A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  “Who’s there with you, Papa?” I asked, my whole body in a sweat. The boy knocked on the rectangle of glass and tapped his wristwatch several times with his index finger.

  “No, it’s the television,” she said. “By the way, I thought of giving you one, I think you don’t have one there.”

  “Will you two come and bring it?”

  “I can’t, I’ll have it delivered.”

  “Then save your money, I don’t want it. Since you’ve decided that I’ll leave in September, right? And in the summer we’re always out in the street, we won’t watch it.”

  I was hoping to provoke her but she didn’t react. She was in a hurry now, more than the kid who was marching back and forth in a huff outside the phone booth. Again the voice in the background, but I couldn’t understand the words. And then a strange sound. She promised to call me back, and we would also meet, she said. She ended with a hurried goodbye and hung up, without waiting—in vain—for mine. I stood with the sweaty receiver in my hand and an intermittent beep, in my head a flammable rage. I immediately decided not to see her again, and no more “mamma,” even inside I would call her Adalgisa, with all the ice that the name concealed. I truly lost her, and for a few hours I thought I could forget her.

  “Look who it was, the arminuta,” the boy said when I came out. He spat as he looked at me.

  “Take your time on the phone while I go get my brothers. They’ll rip you to pieces,” I threatened through fiercely clenched teeth.

  In the middle of the afternoon I was combing Giuseppe’s hair with my fingers, and he was still and quiet on my bed: he liked that. How could I know the effort she had made not to cry, hearing me after almost a year. Or maybe for a few seconds she had had to cover the mouthpiece with her hand, I knew that gesture. If she still wasn’t able to take me back, there were surely serious reasons that it wasn’t the moment to explain, that’s what she’d said. Basically girls like me couldn’t understand everything. But I was sure that one day I would go home, even if no one ever said anything about it. It would come as a surprise, but a nice one this time.

  She was always thinking about me, she was worried about my future. We would meet. What else was I looking for? I had answered her ungratefully and I didn’t know how to find her to apologize. Some tears fell on Giuseppe’s face, and he opened his eyes.

  I was also sorry about the television. It would be a comfort to Adriana when I had gone to the upper school, as she called it. They had once been given a used one, but after a few months it broke and it wasn’t possible to fix it or buy a new one. It had ended up in the garage shortly before I arrived. That winter we had watched all the episodes of Sandokan on the ground floor, sitting on the widow’s couch. Nibbling on roasted chickpeas with her, we had wept for Marianna. The Pearl of Labuan died in the powerful arms of the Tiger of Malaysia, whom we were mad about. But he had said that no woman would ever again have his love.

  With an outburst of pride I had deprived Adriana of a pastime during my future absence. I reflected on it, a little mortified.

  That day in June, caught between my two mothers. Every so often I think again of the hand of the first that for a few moments rested on my shoulder, at school. I still wonder why she placed it there, a woman so sparing of caresses.

  28.

  A little more than a year had passed, but it was the longest year I had lived, and more than all the others would invade the future. I was too young, and propelled by the current, to see the river I’d been thrown into.

  I went up different stairs with the same suitcase in one hand, the bag with the jumble of shoes in the other. My father drove in circles in search of a parking space, he wasn’t experienced at driving in the city, and had apologized ahead of time, during the drive there, which otherwise passed in silence. He was indecisive at the intersections and other drivers honked repeatedly. Too saddened by my departure, I couldn’t help. With one foot in the car and the other out, I had stood looking for a moment at Giuseppe, who cried and reached out his hands to me, while the mother held him. Go, go, she had said, over his cries, and so we had left each other. Adriana hadn’t wanted to say goodbye, she was furious with me for breaking our vow not to be separated. She had hidden in the garage.

  Somehow, we arrived at the address I had written down. The building was a couple of kilometers from the beach, and a few streets from the high school I would go to. As soon as I got out of the car I looked up at its severe and compact mass, at the light brown stucco. It was on the opposite side of the city from the house I had lived in until the year before. On the third floor a door awaited, slightly open. I stopped for a moment to calm my breath and my heart. I was about to knock when the door opened softly the rest of the way and in the shadowy light of the entry hall a gigantic girl appeared. So she seemed, compared to me. She greeted me with a broad, welcoming Hi, already full of familiarity. Her voice was enchanting: tiny bells rang inside it, fading a few seconds after the words.

  “Come in, my mother will be back in a minute,” she said, taking my bags.

  I followed her into the room we would share. On the bed meant for me were two shoe boxes and new clothes for the school year. They were displayed in a certain order, like gifts for the bride in the days before a wedding. My future textbooks occupied a shelf of the bookcase that Sandra showed me, notebooks were ready on the desk, next to a calculator. Adalgisa had just come by, always generous.

  “Your aunt came with all this stuff for you,” Sandra confirmed.

  She looked at me, her chestnut eyes surprised, maybe at my lack of enthusiasm for the gifts that had preceded me. And yet I needed them, the clothes she saw me in were shabby. But I was tired of receiving goods in that way.

  I observed her as well, from head to toe, discreetly. In spite of her mass she seemed younger than seventeen, with skin as clear as a child’s and the face of an enormous angel.

  Her mother arrived with my father, whom she had met on the stairs. He didn’t remember the last name of the family that was to host me and was wandering from one landing to the next, ringing at the doors. Signora Bice had rescued him from his difficulty and had drawn him on behind her, talking to him in the strong Tuscan accent she’d kept though she was far from her home. She led us into the kitchen and served cookies just taken from the oven, for my father a small glass of vin santo to dip them in.

  “I pick this up when I go to see my other daughter in Florence. Just taste it,” and she waited for the comment after a sip. Then she turned to me, eating a cookie out of politeness, and assessed my appearance. “You’re too skinny, look at us here!” She pointed to herself and her daughter and laughed, shaking her large bosom. Her prominent jaw and jutting lower front teeth gave her the air of a cheerful bulldog.

  Signora Bice had guessed at first glance that the lack I suffered from did not concern food, I’m sure of it. In the years I spent with her she didn’t offer herself as a substitute but confined herself to nourishing me with affection, admiring my commitment to studying, inventing the ritual of a chamomile tea after supper to induce sleep, which was always elusive. It was much more than what had been asked of her.

  In the morning she came to wake us up, and found me with eyes open, often with a book in my hands. “Look at that lazybones,” she said with a nod in the direction of her giant daughter asleep under the covers. We smiled conspiratorially, then she called her.

  I’m still grateful to her, but after I graduated I didn’t go back. I’m not in the habit of returning to those I’ve left.

  That afternoon, before my father departed, I looked among the clothes displayed on the bed for something that Adriana could wear. They were too big for her, except for a hat and a scarf. Don’t be mad at me, Saturday I’ll leave right after school, wait for me in the square at three, I wrote in a note. I gave everything to him to bring to her.

  “If you need to, go ahead and give her a slap, imagine she’s yo
ur daughter,” my father said to the signora, as he headed toward the door. He didn’t know that he should use the formal “you.” In his rough way he was asking her to love me like a mother; today I can believe that.

  “Be careful Saturday when you get the bus to come home, it’s not the only one that leaves from the city. Try to get the right one,” he said, and then, again to the signora: “Maybe it’s better if you can take her to the stop, at least the first time. Also to the school, please, she doesn’t know where it is.”

  He spoke as if I were his. He had never concerned himself with me or the other children, really. Or maybe I just hadn’t seen it. I lowered my head with emotion.

  “Straighten your shoulders, or you’ll be a hunchback.”

  The smack arrived strong and corrective. I remained with the imprint of my father’s heavy palm on my back.

  Later Sandra looked at my bewilderment.

  “I’ll help you unpack your bags,” she offered.

  “Would you mind if I stuck something on the wall?” I asked.

  “No, of course not, here are the thumbtacks.”

  It was a drawing of my sister’s that she had done on one of the rainy days that ended the summer. On the page she and I were holding hands amid flowering grasses. With my free hand I was holding a book that said “HISTORY” on the cover, while she held a sandwich. An edge of mortadella hung out, recognizable by the tiny white circles of fat amid the pink. She loved mortadella. Another difference caught by the pencil: she was smiling, showing some little teeth, but I wasn’t. She’s always been a genius, that Adriana.

  I stared at the sheet of paper above the desk, and next to it I put up a kerchief she used to protect her head from the sun—I’d taken it unbeknownst to her, since she wouldn’t need it anymore that year. Sometimes I’d seen her knotting it quickly behind her neck, when we went to pick fava beans, for instance.

  “This thingy makes me sweat, but without it I get a bloody nose,” she said.

  While I pinned up the corners of the square of material I smelled the odor of Adriana’s hair, and my discomfort diminished a little, like a fever. Then I had the kerchief near me every night, with its faded geometric motifs. Little houses, stylized bushes, baskets pulsed in the dark like phosphorescent figures roused by my eyes. Then I thought of her and the pact I had betrayed. One day I would be redeemed, if I could manage to bring her there with me. I had already estimated the measurements of the room, another bed could fit, and maybe Sandra and her mother and father, whom I had meanwhile met, wouldn’t mind another guest. They’d laugh at Adriana’s lightning-quick remarks, she would amaze them with her too adult common sense.

  I already felt that I had to make up to her for some of the good luck I’d had, compared with her. And yet, of the two of us, I am the one who seems less fit for life.

  What might happen to her while I wasn’t there? My nights were filled by the disasters that could occur—after all, we had already lost a brother, and maybe that house attracted catastrophe. To her I devoted the wakefulness of that first period, but over the years I’ve always found something to agitate me, an excuse not to sleep. I still try different remedies, a new mattress, a drug just issued, a recently perfected technique for relaxation. I know already that I won’t let myself yield to sleep, except for brief intervals. On the pillow every night the same knot of phantoms awaits me, the obscure terrors.

  29.

  I got used to that house, too, and the family. Signor Giorgio, Sandra’s father, was meek and silent. He was the only thin person in the family; by now his wife had given up trying to fatten him. On the other hand she did manage to increase my weight by a few kilos, like a good witch, one who wouldn’t eat me. She served me generous portions and I finished them, embarrassed to leave anything on my plate.

  Signora Bice took me to school the first day, as my father had asked her to. I learned the shortest route: halfway there some caged canaries on a balcony chirped—I would see them every morning.

  “This is fine, thank you,” I said to her when we arrived in sight of the pale yellow building and the groups of shouting boys and girls waiting to enter.

  I went alone toward the open entrance. The lump in my throat of every beginning, of excitement and fear. In my class there was a girl I knew, who had gone to the same pool, years back. I was looking down and hadn’t seen her; she called to me and we sat next to each other. She had recently moved to that neighborhood with her family.

  “Why in the world are you enrolled in this high school, don’t you live on the northern shore?” she asked later.

  I opened my mouth to answer and closed it. I didn’t know what to say, certainly not the truth, and at that moment no credible lie came to my aid.

  “It’s a long story,” I murmured, just before the liberating sound of the bell. I would tell her another time. Meanwhile I would prepare to lie.

  Thus began years of shame. It wouldn’t leave me, like an indelible stain, a birthmark on my cheek. I constructed a plausible story to explain to others, teachers, classmates, the absence of family around me. I repeated that my father the carabiniere had been transferred to Rome and I hadn’t wanted to leave our city. I was staying with a relative and on the weekend I saw my parents, in the capital. The false turned out to be more plausible than what had really happened.

  One afternoon Lorella, my deskmate, called to ask if she could borrow my mathematics notebook.

  “I’ll bring it over, where do you live, exactly?” I asked with excessive haste.

  “No, I’m out with my mother, right in your street, what’s the number?”

  Now I was trapped, I had to tell her the number and floor. Only Signora Bice was home, luckily.

  “A school friend is coming. She thinks you’re my aunt, is that all right?”

  “Of course, but remember to use the informal you,” and she winked, perhaps with compassion. She understood, without need of explanations. She wanted to go to the door. “Come in, my niece is expecting you.”

  She also insisted on taking me to the bus stop, the first Saturday. The ride seemed interminable, and I was scared. Maybe in the town they’d already forgotten me. The time had been too short for attachment, even if we had been capable of it.

  On Monday I had sent a card to my sister asking her to say hello to all the others for me. It would become a habit, I would send one every week, to remind my family that I was there and would come home. For Adriana and Giuseppe I drew hearts and wrote smack. Sometimes the mail was slow to arrive and I preceded it on the Saturday bus.

  That first time I returned the road was blocked because of an accident a few kilometers from the town, and we were stopped for a long time. Surely my sister had gotten tired of waiting, even if she’d come to meet me. When the bus finally passed the “Welcome” sign, I was certain that she wouldn’t be in the square and felt how difficult it would be to go home alone. But there she was, with her fists on her hips, elbows out, and on her face the expression of disappointment I knew. It was a few minutes before four.

  “I can’t wait hours for you. I also have things to do,” she burst out.

  She was really funny, in the still warm air she was wearing the wool hat I had given our father for her. In Adriana’s theatrical language it meant that she had forgiven me the sin of leaving her. We crushed each other in a hug.

  Maybe only she and I had seen in my return to the city a new separation. At home, our mother acted as if I had gone out for five minutes to buy salt at the tobacco shop. But she had kept a plate of pasta from lunch in the oven for me. She warmed it up, while I was in the bathroom. She must have calculated that between school and the bus I hadn’t had time to eat.

  “Here she is again,” Sergio greeted me, with a mean look.

  Nothing was different after a week.

  One Friday in December I had a fever, and on Saturday Signora Bice was adamant, I couldn’t g
o. I telephoned Ernesto’s wine shop to ask him to tell my family, he said all right, but I had no idea if he’d understood, I heard the raised voices of the customers, the clink of the unbreakable glasses. Above all I didn’t want Adriana to wait for me at the bus stop. I counted the days until Christmas vacation and then I crossed them off one by one as they passed.

  When I got back I found her thinner and at war with everyone. She barely nodded even to me when I entered with my bag, and right afterward she went to the widow’s, taking her bad mood down the stairs. Someone else had to tell me what was happening.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked my mother, who was standing at the kitchen table. Next to her, on the floor, a bucket of potatoes to peel.

  “Who, your sister? She’s gone mad, she won’t eat. Only an egg beaten with marsala, early in the morning, but no one can see her, or she’ll leave it. I make it and go back to my room.”

  “Why’s she acting like that?” I asked, eating turnip greens and beans she’d set aside for me. I was sitting opposite her, with the plate on the bare surface of the table.

  “She doesn’t want to stay here anymore, that feral cat. She wants to go to the city with you,” and, incredulous, she moved the knife through the air. “Sometimes she digs in her heels like a mule and won’t go to school, that girl’s not even scared of her father’s beatings.”

  She shook her head, dropping a peel in the shape of a spiral on the floor.

  “I’ve finished, I’ll go down and call her,” I said.

  “See if she’ll talk to you, she pays some attention to you. Your father’s worried, he’s afraid that child will die, too. He comes home every night with a fresh egg, he gets it from someone who works at the brick factory and has some land.”

  I went down to find my sister. She was on the couch and as soon as she heard me she grabbed the first magazine within reach and pretended to be absorbed in reading it. On the low table was a tray of cookies, but it seemed that not even one was gone. The widow tried, my mother had warned her. Adriana was not the type to fall for it.