The Lost Daughter

12

A reddish light roused me from my work: it was no longer raining. I spent some time putting on makeup, dressing with care. I wanted to look like a respectable lady, perfectly proper. I went out.

The Sunday evening crowd was less dense and noisy than Saturday’s, the extraordinary weekend flood was diminishing. I walked along the sea a little, then headed toward a restaurant next to the market. I ran into Gino: he was dressed the way he always was at the beach, maybe he was just returning. He nodded respectfully in greeting, and wished to pass on, but I stopped and so he was compelled to stop as well.

I felt the need to hear the sound of my voice, to get it under control with the help of someone else’s voice. I asked him about the storm, what had happened on the beach. He said there had been a strong wind, a tempest of water and wind, many of the umbrellas had been overturned. People had run for shelter to the bath house, the bar, but the crush had been too great and most had given up, the beach emptied.

“Luckily you left early.”

“I like storms.”

“Your books and notebooks would get ruined.”

“Did your book get wet?”

“A little.”

“What are you studying?”

“Law.”

“How much longer do you have?”

“I’m behind, I’ve wasted time. Do you teach at the university?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“English literature.”

“I saw that you know a lot of languages.”

I laughed.

“I don’t know anything really well, I also wasted some time. I work twelve hours a day at the university and I’m everyone’s slave.”

We walked a little, I relaxed. I talked about this and that to put him at his ease, and meanwhile I saw myself from the outside: I dressed like a proper lady, he covered with sand, in shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops. I was amused, even rather pleased; if Bianca and Marta had seen me I would have been teased no end.

He was certainly their age: a male child, a slender nervous body to care for. The young male bodies that had attracted me as an adolescent were like that, tall, thin, very dark, like Marta’s boyfriends, not small, fair, a little stocky and plump, like Bianca’s young men, always a little older than she, with veins as blue as their eyes. But I loved them all, my daughters’ first boyfriends, I bestowed on them an exaggerated affection. I wanted to reward them, perhaps, because they had recognized the beauty, the good qualities of my daughters, and so had freed them from the anguish of being ugly, the certainty of having no power of seduction. Or I wanted to reward them because they had providentially saved me, too, from bad moods and conflicts and complaints and attempts to soothe my daughters: I’m ugly, I’m fat; but I, too, felt ugly and fat at your age; no, you weren’t ugly and fat, you were beautiful; you, too, are beautiful, you don’t even realize how people look at you; they’re not looking at us, they’re looking at you.

At whom were the looks of desire directed. When Bianca was fifteen and Marta thirteen, I was not yet forty. Their childs’ bodies softened almost together. For a while I continued to think that the gazes of men on the street were directed at me, as had happened for twenty-five years; it had become habitual to receive them, to endure them. Then I realized that they slid lewdly from me to rest on the girls; I was alarmed, and gratified. Finally I said to myself with ironic wistfulness: a stage is about to end.

Yet I began to pay more attention to myself, as if I wanted to keep the body I was accustomed to, put off its departure. When my daughters’ boyfriends came to the house, I tried to make myself more attractive to receive them. I barely saw them, when they entered, when they left, saying goodbye to me in embarrassment, and yet I was very careful about my appearance, my manners. Bianca took them into her room, Marta into hers, I was alone. I wanted my daughters to be loved, I couldn’t bear them not to be, I was terrified of their possible unhappiness; but the gusts of sensuality they exhaled were violent, voracious, and I felt that the force of attraction of their bodies was as if subtracted from mine. So I was content when they told me, laughing, that the boys had found me a young and good-looking mother. It seemed to me for a few minutes that our three organisms had reached a pleasant accord.

Once, I was perhaps excessively flirtatious with a friend of Bianca’s, a surly fifteen-year-old, practically mute, with an unwashed and suffering appearance. When he left, I called my daughter, she came to my room: she and then, out of curiosity, Marta.

“Did your friend like the cake?”

“Yes.”

“I should have put chocolate on it, but I didn’t have a chance, maybe next time.”

“Next time, he said, if you’d give him a blow job.”

“Bianca, what kind of language is that?”

“That’s what he said.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did.”

Gradually I yielded. I taught myself to be present only if they wanted me present and to speak only if they asked me to speak. It was what they required of me and I gave it to them. What I wanted of them I never understood, I don’t know even now.

I looked at Gino, I thought: I’ll ask him if he’ll have dinner with me. I also thought: He’ll invent an excuse, he’ll say no, never mind. Instead he said only, but timidly:

“I should go and take a shower, change.”

“You’re fine like that.”

“I don’t even have my wallet.”

“I’m inviting you.”

Gino made an effort at conversation during the entire meal—even attempting to make me laugh—but we had almost nothing in common. He knew that he had to entertain me between one mouthful and the next, he knew that he had to avoid silences that were too long, and he did his best, he hurled himself onto the most diverse paths, like a lost animal.

Of himself he had little to say, he tried to make me talk about myself. But his questions were stiff, and I read in his eyes that he had no real interest in my answers. Although I tried to help him, I couldn’t escape the fact that the topics of conversation were quickly being used up.

First he asked about what I was studying, I told him I was preparing a course for the next year.

“On what.”

“Olivia.”

“What’s that?”

“A story.”

“Is it long?”

He liked short exams, he was very annoyed by professors who pile on the books to show that their exam is important. He had big white teeth, a wide mouth. His eyes were small, almost slits. He gesticulated a lot, he laughed. He knew nothing of Olivia, nothing of what I was passionate about. Like my daughters, who, growing up, had stayed cautiously away from my interests, had studied science, physics, like their father.

I spoke a little about them, saying a lot of nice things but in an ironic tone. At last, slowly, we fell back on what we did have in common: the beach, the bath house, his employer, the people on the beach. He talked to me about the foreigners, almost always pleasant, and the Italians, pretentious and arrogant. He spoke with sympathy of the Africans, of the Asian girls who went from umbrella to umbrella. But only when he began to speak of Nina and her family did I understand that I was there, in that restaurant with him, for this.

He told me about the doll, about the child’s desperation.

“After the storm I looked everywhere, I raked the sand until an hour ago, but I couldn’t find it.”

“It will turn up.”

“I hope so, especially for the mother: they’re furious with her, as if it were her fault.”

He alluded to Nina with admiration.

“She’s been coming here on vacation since her daughter was born. Her husband rents a villa in the dunes. You can’t see the house from the beach. It’s in the pinewood, it’s a beautiful place.”

He said that she was a really well brought up girl, she had finished high school and had even gone, briefly, to the university.

“She’s very pretty,” I said.

“Yes, she’s beautiful.”

They had talked a few times—I gathered—and she had told him she wanted to go back to her studies.

“She’s only a year older than I am.”

“Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-three, I’m twenty-two.”

“Like my daughter Marta.”

He was silent for a moment, then said suddenly, with a dark look that made him ugly:

“Have you seen her husband? Would you ever have made your daughter marry someone like that?”

I asked, ironically:

“What’s wrong with him, what don’t you like?”

He shook his head, and said seriously:

“Everything. Him, his friends and relatives. His sister is unbearable.”

“Rosaria, the pregnant lady?”

“Lady, her? Forget about her, it’s better. I admired you yesterday, when you wouldn’t move from your umbrella. But don’t do things like that anymore.”

“Why?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders, shook his head unhappily.

“They’re bad people.”