The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  The secrets they shared as they ate, and ogled clothes, and lay across each other’s beds on Sunday afternoons, were mainly Barbara’s. Things her sisters had done, or that she had overheard them saying. Rows her parents had. And graphic descriptions of the rustles and small cries that emanated from their bedroom afterward.

  Angela did tell about being chased at nursery school, and about the bets that were made concerning exactly what was under her skirt, and even about the time she saw her father standing under the streetlight kissing Signora Ravalli. But she never told Barbara about the ghosts. Or about the fact that she still sometimes heard the Sh’ma Yisrael in the autumn rains. She never told about walking up the Corso d’Este to peer through iron railings. Although she did once mention something about trees with ruby leaves, and was pleased when Barbara’s father, who had recently lectured in America, confirmed that this was, in fact, true. But she said nothing about being her mother’s angel. Or about the apple. And she never once mentioned Antonio.

  For a while, after the night he walked her home and carried her bag and lifted her hair from her forehead leaving behind nothing but the brush of his fingertips, she had thought he would come back. She’d looked for him on the street and in crowds at the market. Had scanned the faces of the boys who hung around Piazza Trieste on Saturday afternoons. From time to time, when she could slip away from Barbara, Angela had even gone home exactly the same way, and at the same time, as she had on the day he had appeared beside her. When she did that, she would be sure to stand in exactly the same place, and look over the wall and down into the moat, and to ask herself exactly the same questions, about Lucrezia Borgia and the books.

  It became a ritual, like staring through the railings of the houses on Corso D’Este. A sort of prayer. As if, in holding faith with that afternoon, she could wind back time. Re-create chance. Summon Antonio from the ordinary evening air the way an alchemist summoned gold from lead.

  But he never materialized. And finally all she could think of was to wander along the city walls on Sunday afternoons while Barbara was at one of her mother’s recitals or having lunch with her family. Then Angela would stand in the line of trees that topped the ramparts and listen to the raucous shouts of the boys and the shrill burst of the umpire’s whistle, and search the bobbing heads until she picked Antonio’s out from the group racing up and down the ragged pitch beyond the Angels’ Gate.

  * * *

  Summer came and went. The football games stopped. Barbara’s family rented a villa on the coast below Rimini for the month of August. Angela was invited for a week, and found it hot and sandy and rather boring, and was more glad than she would have guessed when it was time for her to return to Ferrara, where she helped her father in the evenings as he scrubbed the marble tops of the counters in the butcher’s shop and washed the floor and sprinkled it with sawdust. On Sundays she sometimes went with him to his cousin’s farm where the veal calves were raised, driving in the butcher’s van, her father’s big hand beating time to the radio, dry wind blowing through the open windows of the cab that had nothing as fancy or expensive as air conditioning.

  In September Angela started at a new school where, increasingly, she found herself wandering happily, and then lost, in lines of equations. Angles and spheres and cubes floated through her dreams. She marked the anniversary of the night Antonio had walked her home by slipping out after supper and walking up to the Castello, as if her presence could summon him. The weather was colder and the big square empty. When she stopped in the Via Mazzini to stare in the window of the same shop, she thought for a moment that she saw him in the reflection, hovering at her shoulder. But when she spun around, it was not Antonio at all, just some other boy with curly hair and bad acne who stared at her, then smirked and slunk away.

  Christmas arrived. On New Year’s bells rang and fireworks exploded. Angela had forced herself to stop going to watch the football games. She had told herself it didn’t matter if she ever saw Antonio again or not. And mostly she believed it. Mostly he felt like a dream. Or sometimes a ghost. But occasionally something would tug at her sleeve. She would remember the warm indolent smell of August. Or see a smattering of speckled light. Or spot someone in the street, walking just ahead of her, who might be him. Then she would climb up onto the city walls and stand in the lines of the trees and allow herself a guilty look down onto the football pitch, just to prove that he was real.

  * * *

  It is on a Sunday like this, in February, that, without quite meaning to, Angela takes Barbara with her. The fog of the previous week has finally given way to a limpid blue sky. It is still very cold. Even with the sun out, frost coats the branches and silvers the tiniest twigs. Dead thickets glitter in the old Hebrew cemetery. Ice makes a thin bright skin across the mud-churned puddles.

  At Christmas Barbara’s parents increased her pocket money and opened a bank account for her, because she has to get used to independence. Barbara’s parents talk a lot about independence and rarely ask where the girls are going or what they are doing, so Barbara telephones and suggests they take the train to Bologna and go to a film. But Angela is feeling a tug in her stomach, the sort of thing she imagines stitches straining over a wound must feel like. The night before she dreamed of Antonio. Woke up in the dark with a hot-hand feeling on the back of her neck, sure his fingers were lifting the hair off her forehead. So when Barbara reels off a list of what’s playing, Angela says nothing. Finally she mutters something about taking a walk to get some exercise, and to her surprise, after a small silence, Barbara agrees. She announces that the films are all meant to be stupid anyway, and that Angela is right. They should go for a walk. Angela puts the phone down feeling as if she’s been shoved from behind in a crowd.

  When she arrives at the Barellis’ house and rings the bell, Barbara is waiting.

  “Come on.” Before Angela can even step inside, Barbara grabs her by the arm and spins her around, barely giving her time to hear the rising voices that are coming from the dining room. “Let’s go,” Barbara hisses. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She runs them down the steps.

  “They’re arguing,” Barbara says, as they reach the pavement. “Papa and all his friends. It’s supposed to be a lunch party, but all they ever do is argue. Every weekend. I can’t stand it. Talk. Talk. Talk.” Barbara’s hair, which is pulled back in a long dark braid, swings like a pendulum. “All they ever do is talk about politics. They don’t do anything, just talk. They never shut up.”

  It’s a conversation Angela and Barbara have had before. More than once. Well, not really a conversation, Angela thinks, since she doesn’t say much. Barbara’s father teaches politics and economics, and since the oil crisis of the autumn before and the general strikes that followed, the Barelli house seems, especially on Sunday afternoons, to be full of cigarette smoke and shouting.

  As a result it’s not uncommon for Barbara to seek sanctuary at the apartment, where the girls work at the kitchen table or watch television undisturbed because Angela’s father does not care about politics and is often out on Sundays in any case.

  Since the supermarket opened down by the train station, he has been forced to keep the butcher’s shop open on Saturdays, which means he now spends Sunday afternoons getting ready for the week ahead, doing the books and working in the cold store. Running the meat grinder. Invoking the recipes his father taught him as if they are a magic shield that will protect against Styrofoam-backed shrink-wrapped chops and pellucid watery chicken breasts.

  “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  Barbara pulls her new jacket tighter around her as they turn the corner and pass the high dark walls of the Casa Romei. “I hate it,” she says suddenly. She stops in the street and turns on Angela. “Don’t you?” Barbara’s cheeks are pinched with cold and unhappiness. “Hate this town? It’s like a prison. It’s even got walls like a prison. I can’t wait until we go to university.”

  Barbara shakes her head and starts walking again
.

  “We had a fight about it,” she says. “Papa wants me to go here. But I’m not going to. I won’t. I told Mama. I swear. Laura didn’t, and I don’t have to.” Laura is Barbara’s middle sister. She left in September to begin the university in Padua. “He’s only picking on me,” Barbara adds, “because I’m the last one left. Because there isn’t anyone else he can boss around.”

  Angela nods. She might suggest that perhaps Professor Barelli wants Barbara to stay because he will be lonely with no daughters in the house. But she isn’t sure if this is true, or even if it is, if there is any point in saying it, or in doing anything but nodding, which is probably all Barbara wants her to do. Certainly she does not want Angela to say that she could not imagine leaving her own father. Or, for that matter, Ferrara. That to her the walls are not a prison, but an embrace. Angela remembers how sad she felt for Antonio that winter night when she thought of him living outside them. Her father’s newspapers, the ones he falls asleep reading in his chair, skitter through her mind. The pictures of striking workers, and of the men who were kidnapped in Milan, their faces staring out after they’d had their heads shaved and their photos taken and been left chained to the rails of the Fiat factory with placards hanging around their necks because the Red Brigades said they were fascists. She thinks of the photos of people throwing stones. And knows she does not want to go out there. Ever.

  They pass the wire-topped walls of the hospital, cross the traffic circle, which is quiet on a Sunday afternoon, and climb up the steep bank onto the ramparts.

  “Come on.” Barbara bangs her hands together as they reach the packed gravel path. “I’ll race you.”

  These races take place frequently and are pointless. Barbara runs on the girls’ team at school, and is taller and faster, and stride for stride can beat not only Angela, but almost anyone else. Angela laughs and chases her anyway. Through white huffs of breath, she sees her friend’s long gangly body transformed as her black braid flies out behind her, catching the halfhearted sun.

  As they reach the section above the football pitch, Angela slows. Shouts, cut by the blade of a whistle, rise in the chilly air. A group of parents and girlfriends stand at the top of the bank, stamping their feet, digging their hands in their pockets, calling encouragement and clapping. As Barbara runs on down the avenue of trees, her figure growing smaller and smaller, Angela stops, hovering at the edge of the supporters, and scans the game. But she doesn’t see Antonio.

  Something in her chest deflates as she watches the pack of boys hurtle down the muddy pitch. Damp rises through the soles of her shoes. Then the ball flies, and a clump of arms and legs and jerseys tangle and collapse. The referee shouts and waves his arms. The players line up for a penalty kick, jostling and pushing, and suddenly there he is. Antonio is standing in the wall, in front of the goal. After the kick comes, and is successfully fended off, he runs up the field with his arms above his head.

  “Who is he?”

  It’s not until Barbara speaks that Angela realizes she has come back and is standing so close, her chest rising and falling, her face flushed and eyes bright, that Angela can feel the hot huff of her breath.

  “Who’s who?”

  Even as she says it, Angela feels the telltale pink flush burning up her neck and into her cheeks. Barbara grins, watching her as if this is the single most interesting thing Angela has ever done. Then she looks back at the pitch, shoves her mittened hands into her pockets, and says, “He comes from the factories, doesn’t he?”

  Angela shrugs.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Angela turns and begins to walk away. She’s making for the path that cuts down toward the Certosa, suddenly anxious to be off the walls. “Come on,” she calls. “I’m cold.”

  But Barbara doesn’t move. Instead she stands looking down onto the football pitch, leaning forward and frowning, her hands dug into her pockets, her braid hanging over her shoulder. Angela watches. And for a moment she thinks Barbara looks exactly the same way she does when she’s spotted something in a shop window, but can’t quite make out what’s written on the price tag.

  It is exactly two months to the day after that, on April 18, 1974, when The Red Brigades kidnap Mario Sossi.

  * * *

  Angela saw it first on the television news. It was an hour or two after supper, which had been spring lamb, chunks so pale they were almost white, braised with peas, tiny and bright green.

  After eating Angela and her father had stood side by side at the deep white sink, passing dishes, forks, knives, from hand to hand, washing and drying. Angela would never have told Barbara, or anyone else for that matter, but it was her favorite time of the day—these few minutes she and her father spent moving around the stove and sink and table, clearing away, wiping, scrubbing and drying, no words necessary between them, the warm smell of the meal they had just shared still hanging in the room.

  When they finished her father placed his hand on her head, as he had done every night since she could remember. Then he sighed, a smile lighting his broad, round face, and ambled into the sitting room, where he turned on the television and picked up his paper and sank into his sagging brown chair with the pages spread across his knees.

  Angela knew it would not be long before he fell asleep. And sure enough not a half hour later, from the kitchen table where she sat, her exercise books spread across the scarred wooden surface, she heard the muffled grunts and little gasps that meant she could turn off the television. Cut dead the aimless mumble about strikes and weather reports.

  The nights had grown warmer. Before dinner she had opened the window. Now she got up and closed it, fastening the latch, then went across the hall to the sitting room. From where she stood in the doorway, Angela saw her father’s mouth open, his head lolled back, resting against the worn cushion. It occurred to her that his hair, although still abundant, was almost white, and she found herself wondering when that had happened, and why she hadn’t noticed it before.

  His blue eyes were closed, the lashes dark against his cheeks, which had bright red patches on them. Her father’s hand twitched, fingers jumping on the newspaper as if he was trying to point something out. Angela turned toward the TV. She was about to switch it off, when the picture shifted abruptly to a street, then to an ordinary-looking house. The announcer said it was in Genoa. A picture of a man in the white-and-black outfit of a prosecutor appeared and was rapidly replaced by a policeman, who announced that someone called Mario Sossi had been kidnapped. Witnesses saw him shoved into a van. Five thousand police and carabinieri had been called to the city. The picture switched to a line of traffic. Carabinieri officers moved from car to car, opening trunks and doors. Some carried submachine guns cradled in their arms like babies.

  Angela stood staring. She had never been to Genoa. She had never been anywhere larger than Bologna. She leaned down and switched the television off, driving the pictures away, sending them back where they belonged, outside the walls.

  But Mario Sossi was not banished so easily.

  By the next morning his face stared from the racks of the corner shops that sold magazines, and gazed from the rumpled pages of newspapers being read in cafés. In the electrical shop it filled every screen of a whole row of television sets.

  Then a new photo was released. In this one Assistant Prosecutor Sossi no longer wore his black robes and milk-white collar. Instead he sat with his hands folded between his knees and looked small and sad and unimportant. Hardly someone worth kidnapping. Shoving into a van. Calling an “Enemy of the People.” A banner hung behind him. On it were printed the words Brigate Rosse. Below them was a five-pointed star.

  The star bothered Angela. The two bottom points were longer than the others, so it looked as if it was leaning backward, like something propped unevenly against a wall. Its angles, she thought, were not correct. It wouldn’t be possible to work out an equation for that star, and if you did, the sums would not come out the rig
ht way. Looking at it made her feel queasy, the way the glasses of wine Barbara’s parents sometimes pressed on her made her feel.

  “Sossi Sparito nel Nullo.” “Sossi Disappears into Thin Air” the newspaper headlines cried. But it wasn’t true. Because no matter what the newspapers or the politicians or the Carabinieri said, Mario Sossi was everywhere. Even Ferrara’s walls and ramparts couldn’t keep him out.

  As the days passed and Mario Sossi’s family—his wife and his children—begged and pleaded for his safe return, Angela began to dream of him. He slithered under the rusted iron footings and wriggled through the padlocks on the Angels’ Gate. He slid like rain through the alleys of the ghetto, but the shadow he threw as he passed under the street lamps was not his own. It was not even human. Instead it was a long, sharp shape scratched against the dark walls and closed shutters. A five-pointed star that swayed in time to Mario Sossi’s footsteps as they whispered across the cobbles like a prayer.

  * * *

  “My father says he’s a political prisoner.”

  Barbara announces this as they are walking home from school seventeen days after Assistant Prosecutor Sossi has vanished into nothingness and become everywhere at once.

  She lifts her braid and drops it, puffing her cheeks like a blowfish. Summer has arrived abruptly, rushing the trees into leaf and turning the mud on the paths that run along the top of the walls to dust. The cafés have doubled their outdoor tables and the old men walking their dogs have shed their scarves and jackets and unbuttoned the tops of their collars. Stretching their wattled necks, they look this way and that as they amble along the pavements blinking like ancient tortoises. In less than a week Angela will be sixteen.