A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  We opened the garage with the key that was always left behind a brick and got rid of everything.

  “Don’t eat too much,” I said on the stairs. “I have something good for you, later.”

  Upstairs, the family didn’t seem to have suffered from my absence. Only Giuseppe pulled away from his mother’s breast, losing his balance as he leaned toward me. I picked him up and he stuck a sticky, sweetish hand in my mouth.

  “The little lady ate fish,” Sergio pronounced quickly when I wasn’t hungry at supper. “Raw fish,” he added, in order not to leave doubts.

  Vincenzo wasn’t there. After dinner and our tasks, Adriana and I went downstairs with an excuse that wasn’t needed. She had hidden some forks in her clothes; and, sitting on an overturned basket, she tasted her first eggplant parmigiana: she ate all of it, understanding that I was giving up my share. The burp that escaped her afterward sounded like forgiveness for my two days of absence.

  The next morning we had to take care of the baby: the mother was visiting someone in the countryside, stocking up on fruit for jams. We were rolling him back and forth between us on the bed—he was our doll, in a way—when he suddenly burst into tears, his body contracting into itself.

  “Oh goodness, did something stick him?” I asked, frightened.

  “No no, his stomach hurts, he’s writhing,” Adriana answered, trying to pick him up.

  He calmed down after discharging a smelly liquid that dripped along his back to his neck. Adriana knew what to do: she took off his clothes in the bathtub and he stayed there on all fours, a pathetic defenseless puppy on the white, calcium-encrusted bottom. I couldn’t touch him in that condition—I was disgusted in spite of myself—but she didn’t need help, she washed him methodically, rubbing off the soft, foamy feces with her bare hands. She dressed him just in time for a second discharge that got everything dirty again and then again, until we had nothing else to put on him. So she wrapped him in a towel and held him as he howled, while she massaged his colicky stomach.

  “It’ll pass, it’ll pass,” she repeated in his ear, and to me, who was still in a daze, “Make him some tea and squeeze a lot of lemon into it,” but I couldn’t find anything in the kitchen and in my rush spilled water on the floor.

  “Hold him a moment, I’ll take care of it,” but Giuseppe yelled loudly and wouldn’t be separated from his more capable sister. “Go ask the lady downstairs.” Adriana gave up.

  The lady downstairs must have noted my desperate face and taken pity on me; she made the tea at her house. She came up with me to see and went back to get some old clothes of her children’s. We put just a shirt on him; from time to time his intestine emptied again, though less violently. Now I could get near him; I dried his sweaty hair with a rag and finally he left Adriana for me.

  The neighbor came back at noon, with a bowl of cream of rice for him. I fed him, and after a few spoonfuls he fell asleep in my arms.

  “Don’t you want to put him in the cradle?” Adriana asked, but it seemed to me that he was owed a sort of reparation, after what he’d suffered.

  The muscles I was using to hold him went to sleep, like him, and when I moved a little they returned to feeling with a tingling sensation. I don’t think I’d ever felt the pleasure of such intimacy with any creature.

  When the mother returned she scolded us for some jobs we were supposed to do and hadn’t, and for the floor that was still a little sticky in some places where Giuseppe had let go.

  Later Adriana and I peeled peaches that would be preserved in syrup for the winter. She ate a lot of them, stealthily, so as not to be seen by the one who had brought them from the countryside. Dealing with the baby’s diarrhea, we hadn’t had lunch.

  “Kids his age are usually walking already—he’s still crawling, and he doesn’t even say mamma,” I observed, pointing to our brother, on all fours on the floor.

  “Yeah, Giuseppe’s not normal, hadn’t you noticed? He’s retarded,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  I stood with my knife raised, and the fruit fell out of my hand. Adriana’s sudden, spontaneous summaries could be like thunderbolts. I went over to the baby crawling around the house; I picked him up off the tiles and held him in my arms for a moment, talking to him. From then on I saw him with different eyes, as his difference required.

  I’ve never known exactly what he had, or what he lacked. Just a few years ago a doctor read me an abstruse diagnosis.

  “Was he born with it?” I asked.

  He considered me from head to toe, I think, with my proper outfit, my pleasing appearance.

  “In part, yes. But other factors worked against him . . . environmental, let’s say. As a child he must have suffered some form of deprivation.”

  He kept looking at me from behind the table, hands resting on the clinical chart. Maybe he was measuring the divide between my brother and me, and couldn’t make sense of presumed “environmental factors.” Or maybe that’s my imagination.

  In elementary school Giuseppe was one of the first children to have a teacher’s aide, but there was a different person every year, and every June the bond was broken. I saw him leave a tear in the palm of his teacher Mimma’s hand as a souvenir. He’d produced a great number of drawings since he was small, and drawing was his main activity in school. Hands were his favorite subject: he drew his classmates in the act of writing, paying particular attention to the fingers; the rest was just sketched, the head an oval with almost no distinctive features.

  He never learned to defend himself, and if he happened into the middle of a scuffle by mistake he’d stand there, innocent and unmoving, exposed to accidental blows. No one ever hit him intentionally. One morning when I went to pick him up at school he had a cut on his cheekbone. The teacher explained that he’d been punched by a child who wasn’t aiming at him. Giuseppe had grabbed the hand, opened it, and observed it for a long time, as if in search of the nexus between its beauty and the pain it had given him. The classmate had stood still, letting himself be studied.

  17.

  The bell rang. In the corridor the other students kept a distance that defined me as an outsider. Pasted to the desk where I was about to sit was an invisible label with the nickname people used in the town after I came back to the family. I was the arminuta, the one who was returned. I still knew hardly anybody. On the other hand, they knew more about me than I did: they’d heard the adults’ gossip.

  When she was a baby a distant relative wanted her for a daughter. But now she got to be a young lady why was she returned here to these losers? Did the woman who raised her die?

  The desk next to mine remained empty, no one took it. The literature teacher introduced me as a child who’d been born there in the town but had grown up in the city and now had come back—I don’t know who had told her.

  “She’ll be in the third year of middle school with you,” Signora Perilli announced amid whispers and giggles. She asked a girl with crooked teeth to sit next to me; the girl obeyed, grumbling and scraping her chair noisily. “It will be good for you,” the teacher added, when the surly girl finished settling herself and picking up the books she had dropped. “You’ll be forced to speak some Italian.” She was talking to her but looking at my face to see the effect of this first assignment she was giving me. Then she asked each of us how we had spent the vacation.

  “I came here,” I said softly when it was my turn. I left silent the moments she allowed me for continuing, and she didn’t insist with questions. She had small, very blue eyes, and eyebrows so curved that they sketched almost perfect circles. From where I sat, in front and in the middle, I could see her clearly and smell her perfume. The slow flight of hands that accompanied her words through the air began to draw me in. During the second hour I noticed her legs, thickened by bandages that wrapped them under elastic stockings. She was very close, she placed her fingertips on my desk.

  “I just
had an operation on my veins,” she answered my eyes alone.

  With a start I raised my eyes as high as I dared, the teacher was right there. I paused at her jeweled rings, the mysterious lights in the secret depths of the colored gems.

  “The blue is sapphire,” she said, “and the red ruby. In geography we’ll study the countries that produce these marvels.” Then to the whole class: “Now we’ll begin with a review of grammar. Starting today keep in mind that this year you’ll take the exam for your middle-school diploma.” She picked up a hairpin that had fallen out of her hair onto my notebook and returned to her desk.

  She gave us some words to analyze, I answered the questions directed to the others, in a very low voice. She noticed and read my precision on my lips.

  “What is armando, arming?” she asked.

  “My uncle,” some witty boy guessed.

  “Very good, proper name of a person,” she congratulated him, shaking her head slightly.

  “And present gerund of the verb armare”: it came out of me a little louder.

  “The arminuta knows everything,” Armando’s nephew said, laughing.

  “Yes, unlike you she has studied her verbs,” Signora Perilli concluded curtly, shutting him up.

  At recess Adriana appeared fearlessly at the door of the classroom. She had crossed the yard that separated the elementary school from the middle school and come to see how I was. Some buttons were missing from her blue smock and the hem had come unstitched and was hanging down. Any other child of ten would have appeared pathetic, so thin, hair greasy, in the midst of those bigger kids, immediately ready to make fun of her.

  “What are you doing here?” the teacher asked, getting up in some alarm.

  “I wanted to see if my sister’s all right. She’s from the city.”

  “Does your teacher know you left?”

  “I told her, but maybe she didn’t hear because the boys were making a racket.”

  “Then she’ll be worried about you. I’ll call a janitor who can take you back to your class.”

  “I can get back to the class by myself, I know the way. But first I’d like to find out if everything’s O.K. for her here,” and she pointed to me.

  I had remained sitting in my place, paralyzed by shame. Red in the face I stared stubbornly at the desk, as if Adriana had nothing to do with me. I would have liked to kill her and at the same time I envied her that natural and bold unselfconsciousness.

  Having been reassured by the teacher on my account, she raised her voice to arrange to meet me after school and then she left.

  My classmates were all standing, scattered in small groups around the classroom. They were eating, talking and laughing—at me, I imagined. Adriana’s visit made me an even easier target, or maybe I was exaggerating their interest.

  I hadn’t brought a snack, I wasn’t used to making something for myself. From her desk the teacher observed me now and then, discreetly, paging through a book. In spite of her bandaged legs, at a certain point she got up almost suddenly.

  “Eat this, at least. I always have some in my bag, for anyone who forgets to bring something,” and she put a cookie on my desk. She moved away to an argument that was threatening to degenerate. After a few minutes she stopped again, on the way back to her desk. Recess was almost over. She asked me about Vincenzo, who had been a student of hers. I didn’t know what to say, he hadn’t been home for several days and no one in the family seemed to notice. Not even Adriana had a precise idea of where he was. And I, too, was beginning to forget about him a little.

  “He works, but not all the time,” I said.

  The bell sounded and the others took their seats, with the usual scraping of the chairs’ metal feet.

  “What work?”

  “Whatever turns up,” and I saw him again one muggy afternoon splitting wood for a neighbor who was stockpiling it for the winter. I’d gone down to get something in the garage and was captivated as, without his knowing, I watched him, absorbed by the effort, every blow of the axe accompanied by guttural sounds. In the rotations of his upper body the muscles shone in the still crude light of day, a stream of sweat descended along his spine and wet his shorts.

  “Too bad about school.”

  “What?”

  “Too bad he left school,” Signora Perilli repeated.

  “He’s a delinquent!” A voice from the back was raised.

  She reached the boy who had overheard our brief conversation.

  “I’ve also been told that you’re a delinquent,” she provoked him. “Should I believe it?”

  On the way out I wanted to ignore Adriana, but it was impossible. She was waiting for me at the gate, joyful and skipping.

  “You’re a genius of verbs, the middle-school teachers are all talking just about you.”

  I kept going in silence. She always knew everything, almost before it happened, even today I can’t explain it. She was always in the right place, hidden by a door, a corner, a tree, with her prodigious ear. She lost some of that ability as she grew up.

  She was walking a few steps behind me, maybe humiliated by my sullen expression.

  “What did I do to you?” she protested in front of the post office. The suspicion that she’d made me uneasy with her incursion into my classroom didn’t even cross her mind. I decided to wait for her only when two boys from my class came up alongside her: I was the older sister and had to protect her.

  “What are your parents, rabbits? Look at how many you are—six, seven now with the arminuta?” the bigger one teased her.

  “At least our mother makes children with her husband, yours gives it to anyone who asks,” Adriana replied promptly, as she took off. Just touching my arm she advised me to run, too, and so we escaped, aided by the element of surprise and our lightness. They didn’t catch us, and when we felt safe we doubled over with laughter thinking about the fat-face who had gone pale at the insult.

  “But what you said to him—what does it mean exactly?” I asked. “I didn’t really understand.”

  “If you want to stay, you’d better learn the right verbs for around here, too.”

  18.

  On an afternoon in October, after days of absence, Vincenzo returned, his face changed, with the look of someone who had passed a limit. He was wearing new clothes, and his hair, freshly barbered, exposed even more of the fish bone on his temple. He had brought a prosciutto, and he sat it down gently on a kitchen chair, like an important guest. With that surprise maybe he expected that no one would say anything about yet another of his flights. All eyes were fixed on the salted thigh, the bone sticking out of the dried meat. The father wasn’t there, he hadn’t come back from the factory.

  “Shall we start now?” Sergio asked in that silence.

  “No, we’ll wait till it’s time to eat,” his brother answered brusquely.

  He sent Adriana and me to the bakery, for a loaf of that day’s bread. The mamma usually bought day-old bread, because it was cheaper.

  The boys didn’t dare leave, they stayed there, enduring, minute by minute, the long, nervous wait for dinner. Resting against the back of the chair, the prosciutto stared at us impassively. From time to time Vincenzo looked furtively at my body and at my face, doubtful about the origin of his gift to the family. Giuseppe crawled around the feet of the chair: even he felt all that attention focused on it.

  “In the meantime let’s cut it, why not?” Sergio said impatiently.

  “No, he has to see it whole,” Vincenzo replied fiercely, referring to his father, who was late.

  Finally he arrived, on his pants splotches of unbaked brick, his fingers abraded and whitened.

  “Your son came home with that,” his wife said pointing with her chin. “Wash up, we’re eating.”

  He gave a distracted glance at the dinner.

  “Where’d he steal it?” he aske
d, as if Vincenzo weren’t a few feet away, fists clenched, jaw grinding.

  The father bumped into the chair as he was passing by to go and wash, and the prosciutto fell, with a soft thud. Sergio was quick to pick it up and put it on the table; he got a knife, the time had come. Vincenzo took the knife away from him, and headed toward the bathroom door.

  “I’m working for a butcher down in the city, and the boss wanted to give me a bonus for my services, besides the money due,” he said to his father as he was coming out of the bathroom, his hands wet. He pointed to the prosciutto with the knife blade and then brought it to his neck for a moment. “You talk shit because all you’re good for is buying your children day-old bread from the baker,” he hissed, before leaving him there, wordless.

  He sharpened the knife against another blade and began cutting furiously. He tossed the slices onto a plate that Adriana held, shifting it this way and that so that he wouldn’t miss the target, but her brothers’ hands reached out to grab them almost in midair. I observed Vincenzo’s skill in separating the skin from the fat with a blade so unsuited and felt guilty for my suspicions, like the father’s. Maybe he really wanted to try to learn the job, and maybe the other time it wasn’t a lie, either, that the Gypsies had paid him in gold. The town gossip might be baseless, too.

  “Stop it, that’s not the right way,” he said to his brothers. “You have to eat it with bread, and you two aren’t the only mouths.”

  At a nod from him the mamma understood that she should cut the bread. Adriana and I made sandwiches and passed them around several times, three or four each, but the first went to the father, who accepted it without embarrassment. Giuseppe sucked on a slice of prosciutto seasoned with the snot that dripped from his nose, until I saw him and cleaned it off. Adriana and I served ourselves last, along with Vincenzo. He had fed the entire family. He sat beside us and we ate in silence, while the others, now content, left the kitchen one by one.