The mother returned with clean jars to fill. She had already stuck a basil leaf in each one.
“Oh goodness, have you got your period today?” she asked me curtly.
Embarrassed, I answered too softly.
“Well? Do you or not?”
I repeated no with my finger.
“That’s lucky, otherwise it’ll all be spoiled. Certain jobs you can’t do if you have your period.”
The jars of sauce sitting in water in a big pot over a fire in the corner between the building and the dirt embankment had just stopped boiling. Vincenzo appeared with half a bag of corn. He was looking back over his shoulder, and pretended not to hear anyone who asked where he’d gotten it. We cleaned off the beards and the husks; inside, the kernels were tender and sprayed milk if you tested them with a fingernail. I watched the others and imitated them. The edge of a leaf cut my skin, which was still soft.
Vincenzo roasted the corn on the remaining coals, occasionally turning them with his bare hands, a quick touch of his callused fingertips.
“If they get a little charred they’re better,” he explained to me, with a sidelong smile.
He waved the first one in front of Sergio’s face; Sergio thought it was his, but it came to me. I burned myself.
“Serves you right,” Sergio muttered waiting his turn.
“I’ve only had them once, but boiled. They taste much better this way,” I said.
No one heard me. In silence I helped Adriana wash all the containers we’d used for the sauce and put them back in the garage.
“Forget Sergio, he’s mean to everyone.”
“Maybe he’s right, maybe it wasn’t your parents who asked to have me back. Now I’m sure of it, I’m here because my mother is sick. But I bet she’ll come and get me when she’s better.”
10.
Dear Mamma or dear Aunt,
I don’t know what to call you anymore, but I want to come back to you. I don’t like it in the town, and it’s not true that your cousins expected me—in fact they see me as an annoyance, a nuisance for everyone, as well as one more mouth to feed.
You always said that for a girl the most important thing is personal cleanliness, so I’m letting you know that in this house it’s even hard to wash. Two of us share a bed with a mattress that stinks of pee. The boys, who are fifteen and older, sleep in the same room, and you wouldn’t like that. I don’t know what might happen here. You who go to Mass every Sunday and teach catechism in the parish—you can’t leave me in these conditions.
You’re sick and you didn’t want to tell me what’s wrong, but I’m old enough to stay with you and help.
I understand that you took me when I was a baby for my own good, because I was born into a large, poor family. Here nothing has changed. If you care about me please send Uncle to get me, otherwise one of these days I’ll jump out the window.
P.S. I’m sorry I wouldn’t say goodbye to you the morning you made me leave, and thank you for the five thousand lire you put in with the handkerchiefs. What’s left will be enough for the envelope and stamp.
I forgot to sign the letter, which was written on a sheet of paper torn from a lined notebook. I mailed it in the red box next to the door of the tobacco shop and counted the change, just the right amount for two popsicles, mint for me and lemon for Adriana.
“Who did you send it to?” she asked, carefully licking the paper she’d peeled off the frozen surface.
“To my mamma in the city.”
“She’s not a mamma.”
“My aunt, then,” I specified nervously.
“Yeah, she’s a distant cousin of our father. Really the distant cousin is the husband, the one who brought you, the carabiniere. But she has the money, she’s the one who takes care of you.”
“What do you know about it?” The green liquid dripped along the stick, onto my fingers.
“Last night I heard a conversation in our parents’ room. I was hiding in the closet because Sergio wanted to beat me up. It seems that this Adalgisa will also send you to the upper schools, poor you.”
“What else did they say?” I asked, turning the popsicle upside down so that it wouldn’t drip on my hand.
Adriana shook her head and took it away from me; she licked it all and gave it back, offering it to me with a gesture of impatience.
“With the trouble we’re in, they kept saying.”
I sucked what remained without wanting to, putting it all in my mouth for a while, until it was reduced to a ghost of colorless ice.
“Give it to me,” Adriana said, exasperated, and finished it by taking little bites around the wooden stick.
I asked the mailman how long a letter would take to reach the city, doubled the number of days, and conceded one more for writing the answer. Then I began to wait for it, sitting on the wall every morning starting at eleven, while kids played tag or hopscotch in the big square. I swung my legs in the gentle September sun and sometimes I imagined that, any moment, instead of a stamped envelope my uncle the carabiniere, who I’d thought was my father, would arrive. He would take me back in his long gray car and then I would forgive him for everything, for not having opposed my return, for leaving me there on the blacktop.
Or they would both come, she all better, her hair teased by the regular hairdresser, who also cut mine—my bangs had grown down over my eyes—and one of the soft scarves she wore between the seasons wrapped around her neck.
“What are you waiting for, a love letter?” the mailman joked after searching his leather bag in vain and disappointing me.
The delivery truck stopped under the blue sky, in the middle of the afternoon. The driver got out to ask what floor the recipient of the delivery lived on, the name was the mother’s. He began to unload some cartons, while the kids immediately broke off their games to help him carry them up the stairs. We were all curious, and he enjoyed keeping us in suspense.
“Watch it, careful of the corners. Now when I put it together you’ll see what it is,” he repeated to the impatient among us.
“Where do the girls sleep?” he asked, as if following directions learned by heart.
Adriana and I opened the door to the room while looking at each other in disbelief. In a few minutes a bunk bed took shape before our eyes, complete with ladder and new mattresses. The man put it against the wall and arranged a folding screen with three panels around the free sides to separate it from the rest of the room. He went down to get something else; the answer to the letter was not yet complete.
“But who ordered all this stuff? And now who will pay for it?” Adriana was worried, as if waking suddenly from a dream. “Papa already has debts. And where did Mamma go?”
She had disappeared after lunch without a word, the baby in her arms. Maybe she was caught up in conversation at some neighbor’s.
“Our parents didn’t leave us the money,” my sister began to explain to the man, who had carried up some more cartons, with the help of the same swarm of kids. They contained two sets of colored sheets, a wool quilt, a lighter blanket. This all seemed meant for only one of the bunk beds. There were also bars of soap, bottles of my favorite shampoo and anti-lice shampoo—I might need it here. And a sample of my mother’s perfume: she knew that I used to steal a few drops in the morning before going to school.
“The items are already paid for. All I need is the signature of an adult to confirm the delivery.”
Adriana took care of it, imitating the father’s shaky writing. When we were alone in the room she asked to sleep on top, then on the bottom, then again on top. She had taken off her shoes and was trying out the positions, bustling up and down the ladder. We carried the old shapeless wire frame and the stinking mattress to the landing.
“I’m afraid I’ll get the new one wet.”
“She also bought a rubber sheet. You use it.”
“
Who bought—”
The mother returned at that moment, the sleeping baby’s head dangling over her shoulder. She wasn’t surprised by the new thing that Adriana wanted to show her immediately, tugging at her shirt. Irritated by her daughter’s enthusiasm, she looked at the bed and the rest, and then at me, with a sort of dim condescension.
“That finicky aunt of yours sent it to you. Who knows what you told her about us. I talked to her yesterday on the public telephone, Signora Adalgisa had Ernesto in the wine shop call me.”
The privilege of sleeping on mattresses fresh from the factory, enclosed by the screen, backfired on Adriana and me the first night. The boys hid behind that “thingy,” as they called it, and frightened us by jumping out suddenly with a shout. They overturned it again and again, and within a week the fabric stretched between the sides of the panels was torn everywhere. They stuck their heads in the holes and yelled rudely. My sister and I witnessed the ruin of our small separate world: protests were useless to save it, and our parents didn’t intervene. Years as an only child hadn’t taught me to defend myself, and I endured the attacks, impotent and angry. When Sergio passed me, I was surprised that he wasn’t struck down by my silent curses.
Only Vincenzo refrained from insults, and sometimes he shouted at his brothers to stop it, annoyed by their ruckus. After we carried the now useless screen down to the garage he looked at me for a long time, at night and when we woke up, as if he had missed the sight of my body. We still weren’t wearing many clothes, because of the stubborn heat of that weary summer.
The bed so excited Adriana that she couldn’t get to sleep on either the top or the bottom, and we were constantly changing places. At various times during the night she would come and curl up next to me, wherever I was. There was only one rubber sheet, so in a short time Adriana’s involuntary urination soaked both new mattresses.
11.
My seaside mother died on the upper bunk, on one of these nights. If you looked at her she didn’t seem sick, maybe just a little grayer than usual. The hairy mole that extended over her chin like the incarnation of a caterpillar began to fade, slowly. In a few minutes it had turned pale, until it merged with the dark white around it. Air stopped inflating her chest and her gaze was fixed.
The other mother went with me to the funeral. Pooradalgisa pooradalgisa, she repeated, wringing her hands. But then she was expelled: she was wearing nylon stockings full of runs, and she couldn’t be present at the service in that state. I remained alone, only daughter of the deceased. An indistinct group of black figures behind me took part in the ceremony. The gravediggers lowered the coffin into the newly dug hole, the ropes creaking under the weight, rubbing against the corners. I must have gotten too close to the edge of the grave: the grass gave way beneath me and I fell in, on top of her in that wooden box. I lay still, dazed and invisible. The priest gave a monotonous blessing and sprinkled holy water on my body, too. Then came the sound of the shovels, deaf to my cries, as they began to return the earth that had been moved. Finally someone grabbed me forcefully by one arm.
“If you don’t stop screaming like a lunatic I’ll throw you out the window,” Sergio threatened, shaking me in the dark.
I didn’t go back to sleep again. I followed the cold journey of the moon until it was hidden behind the wall.
The nightmare was the culmination of the anguish of my nights. After brief periods of giving into sleep, I would awaken with a jolt, convinced that some disaster was imminent, but what? I groped in those gaps of memory until my mother’s illness returned suddenly to the surface and in the darkness intensified, worsened. During the day I could control it, believe in a cure, a return home afterward. At night she got sicker until she died in a dream.
Later I went down to Adriana, for once. She didn’t wake up, she moved her feet to welcome me into our usual position, but I wanted to rest my head next to hers, on the pillow. I hugged her, to comfort myself. She was so small and bony, she smelled of greasy hair.
By contrast, Lidia’s curls emerged from memory like red flowers between the sheets. She was the younger sister of my carabiniere father, but too young to be called aunt. For several years she had lived with us in my parents’ house, and she appeared in my earliest memories. She had a long, narrow room at the end of the hall, with a view of the waves. In the afternoon I’d hurry to finish my homework and then we’d listen to songs on the radio. She was tormented, thinking of someone she’d lost, and she repeated the choruses of love sadly, with her fist on her asthmatic chest. Her parents had sent her away from their town to her brother’s, to breathe the salt air.
When we were alone Lidia would put on a miniskirt and platform sandals that she kept hidden in the closet and turn the record player up loud. She did the Shake in the dining room, jerking up and down with her eyes closed. Who knows where she’d learned it—she wasn’t allowed to go out after sunset, but sometimes she disobeyed, jumping out a ground-floor window. I wanted her next to me every night: just when I was about to fall asleep I got itches at inaccessible points on my back. Lidia came to scratch me and then she’d stay, sitting on the bed. She counted my vertebrae, I was so thin, and for each one she made up a story. She called the most prominent by name and had them converse like old ladies, touching one and then another.
“They’ll take me,” she said one day, coming home.
That’s how I lost her, to a department store, a few years before I was returned. We had gone shopping early one morning, and while I was trying on a T-shirt with a fish-and-starfish pattern, she had asked a clerk if she could talk to the manager. The manager would be in later, and we waited for her. As soon as she received us in her unadorned office, Lidia took a secretarial diploma out of her purse and asked for a job, any sort of job. She sat across the desk and I stood next to her, and every so often she caressed my arm.
They called her almost immediately for a brief trial. One evening she came home with the uniform quivering in her hands; she would wear it the next day. She tried it on, walking back and forth in the living room. It was blue and white, with starched collar and cuffs. Now, like her brother, she, too, had a uniform. She performed a series of pirouettes to show off the flared skirt, and continued pirouetting through life for years after that. But, of course, I wasn’t there to see any of it.
She advanced quickly from clerk to cashier and after a year was made head of the department. She came home later and later. Then she was transferred to the head office, several hundred kilometers away. She wrote to me sometimes, and I didn’t know what to answer. At school everything’s fine, yes. Patrizia’s my friend as always, of course. In the pool I had learned to do somersaults, but I was still cold. At first she sent postcards of the monuments of the city, then they must have run out. In my notebooks I colored the sun as black as my mood, and the teacher telephoned the house to ask if someone had died. I had an average of ten, the highest mark, on my report card; I filled the time emptied by Lidia with painstaking attention to my assignments.
She returned in August for the holidays, but I was afraid to be happy with her again. We went to our regular beach and she got sunburned in spite of the creams she had bought with her employee discount. To the usual attendants who greeted her she spoke with the false northern accent of émigrés. I was ashamed for her and began to kill my nostalgia.
I saw her only one other time before they decided to give me back. She rang the bell and I opened the door to an unknown woman with dyed and straightened hair. Clinging to her legs was a little girl who wasn’t me.
In the dark with Adriana, I imagined that Lidia would be able to rescue me, maybe take me to live with her for a while, in the north. But she had moved to another city and I no longer knew how to track her down. It was still too soon to imagine a different deliverance.
12.
They turned off the light and jumped into bed. Sergio silenced his brother as I came into the room, but laughter escaped, muffled
by the pillows. Vincenzo had been out since the afternoon and Adriana was still in the other room, with the baby. I undressed in the dark and in that charged silence got between the sheets. My foot touched something warm and furry, alive, which moved and whirred. I heard myself scream and the two boys sneering scornfully, and at the same time felt little pecks on my ankle. I don’t know how I got to the light switch and turned to look at the bed. A pigeon was spinning around, hopping, flapping one wing, spread as if it would be enough to fly. The other hung next to the body, broken. Excrement was on the new sheet. The bird reached the edge of the mattress and fell off, landing on its chest.
The brothers were sitting up, howling with rude laughter; they slapped their thighs and tears rolled down their faces. The animal kept it up, on the floor, trying to lift off. Tired of the spectacle, Sergio picked it up by the healthy wing and threw it out the window. At that moment I was sure that he had broken the other one.
I got too close to him, yelling that he was a monster and scratching his face with all my nails, leaving furrows in his skin that immediately began to bleed. He didn’t defend himself, he didn’t hit me; he laughed again, exaggerating a little to show that I couldn’t hurt him. The other one jumped on the beds like a monkey, imitating the sound of a pigeon.
The father came to see. Even before finding out what had happened he hit them both, just to settle them. By a silent agreement, ever since the boys were grown and his wife was no longer strong enough, he had been the one to give the beatings. She took care of Adriana, with a more or less daily dose.
“It was just a little joke,” Sergio explained, “at night she screams for no reason and wakes us up. So I scared her and made her scream.”
The next day I helped fold the sheets that had already dried.
“Watch out for the bedbugs,” the mother said, chasing away a pretty green one. “I don’t know why they like to get in the middle of the hanging laundry.” She passed naturally from the bugs to her sons. “That second one came out all wrong. The other one every so often runs away, but he’s not too bad.”
A Girl Returned Page 3
