A Girl Returned
Page 2
For a long time I forgot those small tortures inflicted on my brother, and only now, when he’s in his twenties, I happened to remember them. I was sitting next to him on a bench, in the place where he lives, and I noticed a bruise on his skin like the ones I used to leave. This time it was the corner of some piece of furniture that had got him.
At dinner they were all excited about the novelty of the chicken; Adriana asked if it was Christmas in summer. I was torn between hunger and disgust at having seen it gutted, its insides hanging in the sink, amid the dirty breakfast cups.
“A thigh for Papa and one for the girl who fainted today,” the mother decided. But the other pieces were much smaller, and bony, after the breast had been set aside for the next day. The one they called Sergio immediately rebelled.
“If she’s sick she should eat broth, not the thigh,” he protested. “It should be mine, today I helped that woman upstairs move and you took the money I earned.”
“Plus it was her fault you busted the bathroom door,” another one broke in, shaking his index finger at me. “All she does is make trouble, can’t you give her back to the people who had her before?”
With a clap on the head the father pushed him down in his chair and silenced him.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” I said to Adriana and escaped into the bedroom. She joined me soon afterward, with a slice of bread and oil. She had cleaned up and changed, and was wearing a skirt that was too small.
“Hurry up, as soon as you finish get dressed so we can go to the festival.” She stuck the plate under my nose.
“What festival?”
“The patron saint—didn’t you hear the band? And the singers are starting right now, up in the square. But we’re not going there, Vincenzo will take us to the rides,” she whispered.
Less than half an hour later the fish bone on Vincenzo’s temple was shining under the street lights where the road widened and the Gypsies were camped. He was the only one of the boys who hadn’t attacked me in the argument about the chicken thigh, and he hadn’t invited his brothers to come, only Adriana and me. He counted the change he’d scraped together somehow or other, and lingered a while with the ticket-taker: it was clear that they were friendly, maybe from earlier festivals. They smoked together, seemed the same age, and had the same dark skin. The Gypsy took the money for the first rides, then let us go on free.
I had never been on the chair swing ride, my mother said it was too dangerous, and the son of a friend of hers had crushed his thumb on the bumper cars. Adriana, already expert, helped me get up in the seat and closed the safety bar.
“Hold tight to the chains,” she urged before sitting in front of me.
I flew between her and Vincenzo—they put me in the middle so I wouldn’t be scared. At the highest point I felt a kind of happiness: what had happened to me in the past days stayed on the ground, like a heavy fog. I flew above it and could even forget it, for a while. Suddenly, after a few trial rounds, I felt a foot giving me a push from behind and a voice said: “Grab this tail!” But I reached out timidly, I didn’t have the confidence to let go of the chain.
“Reach your hand out, miss, nothin’s gonna happen,” he incited me, then pushed me harder. On the third try I stretched into the void and felt something hairy beat against my open palm. I squeezed it as hard as I could. I’d won the fox tail and Vincenzo’s elation.
The chairs slowed in their clanking circular course and gradually stopped. I got out, took a few involuntary and unsteady steps. Shivers went up and down my arms, but not from cold—after the daily storms the heat returned immediately. He came over and looked silently into my eyes, his sparkled. I had been brave. I straightened my dress, rumpled by the wind. He lighted a cigarette and blew the first puff of smoke in my face.
7.
When we were almost home, Vincenzo gave us his key. He had forgotten something at the rides, we could leave the door partly open for him. But he was late coming home, while I couldn’t sleep, still excited by my flight. On the other side of the wall, in the parents’ room, a rhythmic squeaking, then nothing. Hours passed, and my legs were fidgety; I hit Adriana’s face with one foot. Later, when the wetness arrived as usual, I got up and went to Vincenzo’s bed, which was still empty. Moving around I found the odors of the different parts of his body, armpits, mouth, genitals. I imagined him in front of his Gypsy friend’s caravan as they chatted past the smoke of their cigarettes. I fell asleep like that, toward dawn.
He showed up at lunch, his work pants stained with solid splotches of cement. No one seemed to have noticed his nighttime absence. His parents merely exchanged a look as he approached the table.
His father struck him coldly, without a word. Vincenzo lost his balance, and as he fell one hand landed in the plate of pasta, its sauce made from the tomatoes he had earned, working in the countryside in the days before. He huddled on the floor in self-defense and, eyes closed, waited for the father to finish. When the man’s feet moved away, he rolled a little distance and remained there, supine, recovering on the cool floor.
“Eat, the rest of you,” the mother said, with the baby in her arms. He hadn’t cried during the commotion, as if he were used to it. The boys obeyed instantly, Adriana somewhat reluctantly, delaying to clean up the tablecloth. Only I was frightened, who had never seen violence close up.
I went over to Vincenzo. Rapid, shallow breaths moved his chest. Two rivulets of blood dribbled from his nostrils to his open mouth, and one cheekbone was already swollen. His hand was still covered with sauce. I offered him the handkerchief I had in my pocket, but he turned the other way without accepting it. Then I sat on the floor, next to him, like a point near his silence. He knew I was there and didn’t send me away.
“Next time I’ll crush him,” he promised himself, muttering, when he recognized the sound of his father getting up from the table. By now they had all finished. Adriana began to clear, while the baby, sleepy, started whining.
“If you don’t eat that’s your affair,” the mother said passing by me, “but you wash the dishes just the same, today’s your turn,” and she pointed to the full sink. She and her son didn’t even look at each other.
Vincenzo got to his feet and washed his face in the bathroom. With some pieces of rolled-up toilet paper he stopped up his nostrils and hurried to work, the lunch hour had been over for a while.
While Adriana rinsed the soapy plates that I handed her, she told me about our brother’s escapes. The first time, at fourteen, he had followed the ride operators to a festival in the next town. He had helped them dismantle the amusement park and at the moment of departure had hidden in the back of a truck. He had emerged at the next stop, afraid of being sent home. But the Gypsies had kept him for a few days, and he worked with them, wandering through the county. When they put him on a bus home to his family, they had left him a precious object as a souvenir.
“Papa beat him,” Adriana said, “but he kept the silver ring with curious engravings. His friend you saw yesterday evening gave it to him.”
“But Vincenzo doesn’t wear a ring, it seems to me.”
“He keeps it hidden. Sometimes he puts it on, then he rolls it between his fingers and hides it again.”
“Where? You don’t know?”
“No, he changes the place. It must be a magic ring, after he touches it he’s happy for a while.”
“Last night, too, he slept with the Gypsies?”
“I think so. Whenever he comes back with that pleased expression he’s been with them. And yet he knows he’ll get a beating.”
The mother called her to collect the clothes hanging on the balcony. The tasks she asked me to do weren’t many in comparison to Adriana’s. Maybe she was sparing me, or maybe she forgot I was there. Certainly she didn’t consider me capable, and she wasn’t wrong. Sometimes I couldn’t even understand her orders, in that rapid and contracted dialect.
She scowled, and her eyebrows almost met in the center.
“No, the carabinieri no. Papa went looking for him in the car. She didn’t cry, but she was silent,” she answered, indicating with her chin the direction of the shouting in the other room.
8.
In order to get at least a little sleep, I would remember the sea: the sea a few dozen meters from the house I’d thought was my home and had lived in since I was an infant until a few days earlier. Only the road separated the yard from the beach, and on days of libeccio, the southwest wind, my mother closed the windows and lowered the shutters completely to keep the sand from getting in. But you heard the sound of the waves, slightly muffled, and at night it made you sleepy. I remembered it in the bed with Adriana.
As if retelling fairy tales, I told her about walks along the sea with my parents to the most famous ice-cream shop in the city. She, in a dress with narrow shoulder straps, red nail polish on her toes, walking on his arm, while I ran ahead to get in line. Mixed fruit for me with whipped cream on top, French vanilla for them. Adriana couldn’t imagine that all those flavors existed, I had to repeat them for her again and again.
“But where is that city?” she asked anxiously, as if it were a magical place.
“Fifty kilometers from here, more or less.”
“You’ll take me there sometime, so I’ll get to see the sea, too. And the ice-cream shop.”
I told her about dinners in the garden. I would set the table, while the bathers leaving the beach passed along the sidewalk a short distance away, beyond the gate. They shuffled their wooden clogs, shaking grains of sand from their ankles.
“And what did you eat?” Adriana wanted to know.
“Usually fish.”
“Like canned tuna?”
“No, no, there’s lots of others. We bought it fresh at the fish market.”
I described cuttlefish, imitating the tentacles with my fingers. The contortions of mantis shrimp dying on the counters, as I watched them, spellbound. They stared at me, too, the two dark spots on the tail like reproachful eyes. On the way home, as my mother and I walked along the ballast of the railroad tracks, the bag rustled with their final spasms.
In describing it I thought I could taste in my mouth the flavor of the frittura that she prepared, and the stuffed calamari, the fish soups. Who knew how my mother was. Whether she’d started eating again, whether she was getting out of bed more often. Or if instead she’d been taken to the hospital. She hadn’t wanted to tell me anything about her illness, certainly she didn’t want to frighten me, but I had seen her suffering in the past months, she hadn’t even gone to the beach, she who was usually there in the first warm days of May. With her permission I went to our umbrella by myself, since I was grown up now, she said. I had gone the day before my departure and had even had fun with my friends: I didn’t believe that my parents would really find the courage to give me back.
I still had a tan, broken by the white skin in the shape of my bathing suit. That year I’d needed a bra, I was no longer a child. My brothers were dark, too, but only in the parts exposed during work or play outside. Their skin must have peeled at the start of the summer and then darkened again. Vincenzo had a permanent map of the sun’s bites engraved on his back.
“Did you have friends in the city?” Adriana asked. She had just waved from the window at a schoolmate who was calling her from the big square.
“Yes, I did. Especially Patrizia.”
In fact with her I’d picked out a two-piece bathing suit that spring. We’d gone to a store near the pool where we both swam. She was almost a champion, I went somewhat unwillingly. I was always cold: before I got into the pool, when I got out. I didn’t like the gray inside, or the smell of chlorine. But I was homesick even for that, now that everything had changed.
Pat and I wanted to get matching bathing suits, to show up on the beach with our new shapes. We’d gotten our periods a week apart, and even the eruption of pimples seemed synchronized. Our bodies grew by mutual suggestion.
“This one is better for you,” my mother had said, pulling out from among the other suits on the store’s shelves a bikini that would give me more covering. “Because the skin on your breast is delicate, and in that one you’d burn.” I remember every detail of that afternoon: the next day she got sick.
So I had given up the tiny two-piece, with bows between the cups and on the sides. Not Patrizia—she wanted it anyway. She often came to my house, I went less often to hers: my parents were afraid that her family’s bad habits would rub off on me. They were cheerful, a little absentminded, disorderly. We never saw them at Mass on Sunday, not even at Easter or Christmas—maybe they didn’t wake up in time. They ate what they felt like when they were hungry, they pampered two dogs and a rude cat that got up on the table to steal the leftovers. I remember the snacks we made by ourselves in the kitchen, spreading waves of chocolate on bread, even though it made our teeth hurt.
“This is what gives me energy for swimming,” said Pat. “Take another piece, your mother won’t know.”
Only once did I have permission to stay overnight. Her parents had gone to the movies and we watched television until late, eating potato chips, then we stayed up talking from bed to bed for most of the night, the cat stretched out and purring on the blanket. I wasn’t used to certain kinds of freedom, and at home the next day I nearly fell asleep over the chicken breast.
“Maybe those people gave you something?” my mother worried.
Patrizia thought it was a joke when I told her I had to go away. At first she didn’t understand the story of a real family that was reclaiming me, and I understood less than she did, even when I heard the story told in my own voice just as I had learned it. I had to explain from the beginning, and Pat suddenly began sobbing, sobs that shook her whole body. Then I was really scared: I understood from her reaction that something serious was about to happen to me: she never cried.
“Don’t be scared, your parents, I mean the ones here, won’t allow it. Your father’s a carabiniere, he’ll find a way,” she tried to console me after she recovered herself.
“He keeps saying he can’t stop it.”
“Your mother will be devastated.”
“She hasn’t been well for a while, maybe since she found out she can’t keep me. Or maybe she decided to send me away because she’s sick, and doesn’t want me to know about it. I can’t believe I have a family I’ve never seen and now suddenly they want me back.”
“If I look at you, though, you don’t look like either of your parents. Not the ones we know.”
The idea came to me at night, I reported it to Patrizia in the morning under her umbrella. We perfected it in the smallest details, we were excited about our plan. After lunch I hurried to her house, without even asking permission from my mother, who was in her room resting. In those days she would have let me go anyway, with a weary yes, preoccupied with other things.
Pat opened the door with her head down, leaning against the frame. With a rude foot she pushed away the cat who was swishing his tail around her legs. I no longer wanted to go in. She took me by the hand and led me to the no that her mother was bound to give me. We girls had thought that the next day we’d return from the beach together, and I would stay hidden as long as necessary, even a month or two. If I disappeared, maybe all those parents would try harder to find a solution for me. I would even call my house—just once, though, and for a few seconds, as in a film—to reassure them and dictate my conditions.
“I won’t go there. Either I come home to you or I’m going to run off into the world.”
Pat’s mamma hugged me tight, with her usual affection and a new embarrassment. She cleared off
the couch and sat me down next to her. She even pushed away the cat: it wasn’t his moment.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “You know how much I care about you. But it’s impossible.”
9.
You weren’t happy in the city?” Vincenzo asked me point-blank.
We were in the building’s basement garage. In a shapeless heap against the walls were broken baskets, cartons corrugated by the dampness, a mattress full of holes with tufts of wool sticking out. A headless doll in a corner. In the small central area we kids were peeling tomatoes for sauce and cutting them up into pieces. I was the slowest.
“The little lady’s never done it before,” one brother had already mocked me, in a falsetto voice.
The baby stuck an arm in the bucket of peels and brought it to his mouth. The mother wasn’t there just then: she’d gone to get something.
“So? Why’d you come back here?” Vincenzo persisted, pointing around with a red gesture.
“It wasn’t my decision. My mother said I was grown up and my real parents wanted me back.”
Adriana listened attentively with her eyes on me: she didn’t have to look at her hands or at the knife she was using.
“Yeah, really! Get that out of your head, no one here ever dreamed of you,” said Sergio, the cruelest. “Hey, Ma,” he yelled outside, “for real you took back this moron?”
Vincenzo gave him a shove with his arm, and the other, laughing scornfully, fell off the overturned wooden crate he was sitting on. With one foot he knocked over a half-full container and some of the peeled tomatoes ended up on the concrete floor, in the dust. Without thinking, I was about to throw them in with the garbage, but Adriana took them away from me just in time, with a quick, adult move. She washed them and squeezed them before putting them back in the pot. She turned to stare at me in silence, had I understood? One mustn’t waste anything. I nodded.