A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  I peeled Giuseppe’s orange, starting from his bite mark, and gave him a section. He blinked and twisted his lips because of the bitterness of the juice, then he got used to it, tasting the sweetness, too, and wanted more. Adriana opened a can of meat and we ate it directly from the tin, taking turns fishing out forkfuls. Afterward she took the baby down to the widow’s and I was alone. No sound came from the parents’ bedroom.

  There was no homework that afternoon, and I wandered from one part of the house to another, bored and restless. The color of all that fruit on the table. My seaside mother was obsessed with vitamin C, when I had a dance class she always gave me two peeled oranges to eat on the way, in the car. They’re good for you before physical activity, she said. I went straight to the storeroom, gripped by a thought. I found the bag of mixed-up shoes I’d brought with me in August, and rummaged through it. My fingers picked out by memory the ballet slippers at the bottom, and in the kitchen I put them on under my checked skirt. The silk ribbons were a little dirty and frayed, my big toes hurt immediately, as they always did after the summer break. On my legs a lozenge of cold light from the window. I touched my instep, the unpracticed muscles of my calf. They were still there. Resting my hand lightly on the back of a chair I tried to go up on pointe holding fifth position, and I did a battement tendu ending in a plié.

  “I told her you have to go back to the city for high school and those fine things.” It was the mother, from the bedroom doorway. She spread her palm, as if in a gesture of admiration. “This morning Adalgisa was here and talked about you. But your father and I have been thinking about it ever since you came back, that know-it-all Perilli could keep her mouth shut. You’re wasted here, nothing is right. In October next year you’ll have to go to a good school. Adalgisa agrees.”

  It hadn’t been a dream, the perfume that wasn’t the oranges.

  “So they’ll take me back . . . ” I ventured, in a voice that disintegrated in my mouth. I sat down. My legs felt unsteady, not because of the exercise.

  “No, not that, but at the end of the summer she’ll see about finding a place for you to stay in the city.”

  “Why did she come when I wasn’t here? Couldn’t she wait for me?”

  “The lady who brought her was in a hurry. Adalgisa had heard belatedly about my poor son and wanted to visit.”

  “What do you mean belatedly, if my father was at the funeral?”

  “Obviously your uncle didn’t tell her,” she corrected me.

  “Odd. How is she?”

  “Oh, not bad,” she answered quickly, turning three-quarters of the way around. “Did you see how much stuff she had delivered? It’s time to find a place for it.” And she began putting the cans away in a cupboard. So she closed herself up again in her usual reticence on the subject. My questions no longer reached her. She talked to herself in an undertone, a habit she’d developed since she’d begun recovering, slightly, from Vincenzo’s death. She asked the cans what was in them, the shelf how high it was, she’d never reach it, and her poor son where he was at that moment.

  I stayed sitting on the chair, I didn’t help her. A fierce rage was starting to swell in my stomach. At first, it sapped my strength, sucking the blood from every vein. I took off the pointe shoes, struggling like a tired old lady. I stroked the satin for a moment, sniffed inside searching for the carefree odor of the feet of another time. Suddenly, a destructive energy pervaded me, as if I’d had an injection whose effect was instantaneous. I laid my right hand on an orange, the first available object in the world. It was soft in one place, rotten. Savagely I sunk my fingers into the center and past it, toward the peel on the opposite side. My hand trembled, along with the fruit, and its color of distant sunshine. The juice dripped, wasted, along my wrist and wet my shirt. I don’t know how long after that I threw it blindly at the wall: it passed a few centimeters from her head. She didn’t even have time to turn before I shoved the crate, which was still on the table, and the fruit fell and rolled every which way over the floor.

  “Are you crazy? What’s got into you?”

  “I’m not a package, you all have to stop moving me here and there. I want to see my mother, now you tell me where she is and I’ll go by myself.” I stood up, shaking.

  “I don’t know where she is, not in the house where she was before.”

  I moved closer, trapping her between me and the sink. I grabbed her by the black-clothed shoulders and shook her roughly.

  “Then I’ll find a judge and report all of you. I’ll tell him you exchange a daughter like a toy.”

  I ran outside and stayed there; soon darkness fell and chilled me. From the most secluded corner of the big square I saw the windows light up and, behind them, the coming and going of busy female silhouettes. In my eyes they were normal mammas, those who had borne children and kept them. At five in the afternoon they were already absorbed in the preparations for dinner, the long-cooking, elaborate dishes that the season demanded.

  In time I lost that confused idea of normality, too, and today I really don’t know what place a mother is. It’s absent from my life the way good health, shelter, certainty can be absent. It’s an enduring emptiness, which I know but can’t get past. My head whirls if I look inside it. A desolate landscape that keeps you from sleeping at night and constructs nightmares in the little sleep it allows. The only mother I never lost is the one of my fears.

  That night Adriana came to look for me. There had been two flashes of lightning and the obscurity of the big square frightened her. She stood near the doorway and called into the darkness. Resisting her pleas, like a lost cat’s, was painful, but I tried. I glimpsed her, she, too, had come down without a coat, she stamped her feet and rubbed her arms to get warm. Go, go back, I begged her from inside myself. Or, more secretly: wait for me, wait till I’m ready. She heard me, and answered it all, aloud.

  “If you don’t come back, I’ll stay here and get sick because of you. My nose is already running.”

  I waited a little longer before giving in to her. Then I moved under a working light and she saw me. She ran to hug me.

  “That crackbrain . . . ” she said, rubbing my wet back. “When you get it in your head to run away, don’t you think about me?”

  I wasn’t hungry, I went right to bed. Through the closed door I heard the voices in the kitchen. Then someone came into the bedroom and I pretended to be asleep. It was the mother. I recognized her from the way she dragged her slippers. She must have known that I was awake.

  “Put this on your chest, otherwise you’ll get a fever,” and she moved the covers aside.

  She had warmed a brick in the oven and wrapped it in a rag so that it wouldn’t burn me. Well-being slowly spread under the weight, to my heart. It beat more calmly.

  She must have left silently, while I succumbed to a brief, deep sleep. I didn’t get a fever.

  24.

  I realized it was Christmas because of the school vacation and the bells ringing continuously at midnight. I heard them from my bed: we hadn’t gone to Mass and hadn’t had a special Christmas Eve fish dinner. We’d had pane cotto, escarole and beans, but I liked it better than the stewed eel of other years. I’d always found the eel gluey, but had to eat some out of respect for tradition, as my mother wanted.

  In the morning the neighborhood women remembered the recent bereavement and they came over with something for Christmas lunch, brodo di cardo e stracciatella, broth with eggs, baked crepes with meatballs, turkey alla canzanese, in aspic—all the traditional dishes of the area. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the owners of the brick factory decided to pay the workers at least one of the paychecks they were owed, so our father went to the grocery store and bought two boxes of nougat. When we finished the meat we divided them in pieces and nibbled on them, sitting at the table longer than usual. Adriana was the greediest and she chewed noisily. Suddenly she screamed and jumped up, clutching
her jaw. I followed her into the bedroom, where she had run to cry.

  She opened her mouth and with her index finger touched a half-blackened baby molar. A pale splinter was stuck in the central hollow, maybe a sliver of almond, and had reignited the pain she’d been having sporadically for a while. To get out the fragment of candy Adriana dug into the cavity with a toothpick she kept in her pocket, then she held up the tip to my nostrils.

  “What a stink—smell it. That stupid thing won’t come out, you get it, I can’t do it this time.”

  I was afraid I’d hurt her, but she insisted. The tooth seemed attached to the gum just in one place, but it hardly moved, its time hadn’t yet come. I tried to push it with my fingers, nothing happened. Not even with a thread around it: when I tugged I got an empty noose.

  “You need a tool,” she suggested.

  We looked in the kitchen. The others had gone, the table had been cleared, only the pile of dirty dishes awaited us in the sink. I opened some drawers without a definite idea, examining the most disparate objects. Not a knife, it scared me. A fork. We went to the window, toward the winter sun that was already setting. Adriana opened her lower jaw to me. I placed one of the tines where it looked as if the tooth was beginning to detach. She was motionless and quiet, her arms suspended midair. When I inserted the point deeper I looked into her eyes to lighten the pain. Her pupils dilated, nothing else moved. Holding my breath, I used the fork as a lever, suddenly. The tooth shot out into her throat, while a ribbon of blood erupted from her gum. Between coughing and uttering strangled sounds Adriana got rid of the foreign body, spitting it into the palm of my hand; a red wake followed. Then she sucked up the saliva and plugged up her mouth with a rag.

  That night I cried into my pillow. Who would take out her baby teeth when I returned to the city? She heard me and came down. I told her about the most recent encounter of my two mothers, a week before, and about the new move they had decided for me.

  “So now you’ll go away?” Adriana asked, dismayed in the incomplete darkness.

  “Not now, when high school starts, in September.”

  “And isn’t that what you wanted?” she asked after a pause. In her suddenly adult tone a hint of reproach, but slight, affectionate. “They forced you to come back here, and you don’t like it. Ever since you returned you’ve cried every night, you toss under the covers, you don’t sleep. And now you’re not happy to go back to the city?”

  “I’m not sure about anything anymore, it’s all confused. No one tells me where I’m going. My mother will make some arrangement for me, maybe a boarding school.”

  “Is she crazy? In boarding school the nuns are in charge, and they’re terrible, they even check your underpants.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “There was a girl who lived behind the bakery. The stories she tells!”

  “It’s not so much the nuns I’m worried about,” I murmured, touching her hair. “I won’t see you anymore,” and I started sobbing again.

  We were both disconsolate for a while, then she jumped up and sat on the bed.

  “The two of them send you from place to place whenever it occurs to them. That’s enough, you have to rebel,” she urged, shaking me by the shoulder.

  “How?”

  “Right now I don’t know, I have to think about it. Mean­while let’s swear not to ever leave each other. If you go, I’ll come with you.”

  She crossed her index fingers and kissed them on both sides, turning over her hands with a rapid motion. I glimpsed her in the dim light. I swore as she had.

  I hugged her and she immediately fell asleep, her back against my chest, her vertebrae like beads of a rosary. When she wet the bed I stayed still, clinging to the warmth that bathed my stomach. Every so often she jerked, at one point she even laughed, I have no idea what she might have been dreaming. On other nights her body relaxed in sleep calmed me, but not this one. My anxieties weren’t for myself and my uncertain future—I transferred them to Adriana and Giuseppe. So I tamed them. Already, a few minutes after making that promise, I no longer believed that we would stay together. In September I would leave the town alone. How could those two manage without me? She might make it, but the baby? He was still crawling and I had never heard him say mamma or papa. To help him, I uttered slow syllables, exaggerating the movements of my lips, but his attention wandered. He wasn’t ready.

  At the institution where he lives now, there is one aide he talks to, always the same one, and when that aide goes on vacation he’s silent. So they tell me.

  On every visit I bring him pads of paper and pencils of all different degrees of hardness, he looks at them and feels the points with his index finger, one by one.

  “They’re good,” he says. And then, serious: “Here are the works for this month.”

  Usually he draws his hands as they are drawing themselves, the right at work and the left holding the paper steady. But also animals running, dogs, or horses galloping, caught at the moment when no hoof is touching the ground.

  Nevertheless, Giuseppe was the only one of the brothers to finish middle school, and then he spent some years at home, increasingly mute and distant, on the far edges of everything that happened. The place he’s in now is better for him. It was once a convent, and when the weather permits the residents spend many hours of the day in the sunny garden.

  Usually Adriana comes with me, and fills the hour with chatter. When I go by myself we sit silently on a bench for a long time. Sometimes Giuseppe gives me a leaf, if one falls nearby.

  In spring I bring him a basket of strawberries, we wash them in the fountain beside the hedge. Then he eats them, after holding them up to the light, one by one, gripping them by the stem. He observes the tiny variations in shape, in color. I suspect that he’s trying to count all those seeds on the surface.

  25.

  The winter was long and harsh, and at home we were freezing. In the early morning I studied under the covers—the widow on the ground floor had given me a lamp that I kept next to the bed—and my numb fingers struggled to turn the pages. In March I won a school contest with a paper on the European Community, and the teacher gave me a savings book in my name, from the Ministry of Education. Then she turned to the class: “You can be proud of your classmate,” and with the weight of her gaze on the students who usually made fun of me, she insisted. “Only twenty students in Italy received this prize.”

  “And one is the arminuta,” a mocking voice burst out predictably at the back of the room.

  By the end of the school day my sister already knew about it, I had no idea how, and she ran ahead to report the news to the family. She showed the book to our parents, all excited. It was red, and inside, handwritten in the column for deposits, it said thirty thousand lire.

  “Can that be taken out of the bank?” the mother asked, after reading it. She closed the book and put it on the table, but she continued to stare at it.

  “That can’t be touched,” the father said, surprisingly. “It’s hers, she earned it with her head,” he added after a pause.

  “She also got ten in math, she likes doing the problems,” Adriana added, circling them.

  I liked the solid geometry of that year, the complex figures, pyramids superimposed on parallelepipeds, cylinders with cone-shaped holes dug into one base. I really enjoyed calculating surfaces and volumes, adding and subtracting them in search of the total. But then I thought that those excellent grades were propelling me straight toward the tomorrow that the two mothers had planned for me in my absence. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow the direction they’d chosen. The next winter I would be going to a high school in the city, but where would I eat, sleep? Would Patrizia and I be able to meet in the afternoon? Sometimes rather than that uncertainty I thought that I would have preferred to stay where I was, with Adriana and Giuseppe, and the parents who had taken me back, and even Sergio a
nd the other boy.

  The teacher returned my Latin homework with a nine on the back of the sheet of foolscap, and, after a moment of joy, I felt lost as I looked at it lying on the desk. My mother would indeed have been pleased, if she could have seen it. She still worried about me, albeit from a distance, more than she worried about her illness: I refused to stop believing that. And yet, in certain melancholy moods, I felt forgotten. I’d fallen out of her thoughts. There was no longer any reason to exist in the world. I softly repeated the word mamma a hundred times, until it lost all meaning and was only an exercise of the lips. I was an orphan with two living mothers. One had given me up with her milk still on my tongue, the other had given me back at the age of thirteen. I was a child of separations, false or unspoken kinships, distances. I no longer knew who I came from. In my heart I don’t know even now.

  My birthday fell in the spring and no one was aware of it. The parents had forgotten in the time that had passed without me, and Adriana didn’t know the date. If I had told her she would have celebrated in her way, jumping up and down and pulling my ears fourteen times. But I kept it a secret and told myself happy birthday, as soon as midnight struck. In the afternoon I went up to the square and bought a diplomatico in the only pastry shop in the town. I asked for a small candle, the kind you put on a cake. The woman looked at me strangely and wouldn’t let me pay. Thus, I got a present.

  In the garage I found matches right away—I knew where they were. I locked myself in, and, in the faint light that came through a kind of peephole, I took the pastry out of the bag and placed it, with the bag underneath, on the dusty surface of an old credenza. I stuck the candle in the middle of the pastry and lighted the wick. In the almost black half light there were no points of reference and I could believe in a real cake, of normal dimensions. I stood watching the flame, which quivered slightly, maybe because of my breath on it. I wasn’t thinking of anything precise, but, besides my fears, I had inside me a luminous force like that small fire. The liquefied wax began to drip along the solid part, down to the powdered sugar. Then I blew it out with a puff and solitary applause, and I sang “Happy Birthday,” whispering in the darkness. The diplomatico was fresh, flaky, I ate it down to the last crumb. Then I went upstairs.