The Lost Daughter

10

I slept a minute, ten. When I woke, I stood up dazed. I saw that the sky had turned white, a hot white lead. The air was still, the crowd had grown, there was a clamor of music and human beings. In that Sunday throng, as if by a sort of secret call, the first person who leaped to my eyes was Nina.

Something was happening to her. She was moving slowly among the umbrellas, hesitant, her mouth working. She turned her head to one side, to the other, as if mechanically, like a bird in alarm. She said something to herself, from where I was I couldn’t tell what, then she hurried toward her husband, who was on a chair under the umbrella.

The man jumped to his feet, looked around. The severe old man pulled him by an arm, he wriggled free, went over to Rosaria. All the family, big and small, began to look around as if they were a single body, then they moved, scattered.

Calls began: Elena, Lenuccia, Lena. Rosaria walked with short but quick steps toward the sea as if she had an urgent need to go in. I looked at Nina. She made senseless gestures, she touched her forehead, she went to the right, then turned abruptly back to the left. It was as if from her very guts something were sucking the life from her face. Her skin turned yellow, her lively eyes were mad with anxiety. She couldn’t find the child, she had lost her.

She’ll turn up, I thought: I had experience with getting lost. My mother said that as a child all I did was get lost. In an instant I would vanish, she would have to run to the bath house and ask them to announce on the loudspeaker what I looked like, that I was called such and such, and meanwhile she would stay at the counter and wait. I didn’t remember anything about my vanishing, my memory held other things. I was afraid that it was my mother who would get lost, I lived in the anxiety of not being able to find her. But I remembered clearly when I had lost Bianca. I was running along the beach like Nina now, but I had Marta bawling in my arms. I didn’t know what to do, I was alone with the two children, my husband was abroad, I knew no one. A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties. It remained impressed on me that I had looked in every direction except toward the sea: I didn’t dare even to glance at the water.

I realized that Nina was doing the same thing. She was searching everywhere but she desperately kept her back to the sea, and suddenly I was moved, I felt like crying. From that moment I could no longer stand aside; I found it intolerable that the crowd on the beach didn’t even notice the frantic searching of the Neapolitans. There are movements so rapid that no draftsman can reproduce them, one is luminous, the other dark. Those who had appeared so autonomous, so overweening, seemed to me fragile. I admired Rosaria, who alone was searching the sea. With her large belly she walked, with her, but short steps, along the shore. I got up then, joined Nina, touched her arm. She turned suddenly, with a snakelike motion, and cried you’ve found her, speaking to me as if we knew each other well, even though we had never exchanged a word.

“She’s wearing your hat,” I told her, “she’ll be found, we’ll see her easily.”

She looked at me uncertainly, then nodded yes, ran in the direction in which her husband had vanished. She ran like a young athlete in a contest with a good or bad fate.

I set off in the opposite direction, along the first row of umbrellas, slowly. It seemed to me that I was Elena, or Bianca when she was lost, but perhaps I was only myself as a child, climbing back out of oblivion. A child who gets lost on the beach sees everything unchanged and yet no longer recognizes anything. She is without orientation, something that before had made bathers and umbrellas recognizable. The child feels that she is exactly where she was and yet doesn’t know where she is. She looks around with frightened eyes and sees that the sea is the sea, the beach is the beach, the people are the people, the fresh-coconut seller is really the fresh-coconut seller. Yet every thing or person is alien to her and so she cries. To the unknown adult who asks her what’s wrong, why is she crying, she doesn’t say that she’s lost, she says that she can’t find her mama. Bianca was crying when they found her, when they brought her back to me. I was crying, too, with happiness, with relief, but meanwhile I was also screaming with rage, like my mother, because of the crushing weight of responsibility, the bond that strangles, and with my free arm I dragged my firstborn, yelling, you’ll pay for this, Bianca, you’ll see when we get home, you must never go off again—never.

I walked for a while looking among the children, by themselves, in groups, in the arms of adults. I was in a turmoil, slightly sick to my stomach, but I was able to pay attention. Finally I saw the straw hat, and my heart skipped a beat. From a distance it seemed abandoned on the sand, but underneath it was Elena. She was sitting a few feet from the water, people passed her by without paying any attention; she was crying, a slow flow of silent tears. She didn’t say that she had lost her mother, she said that she had lost her doll. She was desperate.

I picked her up in my arms and returned quickly toward the bath house. I met Rosaria, who almost tore her away from me with an enthusiastic fury, she shouted with joy, waved at her sister-in-law. Nina saw us, saw her daughter, ran. Her husband, too, ran, all of them, from the dunes, from the bath house, from the shore. All the members of the family wanted to kiss, hug, touch Elena, even though she continued to weep, and to taste some satisfaction of her own for the danger escaped.

I withdrew, returned to the umbrella, began to gather up my things, even though it wasn’t even two in the afternoon. I didn’t like it that Elena was still crying. I saw that the group was celebrating her, the women took her from her mother and passed her around to try to quiet her, but without success, the child was inconsolable.

Nina came over to me. Immediately afterward Rosaria also arrived, she seemed proud of having been the first to establish a relationship with me, who had been so decisive.

“I wanted to thank you,” said Nina.

“It was a good scare.”

“I thought I would die.”

“My daughter got lost on a Sunday in August, almost twenty years ago, but I couldn’t see anything—anguish is blinding. In this situation strangers are more useful.”

“Luckily you were there,” Rosaria said. “So many bad things happen.” Then evidently her gaze fell on my back, because she exclaimed with a gesture of horror, “My goodness, what happened here, to your back, what was it?”

“A pinecone, in the woods.”

“It looks painful—did you put something on it?”

She wanted to go and get an ointment she had, she said it was miraculous. Nina and I remained alone; the cries of the child reached us insistently.

“She won’t calm down,” I said.

Nina smiled.

“It’s a bad day: we found her and she lost her doll.”

“You’ll find it.”

“Of course, if we don’t find her, what will we do—she’ll get sick.”

I felt a sudden sensation of cold on my back, Rosaria had come up behind me silently and was spreading her cream.

“How is it?”

“Good, thank you.”

She continued, attentively. When she had finished, I put my dress on over my bathing suit, picked up my bag.

“Until tomorrow,” I said. I was in a hurry to get away.

“You’ll see, already by tonight it’ll feel better.”

“Yes.”

I looked again at Elena, who was wriggling and writhing in her father’s arms, calling alternately for her mother and the doll.

“Let’s go,” Rosaria said to her sister-in-law, “let’s find the doll, because I can’t stand hearing her scream anymore.”

Nina gave me a nod of farewell, went off to her daughter. Rosaria instead began immediately to ask children and parents, searching meanwhile, without permission, among the toys piled under the umbrellas.

I went back up over the dunes, and into the pinewood, but even there I seemed to hear the child’s cries. I was confused, placed a hand on my chest to calm my racing heart. I had taken the doll, she was in my bag.