing with the keys, she had a half smile on her lips. She looked up, the smile vanished. She said in a stupefied whisper:

“You took her.”

I nodded yes and she jumped up, leaving the keys on the table as if they burned her, murmured, “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

She raised her voice suddenly, said:

“You read, you write all day, and you don’t know?”

“No.”

She shook her head, incredulous, her voice lowered. “You had her. You kept her, while I had no idea what to do. My daughter was crying, she was driving me mad, and you, you didn’t say a word, you saw us but you didn’t make a move, you didn’t do a thing.”

I said: “I’m an unnatural mother.”

She agreed, exclaiming yes, you’re an unnatural mother, took the doll from my hands with a fierce gesture of reappropriation, to herself she cried in dialect I have to go, and to me in Italian: I don’t want to see you anymore, I don’t want anything from you, and she went toward the door.

I made a broad gesture, and said:

“Take the keys, Nina. I’m leaving tonight, the house will be empty till the end of the month,” and I turned toward the window, I couldn’t bear to see her so maddened by rage, I murmured: “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t hear the door close. For a second I thought she had decided to take the keys, then I heard her behind me, hissing insults in dialect, terrible as the ones my grandmother, my mother used to utter. I was about to turn away, but I felt a pain in my left side, swift as a burn. I looked down and saw the point of the pin that was shooting out of my skin, above my stomach, just under my ribs. The point appeared for a fraction of a second only, the time that Nina’s voice lasted, her hot breath, and then disappeared. The girl threw the pin on the floor, she didn’t take her hat, didn’t take the keys. She ran off with the doll, closing the door behind her.

I leaned one arm against the window and looked at my side, the tiny drop of blood immobile on the skin. I waited for something to happen to me, but nothing did, the drop became dark, clotted, and the impression of the painful thread of fire that had pierced me faded.

I sat down cautiously on the sofa. Maybe the pin had pierced my side the way a sword pierces the body of a Sufi ascetic, doing no harm. I looked at the hat on the table, the crust of blood on the skin. It was dark. I rose and turned on the light. I started to pack my bags, but moving slowly, as if I were gravely injured. When the suitcases were ready, I dressed, put on my sandals, smoothed my hair. At that point the cell phone rang. I saw Marta’s name, I felt a great contentment, I answered. She and Bianca, in unison, as if they had prepared the sentence and were performing it, exaggerating my Neapolitan cadence, shouted gaily into my ear:

“Mama, what are you doing, why haven’t you called? Won’t you at least let us know if you’re alive or dead?”

Deeply moved, I murmured:

“I’m dead, but I’m fine.”

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples.
The Lost Daughter
is her third novel to be published by Europa Editions.
The Days of Abandonment,
described by
The
New Yorker
as “a deeply observed, excruciatingly blunt novel,” was published in 2005 and
Troubling Love
was published in 2006.