The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  For a brief second, Angela remembers the day they watched Antonio playing football. She remembers how Barbara knew instinctively who she was watching, which exact person, and what it meant. And how, instinctively, she also knew what had happened when she came back from America. How she knew it all, just as she knows now, even before Angela really does herself, that Angela has no intention of going back to school this year. Or of taking her exams. Or of having any chance of going to university. At this particular moment in time, in fact, she’s really only interested in arranging sausages on trays.

  Tomorrow is Friday but since she can barely stand the sight of beef, sausages are now Friday’s special of the day. Given the occasion, the fact that it is also Valentine’s Day, she wonders if she should have done something with hearts. Ox. Lamb. Human? Barbara watches as she crimps the white doily she’s used to edge the display and carries it into the cold room.

  Before she switches out the light, Angela looks around at the cold room’s empty shelves. It’s lucky the shop isn’t very busy because she’s used up almost all the inventory. There are only a few more chops. Some shoulder of mutton and rag-end necks. Some ground meat. A side of beef is due to be delivered tomorrow, but the truth is, she has no idea what to do with it. The pigs and lambs, thank God, come in pieces. As for the sausages, she stayed up half last night battling with the meat grinder, and with the peppercorns and fennel seeds that look like mouse turds, and the slimy casings that feel like exactly what they are.

  She closes the heavy white door, fastens the latch, and washes her hands in the big sink, feeling the chalky scrape of the soap that is already toughening her skin, making it red and hard. Then she reaches for the books that are kept below the register so she can close out the day.

  “You can’t do this.”

  Barbara’s voice is resigned even as she says it, but Angela loves her for trying. For the fact that she won’t quit. This is the third night in a row Barbara has turned up at the shop. She has gone to the hospital with Angela, too. Bought displays of dyed carnations and spiky gladiolas and written cards that say things like “Get Well Soon!” Now she’s perched on the spare stool beside the register wearing her running clothes—a new set of dark blue sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt with the logo of some American university in bright yellow on the front. She reaches out and puts her hand over Angela’s, stops the pencil that is about to move across columns and will add up to nothing more than the growing shadow of the mushroom cloud.

  “Your dad wouldn’t want you to.” Barbara looks at her. “You know that, Angie,” she says. “He’s so proud of you. He wants you to go to university. He doesn’t want you to do this.” Barbara studies Angela’s face. Then her fingers grip Angela’s. “You haven’t told him, have you?”

  Angela doesn’t look at her.

  “You haven’t told him.” Barbara nods. She almost smiles. “He thinks the shop is closed. He thinks you’re still going to school.” She’s like a stonemason who’s finally got his chisel in the crack, and she’s leaning hard. Determined to cleave this rock away. Split it from the mother cliff.

  Angela can feel Barbara’s eyes on her face, but she doesn’t say anything. Because there is nothing to say. The truth is, she has no idea what her father thinks. She’s not even sure he knows it’s her who comes and sits beside him every evening, who watches while the nurse spoons mush into his mouth that opens the way a baby bird’s or a kitten’s mouth opens. Still, as usual, Barbara’s right. Just in case, on the off chance that he does know who she is, she hasn’t said a thing.

  She’s sworn the Pirottis and the Ravallis and Nonna Franchi to silence, too. And for now at least they’ll do what she wants because they feel sorry for her, and for her father. And because they agree. They’re not convinced that the university is a suitor who lives up to his word. Look at all the children who go, who take up the promise of the New Italy all bright-eyed, and come away with a paper that says they know Philosophy or Economics or all the Great English Novels and still can’t get a job because there are no jobs. What good is that? Besides, unlike Barbara, they know about families. They know what they’re for. They understand that until her father comes back, she must keep the door open, and the lights on, and the blades sharpened—and make sure there is something to cut.

  Which is why she has accepted the offer—the one made by the cousin who rears the vealers. He called yesterday to say he has heard about her father, and that he wants to help. That he’ll come in twice a week to do the butchering. For a fee. Which Angela can’t afford, but will pay. Because otherwise there will be nothing for her father to come back to.

  The cousin’s name is Ubaldo, which Angela thinks is both appropriate and unfortunate, because although he isn’t that old—a good ten years younger than her father at least—he’s losing his hair. It’s slid back from his forehead and now hangs, caught like a glasses strap behind his ears.

  She has, of course, known Ubaldo all her life. But not well. More like you know a building or a tree you walk past from time to time. She can’t, for instance, remember a conversation she’s had with him. If Ubaldo has conversations. Which, frankly, she doubts. And she hasn’t been to the farm for years. Back when she did occasionally go with her father, they didn’t stay long. Her father only lingered to play cards and drink Ubaldo’s bad wine and worse grappa when he went on his own, when he craved, she supposes, unadulterated male company. Which he certainly got. Ubaldo lives alone with three dogs, rib-thin yellow things, and with his herd of dairy cattle, and the vealers—leggy boy calves with sweet wide eyes who suckle and graze and are teased for a few months with the possibility of a future.

  It seems cruel, that dangling promise of summer days. But who is Angela to talk? She wears leather. She eats veal. And the calves run and buck on sharp, salty grass and are killed at home, which everyone says is better, and Ubaldo doesn’t seem like a cruel man. Rotund, he’s the same shape as her father, if not quite as tall. They might even look alike, if Ubaldo had her father’s mane of hair, and his smile, and if there wasn’t something wrong with one of his eyes, which wanders, making him appear—admittedly through no fault of his own—both sly and feckless at the same time.

  Not that it affects his touch with the knives. Watching him the first evening, Angela has to admit, he’s good. Fast at slicing muscle and cracking bone. They have agreed that he’ll come twice a week, in the evenings after he’s finished on the farm. He’ll make up enough cuts to stock the cold room, and cut roasts for any special orders, not that they get many these days.

  This arrangement makes Ubaldo happy because he says he loves her father like a brother. And besides, he can use the extra money. And it gives him an excuse to come into town. Get off the farm, stretch his legs. He winks at Angela as he says this, his eye veering wildly sideways. She makes a point of not understanding. And of hovering at the cash register. When she has to go to the storeroom, leaving him alone in the shop, she locks the cash register, turning the key surreptitiously and slipping it into her pocket.

  And she watches him. More closely than he knows. It occurs to her that she’s been rather stupid, to get herself into this position, to become dependent like this, and that it’s because she never really watched her father. So she has resolved that on the evenings when Ubaldo is here, while she sits at the register, the books open in front of her, or wipes the empty glass cases and mops the floor and sprinkles sawdust like powdered sugar, she’ll watch what he’s doing. Take note of how he separates the rib bones, prying them apart slowly, almost tenderly, before he raises his arm and brings the cleaver down. Of how he lifts a loin and runs his hand over it, feeling for the grain of the meat. Or trims the fat in one neat long cut from a pork belly.

  * * *

  By the end of the first month, Angela’s not surprised her father almost died. It’s exhausting. All this serving and smiling and watching, it’s much more tiring than she would have guessed. And not in the same way that wrestling with equations and proofs, or
even running, is. It doesn’t leave her with a virtuous ache. It just leaves her feeling as if she’s been drained. In fact, recently she’s felt more than once that someone’s pulled the plug on her life. That everything that was previously Angela has whirled away.

  One night, after visiting her father—who was asleep, propped up like a giant doll, his head lolling, tubes running in and out of his arm—she finds she doesn’t have the energy to eat. She’s tried to keep her strength up, she knows it’s important, but she can’t be bothered to cook the sausages she brought home. Even slicing bread seems too much. She blinks. The blade of the bread knife ripples. She gives up and drops it on the kitchen table, abandons the loaf on the cutting board, and opens a can of soup and drinks it sitting on the sofa, out of the pan.

  The soup tastes like nothing at all, which is oddly comforting, as if flavor might require too much effort. As Angela spoons it toward her mouth, she watches the television with one eye. When she’s finished, Angela takes the pan back to the kitchen and dumps it in the sink beside the other pans and the selection of dishes that seem to have found their way there. Then she goes back into the sitting room and puts on her father’s slippers and rolls herself in the maroon blanket. The news has started. It shows a picture of what looks at first to be a castle or a barracks, but turns itself into a prison. Monteferrato in Turin, where they are holding Renato Curcio, one of the leaders of Brigate Rosse—they of the five-pointed star—who kidnapped the prosecutor Mario Sossi. Made him disappear into thin air back in what seems like another lifetime but was, Angela realizes with something of a shock, not even two years ago.

  Or rather, the prison at Monteferrato where they were holding Renato Curcio. Until four o’clock this afternoon when a woman arrived for visitors’ day with a parcel that turned out to be a gun. She is believed, the TV newsreader says excitedly, to be Renato Curcio’s wife, another founder of Brigate Rosse, another kidnapper. Margherita Cagol.

  A picture flashes on the screen as the newsreader says this. Margherita Cagol is pretty and has dark hair that falls to her shoulders. The photo is black and white, but the newsreader assures the nation that her eyes are green. She doesn’t look all that much older than Angela, or very different from anyone else you’d see in the street. She could walk into the shop and Angela would sell her a pork chop without even thinking about it. But the newsreader insists that would be a mistake. That the public should be vigilant. And that anyone who sees her should call the Carabinieri. Immediately. At a special number where operators are standing by. Because Mara, as she prefers to be called, is very dangerous.

  Angela feels her eyes closing. The photo on the TV screen wavers as if it’s underwater. First Mario Sossi, she thinks, now Mara’s own husband. No wonder they’re worried. Walls can’t stop her. Jails won’t keep her out. Mara Cagol makes men disappear like smoke.

  Urban guerrilla warfare plays a decisive role in the task of achieving political disorientation of the state. It strikes directly against the enemy and clears the way for the resistance movement. Armed propaganda achieved by means of guerrilla operations is a phase of the class war, the statement in the newspaper says. Then, a bit farther down it adds: The Christian Democratic Party must be liquidated, destroyed, and dispersed. The Christian Democrats are not just a political party, but the black soul of a regime that for thirty years has oppressed the masses and workers of the country.

  These are the latest communiqués from the Red Brigades who, since Mara—as the press now obligingly call her—staged her prison break, have not, as Nonna Franchi would say, let the grass grow under their feet. They haven’t buttoned their lips, either. Apparently no one ever told them to be seen and not heard. Or if they did, they weren’t listening.

  Because these days the Brigate Rosse seem to feel the need to announce to the nation their innermost thoughts and desires on a regular basis. When they’re not shooting people in the legs. Or kidnapping them. Or both. Last month, a Christian Democrat Party leader was gagged and chained to his desk, along with six office workers. He was tried then and there, found guilty, and gambezzati-ed, shot in the knees. The latest kidnap victim is an industrialist called Vittorio Gancia. No one knows if he’s been gambezzati-ed or tried. No one knows anything at all, because last week he disappeared like smoke.

  Sparito nel nullo!

  It sounds like a toast. And feels like a rerun of a movie. Or, Angela thinks, a sickness that flares up. A fit of epilepsy. An infection that won’t die. Someone vanishes. There’s a police hunt. One thousand, two thousand, four thousand carabinieri are mobilized—antibiotics battling a virus in the national blood. Cars are stopped. Doors are kicked. People cry on television.

  This time it’s coming from Milan, not Genoa. Not that it makes much difference to Angela. She looks at Vittorio Gancia’s picture, half expecting him to be Mario Sossi, then blinks as the words swim across the newspaper. As the letters dance down the page, jigging in time to the snicker and huff of her father’s snoring. It’s comforting, that sound. If she closes her eyes, just for a minute, she can almost believe she’s at home, working at the kitchen table or sprawled on the knobbly rug, and that he’s asleep in his chair. But, of course, he isn’t. And neither is she.

  The infection started the day before. Or two, or three days ago. It’s a little bit like the Red Brigades, nobody knows for sure. What they do know is that it, too, has announced its intentions.

  Her father has been moved back from the recovery ward—where he did exercises squeezing tennis balls and was rolled around in a wheelchair to look at fish tanks and out of the window—to a ward with private rooms where all the nurses and doctors wear gloves. All the time. And sometimes even face masks. Angela has to put one on when she comes close to him. Her lips can only brush his skin through paper. Her hand takes his through a film of plastic. His eyes look up at her, and she is not sure who he is seeing. She wonders if she looks enough like her mother. When she bends down to kiss his forehead it smells clammy, like a steak that’s been left a little too long in the cold room.

  The doctor has reassured Angela that it’s not so uncommon with heart patients, for them to get infections. Especially heart patients who are made weak with recovering, who are worn down. Those are the words they use, over and over. Worn down, as if her father’s a step on a staircase, or one of his own blades. A strip of steel ghosted to the edge of nothingness from too many years of slicing flesh and being stropped on a whetstone. That’s how he looks, too. Not exactly thinner, but smaller, as if he’s retreating inside himself, walking backward out of the world.

  Angela thought dying would be dramatic. She’s seen those movies, where everybody stands around and holds hands and cries while the person who’s doing the dying smiles weakly and gives them advice. Folds words of wisdom into little parcels they can take away and keep forever.

  She knows it’s naïve. Still she thought it might be at least a little like that. But it isn’t at all. It’s just this walking backward. Or in her father’s case, shuffling. It’s just the inside of him getting smaller and smaller, until in one moment that she will not quite be able to put her finger on, he won’t be there anymore and she’ll realize she is alone in the room, and that his carcass is nothing more than that. Just a carcass, like a million she’s seen before. An old frame of bones. Some worn flesh inside pallid skin. Too much fat. A mane of white hair. Twisted hands, chapped and red from a lifetime in a butcher’s shop.

  The newspaper slips to the floor. She opens her eyes and looks out of the window. Spring was very late this year. On the ramparts, the fingertips of trees turned green but refused to unfurl. Shoots thrust through the muddy earth that edged the paths, then thought better of it and retreated. Haze hung over the fields, an unfulfilled promise of growth shimmering in the evening sun.

  Then, all at once, about a month ago, everything unfroze and smelled as if it was rotting. Her birthday came. Barbara gave her a suitcase with her initials on it, which she insists Angela will use for university after
she takes her exams next year, which will, when all’s said and done, leave her not too far behind. Will be little more than a pause quickly forgotten. That in ten years, five years even, when they have their new jobs and new lives, no one will even think about it, much less remember.

  Neither of them say that this will be possible only if her father dies. And Angela knows it won’t happen even then. She takes the suitcase, though. She hugs Barbara, holds her close and smells the sandalwood oil she’s still rubbing on her collarbones, and makes a joke about the new braces her mother has insisted she have on her front teeth. Afterward they drink a whole bottle of wine by themselves.

  It’s Wednesday, the fourth of June, when Angela’s father finally dies and she isn’t even there. She’s in the shop watching Cousin Ubaldo feather slices of veal, which is not as easy to do as it looks, to make them thin as pieces of pink paper. In the moment he leaves the world, she’s staring, hypnotized by the silver blade. She sorts this out in her head—exactly where she was standing, what she was doing—when she gets to the hospital later that night and finds his bed empty.

  * * *

  The hospital staff—the nurses, who have taken off their paper masks and plastic gloves, unveiling themselves like brides—are very kind. They sit with her. They explain about how his heart stopped. How the infection crept through him, skirting the barriers set up by the antibiotics, jumping the walls, stealing into his blood, his lungs, his heart. They tell her that he was in no pain, that he fell asleep and his dreams carried him away.