The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  * * *

  On Ferragósto she doesn’t go out. Instead for the first time in a long time she goes into her room and sits on the floor and pulls out the bottom drawer of her bureau. For an awful moment, she can’t find the blue beads. At first she tells herself she doesn’t care. Then she realizes she’s crying. Her fingers scrabble through a layer of sweaters. She pulls out a handful of old socks and a pair of moth-eaten mittens, then finally, there they are.

  They’re bluer than Angela remembers. She pushes back the shutter and holds them up to the evening light. Faint strains of music are coming from the Castello. She doesn’t know what the band is this year, or if they’ll play “Stairway to Heaven.” Closing her eyes, she lets her hand slip between her legs. That night when she lies down on the couch she keeps the bracelet on her wrist.

  Eighteen days later, on the first of September, the factory explodes.

  * * *

  If she hadn’t heard it, Angela might not have been aware of it, at least not right away. She isn’t aware of much these days, except the shop. Anywhere else—in the apartment, walking home—she can barely move. But there, she can’t stop. She’s taken to cleaning the meat grinder using an old toothbrush, and to polishing the window. She arrives every morning while the sky is still the color of pearls and the only sound is the high swooping cheep of the swallows. In the storeroom she mixes up lemon juice and vinegar in a preserving jar the way Nonna Franchi used to. Then she stands on the street making circle after circle, tighter and tighter, with wadded up handfuls of newspaper. At night she spends extra time washing the floor before sprinkling the sawdust, watching it fall through her fingers like honey-colored snow.

  Angela had just finished serving a customer, and had resumed her scrubbing, when the explosion happened at eleven o’clock in the morning. It was a Wednesday and summer was officially over, so all the shops were open and everyone was back from vacation and having coffee or eating granita at the pavement bars, or wandering between the fruit sellers’ stalls in the Palazzo Municipale.

  Later, during the official inquiries and trials that followed, they would read in the newspaper about how the factory’s management, in an effort to streamline and increase efficiency, had, with the consent of the union, cut its maintenance routine. So when a spark flew into an unemptied bin of papers, the resulting fire—which had not been very big or seemed very serious at first—rapidly became both, because the extinguisher the foreman grabbed did not work. After that, they would read, it was a matter of seconds before the flames found the pocket of gas that had built up during the holiday due to a leak in the pipe and poor ventilation.

  Not that the shoppers and strollers and coffee-drinkers of Ferrara were aware of any of that at the time. They were not aware of much at eleven o’clock that morning, except perhaps that the day was already very hot and that there was a shortage of cucumbers and melons due to the late spring. Until they heard the noise.

  It was a combination of a crack and a boom—the sort of thing that might have heralded the end of the world in a low-budget disaster film—and was followed by a shudder. By a physical rocking of the air. People walking on the walls said they felt them quaver. Glass rattled. Bicycles tipped over. At the Duomo a pigeon fell straight down onto the steps. Then, as people turned and looked upward—wondering if, despite the flawless sky, they had heard summer thunder—they saw a second sun.

  Some described it as a giant fist—a hammer of God that opened its fingers and hung for one perfect moment like a vast blessing hand. Then snapped closed with a roar. And was swallowed by a shimmering blackness that rose and spread and undulated to the sudden yowl of sirens.

  Like everyone else, Angela ran into the street. She stood beside the Pirottis and the man who owned the leather repair shop and the ladies from the laundry, all of them staring upward, mouths open, hands slack, until someone ran shouting from Via delle Volte toward Porta Paola. Others followed seconds later, thundering like a buffalo herd toward the noise.

  Antonio. Antonio’s building. The words ran through Angela’s head, stopping her brain until someone else shouted that it was one of the factories—a fire, an explosion, an attack—and Signora Pirotti, whose bad knee stopped her from running anywhere, pushed Angela onto the pavement because fire engines and ambulances were already screaming up Via Mayr.

  By afternoon, the word goes around that, because all the ambulances are busy, bodies are being laid out in the Sacra Famiglia—that the dead are waiting in the house of God. Few of the factory workers shopped inside the walls—as a rule, they preferred the newer stores, purpose-built for the apartment buildings—but still the shop shutters come down. All along the street, Angela hears them rattling like trains on broken tracks.

  It takes her fifteen minutes to walk to the church. It is said that, a thousand years ago, Sacra Famiglia was the sight of Ferrara’s first cathedral, although Angela has always wondered how anyone knows for sure. If it’s true, nothing is left of the cathedral now, although the present church is old enough. Angela has always considered it sad, like a lost dog. Because when the river changed its course and the city moved with it, Sacra Famiglia was left behind, stranded beyond the Darsena, outside the safety of the walls.

  The blades of helicopters whump-whump as they land on the parking lot, then rise like giant carrion birds, ferrying their bloodied cargo to hospitals bigger and better equipped than Ferrara’s. Cars and ambulances come and go. Firemen and carabinieri and first-aid crews scurry back and forth from a makeshift tent where those who were most severely burned wait to be airlifted. The tent has been put out here, Angela hears someone say, because it was necessary to get as far away from the factory as possible since it is still burning and there have already been a couple of smaller explosions. No one knows how many more pockets of gas the flames might find.

  She is by no means alone. Other people have come, too. Women mostly. Some old, some young. Wives and sisters and mothers. Some run back and forth, darting from a fireman to a policeman, grabbing sleeves, shouting, begging. Others stand in small knots, blank looks on their faces. One girl, not much older than Angela and heavily pregnant, waddles like a penguin along the pavement, tears streaming down her reddened cheeks. No one notices, or if they do they don’t care, when Angela eases open the huge door of Sacra Famiglia and slips inside.

  What hit her first was the smell. It always did, on the rare occasions when she went into churches—the strong, sweet, cloying scent of the incense, dense and heavy, like a spice cake on the edge of burning. She breathed the familiar odor of damp stone, the smell of centuries she had grown up with, cold marble, and the faint mildew of plaster mingling with the smoke from the votive candles. This time, though, there was something else. Something animal, both familiar and different from the smell of the butcher’s shop—blood and flesh, mixed with feces. Human shit. Angela balked like a calf at the door of an abattoir, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light.

  When she finally stepped inside, she felt the high empty flight of the roof above her. It was quiet, and very still. So much so that it took her a moment to pick out a faint, low, continuous murmuring, and to understand that it was coming from two priests as they moved in concert, up and down, bending over the dark shapes of what had, until a few hours ago, been men, reciting the prayers for the dead.

  There were other people in the church, too. Several nuns, one of whom had a clipboard and seemed to be trying to identify bodies, and a handful of women doing exactly what she was doing. Moving from corpse to corpse. Slowly, silently, methodically, looking for a familiar face.

  Afterward, she did not understand how she knew he would be there. But she did. She had known it when she left the shop, padlocked the shutter, and instead of turning toward the city and the apartment, had gone down across Piazza Travaglio and passed through the walls at Porta Paola, following the route Antonio had taken a thousand times, the way he had been going that winter night when she saw him all those years ago.

  Now she s
tood looking down at the face that was the reflection of his. A little thinner, the nose not quite as sharp, nor the mouth as generous. The eyes would be the same, if he opened them—black as river stones. But Piero would never open his eyes again.

  Angela dropped to her knees, aware too late that she was in a slick of blood. Piero’s heart had not been pumping or they would not have brought him here. It was just the last shadow of his life she knelt in. His hair was still wild, half of it. The other half was matted. Her hand came away, sticky and dark, when she smoothed the curls off his forehead. Face paint, she thought, it’s face paint, and she saw again the low, sweeping bow, the idiotic half-drunken grin, the way he and Antonio had wrestled, their bodies twining like young, limber snakes. And then Antonio was standing on the ladder above her, looking down, smiling. I told my brother, I told Piero, he deserves more than bread. He deserves roses, too.

  Angela reached down and touched Piero’s forehead, his eyes, his lips.

  “Bread and roses,” she whispered, her fingers resting on his skin. “For you, bread. And roses.”

  * * *

  It is two days before she opens the shop again, and even then more than half of Via Mayr is still locked down. Angela weighs the keys in her hand. She’s afraid of stock spoiling, and besides, she has spent two days in the apartment with its dirty dishes and piles of clothes in the sitting room and sounds of the Ravallis snuffling below. She bends to undo the padlock. The sky is milky, and there’s still a strange smell in the air. The street is so quiet it might be Sunday. She notices a thin black dusting on the pavement. The remains of lives. It’s fallen all over the city, wormed its way into the cracks and smeared the windowpanes.

  The shop reveals itself little by little as she pushes the shutter up, like a picture developing. First the empty display cases, then the register and the meat grinder on its stand, finally the grinning pig and laughing cow. She steps inside and feels the coolness and the silence. Her father’s white coat still hangs on its peg. The collar is frayed, one pocket ripped and restitched. She touches it, her fingers resting on the worn cloth.

  “Buongiorno, Papa,” she says, just like she does every morning.

  By ten a.m. there have barely been any customers and there is nothing left to clean or polish, so she opens the books. Barely a week after her father died, Angela had a visit from a man at the bank. He had been only a little taller than she was, and had worn a gray suit made of a fabric that hissed when he reached out to shake her hand.

  “Signor Carossi,” he had said, and smiled, revealing pink gums. Then he had offered his condolences for her father’s death, and asked what she planned to do.

  Angela had stared at him, not understanding the question, until finally he had chewed his lower lip and assured her that he understood that this was a difficult time, and that the bank, presumably in the person of himself, was eager to help in any way it could. When she had not replied, he had chewed his lip some more, then said perhaps it would be better if he came back in a few weeks so they could have another chat. Finally he had turned to leave, but had stopped again, lingering in the doorway, allowing warm dusty air from the street to blow in. There was something, he said, that she ought to know. That he felt he ought to tell her. The supermarket had expressed an interest in buying the butcher’s shop. The bank man had tried to smile as he said this, then added that he hesitated to mention it just now, and he was sorry if he had upset her. But he thought it might help her to know she had options.

  A week later she had received a letter informing her that the interest rate on the loan had been increased due to the bank’s enhanced risk as a result of the death of the proprietor and subsequent unavoidable changes.

  Now, with the books spread in front of her, all she can see are clouds. Mostly the mushroom cloud, which seems, like the smoke that rose from the factory, to have grown darker and thicker. To quiver and turn to dust and stick all over her. She closes her eyes, but that is no better. Piero bows and laughs, crimson running down his face. There is a tap on the glass.

  Angela starts and looks up. Ubaldo is standing on the pavement. He grins at her and waves, his bad eye veering so he appears to be looking two ways at once. He pushes through the door, his newspaper tucked under his arm.

  “Ciao.”

  Ubaldo drops the paper on the counter beside the cash register. The front page is still covered in pictures of the fire—of the ruins of the factory, and of men with blackened faces, and of what appear to be pieces of twisted metal.

  Ubaldo whistles and puts his apron on. Then he crosses the shop, flips the paper open, and runs one of his big hands down the page which lists the day’s races.

  “There,” he says lovingly. “There she is. Our fame and fortune.”

  His finger with its chipped nail rests under the name of a horse called Delilah. But Angela is not looking at that. Her eyes have slid to the facing page where there is a picture of men in dark suits, union officials coming down the steps of a building in Rome, their faces grim. The caption says it is the headquarters of the Christian Democrat Party, where they have been holding meetings to ensure the ongoing protection of workers’ rights. Below, in black-lined columns, are the names of the dead.

  Ubaldo is saying something—about this horse, and how much he has bet on it, and what they can do with the money when it wins. Angela blinks. She sees her finger reaching out, touching the name, reading it like braille.

  Piero Giovanni Tomaselli, twenty-four, of Ferrara.

  She closes her eyes and hears them laugh. She sees Antonio. She feels his hand on the small of her back. But it isn’t Antonio’s. It’s Ubaldo’s.

  “Carina,” he is saying. “Carina—”

  Warmth seeps from his huge body, as if he’s one of his own cows with their pale wet mouths and soupy eyes. The hot damp of him presses through the thin cotton of Angela’s smock, and through her blouse, and onto her skin. She can feel the bulge of his stomach. She can feel his belt buckle, and the hardness below.

  “You’re tired,” Ubaldo murmurs. “You work too hard, you should let me—”

  Angela jumps backward. The stool flies sideways. Pinned against the marble counter, she spins, reaches up, and grabs.

  “Don’t!” The blade of the filleting knife flashes. “Don’t ever touch me again!”

  For a moment both of them stand frozen. They watch as the bright line of blood runs down Ubaldo’s arm, as it opens in a stream and begins to dribble through the dark hairs on the back of his hand. A drop lands and blossoms on his apron, poppy-red against the washed-out stains from cows and pigs and sheep.

  Ubaldo stares. For once both his eyes are on the same thing. His mouth opens and closes, like a fish gasping for air. Then he turns and crashes into the stool. Like a terrified animal, he scrabbles over it, and around the counter, slipping on the sawdust as he grabs for the door, which crashes open.

  The last time Angela ever sees him, he is bolting down the pavement, holding his arm with his free hand, lurching and slipping like a terrified horse.

  She goes to see the man in the bank three days later. They agree that she will keep the butcher’s shop open until she has used up all the inventory in the cold room, sold the chops and bacon and roasts Ubaldo had prepared. She does it fast. She puts up a SALE poster like the one in the supermarket. And then it’s over. On the last day, the day when Signor Carossi comes in his hissing suit and she gives him the keys, he asks her if there is anything she would like to keep. She looks around. What would she do with the meat grinder or the cash register? How would she get the grinning pig or the cow off the wall? Finally she chooses several knives. She wraps them in her father’s apron. Then, at the last moment, she takes his white coat, too.

  * * *

  It wasn’t difficult for Angela to find work. The Pirottis were more than happy to pay her to do their books, and their son-in-law was a carpenter and he paid her, too. She insisted on doing them at home because she did not want to walk down Via Mayr. If she had to go
to Via Ripagrande or to Via Settembre, she skirted the blocks near the butcher’s shop. She slipped up only once, when it was unavoidable, when a woman who had a tailor’s shop near Piazza Verdi wanted to hire her. Even then she waited until sunset, as if somehow that would help, before scurrying, trying to keep her head bent although it was a clear evening and wasn’t raining or even very windy. It didn’t work. Forced to stop when she crossed the street, she’d looked up and seen the shop front, the plate-glass window and even the macellerìa sign, boarded over. The sheets of plywood were pale, almost white in the dusk. Already they had been covered with posters. Green ones, advertising laundry soap and roasting chickens and discounted cooking oil.

  Christmas came and went. Angela spent it with the Ravallis. Barbara did not come home, but wrote to say her father was taking her to San Francisco, where they would meet her sisters and then go skiing. She sent Angela a tracksuit from her university, and asked how the studying for her exams was going and when she was going to take them?

  The answer was never. By December Angela had five or six small shops she did the books for, and in January a pizza parlor up near the Piazza Ariostea hired her to come in three afternoons a week. The owner had a bakery, and bar, too, and had fired his last accountant for stealing. He paid her under the table, in cash. On her birthday they gave her a party, and told her she was still una piccola bambina, a little kid, at twenty, which was especially true since she was only eighteen. After that first night at the hospital, she had found it too complicated to stop lying about her age. So she didn’t.