The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  The sauce is heavy and velvety and pale, exactly the way her father taught her to make it, and as a treat she has brought rice, too, the thick kind more usually used for risotto that she has steamed so it sticks together. She makes a well of it, and suddenly wishes she had remembered to bring parsley, to sprig the edge and sprinkle across the top.

  Angela picks up the plate. Antonio unlocks the door to the little room, then turns away and goes back into the kitchen, letting her step inside alone.

  He is sitting on his bed, his hands between his knees again, almost exactly the way he was the first time she saw him. She doesn’t know if they’ve taken the razor away or if he has just decided to stop shaving. And possibly stop washing. That’s how it smells. She tries not to let this register on her face as she sets the plate down.

  “I’ve brought you veal,” she says. But he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look at her, or seem to be aware that she is in the same tiny space, that she is standing not a few feet from him.

  “I cooked it myself. There’s nothing in it.” When he doesn’t reply to this, she adds, “I made it specially. For you.”

  Angela lays out the plastic utensils, the napkin, another twist of salt, and still he doesn’t look at her. There is no sound from beyond the door. She has no idea where Antonio is, or what he is doing. A pall of helplessness descends over her, thickening the air, making it hard to breath or move. Finally she steps around the desk and sits down on the narrow bed beside him. The mattress is thin and hard, and she thinks it must be uncomfortable to lie on for one night, never mind the seven weeks they have kept him here. The fan set high up in the wall has developed a whine.

  “Your grandchild.” She reaches out and takes his hand, which is limp and alarmingly cool. “Anna’s child,” she says. “You’ll hold him soon. You have to stay strong enough to hold him.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I’ll never hold him. They’re going to kill me.”

  “They won’t kill you. I promise.” Her words are sharp, as if she is spitting them. Slapping them into his face the way you slap someone who is fainting. “They’ve told me they won’t. They won’t kill you. I know. I promise. You will go home.”

  Something in this seems to touch him. Very slowly his head swivels. When he looks at her, she realizes he has become familiar, the soft mouth, the folds of skin, the eyes that are black but not like river stones. Black instead like midnight.

  “You have to try. You have to eat. Please.” Her pleading melds with the high-pitched mew of the fan. “You have to try. What is your favorite? What do you eat at home, with your family? Tell me, and I’ll make it. I’ll bring it to you. No one else will touch it. I promise.”

  “Do you know what I miss?” he asks, and when she shakes her head she is sure he is going to say his children, or his wife, or all of them—his family. But he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “The sky. It has been forty-eight days since I have seen the sky.” He smiles. “Angela.” She feels a slight, returning pressure on her hand. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what the sky looks like today.”

  So she does.

  She whispers that it is very blue, because there are no clouds at all. That in the morning it was as pale as the veins that run under a child’s skin, and that now it is darker, more like the breast of bird, the kind you see in paintings, and that at sunset it will turn the color of the inside of shells.

  When she stops talking, he nods.

  “Thank you,” he says, and she realizes that he is crying, that thin glassy tears are running down into the folds of his whiskered cheeks. “Come to my funeral, Angela,” he whispers. “I only want people who love me to come to my funeral.”

  When Angela leaves the room, she is shaking. She feels weak and sick again, and it takes her a moment to realize that no one is there. That Antonio is not sitting at the kitchen table. That he doesn’t get up and come to the little room and turn the battery of locks.

  She stands, confused, then she realizes that the door to the room off the kitchen is open, too, and that there is no noise coming from inside. She tiptoes over and peers in, her heart banging. There are mattresses, and stacks of books, and clothes hung over chairs. Angela turns back to the kitchen. Sun is pouring through the huge window over the sink and spilling onto the unswept floor.

  She whirls around. Before she knows what she is doing, she is back in the horrid, stuffy utility room. She is taking his hand. She is pulling him up off the little bed, and dragging him past the desk to the open door.

  He comes with her obediently, shuffling in his stocking feet. Angela pauses, listens. But there’s nothing. So she leads him out, and into the kitchen, where they stand like children, holding hands and staring out of the window.

  There’s a park across the street. They can see the feathery tops of the trees and a single puff of cloud, the kind Nonna Franchi used to tell her were angel’s kisses. He turns his face toward the sunlight that hits the dirty dishes and the rimes of food and the glasses that have lip marks on them, and as he does Angela looks behind them toward the entry hall and the front door, which she realizes is ajar.

  She has no idea where Antonio has gone, but she knows the way out of here. She knows the elevator—she could push the button in her sleep. She knows how many steps it is to freedom.

  She walks into the entryway. She can see a sliver of the landing. No shadows fall across the floor. The only sound is her breath, and the scrabble of her heart, and she has begun to turn around, begun to go back, and grab his hand, and lead him to the elevator, when footsteps sound on the stairs.

  The door flies open, and a man Angela has never seen before strides in. He is shorter than Antonio and has dark hair and a mustache and glasses and is wearing a striped shirt with a linen jacket over it and walking so fast he almost slams into her. For a moment they stand paralyzed, staring at each other. Then he shoves past her into the kitchen, swearing as he bangs against the wicker basket.

  Angela feels her head spin. People say that, but this time it’s true. She will say, she will say—she has no idea what she will say. Then it flicks across her mind that there are two of them and one of him, and if they are quick, if they can find a knife or—

  But the kitchen is empty. The spot in front of the sink where Aldo Moro had been standing, his face bathed in sunlight, his eyes fixed on the trees and the puff of the cloud, is filled only by dust motes.

  The man she doesn’t know is already around the corner. She follows him in time to see, even before he reaches for the handle, that the utility room door is closed. When he opens it, Aldo Moro looks up. He is sitting at the desk, has a plastic fork in his hand, and has speared a piece of veal. His head is tilted, his smile is quizzical as his eyes meet Angela’s. Then the door is slammed and the locks are turned.

  “Goddamn it!” the man explodes at Antonio as he walks in to the entryway. “Where the hell were you?”

  Antonio shrugs.

  “An alarm went off, in the garage. I went down to check.” He takes a gun out of his pocket and places it on the table. “It’s OK,” he says, nodding toward Angela. “You can trust her. I told you. Nothing happened, right?”

  “She didn’t lock the door.”

  Both of them are talking about her as if she isn’t there, as if she isn’t standing two feet from them. Antonio shrugs again.

  “I’m sure she was about to.” He comes and puts his arm around her. “Weren’t you?” he says, and from the pressure of his hand, from the rigid way he is standing, she realizes that whoever this man is, Antonio hates him.

  She nods. Antonio leans down and kisses the top of her head.

  “You can trust her,” he says again. “I told you.”

  Angela leaves a few minutes later, carrying the basket, the cloth folded over the top of it. As soon as she gets into the lobby, even that feels heavy. It must show on her face, because Antonio, who has come down in the elevator with her, says, “Don’t mind him. He’s an asshole.”

  S
he nods. She wants to ask about the gun. She wants to know how long he has been carrying it, and if he always sat out there with it, if the trigger was unlocked and his finger was on it while she was laying out plastic knives and forks and whispering the names of Aldo Moro’s children. She wants to ask what he would have done if—

  But she doesn’t. Instead she smiles and lets him kiss her and tell her he’ll see her tonight before she walks back out onto the street where the sun hits her like a slap and makes her eyes water and where she starts to shake so badly that as soon as she gets around the corner she has to cross into a bus stop and sit down on the bench and put her head between her knees.

  * * *

  April is over. Angela’s twentieth birthday is coming up. Four days before it, on Sunday morning, Antonio says he has a surprise. He is going to take her to Ostia.

  “But we have no car.”

  The little Fiat broke down some time ago, shortly after they arrived in Rome. They sold it to a junk man because they couldn’t afford to fix it and, as Antonio said, you don’t need a car in the city anyway. He beams at her across their rickety table that even putting coins under the legs won’t fix.

  “Yes, we do,” he says. “For today.”

  It is a red Renault, and Antonio has already put everything they will need into it. Her basket, which he has packed with a bottle of wine and glasses and food for a picnic. Their bathing suits, rolled in towels. He has even bought her a new pair of sunglasses, fancy ones she admired once in a magazine. They are in a case on the passenger seat with a ribbon tied around them. At the last minute, as he is starting the car, Angela shouts, “Wait, there’s something we’ve forgotten!” And runs back inside and upstairs and grabs the old maroon blanket so they will have something to sit on at the beach.

  The road to Ostia is straight and feels as if it runs slightly downhill, unspooling like a long gray ribbon. They turn on the radio and sing along. Antonio reaches out and takes her hand and squeezes it, and for the first time in a long time they feel as if they are themselves again. As they drive away from Rome, the last fifty days melt. They fade and dissolve. Flake away. Angela leans back in the seat and thinks that this is how she used to feel when she ran.

  At the ancient port, which is now not very near the ocean in much the same way that Ferrara’s Darsena is not very near the Po, they park under the pine trees and wander among the ruins of the Roman city. They walk into houses, step over crumbled walls into people’s kitchens and bedrooms and storerooms. They lean down and trace the outlines of mosaics of dolphins and sea monsters and ships and climb up the steps and sit on the warm stone seats of the amphitheater. Then they get back in the car, and follow the river to the sea.

  * * *

  The blanket is spread on the soft loamy earth where the pines meet the sand. They change behind their towels and run, holding hands, into the soft, sloppy waves. Antonio swims and dives, while Angela only paddles up to her waist, until he attacks her from behind and pulls her under, sucking her down like a sea monster. Later they drink the wine and stretch out on the blanket, feeling the sun dapple their wet skin. Antonio rolls over lazily and licks the inside of her arm and the well of her collarbone. His tongue is warm and smooth and when he kisses her, his lips are salty.

  “I love you, Angela,” he says. And a little later he takes her hand, and presses her palm to his mouth. Then he reaches back into the basket and pulls out a tiny box.

  The ring is gold. A very thin band with a tiny emerald, her birthstone, set into it. Antonio slides it onto her left hand. Then he folds her fingers around it and says, “Marry me.”

  And Angela says, “Yes.” “Yes,” she says again, just to hear the word, and despite everything that has happened in the last weeks, she thinks she has never been happier in her life.

  There’s traffic and the drive home takes longer than they would like. So by the time they get back to Trastevere it feels like forever since they last felt each other’s skin, disappeared inside each other’s taste and touch. When they finally find a parking place and get back to their building they are so impatient that they run inside and upstairs, and it is only late at night, after Angela has fallen asleep and woken up and they have made love again, that she remembers that although they grabbed the basket and the towels, they have left the blanket, covered in sand, in the back of the red Renault. She means to fetch it the next morning. But when she wakes up, Antonio is already gone and the car is gone with him.

  * * *

  Monday passes in a blur. Angela has time to make up at her jobs, from when she was sick. Antonio has said he will take her ring, sometime next week, and have it engraved with the date, May 7, 1978, and she decides that she will not tell anyone that they are getting married—not that she has anyone to tell except the dry cleaner and the florist and the man who owns the restaurant—until after. Until she can put it on her finger and never take it off.

  Somewhere in the back of her head, she knows that what she really means by this is, until after all of this is over. Until the mice decide they have tortured the country and extracted their pound of flesh from Aldo Moro, and they let him go, and dismantle the People’s Prison, and the apartment at Via Montalcini is no more. She senses that this will be soon—that that is why Antonio has asked her to marry him now. That it’s his way of telling her that any day they will have their own lives back, their own future, and that all of this will be nothing but a bad dream. In the meantime she threads the ring onto her gold chain and wears it with her locket, next to her heart.

  That night Antonio brings her a bouquet. Pink roses. She knows they are a few days old—this is the bad side of working at the florist’s, she understands which blooms get discounted and when, and will never look at bouquets with the same eye again—but she doesn’t care. They are the first flowers he has ever brought her. She puts them in water with a crushed-up aspirin—another recently acquired nugget of wisdom, along with how to fold shirts and napkins—and makes him a special dinner. They share a bottle of wine and talk about when they will go to Mestre to tell his parents, and do not even turn on the television. The next morning, Tuesday, May 9, Antonio gets up very early, at six a.m. Before he leaves the apartment, he holds her face in his hands while she is still in bed and whispers, “I love you Angela Vari.” Then he kisses her, and she closes her eyes and drifts back to sleep.

  It is seven hours later, just after half-past one that afternoon, and Angela is sitting in the back room at the florist’s trying to understand how things could possibly have gotten so out of control, how this mushroom cloud could have grown quite so fast and under her very nose, when a woman screams.

  The sound is high and shrill, and by the time Angela and the florist have rushed out of the shop and into the tiny piazza that fronts it, it has wound down to a kind of keening wail. A crowd is bunched around the fountain, and within seconds the wailing grows as if it is being passed from one person to the next.

  “What? What?” people are asking, the people who are not already wailing.

  A man turns away, his face ashen, his hands twisting.

  “They’ve done it,” he says. He stares blankly at Angela and the florist, who is now clutching Angela’s sleeve. “They’ve done it,” he says again. “They’ve murdered Aldo Moro.”

  * * *

  Angela hadn’t believed it. She found herself shaking her head, saying first to herself, and then out loud and over and over again, “No, it’s not true. It’s not true. No, it’s not true.”

  But it is. And now she knows it, because she is standing in front of an electronics’ shop with a clutch of other people watching the television footage from Via Caetani, where, at one o’clock this afternoon, the body of Aldo Moro was found in the back of a car.

  There is footage of the street, which is clogged with policemen and carabinieri. There is a blurred shot of an ambulance flying by, and the high whoo-whoo of sirens. And then there is a color photograph. It was taken by a photographer called Gianni Giansanti, who looks
no older than Angela and caught the break of his life when he happened to be around the corner at one p.m.

  Gianni Giansanti is still talking about this, describing how he had his camera and turned and sprinted, when the photograph he took fills the screen.

  Aldo Moro lies twisted, his head on his shoulder. He is unshaven and wearing his navy blue three-piece suit, the pants he always had on and the jacket and waistcoat Angela saw that first day draped neatly over the back of his chair. He has been shot ten times in the chest and one of his hands is curled like a baby’s over his heart. Several policemen are trying to stop people getting too close to the open back of the car, which is a red Renault. A carabinieri officer is reaching for the edge of the maroon blanket that Aldo Moro is lying on, and that has obviously been his shroud.

  The street tilts. Angela reaches for the wall of the shop, but she doesn’t feel the rough brick beneath her hand. Instead she feels the worn wool that all her life was folded at the foot of her parents’ bed. That she slept coddled in for the weeks and months after her father died. That Antonio covered her with when she was sick. That he laid her on while he licked the sea from her skin, and kissed her. That she felt rough and sandy against the back of her legs as he opened the little box and slid the ring onto her finger and asked her to marry him. The maroon blanket that, in her fever for him, she forgot to bring from the back of the red Renault they drove to Ostia.

  She’s lucky there’s a dustbin a few steps away. She gets to it, and is sick. Once. Twice. A third time.

  * * *

  Via Forte Trionfale is a river of light. A thousand flames, perhaps more, flicker from the candles that the silent crowd stand holding. Stars fallen to earth, burning for the memory of Aldo Moro.

  Angela stays there all night. She couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Already posters are tied to railings and the backs of benches and the sides of rubbish bins. Some have flowers looped through the strings and ribbons that hold them in place. Aldo Moro’s face stares out from them. Underneath are printed the words, Egli Vivra Nei Nostri Cuori. He Will Live in Our Hearts.