The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  * * *

  71 Via Forte Trionfale. Angela is not sure what she expects it to look like, but she understood at once, as soon as she got on the bus home and pulled the smudged tiny scrap out of her pocket, what it was. This is where Aldo Moro lived. This is the home where his family waits for him.

  She had stared at the cramped handwriting, the four words of the address, as the bus lurched along, feeling something like panic, as if he had given her a bomb. A tiny incendiary device that could explode at any moment and ruin her entire life. Kill her. She had crumpled it up and held it, balled in her palm until she got off. Then she had dropped it in the first litter bin she passed and vowed to forget it.

  But it was not that simple. She heard the words the next morning, beaten out in the tattoo of her feet as she walked to the dry cleaners. She heard them in clink of glasses and the rattle of plates as the tables were cleared at the trattoria after lunch. The next morning at the florist’s she heard them in the whisper of cellophane wrapped around blooms. Have you seen my family? Have you seen my family?

  And then, two days later, walking home, there is the newspaper, a special late edition. People are lining up to buy it at the kiosk on the corner. They turn away and open it there on the pavement, read, their heads bent, as the pages flutter in the April evening wind.

  Angela stops. There was a time when she paid little attention to the papers, when they were a backdrop on the far horizon of her life, removed from everything that counted—her father, the shop, Antonio, Barbara, how fast she could run a mile. Not anymore. Now she feels they are written to her. Personal messages that might as well carry her name. She sidles around a large man in a jacket and flat cap until she can see the poster pasted to the kiosk’s signboard, read the ugly black letters:

  Red Brigades Communiqué Number 9

  The Interrogation of The Prisoner Aldo Moro Has Been Completed.

  There Are No Doubts, Aldo Moro Is Guilty and Therefore

  Is Condemned To Death.

  When she gets back, Antonio is not home. The little apartment seems to close around her, its walls collapsing until it feels no bigger than a broom closet. A utility room. One more People’s Prison.

  Finally, at seven o’clock, she can’t stand it any longer. Angela snatches her jacket and her purse, and runs down the stairs, almost afraid he’ll arrive and stop her. She studies the map in the bus shelter. Via Trionfale snakes high above the city, and there, off of it, is Via Forte. She can figure out the stops and bus lines, but she has no idea how long it will take her to get there, or when she will get back.

  In the end she walks what seems a long way. A few times she stops and looks back at the lights of Rome burning in the spring night. The neighborhood is unlike anywhere she has ever lived. It is as different from Trastevere and Ferrara and the ghetto as it is possible to imagine. None of the buildings are old. They look like the shoe boxes out at the Darsena, except they are bigger, and set back from the street, and most of them have balconies. Greenery flows over the railings like Rapunzel’s hair.

  Lights glint through the tresses of ivy. Trees cast shadows against the concrete walls. Angela knows when she finally finds the right street because there is a crowd, a blob of people in the soft dark. She can hear them murmuring and shifting, stamping like anxious horses. A line of policemen stand facing them. Several more stand on the pale stone steps of the building. One turns toward the glass door and Angela sees the outline of the gun he carries.

  As she sidles into the crowd it becomes clear that most of them are journalists. They rustle and twitter among themselves and strain at the fact that they are not allowed to surge across the street and into the building, ride the elevator up and storm the doors of the penthouse apartment where someone has muttered that the Moro family is hiding. Angela leans back, cranes upward. But there is nothing to see, just tiny glints of light escaping through what are obviously closed shutters.

  When a few minutes later a car comes down the street and is waved to the door and a woman gets out, the crowd trembles, taut as hunting dogs. A couple of the journalists shout questions. “Have you spoken to your mother?” “Has she had word from your father?” “Has there been another letter?” The woman runs up the steps, her head bent, and Angela finds herself leaning forward, standing on tiptoe, straining to see her face, and her belly. Suddenly she is consumed by the idea that if the woman will only look this way, will only stare for a moment into the crowd, their eyes will meet and they will know each other. But when she turns around at the top of the steps, it is clear that she is not pregnant.

  She raises a hand. Stillness falls as quickly and completely as if she was the pope. She doesn’t even have to raise her voice.

  “Pray for my father,” she says.

  Then she’s gone.

  * * *

  It is four days before Angela goes to Via Montalcini again, and in the meantime things become very strange. The president of Italy pleads for Aldo Moro’s life. “A sense of humanity may induce them to a gesture of repentance,” he says. Aldo Moro’s wife, Eleonora, goes to a special mass and kneels side by side with the political leaders she has attacked because they will not bargain, dice, and deal with the Red Brigades for the life of her husband.

  Watching on TV Angela studies Signora Moro as she comes out of the church. She has read enough of the papers to gather that it was Agnese she saw on the steps, his daughter who is not pregnant. But other than that she doesn’t know what she’s going to say. How she is going to tell him that she saw nothing but a building, a crowd in the dark, some policemen, and a woman begging them to pray? Then it appears she may not get the chance to do even that, because two days after her trip to Via Trionfale, a reporter at the newspaper Il Messaggero receives a telephone call telling him to look in a garbage can, where he finds a statement entitled The Trial of Aldo Moro. The text is intoned on the radio, flashed across the television screen, and printed on front pages, not only in Italy, but around the world.

  We announce that we have carried out the execution by suicide of Aldo Moro,

  president of the Christian Democrats. We consent to the recovery of his body

  by making known the precise place where it rests. The body of Aldo Moro is

  immersed on the slimy bottom of Lake Duchessa.

  There is footage of helicopters taking off, and of commandos standing in the snow of the high Abruzzi, which stretches, white and untouched, save for the footprints of boar and wolves. Frogmen crack the ice of both Lake Duchessa, and of a smaller lake in a neighboring valley. But the bottoms, although undoubtedly slimy, yield nothing.

  * * *

  “Is it true?” Angela’s voice sounds very small, even to her.

  Antonio is sitting on the sofa staring at their television, which is always on now, as if the only way they can be sure of what is happening is to see it on the screen. He looks up at her as she speaks and shakes his head. Then, a little to her surprise, he gets up from the sofa and comes and puts his arms around her. It’s the first time since the night she shouted at him.

  “No, Carina,” he says. “It’s not true. We don’t even know who sent it. It’s a fake.”

  He smoothes her hair. His hand on her cheek, the feel of his chest and shoulders, his chin as it nudges her forehead is like air. She has been slowly suffocating without it.

  “We’re not barbarians,” Antonio says. “No one is going to kill him.”

  Angela looks up at him.

  “I promise you,” Antonio’s lips brush the top of her head. He takes her face in his hands. “No one is going to kill him. I promise you, Carina. I promise. But we have to make the threat—to force them. To be recognized. To get their attention. They’ll give in,” he says. “They’ll take us seriously. You’ll see. They’ll give in.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “They will.” He kisses her. “They will,” he says. “We’re not the killers. They are.”

  * * *

  The next day when she arriv
es at the apartment, there are the usual mouse sounds, scrabbling and rustling from behind the closed door, as if whoever is in there is burrowing away, afraid of Angela’s eyes. Afraid that if she so much as glimpses them they will go up in flames, or fly apart in tiny pieces.

  As usual Antonio is waiting for her. After she has unpacked the basket, he packs it again, loading in two of her baking dishes from previous meals. As he goes to the cupboard for a plate and plastic utensils, she lifts the lid off the top dish and sees that, as usual, it has not been cleaned. Lentils in tomato sauce line the bottom, and there are still chunks of onion and pork. Angela lifts one out and eats it absently, watching Antonio as he searches through drawers for the box of spoons.

  The taste brings her father back with a jolt. Suddenly she is standing again in the kitchen in Via Vittoria, dicing carrots, the knife rising and falling above the old chopping board while he stands swirling oil in the cast-iron pan, seasoning it with peppers. She eats the remaining two pieces, making sure to catch some of the lentil sauce, wipes her hands, and puts the lid back on the baking dish, which she will have to scrub and scour after she’s lugged it home on the bus. So much for proletarian equality. She’s half tempted to march over and bang on the closed door. Shout through the keyhole that doing dishes is moral, and thus good for the revolution.

  After the plastic spoons are finally located, Angela takes the meal. She watches as Antonio unlocks the door, then steps into the tiny room. The first thing she sees is the front page of the newspaper, carefully clipped and lying on the desk. In the center of it is a photo of Aldo Moro. Wearing the same white shirt, and freshly shaven, he sits in front of the five-pointed star holding a copy of the morning edition of La Repubblica, which bears the banner headline Moro Assassinato. Moro assassinated. His head is tilted. He has his quizzical little smile on his face, the same one he has now as he sits on his bed watching Angela.

  He looks much better than when she saw him last, as if the anger has left him and even he has found this last episode—the slimy lake, the frogmen and helicopters and reports of his suicide—almost funny.

  “What have you brought me?” he asks, and it takes her a moment to realize that he is not talking about the bowl of risotto she holds in her hands.

  He stands up in his stocking feet as Angela bends to put the bowl down. They are so close they are almost touching. The door is ajar. She can hear Antonio in the main room, talking in low tones, presumably to one of the mice who has emerged now that she is safely out of sight.

  “Agnese,” she whispers, and his hand reaches out and closes over hers.

  Angela looks down at the pale soft nails, the long elegant fingers and narrow bones so unlike her own father’s, and doesn’t have the heart to tell him that that’s all. That she took the bus and walked up the street and stood inside a crowd, and saw nothing except a glimpse of one of his daughters and tiny slats of light escaping through the penthouse shutters.

  “And your wife,” she murmurs.

  “Noretta?”

  The hand tightens. Angela nods. Then she lies. She whispers everything she can remember about Signora Moro from the television. What she was wearing. Her silver hair. Her glasses.

  When she stops, his eyes are shiny and far away.

  “Your grandchild,” she whispers. “He’s getting bigger and bigger. He’s waiting for you to come home.”

  “Anna.”

  Angela has no idea if this is the pregnant woman’s name, but she nods anyway.

  “She was wearing a green scarf.”

  “Maria Fida, Anna, Agnese, Giovanni,” he whispers.

  The names of Aldo Moro’s children flutter in the fetid air. Angela nods. He turns away, and she reaches into her pocket and takes out another linen napkin, and a twist of salt that she lays carefully beside the bowl.

  “What is your name?”

  She looks up. He’s watching her. Angela swallows. Part of her would like to, but she can’t look away from him.

  “Angela,” she whispers.

  He nods. The voices beyond the door have stopped. Angela glances behind her, but before she can turn to leave, he reaches out. His thumb presses her forehead. He makes a small cramped cross, and whispers, “Don’t let them take your heart, Angela.”

  * * *

  The sickness hits her like a punch. By the time she gets home, she is doubled over, can barely creep up the stairs and let herself into the apartment. With very few exceptions, Angela has been blessed with rude good health. While other children succumbed to flu, tonsillitis, winter colds, and even things more serious, Angela barely ever spent a day in bed. Once, when she was eight, she had been pushed over playing in the Piazza Lampronti and had skinned both knees, gotten a bloody nose, and sprained her wrist, necessitating a week’s worth of wearing a brace and much attention from Nonna Franchi, but that was about it. So she is wholly unprepared for the waves of nausea punctuated by pains in her stomach as sharp as knife jabs.

  When Antonio comes home and finds her curled on the sofa, her face pale and sweating, he calls the doctor, a round, smooth-faced man in a suit whose shoes make a squeaking sound and who comes right away and pronounces that she is neither pregnant nor has appendicitis, but has probably eaten something that doesn’t agree with her, and will almost certainly feel better by morning. She does, but not much. Antonio goes to explain to the dry cleaners, and the trattoria, which sends him home with a jar of soup, and the florist’s, who add a bouquet of day-old lilies. When he comes back, he holds her hand and smoothes her hair and tells her to sleep and leaves her tucked up on the sofa in the old maroon blanket.

  Angela does sleep. Almost as soon as she hears the door close and his footsteps echoing on the stairs, she feels herself sinking, being pulled down into some place so dark and empty it feels like death. She is not alone in this well of dreams. Voices flutter around her—her father’s, her mother’s; their words finger her cheeks. She hears the shuffle of worn shoes on cobbles and the rustling of prayers. Once, the darkness parts and she finds herself on Via Vittoria. It is night. The street lamp is hazy and the familiar houses rise on either side of her, cradling her in the deep womb of the ghetto. She stands at the corner and watches while ahead a figure moves away from her, a man whose footsteps ring words she can hear but not make out, and whose shadow looms in a five-pointed star.

  She wakes up sweating, and pushes the blanket aside and realizes that it is dark. The summer night has dropped over Rome. When she sits up her head swims a little, but not too much. Antonio is not in the apartment. Her mouth is dry and her tongue feels swollen. Her bare feet are strange on the floor and unreliable, but she goes into the kitchen nonetheless and makes herself a cup of tea, and opens the window and listens to the horses shuffling in their stables while the last shreds of cloud fade in the sky.

  Feeling better she rinses the tea mug and goes back into the sitting room and turns on the television. A crowd is gathered at St. Peter’s, a sea of heads and shoulders sparked by the candles some of them are holding. The pope has made an appeal.

  “I beg you on my knees, free the honorable Aldo Moro, simply, without any conditions, not so much because of my humble and loving intercession, as by virtue of his dignity as a common brother of humanity.”

  Despite the warm evening, Angela pulls the blanket back over her. This time she is not sure if she sleeps or not. She seems to drift on the noise from the television. Words form and break before she can get ahold of them. When Antonio finally comes home, she keeps her eyes closed, her face buried in the cushion. She feels him bend down, brush her hair aside, put his hand on the hot damp back of her neck. He kisses her shoulder, then turns off the television and goes to sleep in the bedroom.

  The pope’s appeal does seem to have some effect. The next day the Red Brigades issue a specific demand for the first time. They will free Aldo Moro in exchange for thirteen prisoners, among them Mara Cagol’s husband and another man who was one of the kidnappers of Mario Sossi.

  Aldo Mor
o writes another letter begging the government to agree. It is delivered in what is now a regular pattern—to Milan, Rome, and Genoa. Angela dreams of this. Of people who look no different from herself dropping his words into dustbins. Slipping them through the open windows of cars. Tucking them into the cracks of phone booths and shutters of shops.

  Let the Will of God be Done, Aldo Moro writes. We are almost at Zero Hour. It is more a matter of seconds than minutes from the end. We are at the moment of slaughter.

  * * *

  It is a few days later when Angela forces herself into the kitchen, when she takes down her knives and strops them on the whetstone and begins to dice the veal she has asked Antonio to buy.

  She is doing this, not because he asked her, but because Antonio has told her that Aldo Moro is refusing to eat anything they bring him. He has accused them of drugging him and trying to poison him, when he will speak to them at all, which is not often now. The government has refused to release any prisoners, and Brigate Rosse is refusing to speak to the Catholic organization, Caritas, which has offered to negotiate. Neither side will recognize the other. Neither side will speak to the other. And Aldo Moro’s words do nothing. He is caught in the middle, stranded in silence.

  Let the Will of God be Done, his latest letter said. Angela who, unlike him, does not believe in God—or at least a God who, as far as she can see, has any discernible will—considers what this might mean as she adds the tenderest baby carrots, the newest peas, the soft furred shells of tiny artichokes to the oil that is spitting in the pan.

  Via Montalcini feels different from the moment she walks through the door. There is a palpable sense of disarray. Usually the entrance and the kitchen, which are really all she ever sees, are neat to the point of barren. Now there are books and papers lying about. A huge wicker basket sits by the table. There are glasses and knives and forks and plates in the sink. Antonio has to wash one before she can dish out the veal.