A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  That night a man came to invite us to the country the following day, Sunday. It was already late, and he sat with our father at the kitchen table. He looked like a pirate, because of a black patch over his right eye, held on by a string that circled his head, which was almost bald, except for some curly gray tufts on his neck. In one corner of his mouth he balanced the butt of an old cigar, the tip blackened by previous smokes. He never took it out, so when he spoke he twisted his jaw to that side. I was curious about him and a little frightened by his appearance.

  “At this hour your wife is already in bed,” I heard him say. “She still hasn’t recovered from the tragedy, of course. Tomorrow, you’ll see, some fresh air will help and then there’s Nonna Carmela who wants to see her again, she’s always thinking of her goddaughter. She gave me this for her, you stick it under the mattress, where she puts her head.”

  I only glimpsed the object, which looked like something wrapped in fabric. Our father put it in his pocket and got up to get a bottle of wine; Adriana and I couldn’t reach the cupboard where it was kept.

  “And whose child are you?” the pirate asked me pointblank when he noticed that I was new there.

  “She’s my sister,” Adriana immediately broke in. “They gave her to a cousin, when she was a baby. Now we’ve taken her back.”

  “I’d heard that fact. So tomorrow you’ll come, too, at my house we have everything,” he encouraged me, examining me with his single eye.

  Later, from the top bunk, Adriana told me the story of the man with the eye patch. He was a godfather of ours, who lived in a place where all the land was farmed. When he was a boy a rock tossed up at full speed by the tire of a maneuvering tractor had hit him in the right eye, blinding him. Because he always had the cigar stub in his mouth he was known to everyone as Half-Cigar, but you got in trouble if he heard it.

  “What’s his real name?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember, but anyway in the country you have to call all the grown-up men uncle even if they’re nothing to you, that’s the custom.”

  “What did he give him for her?” And I leaned out to point to the parents’ room.

  “I don’t know, maybe a talisman. His grandmother is really old and she’s a folk healer. People go there to get advice and medicines. When I had whooping cough she sent me a syrup that was really disgusting, I kept spitting it out. And for worms she uses wood, oh Lord how bitter it is!”

  I discovered only years later that Adriana’s “wood” was wild wormwood, whose curative properties were known to the country healer.

  We left the next morning, in the slightly uncooperative car. The brothers didn’t come: You always have to work in the country, they said, and they didn’t feel like it. Adriana didn’t usually get carsick, and yet she began to complain of nausea as soon as we left the town, maybe she had drunk some milk right at the last moment. We stopped just in time at the bend beyond the dredge, and she threw up her breakfast on the edge of the field that had drained Vincenzo’s blood. There it was, the fence that had ended his flight.

  I stood next to my sister while she was throwing up. The mother didn’t get out, instead she closed the window and turned in the other direction with her hands over her face. From the movements of her shoulders in the car I could see that she was sobbing.

  26.

  At the farmhouse we were greeted by the scent of flowering acacia and a numerous family, of several generations. They were all in the farmyard, engaged in various activities. Half-Cigar was sharpening a scythe, rhythmically pounding the edge of the blade with a big hammer. He seemed really pleased to see us. Maybe he had talked about me; no one was surprised by my presence, only they looked at me with curiosity, especially the children. Two boys were taking the sheep to pasture, but they sent them on ahead with shouts and whistles and stopped to greet us. The wife left a bucket of grain for the chickens and went inside to get something for us to drink. The men had anisette, for us women and children she had a sour-cherry drink bottled the year before.

  “You’ll take some bottles later,” she said, and, more softly, to our mother: “Nonna Carmela is expecting you, you know where she is.”

  She took Giuseppe gently from her arms and pointed with her chin toward an ancient oak beside the house. I followed the mother in that direction, without understanding. A short distance away I saw her and stopped abruptly. She occupied a high chair with a roughly carved back, a sort of rustic outdoor throne. She was wearing a big smock buttoned in the front, the color of the shade that sheltered her. I stood there staring at her, enthralled by her fairy-tale grandeur. The skin of her face, burned by the sun of a hundred summers, blended into the bark of the tree behind her: it had the same immobility, the same texture of cracks. To my eyes both appeared timeless, the old woman and the oak.

  They told me later that she had died once and remained dead for several days, but she couldn’t bear the solitude and had returned.

  “Godmother Carme’ . . . ” the goddaughter called, her voice already breaking.

  “I know it all, my girl, I know it, how you feel,” and she summoned her close, with a very slight gesture of her arm. At every movement I heard creaks, groans, the contractions of rusty joints.

  The mother knelt beside her in tears and placed her head in her lap, her cheek facing up. A broad, ancient palm arrived promptly to cover it.

  “For the illness you have, there’s no medicine I can offer,” she confessed without guilt. She raised a hand for a moment, looking at it in its impotence, then she brought it down to give what she could, a rough caress.

  “Hello,” I said, out of politeness.

  She stared at me, focusing, but her eyes were almost completely covered by the drooping lids, and all I could distinguish was two narrow cracks through which penetrated what she could still know of the world. A small girl came running with a bunch of newly picked herbs.

  “Are they good?” she asked, breathlessly.

  “There’s still the dew on them?”

  Yes, they were damp with dew. So they were good. The great-grandchild put them in a glass on a low table I hadn’t noticed, also in the shade of the oak. On the tabletop were bottles and jars containing strange concoctions and poultices, of all kinds and for all spells. Also an oil cruet and a dish of water, to drive out and cure the evil eye. A small knife with which she drew signs on the body corresponding to the diseased organs, but without cutting.

  Just then a car arrived and two people got out, in search of advice and remedies from Zi’ Carmela.

  The mother rose. The old woman spoke to her.

  “You were born under a bad planet, but this one will bring you success,” she said, shaking a finger at me.

  Then she received clients for hours, sometimes a line formed, there in the farmyard. They were taking advantage of the waning moon, the most propitious phase for reducing all evils, Half-Cigar’s wife explained to me.

  It wasn’t true that we had to work that day, we had only to pick favas in a field and eat them at lunch. They gave us baskets and we went; Giuseppe stayed in the house with a little girl who adored him. We were accompanied by a clamor of birds, swallows darting incessantly over our heads. They were carrying insects to the newborns waiting in nests attached to the beams of the barn. We skirted a field of barley, with its sharp hairy spikes. As I passed I grazed blades of grass limp in the insistent sun; its rays dazed me, after all that winter. There was the garden, with straight, parallel furrows, and in the hollows salad heads at regular intervals; and the plot set aside for tomatoes, the plants still young and fragile.

  We reached the favas. I picked the first pod so clumsily that I bent the thin stalk to the ground. I looked at it, mortified.

  “Come here, I’ll show you how to do it,” the mother said. “Hold it here at the top with one hand and pick with the other.”

  I stayed beside her, we used the same basket. The
others were a little farther on.

  “Try them, they’re good,” and she filled my fist with beans. They tasted of green, of morning sap, little creatures that you were almost sorry to crush between your teeth.

  We kept on with our harvest. Here and there amid the leaves were lumps of whitish foam. It was the spit of the cuckoo, she explained, and Godmother Carmela used it sometimes in her potions. Only recently I happened to read that it’s produced by the larva of the spittlebug, and the fable dissolved.

  “Everything here is so well tended, so orderly,” I said with a sigh. “I wish my life were like this field”: the words slipped out.

  Maybe the place invited intimacy, maybe it was the influence of the healer.

  The mother didn’t answer, but she was listening.

  “How old was I when you gave me to your cousin?” I asked softly, wearily but without anger.

  “You were six months old, I was weaning you. After she brought the traditional gift of money, which is supposed to encourage sleep, Adalgisa returned every week, she always wanted to take you back to her house.”

  “Why?”

  “For years she’d been trying to have children and couldn’t.”

  Nearby the others were picking and eating, at times the squealing voice of Adriana reached us, followed by laughter.

  At first my mother refused, but then she got pregnant with her fifth child and my father lost his job. They had talked one night, shut in their room, while I was sleeping unaware in the cradle and my brothers were sleeping, too, in the other room. They had given in.

  The cousin wanted me specifically, small and a girl; otherwise love wouldn’t develop. She took me before I could understand.

  “She didn’t take anything with her from our house, she bought everything new. I kept your things for the child in my womb, but after twenty days I lost it. I bled and nearly died.”

  “You couldn’t come and take me back?” I asked weakly.

  “Adalgisa wouldn’t give you back, she was already raising you, as she said.”

  I sat on the ground, with my chin on my knees. My eyes were burning with the effort to hold back tears. She remained standing, with the full basket hanging on her arm. It must have been midday, she was sweating in silence. She couldn’t take that one step that separated us from consolation.

  From the farmyard they called us for lunch. We came in from the field, all heading in the same direction on the path that separated the crops. Free of the danger of our feet, the plants became neighbors.

  “Why such serious faces?” Adriana asked, all cheerful.

  A long table awaited us, set under an awning. And warm bread to eat with oil and raw favas; cooked favas with new onions, pecorino cheese, prosciutto from a pig sacrificed the year before. On a grill sheltered from the wind, lamb was already cooking on skewers. My father talked to Half-Cigar, they drank wine from the previous harvest, praising its strength and color. Maybe I had never seen him laugh so much: only then did I notice his missing teeth.

  The old woman didn’t move from the shade of the oak; they brought her some food there, though she didn’t eat much now, and no meat. During our long lunch she continued to receive people, healing them with poultices and ancient, secret words.

  She died at a hundred and nine, sitting in her usual place. A sort of flame rose from her last breath that instantly dried the foliage of the tree, leaf by leaf. That was how they realized almost immediately that she was no longer there. Three days after the funeral, the monumental trunk fell to the ground, with a nighttime crash that woke the entire district. On the right side, though, without hitting the house. For years it provided wood for Half-Cigar’s family to burn, and, who knows, maybe it still burns during their winters.

  27.

  We were playing in the big square, around noon. Ernesto’s son came running to tell me that at four in the afternoon someone would telephone me at the wine shop. He hadn’t spoken to the person in question and didn’t know who it was. I immediately began to imagine the person in question, and that took away my appetite for lunch, beans with potatoes.

  That morning I had been at school with my mother, to collect my middle-school diploma. As always since Vincenzo’s death, she was dressed in black, in a shapeless skirt and a shirt faded from washings. Among the results posted in the corridor I had read her my “EXCELLENT” and she was utterly matter-of-fact. She thought everything came easily to me, she didn’t know how I had suffered over the Latin test, with that pair of auts so far apart as to blind me to the obviousness of the meaning. In the second hour the teacher, passing by the desk, had twice formed her lips into an “or,” and the tangled skein of the translation had immediately been freed from its spell.

  The moment we entered the classroom where the diplomas would be handed out, I felt my mother’s hand cross my back and stop decisively on my shoulder blade. I’d sunk my head down between my shoulders, like a dog fearful and pleased by the first caress after long neglect. But I escaped quickly, with an abrupt movement, and pulled slightly away. I was ashamed of her, of her cracked fingers, the faded mourning, the ignorance that slipped out at every word. I never stopped being ashamed of her language, which, when she tried to speak properly, became a ridiculous dialect.

  The public phone booth was at the back of Ernesto’s shop, in the sun. A stale smell of cheap wine was strong there, along with the blurred conversations of the old men who were drinking it even at that hour, in that heat. I arrived early, and waited for the call sitting on an old stool that swayed every time I moved. I jumped up at the first ring. Ernesto answered and handed me the line. I was afraid to pick up the receiver and hear her again, after all that time. I closed and immediately reopened the door of the booth, I was suffocating. I delayed a few more seconds, thinking that I had to hurry, or she would hang up, maybe forever. I said hello and breathed into the little holes of the receiver.

  I imagined that she would be moved, but no, she wasn’t. She greeted my ear and asked how I was, with only a slight hesitation.

  “How are you?”

  “Thank God. But tell me about you, instead.”

  She quickly broke the silence that followed.

  “I hear that you’re the best in your school, I expected it.”

  Her capacity for getting information at a distance was surprising. In the classroom just a few hours earlier, at the end of the brief ceremony at which the diplomas were handed out, Signora Perilli had spoken to my mother.

  “Your daughter was the best, she has a real talent for studying. And now you mustn’t waste it, we already discussed it, remember?” she had asked, staring at her. “Here are the names of three high schools in the city. Consider them and then let me know where you’re thinking of enrolling her. If it’s all right with you I’d like to stay informed about her academic progress,” she had concluded, handing my mother a sheet of paper.

  For me, on the other hand, she carried books for summer reading in her bag. Finally she had held my face in her hands like something precious and kissed my forehead. One of her rings got tangled in a lock of hair and when she managed to free it a hair remained twisted around the amethyst from Brazil. I said nothing, and so a tiny part of me would stay with her a little longer.

  At the door my mother had had a second thought and she turned back.

  “I didn’t go to school, but I’m not stupid, professor. I understood on my own that she has a brain for studying.” She touched my head as she spoke. “I’ll see how I can arrange things and I’ll have her go on.”

  The voice in the receiver was a little different from the last time, fuller and rounder, even after it had traveled all those kilometers of cables. It didn’t sound sad, nor was there any hint of illness. For an instant I believed that she was well and ready to take me back. Was that why she was calling? A blade of anguish unexpectedly pierced my throat at the prospect of what was, for me, more desira
ble. I no longer knew what I desired. It was only a moment of confusion; meanwhile the other continued, calmly.

  “Maybe your mother already told you that we want to send you to a good high school—you deserve it.”

  It was chilling the way the subject of that sentence came to her so spontaneously, as if she, too, were not my mother but a wealthy old aunt willing to pay for my future.

  “So I’ll come home? In the town there’s no high school,” I ventured after a pause.

  “Actually I thought of settling you at the Ursulines, it’s a very good girls’ boarding school. I would take care of the expenses.”

  “Forget boarding school. I’d rather not go to school anymore,” I replied curtly.

  “Let’s see if we can find another solution, then, maybe a reliable family would take you as a boarder.”

  “But why can’t I come home with you? What did I do to you?” I almost shouted.

  “Nothing, I can’t explain now. But it’s very important to me that you continue your studies.”

  A boy came over to the booth and walked back and forth impatiently. I closed the door suddenly, pulling on the vertical handle.

  “What if Patrizia’s parents would take me?” I challenged her.

  “They don’t seem to me like the right family. But don’t worry, we have plenty of time to get organized.”

  A sound in the background, as of a chair moved. Then a male voice that said something. But I wouldn’t have been able to swear to it, there was occasional interference on the line.