A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  I sat down next to her, we were at home there. I ate a cookie and then another, hoping it would be contagious. Once the civilities were over—how I had grown and how pretty I’d become—Maria busied herself in the kitchen. She opened the oven, we knew by heart the way the door creaked. The smell of meatloaf reached us. Adriana kept her eyes on the page of the magazine, her neck tense.

  “What’s the story?” I asked, breathing in her ear.

  “A photo romance, can’t you see?” she said, deliberately misunderstanding, in a slightly strident voice that seemed close to dissolving into tears.

  “Not that. You, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, still without turning.

  She crossed her legs and leaned her chest forward slightly to increase the distance from me, letting the magazine slide over in the other direction. Some pages fell closed, and she resumed reading randomly, too eagerly.

  “I hear you don’t eat, you go to school on alternate days. Upstairs they’re worried about you.”

  “Worried, them, come on! They don’t worry even if you die.” And she turned some pages with an impetuousness that almost tore them.

  “Can I help you?”

  She didn’t answer right away. I took her spindly arm with my hand and held it. I couldn’t see her face, but I felt her resistance giving way a little at a time.

  “When it’s time I’ll tell you,” and she closed the magazine suddenly. “Bye, Mar’.” She said goodbye as she rose, and I followed her. Maria came from the kitchen, she looked at me and pressed her lips together in a sign of impotence and apprehension. Adriana was already going up the stairs.

  We had dinner without her, she retreated to the bedroom. Giuseppe was all over me constantly, as soon as I got home. I put him to bed and then went to her. I don’t remember where the other boys spent the night, or the reason. My sister was sitting on the edge of the upper bunk, swinging her legs in the emptiness. She stopped while I climbed the ladder.

  “That jerk Sergio broke it,” she said, seeing that I noticed a missing step. “I don’t want to stay here anymore,” she began calmly, even before I settled myself next to her.

  She started peeling the dark scab of a wound from the back of her left hand.

  “Since you went back to the city, I’ve felt lost here. I’m always thinking about you and Vincenzo,” and she pointed with her chin to the empty bed that no one had had the courage to take away.

  She used her teeth for a second when she couldn’t manage with her nails. Underneath appeared the new skin, bright pink, with the wish to yield to the pressure of the blood that permeated it.

  “You have to let me come where you are, ask that lady who’s so nice,” she added, as if nothing were easier.

  “How do you know she’s nice? Plus there’s no room there, her daughter and I are already crowded,” I said, suddenly harsh.

  “But I don’t take up space. I can sleep with you, head to toe, remember when you came?” she asked, looking at me with the hopeful eyes of a begging child.

  Of course I remembered, and yet I felt a resistance inside, and I didn’t understand where it was coming from. I had often imagined taking her away with me. I leaned my back against the partition behind us, which divided the room from our parents’.

  “Even if they said yes, who would give them the money to pay for your room and board?” and I beat my knuckles softly against the wall.

  “They certainly don’t have it,” Adriana said quickly. And then, in a firm and thoughtful tone: “But there’s someone who does. Adalgisa. You could try.”

  I straightened my back suddenly. “How can you think that? You’re really crazy. I don’t even know where to find her.”

  “All right, then. Here I don’t feel like eating anymore. If I starve to death don’t start crying afterward.” She started swinging her legs again, unhurriedly, staring at the wall opposite. She had an advantage over me, a kind of plan already made in her mind. She played her hand like an adult.

  “Come on, try to be reasonable. She already pays for my studies. What reason would she have to be concerned with you, too? You’re not her daughter,” I said, sweating.

  “Neither are you, for that matter. Adalgisa took you just for a few years and then she sent you back.”

  “Yes, because she was sick and couldn’t take care of me. She wanted to protect me.”

  If Adriana had looked at me, maybe she would have stopped, but her eyes were fixed on that dirty white wall in front of her and didn’t see the desperation.

  “Sick, come on! You still believe in fairy tales. She was pregnant, so she threw up. Is it possible you didn’t think of that?”

  “You’re completely stupid,” I said shaking my head. “She’s sterile, that’s why she adopted me.”

  “Seems to me it’s her husband who couldn’t, she has a baby now, and it’s not the carabiniere’s. That’s why this disaster happened.”

  “What do you know about it? You’re just an ignorant gossip”—and I turned away in disgust, panting. My heart was pounding furiously in my temples, like the fists of an imprisoned devil.

  “Everybody knows. I heard Mamma and Papa, they were sorry that the baby’s already getting big and they still haven’t gone to give him a baptism present.”

  So Adriana pinned me to the truth, the night before Christmas Eve of 1976. At the holiday lunch there were two of us who didn’t eat, the brodo di cardo con stracciatella would be left over for a snowy Santo Stefano.

  I had no words to answer her, on the upper bunk of the bed that Adalgisa had sent us the year before. I grabbed her left hand and dug my nails into the flesh as hard as possible, reopening the cut. Together we watched the blood surfacing around the wounds of the only weapons that remained to me. She didn’t cry and didn’t move. When I took my fingers away, I hit her on the back to push her off, but she knew how to fall from up there. I cried with a violence I’d never felt before.

  Then I lay down and didn’t move. My body throbbed, breathing on its own. Adriana understood that she shouldn’t climb back, she curled up down below, a short distance from my hatred.

  30.

  The strange cry in the background when Adalgisa phoned me at Ernesto’s wine shop. That’s what it was: the wail of a child. Of the child. And the male voice that summoned her—maybe she had said he’s awake—deeper than the one I knew. Is it Papa, I had asked her, and she: No, it’s the television. Oh, the television.

  The bed rest, the nausea of the first months of pregnancy, not of illness. Sudden tears—I thought they were for me—in the last weeks I’d spent with them, the angry tones one evening, behind the closed door of the bedroom. The ringing of the telephone followed by silence if I was the one who answered. Then that anxious rush to go out, usually to the pharmacy or the doctor. I’ll go and get the medicine, Mamma, give me the prescription. No, I’m all right now, a little air will do me good. But one day the doctor’s clinic was closed, and I had happened to see her strolling in that neighborhood. And later she had returned from there.

  On the bus that was too slow I was reconstructing yet again the hints I’d ignored; they were always the same, but then every so often a new one came to mind. Her package of sanitary napkins in the bathroom that was always half full. And, back in time, her commitments at the parish church that became almost daily—I was older and could stay home by myself. Adalgisa was a catechism teacher. She listened to children reciting the Credo from memory, drumming with her fingers on the prayer book: that’s what I saw when she used to take me with her.

  I would return to the city before the end of the winter vacation, with the excuse of homework to be done in a notebook that had been left at Signora Bice’s. But actually I had something urgent to ask her. And then I couldn’t bear another day in the house where Adriana had said: Everybody knows. I wanted to die of shame
, that night. My adoptive mother had sent me back because she was having a real child, everybody knew except me.

  In the darkest hours after the news I tried to make my heart stop, it would take so little. Just keep it passive, as if underwater. I counted in silence, waiting for the oxygen that was left to dissolve into the bloodstream, for sleep to swallow me, heavier and heavier until it was transformed into death. But reaching the limit I breathed deeply, with a long hiss, I was the swimmer who emerged and filled her lungs with air to survive. The world I had known collapsed around me, pieces of sky fell on me like light pieces of scenery.

  When dawn appeared at the window on the morning of Christmas Eve, my father woke on the other side of the wall. Rhythmic creaking of the slack old box spring. That hadn’t been heard since the death of Vincenzo.

  My mother in the kitchen, afterward. I was already there, in the dim light. She didn’t see me right away, she was startled by a movement.

  “Why didn’t you tell me she was having a baby?”

  She widened her arms and sat down, slowly shaking her head, as if she had expected the question for a long time and still didn’t know the answer.

  “She wanted to tell you, but time passed and she never showed up.”

  “Who’s the father?”

  “I don’t know. It was the husband who couldn’t have children, the other man got her pregnant without any fuss.”

  “It must be someone who goes to the church, she spent whole afternoons there,” I thought aloud. I sat down, too. I rested one arm on the table beside me.

  “As long as it wasn’t the priest,” my mother tried to joke. “I’m making coffee, you want a drop? Now you’re grown,” and she got up. She fussed with the coffeepot and the spoon, I didn’t look at her. After a few minutes the gurgling and the aroma in the air. I grabbed her wrist as she was putting the cup for me down on the formica counter, and the little coffee I would have been allowed to drink spilled.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She wasn’t angry about the coffee, she let it spread, fragrant and hot, to the edge. One drop fell, another. She had already put in the sugar, I could tell from the smell. I went on squeezing her wrist, the skin whitened around the grip of my fingers.

  “I was waiting till you were a little older, before causing you that pain.”

  I relaxed my grip and pushed away her arm.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Adalgisa, the child.”

  “I don’t know where she is with the baby, that’s why I haven’t gone to give her a present.”

  With the sponge she dried the table, the drops on the floor.

  “Now don’t be like that other girl, who’s not eating. I’ll beat you an egg, too, I have a lot for Christmas.”

  I left before she could try.

  Adriana and I didn’t speak to each other in the following days, but I felt her guilty, attentive gaze on me. She seldom went to the widow’s, she was always around, at the proper distance. I was reading in bed one night and the book fell out of my hands. She was quicker than me, she came down the ladder like a cat and picked it up.

  “Is it good?” she asked, opening it.

  “I think so, I’m just at the beginning.”

  She knelt on the floor, she leafed through some pages. “Damn, not even a drawing. Will you lend it to me when you finish? Now that I’ve gotten to middle school I have to start reading some novels.”

  “O.K.,” I said, and she climbed back up all excited.

  She had suspended her hunger strike and I, too, made an effort, though the food tasted as bitter as medicine. I ate as little as possible so as not to attract attention.

  I put the book on Adriana’s pillow before I left. I couldn’t find her in the house and it was already late, I went away without saying goodbye to her. Just beyond the big square I recognized her steps behind me, she reached me out of breath.

  “Maria is like glue, she calls me every second. This time I ran away, she wanted help moving the furniture.” She took a handle of the bag I was carrying, to share the weight. We walked toward the bus stop, and it was almost like holding hands.

  “I talk too much sometimes,” she admitted, panting from the uphill slope.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that if you tell the truth. It’s the truth that’s wrong.”

  On the steps of the bus I turned to look at her. “I’ll ask the signora if she can make room for you. She’s nice, you’re right.”

  That wasn’t the most urgent question burning in my mouth when Signor Giorgio opened the door. I had already forgotten Adriana, at least for a while. He was alone in the house, his wife and daughter were at the hospital. Sandra had broken a leg, without falling: I imagined the crack of bone under her weight. They would release her the next day, meanwhile for that night the mother would stay with her and I would have to wait to talk to her. I called Patrizia and she invited me to dinner at their house; we had seen each other at irregular intervals since I returned to school in the city.

  Just as I was at the door putting on my coat Signora Bice turned her key in the lock. She was in a hurry, she had come to pick up something. I asked her about Sandra out of politeness but didn’t even listen to the answer, it didn’t much matter to me.

  “I lost my aunt’s phone number, could you give it to me?”

  She seemed a little surprised, perhaps recalling my reticence whenever she mentioned Adalgisa. I hadn’t understood what she knew about me, certainly that that aunt paid for my school.

  “I had one, but then it changed and she forgot to write down the new one. I’m sorry.”

  “Then how do you manage . . . about the money?” I ventured without looking at her.

  She held back a moment, maybe she was wondering if she could say it or not. “She comes by to settle the last Friday of every month.”

  Certainly in the morning, when I wasn’t home. Otherwise we would have met.

  “By herself?” escaped me.

  “Yes. Now I must hurry, Sandra is waiting for me.” Instead she took two steps in the direction of the bathroom and stopped. I stood there, hand on the front door. “You’ve come back early from the vacation and with a dark face. I’m glad you’re going to your friend’s, so you’ll have a little fun. If you want to stay overnight you have my permission.”

  31.

  A slice of panettone in front of me, on the table covered by a Christmas-print tablecloth. Along the border a line of reindeer pulled sleighs piled with gifts, but the first was decapitated by the edge of the fabric, and the others appeared to be following him toward the same fate.

  “You don’t even like the candied fruit?” Patrizia’s mother asked, since I wasn’t eating.

  Somehow released by her words, tears escaped, onto the candied fruit and the raisins, onto the soft yellow cake. At a nod from Vanda, her husband went into the living room and turned on the television. Motionless and tense on the chair next to mine, Pat looked at her mother. Apart from some attempts at conversation by Nicola that came to nothing, the dinner had been unusually silent. The scrape of silverware on plates, nothing more. They were sad because of the death of their old cat.

  “She wasn’t sick. She was pregnant,” and I dried my cheeks with the red napkin. “I should have realized it right away, before they sent me back to the town.”

  “You weren’t ready then.” Vanda moved around the table, toward me.

  “That’s why they sent me back. But what did I have to do with it? I would have helped her, with the baby.”

  “Did she tell you?”

  “I found out from my sister.”

  Vanda put a hand on my shoulder, in disbelief, and I leaned my head against her soft wool hip. She held me lightly. I closed my eyes in weariness, I would have liked her to be silent and still, at least for a short while, so
that I would have a few moments of rest, leaning on a human body, lost in its perfume, in a brief period of forgetting.

  “That a child had to tell you, that’s not possible. I was convinced that Adalgisa would speak to you, sooner or later—it was up to her to explain to you.”

  Her disdain vibrated deeply against my ear. I sat up, as if shocked.

  “But now I know when she goes to pay the signora, in the morning, when I’m at school. The next time she’ll find me.”

  Nicola called Vanda, she had to answer an urgent phone call.

  “I’ll be there, too, with you, I’ll stay home from school,” Pat offered. She had been silent the whole time.

  “No. By myself.”

  “Anyway, I ran into her once—Adalgisa, with the baby and her man now,” Patrizia resumed, as if she had suddenly recovered the memory. “You remember the widower who spent a lot of time at the church for a while, that handsome muscular guy?”

  I didn’t care about him, I barely remembered him. He had been married in our church and after the loss of his wife he came there some afternoons.

  I argued a little with Pat—but with a sort of resignation that was now habitual—who had kept everything to herself until that moment. Even she.

  “And the baby?” I asked, after the silence that followed.

  “Who looked at him? I was too busy examining the father. And then he was sleeping.”

  At least she had seen who was holding him? That yes, Adalgisa. He wasn’t even a stepbrother for me, I reflected. His mother wasn’t mine.

  Patrizia wanted to drag me into the gossip, but the subject was too painful. Vanda, coming back into the room, caught her last remark.

  “Be quiet,” she said, with a harsh look.