The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  She starts to reply that it is not Barbara’s father at all who has said that Mario Sossi is a political prisoner but the Red Brigades themselves, who have just sent another of their communiqués to the newspapers. In this one they have announced that Mario Sossi is being put on trial for his crimes against the workers, and that after that, because he is a political prisoner, he can be exchanged. For four terrorists he was prosecuting, whom the Red Brigades would like flown to Cuba or Algeria. Or possibly North Korea.

  “Criminals!” Angela’s father had shouted at the television the night before. “Anarchist scum!” He had even thrown one of his slippers.

  But Angela can’t be bothered to point any of this out. It’s too hot and she wants to get out of her school clothes and Barbara won’t pay any attention anyway.

  “They got in a big fight about it last night.” Barbara slides her eyes sideways like a cartoon cat.

  “My mother and father,” she says, in case Angela thinks she is talking about someone else. “My mother says they’re nothing but spoiled children, the Red Brigades. My father says they’re fighting capitalism. I think they should get divorced,” she adds, presumably referring to her parents, not the Red Brigades, although Angela thinks the country divorcing them might be a great idea, especially if they’d shut up. “They don’t do anything anymore but fight,” Barbara says. “My mother says she’s taking me on holiday alone this year. She doesn’t want my father to come.”

  Angela looks at her. Barbara is watching her feet now, concentrating on them as they fall one after the other onto the pavement.

  “We’re going to Positano.” Barbara shakes her head and tugs her braid. “To stay with my aunt. Her new husband has a villa. And a boat.”

  “But do you want to?”

  As far as Angela knows, for the last few years it has been Barbara and her mother who do nothing but fight. Signora Barelli is neat and very precise, like a pile of papers squared at the edges. She has long-fingered hands that she flexes and rubs cream into, and is, in Angela’s opinion, rather mean. She calls Angela “Barbara’s little friend.” As if she’s a hamster. Or a mouse that talks.

  Professor Barelli, on the other hand, is large and unruly, like a sheepdog. He sometimes pulls Barbara’s braid when she walks by, a sort of yank of recognition, as if he’s just remembered who she is. His hair falls in his eyes and Angela is always afraid he is going to set it on fire when he smokes. Last year he won some sort of award for teaching, a fact Angela finds hard to understand because his suits don’t seem to fit properly and he shuffles as if his shoes are about to fall off. On the rare occasions when she eats at the Barellis’, he makes loud pronouncements, then huffs and laughs like a broken vacuum cleaner.

  Angela stops. Behind them a woman on a bicycle swerves and rings her bell. The girls step into the shadows at the entrance to the theater. Barbara shrugs.

  “My cousins are OK,” she says.

  Angela has no idea if this is true, or if it is wishful thinking, since until that moment she has never heard Barbara mention her cousins.

  “I’ve never met the husband,” Barbara adds. “Neither has my mother. My aunt only married him last month.” Barbara fingers the edge of her book bag. “We’re leaving right after school.” Her cheeks color. “Mama’s already bought the tickets.”

  She does not need to add that there will be no invitation for Angela this summer. Unlike Rimini, Positano is too far away. And there are the cousins, and the new husband, and the boat.

  “But what about your father?”

  The idea of Professor Barelli rambling through the house alone, smoking his cigarettes in an empty sitting room and cooking his meals in the big fancy kitchen while he makes pronouncements to himself and laughs at nothing, seems impossible to Angela. Barbara shrugs again.

  “He’s teaching at a summer school in America.” She smiles and drops her braid. “I might get to go visit him,” she adds. “In August. Come on.” She grabs Angela’s arm and steps out of the shadows. “Let’s go get something to eat. Let’s eat lots.”

  They have hamburgers. And French fries, and gelato, and by the time they part on the corner of Via Mazzini, Angela feels sick. As she turns into her street, she looks at her watch. It’s just before six, but her father won’t be home yet. He keeps the shop open until seven on weeknights, although he grumbles frequently that there isn’t much point because more and more people go to the supermarket, where they can buy everything at once. It’s only the old ladies, her father says, who come to peer through the glass of the display case and ask questions about the cut of the fillets and how long the beef has been hung. And they always come in the morning, early and dressed in black. So what is the point of leaving the doors open until seven so he can stand behind the counter all by himself?

  Angela doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t know the equation that would make the supermarket go away. As much as she would like to, she doesn’t know how to reduce it to zero—cancel it out with involtini, and veal piccata, and the soft, fat manicotti her father still makes sometimes on Saturday night.

  She goes to her room and lies down on her bed and closes her eyes and tries not to see the summer stretching out ahead of her like a long, hot, empty road. Or her father standing by himself in the shop. Or the picture on the front of the day’s newspaper, which, for once, had been not of Mario Sossi, but of his wife, who had tears running down her face because she did not want to go away from her husband to Positano or anywhere else, but wanted him back. And who, when she was not allowed to go on television anymore, had written letters to the pope, and to the president. Pleading with them to somehow do what five thousand police and carabinieri have so far failed to do—reach down and fish Mario Sossi out of the nothingness he has vanished into.

  For Angela’s sixteenth birthday, Barbara gives her a silver bracelet. Her father gives her a record player and a locket with the letter A engraved on it that once stood for Annabeth, because it was her mother’s, but now it stands for Angela because it’s hers.

  He puts the gold chain around her neck, but his fingers are too big and too callused to fasten the tiny clasp, so Angela does it herself. Then she hugs him, and feels his arms around her and breathes in the smell of him—the carbolic soap he uses to scrub down the counters of the shop, and the detergent from the Laundromat that lingers in his shirts, and the sweet woodiness of the cheap cigars he buys with his newspaper every morning and thinks Angela does not know about because he smokes them after work while he helps Signor Pirotti, the two of them side by side puffing like steam engines as they pull the metal gates down across the front of the Pirottis’ fruit stall and then the butcher’s shop and fasten them with the same padlocks their fathers used.

  A week later, on May 18, the Red Brigades announce that they have decided to execute Mario Sossi. They say he has been tried in a revolutionary court and found guilty. They say that he is an enemy of the people—a cohort of the fascists and the capitalists who keep the proletariat enslaved, and that therefore he must die. Then they change their minds and free him. On the thirty-fifth day Mario Sossi comes back from nowhere.

  Then, once he is free, once everyone knows where he is—home again with his wife and children—he vanishes again. He disappears from the television and the magazines and the front pages of the newspaper as if he had never been. And after that school ends, and Barbara leaves for Positano, and Angela goes to work in the butcher’s shop.

  * * *

  At first her father argued. He did not, he said, spend his days up to his elbows in sausage meat so his beautiful daughter, who is so clever at math and English and is going to be the first person in their family to go to university, could learn to pull the guts out of chickens. If her mother knew, he insisted, she would reach up from the grave, grab him by the shirttails, and pull him down and slam the lid.

  Angela, however, pointed out that she intended to work for someone, not only because she had nothing better to do, but also because she wanted
to make some money of her own, so it might as well be him. She also pointed out that it would only be for the summer, and then suggested that if he did not want her slicing liver and arranging beef tongues, he could at least let her run the cash register and keep the books, which was, after all, what her mother had done after they married and while she had been planning their business empire based on prosciutto and American corned beef, whatever that was.

  Faced with this, her father agreed. Grudgingly. So as the days grew hotter and the nights grew shorter, Angela began to walk in the footsteps of her parents and grandparents. Every morning she threaded her way down the Via Vittoria and along the Via Ragno and into the Via Carbone, which had once been the haunt of the charcoal sellers. She passed under the dark, cool arches of the Via delle Volte, where she had seen Antonio that night and where before the war the prostitutes had lingered like stray cats, and stepped finally into Via Mayr with its traffic and potholed pavement and brick-fronted buildings rimed with soot.

  The butcher’s shop was on the corner. A few years earlier, before the new supermarket had opened, her father had, in a fit of optimism, invested in a new sign and a new front window. Their name, Vari, marched across the plate glass, which was kept spotless. But the red and black letters that hovered above, spelling out MACELLERìA, had been made grubby with winter rain and the exhaust fumes from the trucks that rattled by on their way to the Ripagrande.

  Angela didn’t know if the white coat she put on every morning had actually been her mother’s, but she liked to imagine it was. After buttoning up, she braided her hair and stuffed it under a cap. Then she sat behind the cash register and tried to imagine that in this white-walled room surrounded by knives and lumps of flesh, it would be possible not only to fall in love, but to build dreams—of a house with trees that had spreading branches and leaves made of rubies. Tried. And failed.

  She did not do much better with the books. The long and the short of it was, her father was in debt. Several years earlier he had borrowed to pay for the new sign and the window and the butcher’s van. All of which had probably seemed reasonable at the time, when the choice people had was which butcher to use rather than whether to use one at all. Now all that had changed.

  As she watched him, his large hands unexpectedly graceful as he teased out gristle or brought a cleaver down, she understood why he had not wanted her to see the accounts. The more he fell behind, the greater risk the bank considered him, and the higher they raised his rates. Month by month the amount of capital his repayments covered grew smaller and smaller while the share that went to interest grew bigger and bigger. It was like a silly nursery rhyme about running around and around in circles. Or worse, like the mushroom clouds they were shown in movies at school. Sometimes Angela feared the debt would blossom and spread forever, the interest growing and growing, until it turned the sky black and blotted out the sun.

  In the quiet of the afternoons while he worked in the cold room after the morning rush—when there was one—Angela took to easing open the cash register. Holding her hand over the bell so he wouldn’t hear it ping, she slid half the lire notes he paid her back into their little black plastic slots.

  It’s a Sunday at the end of July when she decides to wash the sign. Her father has taken the van and gone with Signor Pirotti, whose own van has broken down, to collect an order of cherries from somewhere near Imola. They rattle off just as the bells start ringing for mass. Standing in the street, Angela waves. Then she takes the keys to the storeroom in the alley that they share with the fruit stall and fetches the ladder and a bucket and sponges and a bottle of the detergent they use to mop the floors.

  The ladder is old and very long and heavier than she thought it would be and it takes her some time to maneuver it out the narrow side door. Then she has to drag it around the corner and into Via Mayr, bumping the ends over the curb. She’s relieved the street’s empty, closed up tight for Sunday, so there’s no one to witness her first ham-fisted attempt at getting it up against the front of the shop. Afraid of resting it on the glass, she finally props it against the grimy brick.

  But when she puts her foot on it and begins to climb, it feels flimsier than its weight suggests. A rung is broken, and the bucket is heavier and more unwieldy than she thought. There’s a hook at the top, but hanging the bucket makes the ladder tilt, which frightens her. Down feels like a long way. Finally she’s reduced to leaving the bucket on the pavement, soaking the sponge, going back up the ladder, and leaning over to swipe inefficiently at the M and the A and eventually the edge of the C. The E is out of reach.

  Sweat mingles with the dirty, soapy water on her hands and arms. It dribbles down her side, until the thin cotton shirt she’s wearing clings like a second skin. Angela rubs the hair from her eyes with the back of her arm, and wonders how she’s going to clean the Ls and the E and R in the middle. She feels the sun beating on her back and on the top of her head and thinks suddenly of Barbara on her uncle’s boat in Positano. Which makes her think of Barbara’s mother, of her smiling her smile that is not a smile at all, and saying, “Now, what about you and your little friend?” or “Would your little friend like to stay for lunch?” and how she wanted to turn and shout, “My name is Angela!” but never had, and never would. She thinks about that, and about the columns of numbers in her father’s books that get larger and larger in the wrong way. Then she begins to cry.

  The M and A and C are dripping down onto what was the clean plate glass window her father polished every morning. The ladder has given her a splinter that catches and rips at her thumb. The pig and the cow painted on the shop tiles laugh at her. She decides she hates them, and has no idea how long she has been standing there, crying and sniffing and feeling the damp squelch in her shoes, when she hears his voice.

  “That looks better,” Antonio says.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Angela doesn’t even turn around to look at him. She shakes her head, suddenly beyond caring about anything—what she looks like, or what Barbara’s mother thinks, or even about the fact that Antonio has appeared like magic and is standing not two feet away and speaking to her while her nose is running and her cheeks are turning red.

  “It’s a mess. It’s just a huge, big mess.”

  Antonio steps in front of her. He is wearing jeans and a white shirt and carrying a gym bag. A pair of football shoes are tied by their laces and dangle from the handle. He looks at her for a moment. Then he looks back at the sign.

  “I can’t reach.” Angela wipes her nose on the back of her hand and knows she’s sounding like a baby, but she can’t help it. “I wanted to surprise Papa.” Her voice is perilously close to a wail. “And now I’ve gone and messed up the window, too.”

  Antonio laughs. Then his face sobers.

  “Hey,” he says. He reaches out and touches her cheek with the tip of his finger. “It’s only soap and water.”

  He steps into the shop doorway and puts the gym bag down, and before she realizes what he’s doing, he’s taken the ladder and jiggled it around, releasing a latch she hadn’t even noticed and somehow opening the rungs so the top feet will reach well above the sign. He steadies it against the wall.

  “You hold it.” He turns to her. “Like this.”

  Antonio grabs the ladder and braces his foot against the bottom rung. Angela stares at him.

  “What are you doing?”

  He cocks his head and smiles at her, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.

  “I’m washing the sign, Butcher’s Daughter.”

  Before she can say anything—protest that he will be late for wherever he’s going, football practice, obviously, or that he will get wet—Antonio takes the bucket, throws the sponge into it, and starts to climb. Angela darts forward, grabbing the ladder, bracing her foot as he’d shown her, feeling his weight as he moves upward as if she’s holding him in her hands.

  “I’m going,” he says a moment later, without looking down at her.

  Angela has no idea wh
at he’s talking about. Balancing, he holds the bucket with one hand and wrings out the sponge with the other. Water plops and foams, splatting beside her shoes.

  “To the university, at Padua.” He begins to clean the middle E she had not been able to reach.

  “Remember?”

  She nods. Of course she remembers. The old wooden ladder is digging another splinter into the heel of her hand, but she doesn’t feel it. Instead she feels the strong, hard bones of Antonio’s fingers. She feels his skin, smooth and tight as an apple’s. He switches the bucket, washing the first, then the second L.

  “Philosophy.” He shakes his head, making the ladder wobble. Laughter bounces down to her. “In a few weeks. I can’t really believe it.”

  “Is your father still angry?”

  Antonio shrugs. He leans out to clean the second E, then starts climbing back down. The long stretch of his leg is above her. Then the small of his back. When his foot hits the pavement, she lets go of the ladder. His arms brush hers as he turns around. He smiles, hands her the bucket, and grabs the rails, shifting the ladder sideways.

  “Yes,” he says. “But not as much as he pretends to be.” He takes the bucket and starts to climb again. “They’ve been out on strike,” he adds without looking down. “So he has plenty of time to sit at home and tell me that nothing but a day’s hard, honest work will get me anywhere in this world. Needless to say,” he adds, “he doesn’t consider studying a day’s hard, honest work.”

  Antonio laughs again as he says this, but this time it doesn’t sound as though he thinks anything is funny. Suds stream across the black and red letters and down onto the window. The smiling pig vanishes behind a cloud of foam. The pavement is hot. The soapy water slides onto it, and begins to steam, rising like breath around Angela’s ankles.