The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante

  Gianni, when I got home, reproached me because in four days I had called only twice, even though Marta was sick. I said: I had a lot to do. I also said that, after what had happened, I would have to work very hard to take advantage of it. I began to go to the university, provocatively, ten hours a day. When we returned to Florence, my professor, suddenly available, did all he could to help me finish and publish a new essay, and he collaborated energetically with Hardy to enable me to spend some time at his university. I entered a period of painful, frenzied activity. I studied intensely and yet I suffered, because it seemed to me that I couldn’t live without Hardy. I wrote him long letters, called him. If Gianni, especially on the weekends, was home, I hurried to a pay phone, dragging Bianca and Marta with me so that he wouldn’t become suspicious. Bianca listened to the phone calls and, although they were in English, understood everything without understanding, and I knew it, but I didn’t know what to do. The children were there with me, mute and bewildered: I never forgot it, I will never forget it. Yet I radiated pleasure against my own will, I whispered affectionate words, I responded to obscene allusions and made obscene allusions in turn. I was careful—when they pulled me by the skirt, when they said they were hungry or wanted an ice cream or insisted on a balloon from the man with balloons who was just over there—never to say, That’s it, I’m leaving, you’ll never see me again, as my mother had when she was desperate. She never left us, despite crying that she would; I, on the other hand, left my daughters almost without announcing it.

  I drove as if I were not at the wheel, unaware even of the road. Through the windows came a hot wind. I parked at the apartment, I had Bianca and Marta before my eyes, frightened, small, as they had been eighteen years earlier. I was burning hot, and got in the shower immediately. Cold water. I let it run over me for a long time, staring at the sand that slid black down my legs, my feet, onto the white enamel of the floor. The chill of the crooked wing falls down along my body. Get dry, dressed. I had taught that line of Auden’s to my daughters, we used it as our private phrase to say that we didn’t like a place or that we were in a bad mood or simply that it was a freezing cold day. Poor girls, forced to be cultured even in their family lexicon, from the time they were children. I took my bag, carried it out onto the terrace in the sun, spilled the contents onto the table. The doll fell on one side, I spoke to her, the way one does to a cat or a dog, then I heard my voice and was immediately silent. I decided to take care of Nani, for company, to calm myself. I looked for some alcohol, I wanted to erase the pen marks she had on her face and body. I rubbed her carefully, but I didn’t do a good job. Nani, come, dear. Let’s put on the underpants, the socks, the shoes. Let’s put on the dress. How nice you look. I was surprised by that nickname, which I myself was now easily calling her. Why, among the many that Elena and Nina used, had I chosen that one. I looked in my notebook, I had recorded them all: Neni, Nile, Nilotta, Nanicchia, Nanuccia, Nennella. Nani. You have water in your belly, my love. You keep your liquid darkness in your stomach. I sat in the sun, next to the table, drying my hair, every so often running my fingers through it. The sea was green.

  I, too, was hiding many dark things, in silence. The remorse of ingratitude, for example: Brenda. It was she who had given Hardy my text, he told me himself. I don’t know how they knew each other, and didn’t want to know what reciprocal debts they had. Today I know only that my pages would never have gotten any attention without Brenda. But at the time I told no one, not even Gianni, not even my professor, and above all I never looked for her. It’s something that I admitted only in the letter to the girls two years ago, the one they never read. I wrote: I needed to believe that I had done everything alone. I wanted, with increasing intensity, to feel myself, my talents, the autonomy of my abilities.

  Meanwhile things were happening in a chain reaction, seemingly the confirmation of what I had always hoped for. I was good; I didn’t need to pretend a kind of superiority, as my mother did; I really was a creature out of the ordinary. My professor in Florence was finally sure of it. The famous, sophisticated Professor Hardy was sure of it, he seemed to believe it more than anyone. I left for England, I returned, I left again. My husband was alarmed, what was happening. He protested that he couldn’t keep up with work and the children both. I told him that I was leaving him. He didn’t understand, he thought I was depressed, he looked for solutions, called my mother, cried that I had to think of the children. I told him that I couldn’t live with him any longer, I needed to understand who I was, what were my real possibilities—and other lines like that. I couldn’t announce that I already knew all about myself, I had a thousand new ideas, I was studying, I was loving other men, I was in love with anyone who said I was smart, intelligent, helped me to test myself. He calmed down. For a while he tried to be understanding, then he sensed that I was lying, got angry, moved on to insults. Finally he said do what you want, get out.

  He had never really believed that I could go without the children. Instead I left them to him, and was gone for two months; I never called. It was he who hunted me down, from a distance, harassing me. When I returned, I did so only to pack my books and notes, for good.

  On that occasion I bought dresses for Bianca and Marta, and brought them as a gift. Small and tender, they wanted help in putting them on. My husband took me aside gently, asked me to try again, began to cry, said he loved me. I said no. We quarreled, and I shut myself in the kitchen. After a while I heard a light knocking. Bianca came in, very serious, followed by her sister, timidly. Bianca took on orange from the tray of fruit, opened a drawer, handed me a knife. I didn’t understand, I was running after my own desires, I couldn’t wait to escape that house, forget it and forget everything. Make a snake for us, she asked then, for herself and Marta, too, and Marta smiled at me encouragingly. They sat in front of me waiting, they assumed the poses of cool and elegant little ladies, in their new dresses. All right, I said, took the orange, began to cut the peel. The children stared at me. I felt their gazes longing to tame me, but more brilliant was the brightness of the life outside them, new colors, new bodies, new intelligence, a language to possess finally as if it were my true language, and nothing, nothing that seemed to me reconcilable with that domestic space from which they stared at me in expectation. Ah, to make them invisible, to no longer hear the demands of their flesh as commands more pressing, more powerful than those which came from mine. I finished peeling the orange and I left. From that moment, for three years, I didn’t see or hear them at all.

  20

  The buzzer sounded, a violent electric charge that reached the terrace.

  I looked at the clock mechanically. It was two in the afternoon, I couldn’t imagine anyone in the town who knew me well enough to ring at that hour. Gino, it occurred to me. He knew where I lived, maybe he had come for advice.

  The buzzer sounded again, less decisive, shorter. I left the terrace, went to answer.

  “Who is it?”

  “Giovanni.”

  I sighed, better him than the words with no outlet in my head, and pressed the button to open the street door. I was barefoot and looked for my sandals, I buttoned my shirt, adjusted my skirt, smoothed my wet hair. At the sound of the bell, I went to the apartment door. He stood before me, sunburned, his white hair carefully combed, a slightly loud shirt, blue pants with an impeccable crease, polished shoes, and a paper-wrapped package in his hand.

  “I’ll take just a minute of your time.”

  “Come in.”

  “I saw the car, I said: the signora has come back already.”

  “Come in, sit down.”

  “I don’t want to bother you, but if you like fish, this is just caught.”

  He came in, offered me the package. I closed the door, took his gift, made an effort to smile, and said:

  “You are very kind.”

  “Have you had lunch?”

  “No.”

  “You can even eat this raw.”

  “I would find that dis
gusting.”

  “Then fried, and eaten very hot.”

  “I don’t know how to clean it.”

  He went from being timid to abruptly invasive. He knew the house, he went to the kitchen, began to gut the fish.

  “It will take no time,” he said. “Two minutes.”

  I looked at him ironically as with expert motions he removed the guts of that lifeless creature and then scraped away scales as if to take from them their sheen, their color. I thought that probably his friends were waiting at the bar to find out if his undertaking had been successful. I thought that now I had made the mistake of letting him come in and that, if my hypothesis was solid, he would stay, one way or another, long enough to make plausible what he would then recount. Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses. Giovanni, I thought, whatever happened, would boast of his prodigious erection with the stranger, without drugs and despite his age.

  “Where do you keep the oil?”

  He attended to the frying skillfully, his words tumbling out nervously, as if his thoughts were moving too fast for the structure of the sentences. He praised the past, when there were more fish in the sea and the fish were really good. He spoke of his wife, who had died three years earlier, and his children.

  “My oldest son is much older than you.”

  “I don’t think so—I’m old.”

  “What do you mean old, you’re forty at most.”

  “No.”

  “Forty-two, forty-three.”

  “I’m forty-eight, Giovanni, and I have two grownup daughters, one is twenty-four and one twenty-two.”

  “My son is fifty, I had him at nineteen, and my wife was only seventeen.”

  “You’re sixty-nine?”

  “Yes, and three times a grandfather.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “All show.”

  I opened the only bottle of wine I had, a red from the supermarket, and we ate the fish on the table in the living room, sitting beside one another on the couch. It was astonishingly good. I began to talk a lot, feeling reassured by the sound of my voice. I talked about work, about my daughters—mainly about them. I said: they didn’t give me many headaches. They were good students, always promoted, they graduated with high marks, they’ll become excellent scientists, like their father. They live in Canada now, one is there—more or less—to complete her studies and the older one for work. I’m pleased, I’ve done my duty as a mother, I’ve kept them safe from all the dangers of today.

  I talked and he listened. Every so often he said something about himself. His older son was a surveyor, his wife worked at the post office; the second, a daughter, had married a good fellow, the one who had the newsstand in the square; the third was his cross, he wouldn’t study, made a little money only in the summer, taking tourists out in his boat; the youngest, a daughter, was a bit behind in her studies, she had had a serious illness, but now she was about to graduate from university, she would be the first in the family.

  He spoke very sweetly of his grandchildren, they were all his oldest son’s, the others no, no children. He created a pleasant atmosphere, and I began to feel at ease, with a sensation of positive attachment to things, the taste of the fish—it was mullet—the glass of wine, the light that radiated from the sea and beat on the glass. He talked about his grandchildren, and I began to talk about my children when they were young. Once, twenty years ago, in the snow, what fun we had had, Bianca and I—she was three, in a pink snowsuit, the hood trimmed with white fur, her cheeks bright red. Dragging our sled, we climbed to the top of a knoll, and then Bianca sat in front, between my legs. I held her tight, and down we went, at top speed, both shouting with joy, and when we got to the bottom the pink of the child’s snowsuit had disappeared, and so had the red of her cheeks, hidden under a gleaming layer of ice; only her joyful eyes were visible, and her open mouth saying: again, Mama.

  I went on talking and as other happy moments came to mind I felt a longing, not sad but pleasant, for their small bodies, their wish to touch, lick, kiss, hug. Marta would be at the window every day watching for me to come home from work, and as soon as she caught sight of me she couldn’t contain herself: opening the door onto the stairs and running down, a soft little body, eager for me, running, so that I was afraid she would fall and gestured to her: slow down, don’t run. She was young but agile and confident. I would leave my bag, kneel down, and spread my arms to welcome her. She hurled herself against my body like a bullet, almost knocking me over; I embraced her, she embraced me.

  Time goes by, I said, it carries off their little bodies, they remain only in the memory of your arms. They grow, they’re as tall as you, they pass you by. Already at sixteen Marta was taller than me. Bianca remained small, her head comes up to my ear. Sometimes they sit in my lap, the way they did when they were little, both talking at once, they caress me, kiss me. I suspect that Marta grew up anxious for me, trying to protect me, as if she were big and I little, and it was this effort that made her so aggrieved, with such a strong feeling of inadequacy. But these are things I’m not sure about. Bianca, for example, is like her father, not demonstrative, but she, too, at times gave me the idea that with her sharp, hard words, orders rather than requests, she wanted to re-educate me for my own good. You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.

  “They think they know more than we do,” Giovanni confirmed.

  “Sometimes it’s true,” I said, “because to what we’ve taught them they add what they learn outside of us, in their time, which is always different—it’s not ours.”

  “Nastier.”

  “You think so?”

  “We’ve spoiled them, they expect a lot.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When I was a child, what did I have? A wooden gun. A clothespin was fastened to the butt, a rubber band to the barrel. You put a stone in the rubber band the way you do with a slingshot and fastened the stone and the rubber band to the clothespin. So the gun was loaded. When you wanted to shoot, you opened the clothespin and the stone flew off.”

  I looked at him with sympathy, I was changing my mind. Now he seemed to me a quiet man, I no longer thought he had come to see me so that his companions would think we had had an affair. He was only looking for a little gratification to soften the impact of disappointments. He wanted to talk with a woman who came from Florence, had a nice car, beautiful clothes like the ones on TV, was on vacation alone.

  “Today they have everything, people go into debt to buy stupid things. My wife didn’t waste a cent, the women of today throw money out the window.”

  Even that way of complaining about the present and the recent past, and idealizing the distant past, didn’t annoy me as it usually does. It seemed, rather, a way, like many, to convince oneself that there is always a slender branch of one’s life to hang on to, and, by being suspended there, get used to the inevitability of falling. What would be the sense of arguing with him, telling him: I was part of a wave of new women, I tried to be different from your wife, perhaps also from your daughter, I don’t like your past. Why start arguing—better this tranquil lullaby of clichés. At one point he said sadly:

  “To keep the children quiet when they were little, my wife would wrap a bit of sugar in a rag for them to suck on.”

  “A pupatella.”

  “You know it?”

  “My grandmother once made one for my younger daughter, who was always crying—no one ever knew what was wrong with her.”

  “You see? Now they bring them to the doctor, the
y treat the parents and the children, they think fathers, mothers, and newborns are sick.”

  While he continued to praise bygone times, I remembered my grandmother. She must then have been more or less the age of this man, I think, but she was small, bent, born in 1916. I had come on a visit to Naples with the two children, tired as usual, angry with my husband who was supposed to come with me and at the last minute had stayed in Florence instead. Marta was crying, she couldn’t find her pacifier, my mother reproached me because—she said—I had accustomed my daughter to having that thing in her mouth all the time. I began to quarrel with her, I was fed up, she was always criticizing me. Then my grandmother took a sponge, covered it with sugar, wrapped it in a bit of gauze—from a candy box, I think—and tied a ribbon around it. A tiny being emerged, a ghost in a white robe that hid its body, its feet. I calmed down as if under a spell. Marta, too, in the arms of her great-grandmother, held the white head of that imp in her mouth and stopped crying. Even my mother relaxed, was amused, said that her mother had always quieted me like that: when I was very young and she went out, I would start to cry and scream as soon as she was out of sight.

  I smiled, dazed by the wine, and leaned my head against Giovanni’s shoulder.