First he asked about what I was studying, I told him I was preparing a course for the next year.
“On what.”
“Olivia.”
“What’s that?”
“A story.”
“Is it long?”
He liked short exams, he was very annoyed by professors who pile on the books to show that their exam is important. He had big white teeth, a wide mouth. His eyes were small, almost slits. He gesticulated a lot, he laughed. He knew nothing of Olivia, nothing of what I was passionate about. Like my daughters, who, growing up, had stayed cautiously away from my interests, had studied science, physics, like their father.
I spoke a little about them, saying a lot of nice things but in an ironic tone. At last, slowly, we fell back on what we did have in common: the beach, the bath house, his employer, the people on the beach. He talked to me about the foreigners, almost always pleasant, and the Italians, pretentious and arrogant. He spoke with sympathy of the Africans, of the Asian girls who went from umbrella to umbrella. But only when he began to speak of Nina and her family did I understand that I was there, in that restaurant with him, for this.
He told me about the doll, about the child’s desperation.
“After the storm I looked everywhere, I raked the sand until an hour ago, but I couldn’t find it.”
“It will turn up.”
“I hope so, especially for the mother: they’re furious with her, as if it were her fault.”
He alluded to Nina with admiration.
“She’s been coming here on vacation since her daughter was born. Her husband rents a villa in the dunes. You can’t see the house from the beach. It’s in the pinewood, it’s a beautiful place.”
He said that she was a really well brought up girl, she had finished high school and had even gone, briefly, to the university.
“She’s very pretty,” I said.
“Yes, she’s beautiful.”
They had talked a few times—I gathered—and she had told him she wanted to go back to her studies.
“She’s only a year older than I am.”
“Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-three, I’m twenty-two.”
“Like my daughter Marta.”
He was silent for a moment, then said suddenly, with a dark look that made him ugly:
“Have you seen her husband? Would you ever have made your daughter marry someone like that?”
I asked, ironically:
“What’s wrong with him, what don’t you like?”
He shook his head, and said seriously:
“Everything. Him, his friends and relatives. His sister is unbearable.”
“Rosaria, the pregnant lady?”
“Lady, her? Forget about her, it’s better. I admired you yesterday, when you wouldn’t move from your umbrella. But don’t do things like that anymore.”
“Why?”
The boy shrugged his shoulders, shook his head unhappily.
“They’re bad people.”
13
I got home around midnight. We had finally found a subject that interested both of us and the time passed quickly. I learned from Gino that the fat gray-haired woman was Nina’s mother. I learned also that the stern old man was named Corrado and wasn’t her father but Rosaria’s husband. It was like discussing a film that one has watched without fully understanding the relationship between the characters, at times not even knowing their names, and when we said good night it seemed to me that I had a clearer idea. Only about Nina’s husband had I learned little or nothing, Gino said his name was Toni, he came on Saturday and left Monday morning. I understood that he hated him, he didn’t even want to speak about him. And I, besides, felt very little curiosity about that man.
The boy waited politely until I had closed the street door behind me. I climbed the dimly lighted stairs to the fourth floor. Bad people, he had said. What could they do to me. I went into the apartment, turned on the light, and saw the doll supine on the sofa, her arms turned up to the ceiling, her legs spread, her face toward me. The Neapolitans had turned the beach upside down to find her, Gino had doggedly searched the sand with his rake. I wandered through the rooms, the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen; the town, too, seemed to be quiet. I discovered, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, that my face was drawn, my eyes puffy. I chose a clean T-shirt and got ready for bed, although I wasn’t sleepy.
The evening with Gino had been pleasant, but I felt that something had left me with a vague irritation. I opened the door onto the terrace, a fresh breeze came from the sea, the sky was without stars. He likes Nina, I thought, it doesn’t take much to see that. And, instead of being touched or amused, I felt a pang of discontent that reached toward the girl, as if, appearing every day on the beach and attracting him, she had taken something away from me.
I moved the doll, lay down on the sofa. If Gino had met Bianca and Marta, I wondered almost out of habit, which of the two would he have liked more. Since my daughters’ early adolescence, I had had this passion for comparing them with their friends, close friends, classmates who were considered pretty, who were successful. In a confused way I felt that they were rivals of the two girls, as if the others’ exceptional self-confidence, seductiveness, grace, intelligence took something away from my daughters and, in some obscure way, from me. I controlled myself, I spoke kindly, yet I tended to demonstrate silently to myself that they were all less pretty or, if pretty, unlikable, empty, and I would list the quirks, the stupidities, the temporary defects of those growing bodies. Sometimes, when I saw Bianca or Marta suffer because they felt outdone, I couldn’t resist, I intervened rudely with their friends who were too extroverted, too attractive, too ingratiating.
When Marta was around fourteen she had had a classmate named Florinda. Florinda, although she was the same age, was not a girl—she was already a woman, and very beautiful. With every gesture, every smile I saw how she overshadowed my daughter and I suffered to think that they went to school together, to parties, on outings; it seemed to me that as long as my daughter remained in that company life would continue to escape her.
On the other hand Marta was very attached to her friendship with Florinda—was violently taken with her—and it seemed to me a difficult and risky enterprise to separate them. For a while I tried to console her for that permanent humiliation by sticking to generalities, without ever using Florinda’s name. I kept telling her: how pretty you are, Marta, how sweet, you have such intelligent eyes, you look just like your grandmother and she was a real beauty. Vain words. She thought she was not only less attractive than her friend but less attractive than her sister, than everyone, and listening to me she became more depressed, she said I was saying those things because I was her mother, and sometimes she murmured: I won’t listen to you, Mama, you don’t see me for what I am, leave me alone, mind your own business.
At that time I had a constant stomachache from tension, from a sense of guilt: I thought that any unhappiness in my daughters was caused by a now proved failure of my love. So I soon became more insistent. I said to her: you really do look like my mother, and I brought up my own case, telling her: when I was your age, I was sure that I was ugly, I thought: my mother is pretty but I’m not. Marta let me know, multiplying her signs of annoyance, that she couldn’t wait for me to stop talking.
So it happened that, in consoling her, I felt more and more disconsolate myself. I thought: who knows how beauty is reproduced. I remembered too well how, at Marta’s age, I had been certain that my mother, in creating me, had separated herself from me, as when one has an impulse of revulsion and, with a gesture, pushes away the plate. I suspected that she had begun to flee the moment she had me in her womb, even though as I grew up everyone said that I resembled her. There were resemblances, but they seemed to me faded. Not even when I discovered that I was attractive to men was I appeased. She emanated a vital warmth, whereas I felt cold, as if I had veins of metal. I wanted to be like her not on
ly in the image in the mirror or in the stasis of photographs. I wanted to be like her in the capacity she had to expand and become essence on the streets, in the subway or the funicular, in the shops, under the eyes of strangers. No instrument of reproduction can capture that enchanted aura. Not even the pregnant belly can replicate it precisely.
But Florinda had that aura. When she and Marta came home from school one rainy afternoon, and I saw them walk through the hall, the living room, in heavy shoes, carelessly spotting the floor with mud and water, and then go into the kitchen, grab some cookies, amuse themselves by breaking them into pieces and eating them as they went through the house, leaving crumbs everywhere, I felt for that splendid adolescent girl, so self-assured, an uncontainable aversion. I said to her: Florinda, who do you think you are, do you behave like that at your house? Now, my dear, I want you to sweep up and then wash the floor, and don’t leave until you’ve finished. She thought I was joking, but I took out the broom, the bucket, the mop, and must have had a fierce expression on my face, because she murmured only: Marta made a mess, too, and Marta tried to say: it’s true, Mama. But my words must have been so harsh, uttered with such an indisputable severity, that they were both immediately silent. Frightened, Florinda washed the floor with care.
My daughter watched her. Afterward she shut herself in her room and wouldn’t speak to me for days. She isn’t like Bianca: she’s fragile, she gives in at the first change of tone, she retreats without fighting. Florinda gradually disappeared from her life; every so often I asked how is your friend, and she muttered something vague or answered with a shrug.
But my anxieties didn’t disappear. I observed my daughters when they weren’t paying attention, I felt for them a complicated alternation of sympathy and antipathy. Bianca, I sometimes thought, is unlikable, and I suffered for her. Then I discovered that she was much loved, she had girl and boy friends, and I felt that it was only I, her mother, who found her unlikable, and was remorseful. I didn’t like her dismissive laugh. I didn’t like her eagerness to always claim more than others: at the table, for example, she took more food than everyone else, not to eat it but to be sure of not missing anything, of not being neglected or cheated. I didn’t like her stubborn silence when she felt she was wrong but couldn’t admit her mistake.
You’re like that, too, my husband told me. Maybe it was true, what seemed to me unlikable in Bianca was only the reflection of an antipathy I felt for myself. Or no, it wasn’t so simple, things were more tangled. Even when I recognized in the two girls what I considered my own good qualities I felt that something wasn’t right. I had the impression that they didn’t know how to make good use of those qualities, that the best part of me ended up in their bodies as a mistaken graft, a parody, and I was angry, ashamed.
In fact, if I really think about it, what I loved best in my daughters was what seemed alien to me. In them—I felt—I liked most the features that came from their father, even after our marriage stormily ended. Or those which went back to ancestors of whom I knew nothing. Or those which seemed, in the combining of organisms, an ingenious invention of chance. It seemed to me, in other words, that the closer I felt to them, the less responsibility I bore for their bodies.
But that alien closeness was rare. Their troubles, their griefs, their conflicts returned to impose themselves, continuously, and I was bitter, I felt a sense of guilt. I was always, in some way, the origin of their sufferings, and the outlet. They accused me silently or yelling. They resented the unfair distribution not only of obvious resemblances but of secret ones, those we become aware of later, the aura of bodies, the aura that stuns like a strong liquor. Barely perceptible tones of voice. A small gesture, a way of batting the eyelashes, a smile-sneer. The walk, the shoulder that leans slightly to the left, a graceful swinging of the arms. The impalpable mixture of tiny movements that, combined in a certain way, make Bianca seductive, Marta not, or vice versa, and so cause pride, pain. Or hatred, because the mother’s power always seems to be that she gives unfairly, beginning in the living niche of the womb.
Starting right there, according to my two girls, I had behaved cruelly. I treated one as a daughter, the other a stepdaughter. To Bianca I gave a large bosom, while Marta seems a boy; she doesn’t know she’s beautiful, and wears a padded bra, a ploy that humiliates her. I suffer seeing her suffer. As a young woman I had large breasts, but after her birth I didn’t. You gave the best of yourself to Bianca, she repeats constantly, to me the worst. Marta is like that, she protects herself by seeing herself as deprived.
Not Bianca, no, ever since she was a child Bianca has fought me. She tried to pluck from me the secret of skills that in her eyes appeared wonderful and show that she in her turn was capable of them. It was she who revealed to me that when I peel fruit I am finicky about making sure that the knife cuts without ever breaking the peel. Before her admiration led me to discover this, I hadn’t realized it, goodness knows where I learned it, maybe it’s only my taste for ambitious and stubbornly precise work. Make a snake, Mama, she would say, insistent: peel the apple and make a snake, please. “Haciendo serpentinas,” I found recently in a poem by Maria Guerra that I’m fond of. Bianca was captivated by the serpentines of the peel, they were one of the many magical abilities she attributed to me; it seems touching now when I think about it.
One morning she got a bad cut on her finger trying to show that she, too, could make a snake. She was five and was immediately in despair: the blood flowed, along with tears of disappointment. I was frightened, yelled at her: I couldn’t leave her alone for a moment, there was never time for myself. I felt that I was suffocating, it seemed to me that I was betraying myself. For long minutes I refused to kiss her wound, the kiss that makes the pain go away. I wanted to teach her that you don’t do that, it’s dangerous, only Mama does it, who is grownup. Mama.
Poor creatures who came out of my belly, all alone now on the other side of the world. I placed the doll on my knees as if for company. Why had I taken her. She guarded the love of Nina and Elena, their bond, their reciprocal passion. She was the shining testimony of perfect motherhood. I brought her to my breast. How many damaged, lost things did I have behind me, and yet present, now, in a whirl of images. I understood clearly that I didn’t want to give Nani back, even though I felt remorse, fear in keeping her with me. I kissed her face, her mouth, I hugged her as I had seen Elena do. She emitted a gurgle that seemed to me a hostile remark and, with it, a jet of brown saliva that dirtied my lips and my shirt.
14
I slept on the sofa, with the door to the terrace open, and I woke late; my head was heavy, my bones ached. It was past ten, and raining; a strong wind was agitating the sea. I looked for the doll but didn’t see her. I felt anxious, as if it were possible that she had thrown herself off the terrace during the night. I looked around, hunted under the sofa, afraid that someone had come in and taken her. I found her in the kitchen, sitting on the table, in the shadows. I must have brought her in there when I went to wash my mouth and my shirt.
No beach, the weather was nasty. The plan to give Nani back to Elena today seemed to me not only weak but impractical. I went out to have breakfast, to buy the papers and something for lunch and dinner.
The town had the animation of a day without sun; vacationers shopped or wandered around wasting time. I came upon a toy store along the seafront and remembered the idea of buying some clothes for the doll, since for that day, at least, I would keep her with me.
I went in with no particular aim, and talked to a young salesgirl, who was very helpful. She found underpants, socks, shoes, and a blue dress that seemed to me the right size. I was about to leave, having just put the package in my bag, when I almost bumped into Corrado, the old man with the spiteful expression, the one who I had been sure was Nina’s father and who instead was Rosaria’s husband. He was fully dressed, in a blue suit, white shirt, yellow tie. He didn’t seem to recognize me, but behind him, in faded green maternity overalls, was Rosaria, who reco
gnized me right away and exclaimed:
“Signora Leda, how are you, is everything all right, did the ointment help?”
I thanked her again, saying I felt fine now, and meanwhile I observed, with pleasure, I should say with emotion, that Nina, too, was coming.
People we are used to seeing on the beach have a surprising effect when we meet them in their city clothes. Corrado and Rosaria seemed to me contracted, rigid, as if they were cardboard. Nina gave the impression of a delicately colored shell that keeps its soft inner mass—colorless, watchful—tightly locked up. The only one who looked disheveled was Elena, who, clasped in her mother’s arms, was sucking her thumb. Although she was wearing a pretty white dress, she gave off a sense of disorder; she must have stained the dress a little while ago with chocolate ice cream—the thumb clenched between her lips had a line of sticky brown saliva on it.
I looked at the child uneasily. Her head was lolling on Nina’s shoulder, her nose was running. The doll clothes in my purse seemed to have grown heavier and I thought: this is the right moment, I’ll tell her that I have Nani. Instead something twisted violently inside me and I asked with false sympathy:
“How are you, sweetie, did you find your doll?”
She gave a kind of shudder of rage, she took her thumb out of her mouth, and tried to hit me with her fist. I swerved, and she hid her face against her mother’s neck in irritation.
“Elena, don’t behave like that, answer the lady,” Nina reproached her nervously. “Tell her we’ll find Nani tomorrow, today we’re buying a better doll.”
But the child shook her head and Rosaria whispered, whoever stole her should get brain cancer. She said it as if the being in her belly were also furious because of that affront and so she had the right to feel resentment, a resentment even stronger than Nina’s. But Corrado made a sign of disapproval. It’s kids’ stuff, he said, they like a toy, they take it, and then they tell their parents they found it by chance. When I saw him so close he seemed to me not at all old and certainly not as spiteful as he had from a distance.
The Lost Daughter Page 5
