The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante

  8

  Once I was home, I undressed and examined myself in the mirror. Between my shoulder blades was a livid spot that looked like a mouth, dark at the edges, reddish at the center. I tried to reach it with my fingers; it hurt. When I examined my shirt, I found sticky traces of resin.

  To calm myself I decided to go into the town, take a walk, have dinner out. Where had the blow come from. I searched my memory, but to no purpose. I couldn’t decide if the pinecone had been thrown deliberately from the bushes or had fallen from a tree. A sudden blow, in the end, is only wonder and pain. When I pictured the sky and the pines, the pinecone fell from on high; when I thought of the undergrowth, the bushes, I saw a horizontal line traced by a projectile, the pinecone cutting through the air to land on my back.

  The streets were filled with the Saturday evening crowd, all sunburned: entire families, women pushing strollers, irritated or angry fathers, young couples entwined or old ones holding hands. The smell of suntan lotion mixed with the aroma of cotton candy, of toasted almonds. The pain, like a burning ember stuck between my shoulder blades, kept me from thinking of anything except what had happened.

  I felt the need to call my daughters, tell them about the accident. Marta answered, and started talking about how she was doing, non-stop and shrill. I had the impression that she was more than usually afraid I might interrupt, with some insidious question, a reproof, or simply that I might turn her exaggerated-light-ironic tone into something serious that would have imposed on her real questions and real answers. She went on at length about a party that she and her sister had to go to, I didn’t understand clearly when, if it was that evening or the following day. It meant a lot to their father, his friends would be there, not only colleagues from the university but people who worked in television, important people he wanted to impress, to show that although he was not yet fifty he had two grown daughters, well behaved, pretty. She talked and talked, and at a certain point she began complaining about the climate. Canada, she exclaimed, is an uninhabitable country, both winter and summer. She didn’t even ask me how I was, or maybe she asked but gave me no space to respond. Probably also because she never mentioned her father, I heard him between one word and the next. In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken. That night, while Marta rambled on with her torrents of words, I imagined for an instant that she was not yet born, that she had never come out of my womb but was in someone else’s—Rosaria’s, for example—and would be born with a different look, a different reactivity. Maybe that was what she had always secretly desired, not to be my daughter. She was telling me about herself neurotically, from a distant continent. She was talking about her hair, about how she had to wash it constantly because it never came out right, about the hairdresser who had ruined it, and so she wasn’t going to the party, she would never go out of the house with her hair looking like that, Bianca would go alone, because her hair was beautiful, and she spoke as if it were my fault, I hadn’t made her in such a way that she could be happy. Old reproaches. I felt that she was frivolous, yes, frivolous and boring, situated in a space too far away from this other space, at the sea, in the evening, and I lost her. While she went on complaining, my eyes focused on the pain in my back and I saw Rosaria, fat, tired, following me through the pinewood with the gang of boys, her relatives, and she squatted, her big bare belly resting like a cupola on her broad thighs, and pointed to me as the target. When I hung up, I was sorry I had called, I felt more agitated than before; my heart was pounding.

  I had to eat, but the restaurants were too crowded; I hate being a woman alone in a restaurant on a Saturday. I decided to get something in the bar near the house. I arrived wearily, and looked in the glass case beneath the counter: swarm of flies. I got two potato croquettes, an orange, a beer. I ate without much enthusiasm, listening to a group of old men behind me chattering in a thick dialect. They were playing cards, raucously; coming in I had just glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye. I turned. At the card players’ table was Giovanni, the caretaker who had welcomed me on my arrival, and whom I hadn’t seen since.

  He left his cards on the table, joined me at the counter. He made vague conversation, how was I, had I settled in, how was the apartment, chitchat. But the whole time he was smiling at me in a complicitous manner, even though there was no reason to smile like that; we had met once, for a few minutes, and I couldn’t understand what there was that we could be complicitous in. He kept his voice very low, and with every word advanced a few inches closer; twice he touched my arm with his fingertip, once he laid a hand covered with dark spots on my shoulder. When he asked if he could do anything for me he was practically whispering in my ear. I observed that his companions were staring at us silently, and I felt embarrassed. They were his age, around seventy, and, like an audience at the theatre, appeared to be watching, incredulous, an astonishing scene. When I finished eating, Giovanni nodded to the man behind the counter, in a way that meant it’s on me, and there was no way I could manage to pay. I thanked him and left in a hurry; only when I crossed the threshold and heard the loud laughter of the players did I realize that that man must have boasted of some intimacy with me, the stranger, and that he had tried to prove it by assuming for the onlookers attitudes of a lord and master.

  I should have been angry, but I felt abruptly better. I thought of going back into the bar, sitting down beside Giovanni, and visibly rooting for him in the card game, like a blond bimbo in a gangster movie. What was he, in the end: a lean old man, with all his hair, only the skin spotted and deeply lined, the irises yellow and the pupils faintly veiled. I would have whispered in his ear, rubbed my breast against his arm, put my chin on his shoulder as I peered at his cards. He would have been grateful to me for the rest of his days.

  Instead I went home and waited on the terrace for sleep to come, while the beam of the lighthouse struck.

  9

  I didn’t close my eyes all night. My back was inflamed and throbbing, and from all over town came loud music, car noises, cries of greeting and farewell, right up until dawn.

  I lay on the bed but restlessly, with a growing sensation of flaking layers: Bianca and Marta, the difficulties in my work, Nina, Elena, Rosaria, my parents, Nina’s husband, the books I was reading, Gianni, my ex-husband. At dawn there was a sudden silence and I slept for several hours.

  I woke at eleven, gathered up my things quickly, and got in the car. But it was Sunday, a very hot Sunday: I ran into a lot of traffic, had trouble parking, and ended up in a chaos greater than that of the day before, a stream of young people, old people, children, loaded down with gear, jamming the path through the pinewood and pressing forward to lay claim as soon as possible to a slice of sand and sea.

  Gino, occupied by the continuous flow of bathers, paid little attention to me, only giving a nod of greeting. Once in my bathing suit, I lay down quickly in the shade, face up to hide the bruise on my back, and put on my dark glasses; my head ached.

  The beach was packed. I looked around for Rosaria, and didn’t see her; the clan seemed to have dispersed, mingling with the crowd. Only by looking carefully could I pick out Nina and her husband walking along the shore.

  She was wearing a blue two-piece suit, and again seemed to me very beautiful, moving with her usual natural elegance, even if at that moment she was speaking heatedly. He, without a T-shirt, was stockier than his sister Rosaria, pale, without even a touch of red from the sun; his movements were measured, on his hairy chest was a cross on a gold chain, and he had—a feature that seemed repellent—a large belly, divided into two bulging halves of flesh by a deep scar that ran from the top of his bathing suit to the arc of his ribs.

  I marveled at the absence of Elena, it was the first time I hadn’t seen mother and daughter together. But then I realized that the child was near me, a
lone, sitting on the sand in the sun, her mother’s new hat on her head, playing with the doll. I noticed that her eye was still red; occasionally she licked the mucus that dripped from her nose with the tip of her tongue.

  Whom did she look like? Now that I had seen her father, too, it seemed to me that I could distinguish in her the features of both parents. One looks at a child and immediately the game of resemblances begins, as one hurries to enclose that child within the known perimeter of the parents. In fact it’s just live matter, yet another random bit of flesh descended from long chains of organisms. Engineering—nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer—and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce. I had wanted Bianca, one wants a child with an animal opacity reinforced by popular beliefs. She had arrived immediately, I was twenty-three, her father and I were right in the midst of a difficult struggle to keep jobs at the university. He made it, I didn’t. A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.

  Your life wants to become another’s. Bianca was expelled, expelled herself, but—everyone around us believed it, and we, too, believed it—she couldn’t grow up alone, how sad, she needed a brother, a sister for company. So, right after her, I planned, yes, just as they say, planned, Marta to grow in my belly, too.

  I was twenty-five and every other game was over for me. Their father was racing around the world, one opportunity after another. He didn’t even have time to look carefully at what had been copied from his body, at how the reproduction had turned out. He barely glanced at the two little girls, but he said, with real tenderness: they are identical to you. Gianni is a kind man, our daughters love him. He took little or no care of them, but when it was necessary he did everything he could, even now he is doing everything he can. Children generally like him. If he were here, he wouldn’t stay, like me, on the lounge chair but would go and play with Elena: he would feel it his duty to do so.

  Me no. I watched the child, but, seeing her like that, alone and yet with all her ancestors compressed into her flesh, I felt something like repugnance, even though I didn’t know what repelled me. The little girl was playing with the doll. She spoke to it, but not as to a mangy-looking doll, with a half blond, half bald head. Who knows what character she imagined for her. Nani, she said, Nanuccia, Nanicchia, Nennella. It was an affectionate game. She kissed her hard on the face, so hard that the plastic almost seemed to inflate as her mouth exhaled her gassy, vibrant love, all the loving she was capable of. She kissed her on her bare breast, on her back, on her stomach, everywhere, with her mouth open as if to eat her.

  I turned away, one shouldn’t watch children’s games. But then I looked at her again. Nani was an ugly old doll, her face and body showed marks from a ballpoint pen. Yet in those moments a living force was released. Now it was she who kissed Elena with increasing frenzy. She kissed her lips with determination, she kissed her slender chest, her slightly swelling stomach, she pressed her head against the green bathing suit. The child realized that I was looking at her. She smiled at me with an abrasive gaze and as if in defiance hugged the doll’s head between her legs, with both hands. Children play games like this, of course, then they forget. I got up. The sun was burning, I was very sweaty. There wasn’t a breath of wind, on the horizon a gray mist was rising. I went to swim.

  From the water, floating lazily in the Sunday crowd, I saw Nina and her husband continuing to argue. She was protesting, he was listening. Then the man seemed tired of talking, he said something decisive to her but without getting upset, calmly. He must truly love her, I thought. He left her on the shore and went to confer with those who had arrived the day before in the motorboat. Evidently they were the object of contention. It always happened like that, I knew from experience: first the party, friends, relatives, everyone loves each other; then the quarrels of close quarters, old resentments that explode. Nina couldn’t tolerate the guests any longer and, look, her husband was sending them away. After a while the men, the women of ostentatious wealth, the obese children abandoned, in no particular order, the clan’s umbrellas; they loaded their things onto the motorboat, and Nina’s husband helped them himself, perhaps to hurry their departure. They left as they had arrived, amid hugs and kisses, but none of them said goodbye to Nina. She for her part went off along the beach with her head down, as if she couldn’t bear to look at them a moment longer.

  I swam a good distance, in order to leave behind the crowd. The sea water soothed my back, the pain ceased, or it seemed to me that it ceased. I stayed in the water a long time, until I saw that my fingertips were wrinkled and I began to tremble with cold. My mother, when she realized I was in that state, would drag me out of the water, yelling. When she saw that my teeth were chattering she became even more furious, yanked me, covered me from head to toe with a towel, rubbed me with such an energy, such violence that I didn’t know if it was really worry for my health or a long-fostered rage, a ferocity, that chafed my skin.

  I spread the towel directly on the burning sand and lay down. How I love the hot sand after the sea has chilled my body. I looked where Elena had been. Only the doll remained, but in a painful position, arms spread, legs apart, lying on her back, her head half buried in the sand. Her nose could be seen, an eye, half her skull. I fell asleep because of the heat, the sleepless night.

  10

  I slept a minute, ten. When I woke, I stood up dazed. I saw that the sky had turned white, a hot white lead. The air was still, the crowd had grown, there was a clamor of music and human beings. In that Sunday throng, as if by a sort of secret call, the first person who leaped to my eyes was Nina.

  Something was happening to her. She was moving slowly among the umbrellas, hesitant, her mouth working. She turned her head to one side, to the other, as if mechanically, like a bird in alarm. She said something to herself, from where I was I couldn’t tell what, then she hurried toward her husband, who was on a chair under the umbrella.

  The man jumped to his feet, looked around. The severe old man pulled him by an arm, he wriggled free, went over to Rosaria. All the family, big and small, began to look around as if they were a single body, then they moved, scattered.

  Calls began: Elena, Lenuccia, Lena. Rosaria walked with short but quick steps toward the sea as if she had an urgent need to go in. I looked at Nina. She made senseless gestures, she touched her forehead, she went to the right, then turned abruptly back to the left. It was as if from her very guts something were sucking the life from her face. Her skin turned yellow, her lively eyes were mad with anxiety. She couldn’t find the child, she had lost her.

  She’ll turn up, I thought: I had experience with getting lost. My mother said that as a child all I did was get lost. In an instant I would vanish, she would have to run to the bath house and ask them to announce on the loudspeaker what I looked like, that I was called such and such, and meanwhile she would stay at the counter and wait. I didn’t remember anything about my vanishing, my memory held other things. I was afraid that it was my mother who would get lost, I lived in the anxiety of not being able to find her. But I remembered clearly when I had lost Bianca. I was running along the beach like Nina now, but I had Marta bawling in my arms. I didn’t know what to do, I was alone with the two children, my husband was abroad, I knew no one. A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties. It remained impressed on me that I had looked in every direction except toward the sea: I didn’t dare even to glance at the water.

  I realized that Nina was doing the same thing. She was searching everywhere but she desperately kept her back to the sea, and suddenly I was moved, I felt like crying. From that moment I could no longer stand aside; I found it intolerable that t
he crowd on the beach didn’t even notice the frantic searching of the Neapolitans. There are movements so rapid that no draftsman can reproduce them, one is luminous, the other dark. Those who had appeared so autonomous, so overweening, seemed to me fragile. I admired Rosaria, who alone was searching the sea. With her large belly she walked, with her, but short steps, along the shore. I got up then, joined Nina, touched her arm. She turned suddenly, with a snakelike motion, and cried you’ve found her, speaking to me as if we knew each other well, even though we had never exchanged a word.

  “She’s wearing your hat,” I told her, “she’ll be found, we’ll see her easily.”

  She looked at me uncertainly, then nodded yes, ran in the direction in which her husband had vanished. She ran like a young athlete in a contest with a good or bad fate.

  I set off in the opposite direction, along the first row of umbrellas, slowly. It seemed to me that I was Elena, or Bianca when she was lost, but perhaps I was only myself as a child, climbing back out of oblivion. A child who gets lost on the beach sees everything unchanged and yet no longer recognizes anything. She is without orientation, something that before had made bathers and umbrellas recognizable. The child feels that she is exactly where she was and yet doesn’t know where she is. She looks around with frightened eyes and sees that the sea is the sea, the beach is the beach, the people are the people, the fresh-coconut seller is really the fresh-coconut seller. Yet every thing or person is alien to her and so she cries. To the unknown adult who asks her what’s wrong, why is she crying, she doesn’t say that she’s lost, she says that she can’t find her mama. Bianca was crying when they found her, when they brought her back to me. I was crying, too, with happiness, with relief, but meanwhile I was also screaming with rage, like my mother, because of the crushing weight of responsibility, the bond that strangles, and with my free arm I dragged my firstborn, yelling, you’ll pay for this, Bianca, you’ll see when we get home, you must never go off again—never.