The Lost Daughter (7 page)

Not Bianca, no, ever since she was a child Bianca has fought me. She tried to pluck from me the secret of skills that in her eyes appeared wonderful and show that she in her turn was capable of them. It was she who revealed to me that when I peel fruit I am finicky about making sure that the knife cuts without ever breaking the peel. Before her admiration led me to discover this, I hadn’t realized it, goodness knows where I learned it, maybe it’s only my taste for ambitious and stubbornly precise work. Make a snake, Mama, she would say, insistent: peel the apple and make a snake, please. “
Haciendo serpentinas
,” I found recently in a poem by Maria Guerra that I’m fond of. Bianca was captivated by the serpentines of the peel, they were one of the many magical abilities she attributed to me; it seems touching now when I think about it.

One morning she got a bad cut on her finger trying to show that she, too, could make a snake. She was five and was immediately in despair: the blood flowed, along with tears of disappointment. I was frightened, yelled at her: I couldn’t leave her alone for a moment, there was never time for myself. I felt that I was suffocating, it seemed to me that I was betraying myself. For long minutes I refused to kiss her wound, the kiss that makes the pain go away. I wanted to teach her that you don’t do that, it’s dangerous, only Mama does it, who is grownup. Mama.

Poor creatures who came out of my belly, all alone now on the other side of the world. I placed the doll on my knees as if for company. Why had I taken her. She guarded the love of Nina and Elena, their bond, their reciprocal passion. She was the shining testimony of perfect motherhood. I brought her to my breast. How many damaged, lost things did I have behind me, and yet present, now, in a whirl of images. I understood clearly that I didn’t want to give Nani back, even though I felt remorse, fear in keeping her with me. I kissed her face, her mouth, I hugged her as I had seen Elena do. She emitted a gurgle that seemed to me a hostile remark and, with it, a jet of brown saliva that dirtied my lips and my shirt.

I slept on the sofa, with the door to the terrace open, and I woke late; my head was heavy, my bones ached. It was past ten, and raining; a strong wind was agitating the sea. I looked for the doll but didn’t see her. I felt anxious, as if it were possible that she had thrown herself off the terrace during the night. I looked around, hunted under the sofa, afraid that someone had come in and taken her. I found her in the kitchen, sitting on the table, in the shadows. I must have brought her in there when I went to wash my mouth and my shirt. 

No beach, the weather was nasty. The plan to give Nani back to Elena today seemed to me not only weak but impractical. I went out to have breakfast, to buy the papers and something for lunch and dinner.

The town had the animation of a day without sun; vacationers shopped or wandered around wasting time. I came upon a toy store along the seafront and remembered the idea of buying some clothes for the doll, since for that day, at least, I would keep her with me.

I went in with no particular aim, and talked to a young salesgirl, who was very helpful. She found underpants, socks, shoes, and a blue dress that seemed to me the right size. I was about to leave, having just put the package in my bag, when I almost bumped into Corrado, the old man with the spiteful expression, the one who I had been sure was Nina’s father and who instead was Rosaria’s husband. He was fully dressed, in a blue suit, white shirt, yellow tie. He didn’t seem to recognize me, but behind him, in faded green maternity overalls, was Rosaria, who recognized me right away and exclaimed:

“Signora Leda, how are you, is everything all right, did the ointment help?”

I thanked her again, saying I felt fine now, and meanwhile I observed, with pleasure, I should say with emotion, that Nina, too, was coming.

People we are used to seeing on the beach have a surprising effect when we meet them in their city clothes. Corrado and Rosaria seemed to me contracted, rigid, as if they were cardboard. Nina gave the impression of a delicately colored shell that keeps its soft inner mass—colorless, watchful—tightly locked up. The only one who looked disheveled was Elena, who, clasped in her mother’s arms, was sucking her thumb. Although she was wearing a pretty white dress, she gave off a sense of disorder; she must have stained the dress a little while ago with chocolate ice cream—the thumb clenched between her lips had a line of sticky brown saliva on it.

I looked at the child uneasily. Her head was lolling on Nina’s shoulder, her nose was running. The doll clothes in my purse seemed to have grown heavier and I thought: this is the right moment, I’ll tell her that I have Nani. Instead something twisted violently inside me and I asked with false sympathy:

“How are you, sweetie, did you find your doll?”

She gave a kind of shudder of rage, she took her thumb out of her mouth, and tried to hit me with her fist. I swerved, and she hid her face against her mother’s neck in irritation. 

“Elena, don’t behave like that, answer the lady,” Nina reproached her nervously. “Tell her we’ll find Nani tomorrow, today we’re buying a better doll.”

But the child shook her head and Rosaria whispered, whoever stole her should get brain cancer. She said it as if the being in her belly were also furious because of that affront and so she had the right to feel resentment, a resentment even stronger than Nina’s. But Corrado made a sign of disapproval. It’s kids’ stuff, he said, they like a toy, they take it, and then they tell their parents they found it by chance. When I saw him so close he seemed to me not at all old and certainly not as spiteful as he had from a distance.

“Carruno’s children aren’t like kids,” Rosaria said. 

And Nina burst out, the accent of her dialect much stronger than usual: “They did it on purpose—they were egged on by their mother to insult me.”

“Tonino telephoned, the children didn’t take anything.”

“Carruno’s lying.”

“Even if it’s true, you are wrong to say it,” Corrado reproached her. “What would your husband say if he heard you?”

Nina looked at the pavement angrily. Rosaria shook her head, she turned to me in search of understanding.

“My husband is too kind, you don’t know the tears this poor child has shed. She has a fever—we’re furious.”

I got a confused idea that they had attributed to these Carrunos, probably the family in the motorboat, the doll’s disappearance. It was natural for them to think that they had decided to make them suffer by making the little girl suffer.

“The child is having trouble breathing, blow your nose, sweetie,” Rosaria said to Elena, and at the same time asked for Kleenex but wordlessly, with a peremptory gesture of her hand. I was opening the zipper of my purse, but stopped abruptly, halfway, afraid that they might see my purchase, ask questions. Her husband quickly gave her a handkerchief and she cleaned the child’s nose as she wriggled and kicked. I zipped up my purse, made sure it was tightly closed, and looked at the salesgirl with apprehension. Stupid fears, I was angry with myself. I asked Nina:

“Is it a high fever?”

“A few degrees,” she answered. “It’s nothing.” And, as if to show me that Elena was fine, she tried with a forced smile to put her down.

The child refused with great energy. She clung to her mother’s neck as if she were suspended over an abyss, yelling, pushing off the floor at the slightest contact, kicking. Nina remained for a moment in an uncomfortable position, bending forward, with her hands around her daughter’s hips, pulling in the attempt to detach her, but careful also to avoid her kicks. I felt that she was wavering between patience and being fed up, understanding and the wish to start crying. Where was the idyll I had witnessed at the beach. I recognized the vexation of finding oneself under the eyes of strangers in this situation. Evidently she had been trying to calm the child for hours, without success, and was exhausted. Leaving the house, she had tried to clothe her daughter’s rage in a pretty dress, pretty shoes. She herself had put on a nice dress of a wine color that became her, she had pinned up her hair, wore earrings that grazed her pronounced jaw and swung against her long neck. She wanted to resist ugliness, cheer herself up. She had tried to see herself in the mirror as she had been before bringing that organism into the world, before condemning herself forever to adding it on to hers. But to what purpose.

Soon she’ll start yelling, I thought, soon she’ll hit her, trying to break that bond. Instead, the bond will become more twisted, will strengthen in remorse, in the humiliation of having shown herself in public to be an unaffectionate mother, not the mother of church or the Sunday supplements. Elena screams, cries, and holds her legs neurotically rigid, as if the entrance to the toy store were a snake pit. A miniature, made of an illogically animate material. The child didn’t want to stand on her own feet, she wanted to stay on her mother’s. She was apprehensive, she had a presentiment that Nina had had enough, she sensed it from the way she had dressed up to come to town, from the rebellious odor of her youth, from her eager beauty. So she wrapped herself around her. The loss of the doll is an excuse, I said to myself. Elena was afraid, above all, that her mother would flee from her.

Maybe Nina realized it, too, or simply couldn’t stand it anymore. In a suddenly coarse dialect she hissed, Stop it, and resettled her daughter in her arms with a violent jerk, Stop it, I don’t want to hear you anymore, do you understand, I don’t want to hear you anymore, that’s enough of your demands, and she pulled the child’s dress down hard in front, over her knees, in a sharp gesture that she would have liked to aim at her body, not her clothes. Then, confused, she returned to Italian with an expression of self-reproach, and said to me in a forced way:

“Excuse me, I don’t know what to do, she’s torturing me. Her father’s gone and now she’s taking it out on me.”

Then, with a sigh, Rosaria took the child from her arms: come to auntie, she murmured, with emotion. This time Elena, incongruously, put up no resistance; she yielded immediately, throwing her arms around her aunt’s neck. Out of spite for her mother, or out of certainty that this other body—without a child but expecting one, children love the not yet born a lot, the newborn little, or very little—was at this moment welcoming, would hug her between large breasts, having set her on that stomach, like a seat, protecting her against the possible anger of the bad mother, who didn’t know how to take care of her doll, who in fact had lost her. She entrusted herself to Rosaria with a vehement exaggeration of affection, to imply treacherously: Auntie is better than you, Mama, Auntie is kinder; if you go on treating me this way, I’ll stay with her forever and won’t want you anymore.

“There, go on, so I can have a little rest,” Nina said with a frown of disappointment; her upper lip showed a veil of sweat. Then to me: “Sometimes you just can’t cope anymore.”

“I know,” I said, to indicate that I was on her side.

But Rosaria intervened, and, hugging the child, she murmured: they put us through so much, and she planted noisy kisses on Elena, murmuring repeatedly, in a voice consumed by tenderness: pretty girl, pretty pretty girl. Already she wanted to enter the circle of us mothers. She thought that she had waited too long, but that by now she had learned the part completely. In fact she had decided to show immediately, especially to me, that she could soothe Elena better than her sister-in-law. So, here, she set her down on the ground, be a good girl, let Mama and Signora Leda see how good you are. And the child said nothing; she stood beside her sucking her thumb in desperation, while Rosaria asked me, with an air of satisfaction: what were your daughters like as children, were they like this little treasure? I felt a strong impulse to confuse her, to punish her, throw her off balance.

“I remember very little, nothing really.”

“That can’t be—you don’t forget anything about your children.”

I was silent for a moment, then said calmly:

“I left. I abandoned them when the older was six and the younger four.”

“What do you mean, who did they grow up with?”

“With their father.”

“And you didn’t see them again?”

“Three years later I took them back.”

“What a terrible thing, why.”

I shook my head, I didn’t know why.

“I was very tired,” I said.

Then I turned to Nina, who now looked at me as if she had never seen me: “Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die.”

I smiled at her, I gestured toward Elena:

“Don’t buy her anything—forget it, it won’t help. She’ll find the doll. Goodbye.”

I nodded at Rosaria’s husband, who seemed to me to have assumed his unpleasant mask, and left the store.

Now I was really angry with myself. I never spoke of that period of my life, not even to my sisters, not even to myself. The times I had tried to mention it to Bianca and Marta, together or separately, they had listened to me in distracted silence, had said they remembered nothing, had immediately gone on to speak of something else. Only my former husband, before going to work in Canada, had occasionally begun his remonstrances and resentments from that point; but he was an intelligent and sensitive man, ashamed of his meanness, and he quickly moved on, without insisting. All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.

I wandered around the square trying to calm down, but the echo of the words I had uttered, Rosaria’s expression and her reproaches, the flash of Nina’s pupils prevented me, in fact intensified a constricted anger. Useless to say it wasn’t important, who were those two women, when would I ever see them again after this vacation. I realized that if that judgment could help me bring perspective to Rosaria it was of no use with Nina. Her gaze had pulled back abruptly, but without losing me: it had only retreated, as if seeking a distant point, in the depths of her pupils, from which to look at me without risk. That urgent need for distance had wounded me.