Signora Bice looked at us with an encouraging smile. On Friday she handed me the phone, but first she covered the receiver.
“Go, it’s really important to her.”
So, to my surprise, I found myself dressing carefully that Sunday morning, making my eyes look bigger with Sandra’s eyeliner and mascara, maybe overdoing it a little. Adalgisa telephoned early, impatient to come and get me. I said I’d rather walk, it was so sunny.
I wasn’t satisfied, at the last minute I changed my clothes. I added color to my pale cheekbones. I didn’t even understand who I was getting ready for. I was late getting to the bus stop. Adriana had already arrived and was waiting with a scowl.
“Are you crazy leaving me alone in the middle of the city? You call me at Ernesto’s phone booth, you make me get up early, and then you’re not here?”
I had asked her to come with me, I didn’t want to go alone. For a moment I regretted it. Her clothes were too small, her shoes dirty. Her hair as greasy as ever, even though it was Sunday, bath day. She caught my look.
“If I’d washed it I would have missed the pullman.”
“Bus, Adriana, you have to say you came on the bus and hadn’t told me.” I hugged her.
We spit in turn on a Kleenex and cleaned the old loafers, laughing a little. We set off quickly, chatting, I had so many instructions for her.
“Speak in Italian, please. Except for the bread don’t eat with your fingers, use the silverware. And chew with your mouth closed, don’t smack your tongue.”
“Oh Lord, how nervous you’re making me. You’d think we’re going to see the Queen of England. Have you completely forgotten now what she did to you?”
“Don’t stick your nose in. Behave nicely if you want Adalgisa to help you come to the city.”
We still had a long way to go, but at the bus and tram stops Adriana insisted that she wanted to keep walking.
We arrived late. I rang at the garden gate, the trill was new, more melodious. They had also replaced the fence, so you couldn’t see anything from outside. A last look at Adriana’s sweaty face, I arranged her hair behind her ears, maybe like that it was less noticeably dirty.
“Be careful,” I repeated.
The click of the lock, and we entered. Fleetingly glimpsed, the grass freshly cut, different flowers in the flower beds, arranged in a geometric order. A bush just planted, the earth newly turned. My mouth dry and a tumult of feelings in my chest. The man in the doorway, in a white shirt.
“We were expecting one young lady and two came,” he said, smiling in a friendly way. He shook our hands, as if we were adults, with a vigorous, pleasant gesture.
“Hello. My sister surprised me,” I said, in explanation.
“Good, come in. We’ll add a place.”
We stood still, close together, in the dining room, intimidated. In appearance the house was the same as before, but something indefinable seemed irreparably changed.
“Adalgisa will be here in a moment, she’s with the baby. He eats at twelve on the dot and at this time he should be sleeping. Meanwhile you can wash your hands, the bathroom’s there.”
“I know, thanks.”
Squeezing her legs together Adriana rushed to the door, opened it noisily. She had already wet her pants, and I had forgotten. While I closed the door I noticed the look that followed us.
“I have a few drops in my underpants, let’s hope no one can smell it.”
I reassured her, not me. She stood mesmerized before the makeup shelf, but I snapped her out of it. Without a watch I’d lost any sense of time; it seemed very late for lunch.
No one was in the living room. Two voices in the kitchen, instead, and the smell of fish the way Adalgisa prepared it. The impulse to go in, to nose around the stove, taste this or that, remained from my previous life. One step and I stopped, confused. The house no longer belonged to me. I was a guest.
I wanted to see my room, though, even just for a second.
“Adriana, I’ll show you where I used to sleep, it’s this room here on the side.”
My bed was still there, it was true. But my books, my stuffed animals, the Barbies I’d played with until middle school had vanished. The shelves were occupied by ships in bottles of all sizes—some were tiny, with sails like postage stamps. One, under construction, was sitting on the desk: it was already in the bottle, but the masts were bent over the bridge and there were some threads long enough to reach the wooden surface of the desk. Around it were the tools: tweezers, a case of gouges, other tiny implements used for something or other, who knows what.
There was nothing left of me there.
“Do you like it?”
I started, but the question was for Adriana. I had lost sight of her, she was holding a bottle in her too curious hands.
“It was one of the most difficult to assemble,” he said, approaching to explain the mystery.
“You’re so clever, it came out really beautifully,” she complimented.
“You should use the formal you,” I whispered, not softly enough.
“No, leave her alone, she’s so spontaneous.”
Adalgisa arrived, finally.
She was wearing a blue dress, with an apron tied over it. No surprise at seeing Adriana, she greeted her kindly, asked about our parents. She took my hand, hers damp with emotion.
“Guido, I’ve talked about her so much and now here she is with us. You’ve already introduced yourselves, haven’t you?”
“Of course. You’re right, she’s really a smart girl.”
Then she hugged me tighter, and a thank you escaped her, followed by a small movement, almost a childish hop of joy.
She led us to the table and added a place for Adriana. When my sister saw her lining up the silverware for dessert in front of the gilt-edged plate, she blurted out:
“What do I do with all these? Fork and knife’s good for me, a spoon if the soup is thin.”
I stepped on her foot secretly, I sat next to her to control her. He sat opposite, he looked at her in amusement.
“Don’t worry, use the ones you want. But you’ll see that the smallest will be useful for something good, later.”
Then he asked her if she liked school and Adriana answered so-so.
“I know how clever you are, Adalgisa is always talking about it,” he said to me, as if to apologize for his interest in my sister.
They talked about the town, where he’d gone as a child to visit relatives. He remembered endless lunches, delicious sausages. In return she described Half-Cigar’s sausages, which would wake the dead. She felt really comfortable with him, my warnings forgotten. I trembled every time she opened her mouth. Adalgisa went back and forth to the kitchen, content.
Fish antipasto. She observed her companion’s first bite to see how it was. He approved with a nod. Adriana examined a shrimp without its shell, turning it on her fork.
“Is something wrong?” Guido asked.
“It looks like a worm,” and then she tasted it happily.
They began joking about peoples who eat insects and worms. I was hot, and not very hungry. By now I had stopped pressing Adriana’s foot at every inopportune remark. She was herself.
Adalgisa served spaghetti with clams, spattering oil on Guido’s shirt.
“I’m sorry, dear, I’ll get the talcum powder right away.”
She applied it to the stain with devoted hands, he leaned back, to make it easier. A slow caress, across his chest, before leaving him and going back to her seat. I’d never seen her like that with her husband.
“No grains of sand this time?” she asked then, slightly apprehensive.
“It’s really delicious,” Adriana mumbled, chewing, but the question wasn’t for us.
“No sand, no, I don’t think so, not so far. Only a little salty, but that doesn’t matter. The clams s
hould soak longer.”
Suddenly, from the other room, a small voice called mamma.
“He woke up early. Now you’ll see him,” Adalgisa said, getting up.
“No, dear, stay and eat. Francesco has to obey the rules.”
“But he’s starting to cry,” she protested weakly.
“We’ve made rules, in agreement with the doctor. It doesn’t matter if he cries, he’ll fall asleep again soon.” He pointed to her plate and: “Go on, it’s getting cold.”
She sat down again, but on the edge of the chair, her back rigid. She twirled the spaghetti on her fork and left it there, holding the handle with inert fingers. The child’s crying alternated with pauses in which Adalgisa’s face cleared. Then she would almost raise that fork as Guido had asked. But the wail resumed, gradually louder.
He took a swallow of white wine from the crystal glass, dabbed his lips with the napkin.
“Don’t keep doing that. If it’s closed it should be thrown away.” In the neutral tone there remained barely a trace of the playful kindness of before.
I turned to Adriana. She was forcing open a clam with the tip of her knife.
“I don’t want to waste it,” she said, putting it down on the clean plate.
The sound of the shell on the china was hidden by the child’s voice, louder now. The father was drumming on the table with his right hand. At a certain point he got up and we all followed him with our eyes, sure he would go to his son’s room. Instead he went into the kitchen: Adalgisa had forgotten the main course: sea bass baked with potatoes. She put her hands back in her lap, powerless.
“You’ll go and get him now, won’t you?” Adriana incited her, taking advantage of that brief absence.
She didn’t answer, maybe she didn’t even hear. He returned with the dish and placed it directly on the linen tablecloth. He removed the skin and the bones, served us generous helpings of white fish. Then the vegetable. He told us to eat, trying to come up with a smile. The cries vibrated in the air.
“Maybe he’s sick,” Adalgisa tried, pleading.
“In five minutes he’s asleep. It’s just willfulness.”
Again he went to the kitchen and returned with the bread basket. He replaced the now cold spaghetti with the main course and she turned away slightly, she didn’t even want to see that plate. Two deep furrows at the sides of her mouth suddenly aged her.
Adriana barely tasted it, no one else touched the food. Silence at the table, opposed to those cries from the other room. They diminished and ceased suddenly. Guido nodded, pleased. Then again, even louder.
At the time I couldn’t explain how Adalgisa could resist those cries, I suffered for her. But it was her companion who with his gaze kept her still.
Adriana got up, and maybe they didn’t even notice it. I had no doubt that she needed the bathroom. I was as if paralyzed in my chair, the cries filled house and minds. Maybe it was only minutes, but that interval of crying that had changed the day seemed interminable. Adalgisa slumped in her chair, her attention on the chandelier. The makeup over one eye smeared. He traced the gold border of the plate with his fingertip. Then I saw him start because of something behind me. I turned.
Adriana was holding the child, he had already calmed down. She was rocking him with light movements, his face still red and upset, tufts of hair pasted to his forehead by sweat.
“How dare you touch my son?” the father said, getting up suddenly. The chair overturned behind him. He was panting, a vein pulsing on his neck.
Adriana didn’t even consider him. She gave the baby gently to his mother.
“He had his hand caught in the bars of the crib,” and she pointed to the red marks on his tiny wrist, the swelling already visible on the skin. She pushed his hair back and dried the tears with a napkin before she sat down again next to me. Adalgisa kissed his sore little fingers one by one.
With the palm of my hand I felt my sister’s hard, tense leg. She had been so strong, but she was trembling.
Guido picked up the chair and fell back in it, arms dangling to the floor. Nothing remained of the man who had raised his voice at a girl, pointing a threatening finger at her. He looked inadvertently at his two glasses, of water and wine. I don’t know how long he sat like that, but it’s the image I have of him from that day.
No one spoke. Only a hiccup every so often from the baby, who had gone back to sleep. I had simply to touch Adriana’s shoulder, we understood each other.
“Thank you for lunch, it was all delicious, really. But we’d better go now, my sister has to catch the bus for the town in an hour,” I said quickly. Adalgisa looked at us with impotent, sorrowful eyes. With an almost imperceptible movement she shook her head no. It wasn’t how she had imagined that Sunday.
I went over to say goodbye to her and smelled the odor of warm bread that came from her son. Sometimes he jerked in his deepest sleep. I obeyed the impulse to touch him on his knitted cotton shirt. Maybe it was one of mine, so soft. Adalgisa had saved them in a box on the highest shelf in the closet, along with other memories of my childhood. Instinctively I removed a hair missed on the blue of her dress, as if to restore her to the perfection of that time.
“At least take some dessert,” she ventured.
“Maybe the next time,” Adriana said.
“One moment,” said Guido. He wrapped a piece of cake in paper and accompanied us to the door.
“I’m fixing things up, out here. Come again, we’ll eat outside.”
I closed the gate behind us, we breathed deeply.
“You were great,” I said.
“Someone had to go to that infant. Didn’t they imagine he was screaming in pain?”
We set off along the sidewalk, skirting the garden. At the corner I changed my mind, it was early for the bus. I persuaded her to go down to the beach. Not many open umbrellas, the season had just begun. We took off our shoes and she followed me to the edge of the water, a little doubtful. We were almost in the same place as that long-ago day with Vincenzo. Silently we remembered him.
Adriana looked at me as if I were mad, then she, too, took off her clothes and left them on the warm sand, along with her fear. She trusted my hand and we went in, with our underwear on. A school of tiny fish brushed our ankles. Time to get used to the cold. She walked warily, I swam around her a little. I splashed her and in return she pushed my head under.
We stopped, facing each other, so alone and close, the water up to my chest and to her neck. My sister. Like an improbable flower, growing in a clump of earth stuck in the rock. From her I learned resistance. We look less like each other now, but we find the same meaning in this being thrown into the world. In our alliance we survived.
We looked at each other over the lightly tremulous surface, the dazzling reflections of the sun. Behind us the safe-water boundary. Squeezing my eyelids just a little I imprisoned her between the lashes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Teramo Province, Abruzzo, Donatella Di Pietrantonio completed her studies in the provincial capital, Aquila, and now lives in Penne. Her short fiction has been published by Granta Italy, and her novel, Bella mia, was nominated for the Strega Prize and won the Brancati Prize. A Girl Returned, her third novel and her first to be published in English, won the Campiello Prize.
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