The Lost Daughter

15

Now I was really angry with myself. I never spoke of that period of my life, not even to my sisters, not even to myself. The times I had tried to mention it to Bianca and Marta, together or separately, they had listened to me in distracted silence, had said they remembered nothing, had immediately gone on to speak of something else. Only my former husband, before going to work in Canada, had occasionally begun his remonstrances and resentments from that point; but he was an intelligent and sensitive man, ashamed of his meanness, and he quickly moved on, without insisting. All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.

I wandered around the square trying to calm down, but the echo of the words I had uttered, Rosaria’s expression and her reproaches, the flash of Nina’s pupils prevented me, in fact intensified a constricted anger. Useless to say it wasn’t important, who were those two women, when would I ever see them again after this vacation. I realized that if that judgment could help me bring perspective to Rosaria it was of no use with Nina. Her gaze had pulled back abruptly, but without losing me: it had only retreated, as if seeking a distant point, in the depths of her pupils, from which to look at me without risk. That urgent need for distance had wounded me.

I walked indifferently among the venders of all sorts of goods, and meanwhile I pictured her the way I had occasionally seen her in those days, watching from behind as with slow, precise movements she spread lotion on her young legs, her arms, her shoulders, and finally her back, tensely twisting around as far as she could get, so that I had had the desire to get up and say here, I’ll do it, let me help you, as, when I was a girl, I had thought of doing with my mother, or as I had done often with my daughters. Suddenly I realized that, day after day, without intending to, I had involved her, from a distance, with alternating and often conflicting feelings, in something that I couldn’t decipher, but that was intensely my own. For this reason, too, perhaps, I was now furious. I had instinctively used against Rosaria an obscure moment of my life and had done it to astonish her, even in a certain sense to frighten her; she was a woman who seemed to me disagreeable, treacherous. But in reality I would have liked to speak of these very things with Nina alone, on a different occasion—cautiously, in order to be understood.

Soon it started raining again and I had to take shelter in the building that housed the market, amid sharp odors of fish, basil, oregano, peppers. There, jostled by adults and children who arrived hurrying, laughing, wet from the rain, I began to feel sick. The odors of the market nauseated me, the place seemed increasingly close, I was blazing hot, sweating, and the breeze that came in waves from the outside chilled the sweat, causing moments of vertigo. I gained a spot at the entrance, hemmed in by people watching the water cascade down and children screaming, joyfully frightened by the lightning and the thunder that followed. I settled myself almost on the threshold, so that I would feel only the cool air, and tried to get my nerves under control.

What had I done that was so terrible, in the end. Years earlier, I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities. Ambition was still burning, fed by a young body, by an imagination full of plans, but I felt that my creative passion was cut off more and more thoroughly by the reality of dealings with the universities and the need to exploit opportunities for a possible career. I seemed to be imprisoned in my own head, without the chance to test myself, and I was frustrated.

There had been small alarming episodes, not normal impulses of depression, not a destructiveness expressed symbolically, but something more. Now these events have no before and after, they return to my mind in an order that is always different. One winter afternoon, for example, I was studying in the kitchen; I had been working for months on an essay that, although short, I couldn’t manage to finish. Nothing fit together, hypotheses were multiplying in my head, I was afraid that the professor who had encouraged me to write it wouldn’t help me publish it, would reject it.

Marta was playing under the table, at my feet. Bianca was sitting next to me, pretending to read and write, imitating my gestures, my frowns. I don’t know what happened. Maybe she had said something to me and I hadn’t responded; maybe she only wanted to start one of her games, which were always a little rough; suddenly, while I was distracted by a search for words that never seemed logical enough, or apt, I felt a slap on the ear.

It wasn’t a hard blow, Bianca was five, she couldn’t really hurt me. But I was startled, I felt a burning pain, it was as if a sharp black line had, with a clean stroke, cut off thoughts that were already hard to maintain—that were very distant from the kitchen where we were sitting, from the sauce for dinner that was bubbling on the stove, from the clock that was advancing, consuming the narrow space of time that I had to devote to my desire for research, invention, approval, position, money of my own to spend. I hit the child without thinking about it, in a flash, not hard, my fingertips barely touching her cheek.

Don’t do that, I said in a pseudo pedantic tone, and she, smiling, tried to hit me again, certain that at last a game had begun. But I was first and hit her, a little harder, don’t you dare ever again, Bianca, and she laughed, hoarsely this time, with a faint bewilderment in her eyes, and I hit her again, still with the tips of my outstretched fingers, again and again, you don’t hit Mama, you must never do that, and when, finally, she realized that I wasn’t playing, she began to cry desperately.

I feel the child’s tears under my fingertips, I’m still hitting her. I do it gently, the gesture is under my control but decisive, and the intervals are getting smaller: not a possibly educational act but real violence, contained but real. Out, I tell her without raising my voice, out, Mama has to work, and I take her solidly by the arm, drag her into the hall, she cries, screams, tries again to hit me, and I leave her there and close the door behind me with a firm shove, I don’t want to see you anymore.

The door had a big pane of frosted glass. I don’t know what happened, maybe I pushed it with too much force: it banged shut and the glass shattered. Bianca appeared, wide-eyed, small, beyond the empty rectangle, no longer screaming. I looked at her in terror, how far could I go, I frightened myself. She was motionless, unharmed, the tears continued to flow but silently. I try never to think of that moment, of Marta who was pulling me by the skirt, of the child in the hall staring at me amid the broken glass: thinking of it gives me a cold sweat, takes my breath away. I’m sweating here, too, at the entrance of the market, I’m suffocating, and I can’t control the pounding of my heart.