A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  Europa Editions

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2017 and 2019 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino

  First publication 2019 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Ann Goldstein

  Original Title: L’Arminuta

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover illustration by Elisa Talentino

  ISBN 9781609455293

  Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  A GIRL RETURNED

  Translated from the Italian

  by Ann Goldstein

  A GIRL RETURNED

  For Piergiorgio, who was here for such a short time

  Even today, in a way, I’m still in that childhood summer:

  my soul ceaselessly spins and pulses around it,

  like an insect around a blinding light.

  —ELSA MORANTE, Lies and Sorcery

  1.

  I was thirteen, yet I didn’t know my other mother.

  I struggled up the stairs to her apartment with an unwieldy suitcase and a bag of jumbled shoes. On the landing I was greeted by the smell of recent frying and a wait. The door wouldn’t open: someone was shaking it wordlessly on the inside and fussing with the lock. I watched a spider wriggle in the empty space, hanging at the end of its thread.

  There was a metallic click, and a girl with loose braids that hadn’t been done for several days appeared. She was my sister, but I had never seen her. She opened the door wide so I could come in, keeping her sharp eyes on me. We looked like each other then, more than we do as adults.

  2.

  The woman who had conceived me didn’t get up from the chair. The child she held in her arms was sucking his thumb on one side of his mouth—maybe a tooth was coming in. Both of them looked at me, and he stopped his monotonous crying. I didn’t know I had such a little brother.

  “You’re here,” she said. “Put down your things.”

  I lowered my eyes to the smell of shoes that wafted from the bag if I moved it even slightly. From behind the closed door of the room at the back came a tense, sonorous snoring. The baby started whining again and turned to the breast, dripping saliva on the sweaty, faded cotton flowers.

  “Why don’t you close the door?” the mother curtly asked the girl, who hadn’t moved.

  “Aren’t the people who brought her coming up?” she objected, indicating me with her pointy chin.

  My uncle, as I was supposed to learn to call him, entered just then, panting after the stairs. In the heat of the summer afternoon he was holding with two fingers the hanger of a new coat, my size.

  “Your wife didn’t come?” my first mother asked, raising her voice to cover the wailing in her arms that grew louder and louder.

  “She can’t get out of bed,” he answered, turning his head. “Yesterday I went to buy some things, for winter, too,” and he showed her the label bearing the name of the coat’s maker.

  I moved toward the open window and put down the bags. In the distance a loud din, like rocks being unloaded from a truck.

  The woman decided to offer the guest coffee; the smell, she said, would wake her husband. She moved from the bare dining room to the kitchen, after putting the child in the playpen to cry. He tried to pull himself up holding onto the netting, just next to a hole that had been crudely repaired with a tangle of string. When I approached, he cried louder, upset. His every-day sister lifted him out with an effort and put him down on the tile floor. He crawled toward the voices in the kitchen. Her dark look shifted from her brother to me, remaining low. It scorched the gilt buckles of my new shoes, moved up along the blue pleats of the dress, still rigid from the store. Behind her a fly buzzed in midair, now and then flinging itself at the wall, in search of a way out.

  “Did that man get this dress for you, too?” she asked softly.

  “He got it for me yesterday, just to come back here.”

  “But what’s he to you?” she asked, curious.

  “A distant uncle. I lived with him and his wife till today.”

  “Then who is your mamma?” she asked, discouraged.

  “I have two. One is your mother.”

  “Sometimes she talked about it, about an older sister, but I don’t much believe her.”

  Suddenly she grabbed the sleeve of my dress with eager fingers.

  “Pretty soon it won’t fit you anymore. Next year you can hand it down to me, be careful you don’t ruin it.”

  The father came out of the bedroom, shoeless, yawning, bare-chested. Noticing me as he followed the aroma of the coffee, he introduced himself.

  “You’re here,” he said, like his wife.

  3.

  The words coming from the kitchen were few and muffled, the spoons were no longer tinkling. When I heard the sound of the chairs shifting, I was afraid; my throat tightened. My uncle came over to say goodbye, with a hurried pat on the cheek.

  “Be good,” he said.

  “I left a book in the car, I’m coming down to get it,” and I followed him down the stairs.

  With the excuse of looking in the glove compartment, I got in the car. I closed the door and pressed the lock.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, already in the driver’s seat.

  “I’m going home with you, I won’t be any trouble. Mamma’s sick, she needs my help. I’m not staying here, I don’t know those people up there.”

  “Let’s not start again, try to be reasonable. Your real parents are expecting you and they’ll love you. It’ll be fun to live in a house full of kids.” He breathed in my face the coffee he’d just drunk, mingled with the odor of his gums.

  “I want to live in my house, with you. If I did something wrong tell me, and I won’t do it again. Don’t leave me here.”

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t keep you anymore, we’ve already explained it. Now please stop this nonsense and get out,” he concluded, staring straight ahead at nothing. Under his beard, unshaved for several days, the muscles of his jaw were pulsing the way they sometimes did when he was about to get angry.

  I disobeyed, continuing to resist. Then he punched the steering wheel and got out, intending to pull me out of the small space in front of the seat that I had squeezed myself into, trembling. He opened the door with the key and grabbed me by the arm; the shoulder seam of the dress he had bought me came unstitched in one place. In his grip I no longer recognized the hand of the taciturn father I’d lived with until that morning.

  I remained on the asphalt with the tire marks in the big, empty square. The air smelled of burning rubber. When I raised my head, someone from the family that was mine against my will was looking down from the second-floor windows.

  He returned half an hour later. I heard a knock and then his voice on the landing. I forgave him instantly and picked up my bags with a rush of joy, but when I reached the door his footsteps were already echoing at the bottom of the stairs. My sister was holding a container of vanilla ice cream, my favorite flavor. He had come for that, not to take me away. The others ate it, on that August afternoon in 1975.

  4.

  Toward evening the older boys came home: one greeted me with a whistle, another didn’t even notice me. They rushed into the kitchen, elbowing one a
nother to grab places at the table, where the mother was serving dinner. The plates were filled amid splashes of sauce: only a spongy meatball in a little sauce reached my corner. It was colorless inside, made with stale bread and a few bits of meat. We ate bready meatballs with more bread dipped in the sauce to fill our stomachs. After a few days I would learn to compete for food and stay focused on my plate to defend it from aerial fork raids. But that night I lost the little that the mother’s hand had added to my scant ration.

  My first parents didn’t recall until after dinner that there wasn’t a bed for me in the house.

  “Tonight you can sleep with your sister, you’re both thin,” the father said. “Tomorrow we’ll see.”

  “For us both to fit, we have to lie opposite, head to toe,” Adriana explained to me. “But we can wash our feet now,” she reassured me.

  We soaked them in the same basin, and she spent a long time getting out the dirt between her toes.

  “Look how black the water is,” she laughed. “That’s mine, yours were already clean.”

  She dug up a pillow for me, and we went into the room without turning on the light: the boys were breathing as if asleep, and the sweat smell of adolescents was strong. We settled ourselves head to foot, whispering. The mattress, stuffed with sheep’s wool, was soft and shapeless from use, and I sank toward the center. It gave off the ammonia smell of pee, which saturated it, a new and repellent odor to me. The mosquitoes were looking for blood and I would have liked to cover myself with the sheet, but in her sleep Adriana had pulled it in the opposite direction.

  A sudden jolt of her body—maybe she was dreaming of falling. Gently I moved her foot and leaned my cheek against the sole, fresh with cheap soap. For most of the night I stayed against the rough skin, moving whenever she moved her legs. With my fingers I felt the uneven edges of her broken nails. There were some clippers in my bag, in the morning I could give them to her.

  The last quarter of the moon peeked in through the open window and traveled across it. The trail of stars remained, along with the minimum good fortune that the sky was clear of houses in that direction.

  Tomorrow we’ll see, the father had said, but then he forgot. I didn’t ask him, nor did Adriana. Every night she lent me the sole of her foot to hold against my cheek. I had nothing else, in that darkness inhabited by breath.

  5.

  A wet warmth spread under my ribs and hip. I sat up with a start and touched between my legs: it was dry. Adriana shifted in the darkness, but continued to lie there. Wedged into the corner, she resumed or went on sleeping, as if she were used to it. After a while I lay down, too, making myself as small as I could. We were two bodies around the wet spot.

  Slowly the odor vanished, rising only now and again. Near dawn, one of the boys, I couldn’t tell which, began moving rhythmically, faster and faster, for several minutes, moaning.

  In the morning Adriana woke up and didn’t move, with her head on the pillow and her eyes open. Then she looked at me a moment, without saying anything. The mother came to call her with the child in her arms. She sniffed the air.

  “You’ve wet yourself again, good girl. We make a bad show right away.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Adriana answered, turning toward the wall.

  “Yes, maybe it was your sister, with the upbringing she’s had. Hurry up, it’s already late,” and they went into the kitchen.

  I wasn’t prepared to follow them, and then I lost the ability to move. I stood there, lacking even the courage to go to the bathroom. One brother sat on the bed, legs spread. Between yawns he weighed his bulging underpants with one hand. When he noticed me in the room, he began observing me, wrinkling his brow. He paused on my breasts, covered only by the T-shirt I was wearing in place of pajamas, in that heat. Instinctively I crossed my arms over the encumbrance that had only recently grown there, while sweat surfaced in my armpits.

  “You slept here, too?” he asked in the voice of a man not yet adult.

  I answered yes, embarrassed, while he continued to examine me shamelessly.

  “You’re fifteen?”

  “No, I’m not even fourteen.”

  “But you look fifteen, maybe more. You developed fast,” he concluded.

  “How old are you?” I asked, out of politeness.

  “I’m almost eighteen, I’m the oldest. I already go to work, but not today.”

  “Why?”

  “The boss doesn’t need me today. He calls when he needs me.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Laborer.”

  “And school?”

  “Oh yeah, school! I quit in the second year of middle school, anyhow they failed me.”

  I saw the muscles molded by the work, the strong shoulders. A chestnut spray rose on his sunburned chest and, higher, over his face. He, too, must have grown up quickly. When he stretched I smelled an adult odor, not unpleasant. A scar in the shape of a fish bone decorated his left temple, maybe an old wound that had been poorly sutured.

  We didn’t say anything else, again he was looking at my body. From time to time he adjusted his penis with his hand, to a less awkward position. I wanted to get dressed, but I hadn’t unpacked my suitcase the day before, and it was still on the other side of the room: I would have had to take some steps with my back to him to go and get it. I waited for something to happen. His gaze slowly descended from my cotton-covered hips to my bare legs, to my contracted feet. I wouldn’t turn.

  The mother came in and told him to hurry up, a neighbor was looking for help with a job in the countryside. In exchange he would give him some crates of ripe tomatoes, for making sauce.

  “Go with your sister to get the milk if you want breakfast,” she then ordered me. She tried to soften her tone, but by the end of the sentence she’d gone back to the usual.

  In the other room the baby had crawled over to my bag of shoes and scattered them all around. He was biting one, his mouth looking as if he’d tasted something bitter. Adriana was already cleaning the beans for lunch, kneeling on a chair against the kitchen table.

  “Look how you’re wasting all the good part.” The complaint reached her punctually.

  She paid no attention.

  “Go wash up, then we’ll go and get some milk, I’m hungry,” she said to me.

  I was the last to use the bathroom. The boys had splashed water on the floor and had walked in it, imprints of bare feet and soles of shoes were superimposed on one another. At my house I’d never seen the tiles such a mess. I slipped, but without hurting myself, like a ballerina. Certainly I would not go back to dancing school in the fall, or swimming lessons.

  6.

  I remember one of those mornings in the beginning, when a pale light coming through the windows proclaimed a storm that would break later, as had happened the other days. There was a strange quiet; Adriana had gone with the baby to visit the widow who lived on the ground floor, and the boys were all out. I was alone in the house with the mother.

  “Pluck the chicken,” she ordered me, handing me the dead bird she was holding by the claws, its head dangling. Someone must have brought it up to her; I’d heard some conversation on the landing and, at the end, her thanks. “Then gut it.”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “You’re going to eat it like that? You have to get rid of the feathers, no? Then you cut it up and throw away the guts,” she explained, slightly shaking the arm extended toward me.

  I took a step back and averted my eyes.

  “I can’t, it scares me. I can do the cleaning.”

  She looked at me without saying anything else. She slammed the carcass on the sink counter with a muffled thud, and began furiously pulling out the feathers.

  “The only chickens that one’s seen are cooked,” I heard her muttering between her teeth.

  I got busy cleaning, that wasn’t diffic
ult. Other domestic tasks I didn’t know how to do, I wasn’t used to them. I spent a long time with a sponge scrubbing the chalk stain that stretched along the bottom of the tub, then I opened the tap to fill it. With cold water—no hot came out, and I didn’t want to ask. Now and then from the kitchen came the sound of bones being chopped, while I went on sweating over the dirty bathroom fixtures. Finally I closed the door from the inside with the metal hook, and immersed myself. When I reached out my hand toward the soap on the edge, I felt I was about to die. The blood rushed out of my head, my arms, my chest, and left them freezing. Seconds remained for two necessities: open the drain and ask for help. I didn’t know how to get the attention of the woman out there, I couldn’t call her mamma. In place of the sequence “m” and “a” I vomited lumps of lactic acid into the water that was draining. I no longer even remembered her name, if I had wanted to call it. So I yelled and then I fainted.

  I don’t know how much time had passed when the dry odor of Adriana’s pee woke me. I was lying naked on the bed, with a towel over me. On the floor beside me was an empty glass that must have contained sugar dissolved in water, the cure the mother used for every ailment. Later she looked in at the door of the room.

  “If you start feeling sick can’t you say so right away, instead of waiting for the worst?” she asked, chewing something.

  “I’m sorry, I thought it would pass,” I answered without looking at her.

  I never called to her, not for years. From the moment I was given back to her, the word “mamma” had stuck in my throat like a frog that wouldn’t jump out. If I had to speak to her urgently, I tried to get her attention in various ways. Sometimes, if I was holding the baby, I pinched his legs to make him cry. Then she would turn in our direction and I spoke to her.