The Lost Daughter

21

I made myself study, and continued for much of the night. Starting in early adolescence I learned to be extremely disciplined: I chase thoughts out of my head, put pain and humiliation to sleep, push anxieties into a corner.

I stopped around four in the morning. The pain in my back had returned, where the pinecone had hit me. I slept until nine and had breakfast on the terrace, opposite the sea that trembled in the wind. Nani had remained outside, sitting on the table, and her dress was damp. For a fraction of a second it seemed to me that she moved her lips and stuck out the red tip of her tongue, as if playing a game.

I had no desire to go to the beach, I didn’t even want to leave the house. It bothered me to have to pass the bar and see Giovanni chatting with his friends, and yet I felt it was urgent to resolve the matter of the doll. I looked at Nani sadly, caressed her cheek. My unhappiness at losing her had not diminished, in fact it had increased. I was confused; at moments it seemed to me that Elena could do without her, while I could not. On the other hand I had been careless, I had let Giovanni come in without hiding her. I thought for the first time of cutting short my vacation, leaving today, tomorrow. Then I laughed at myself, where was I letting myself go, I was planning to flee as if I had stolen a child and not a doll. I cleaned up, washed, made myself up carefully. I put on a nice dress and went out.

There was a fair going on in the town. The square, the main avenue, the streets and side streets, closed to cars, were a labyrinth of stalls, while the traffic on the edges of town was choked as if it were a city. I mingled with a crowd of mainly women who were rummaging through a huge variety of goods—dresses, jackets, coats, raincoats, hats, scarves, trinkets, household objects of every kind, real or fake antiques, plants, cheeses and salamis, vegetables, fruit, crude marine paintings, miraculous bottles from herbalists. I like fairs, especially the stalls that sell old clothes and the ones with modern antiques. I buy everything, old dresses, shirts, pants, earrings, pins, knickknacks. I stopped to dig among the jumble, a crystal paperweight, an old iron, opera glasses, a metal sea horse, a Neapolitan coffeepot. I was examining a hatpin with a shiny point, dangerously long and sharp, and a beautiful handle of black amber, when my cell phone rang. My daughters, I thought, even if it was an unlikely time. I looked at the display, which showed the name of neither one but a number I seemed to recognize. I answered.

“Signora Leda?”

“Yes.”

“I’m the mother of the child who lost the doll, the one that . . .”

I was surprised, I felt anxiety and pleasure, my heart began to race.

“Hello, Nina.”

“I wanted to see if this was your number.”

“It’s mine, yes.”

“I saw you yesterday, in the pines.”

“I saw you, too.”

“I’d like to speak to you.”

“All right, tell me when.”

“Now.”

“Now I’m in town, at the fair.”

“I know, I’ve been following you for ten minutes. But I keep losing you, it’s so crowded.”

“I’m near the fountain. There’s a stall selling old trinkets, I won’t move from here.”

I pressed my chest, to slow my racing heart. I fingered objects, examined some, but mechanically, without interest. Nina appeared in the crowd, she was pushing Elena in the stroller. Every so often she held on with one hand to the big hat that her husband had given her to keep it from being carried away by the wind from the sea.

“Hello,” I said to the child, who had a tired look and the pacifier in her mouth. “Is the fever gone?”

Nina answered for her daughter:

“She’s fine, but she won’t get over it, she wants her doll.”

Elena took the pacifier out of her mouth, and said:

“She has to take her medicine.”

“Is Nani sick?”

“She has a baby in her stomach.”

I looked at her uncertainly.

“Is her baby sick?”

Nina interrupted with some embarrassment, laughing:

“It’s a game. My sister-in-law takes pills and she pretends to give them to the doll, too.”

“So Nani is pregnant, too?”

Nina said: “She decided that the aunt and the doll are both expecting a baby. Right, Elena?”

The hat flew off, I picked it up for her. Her hair was pulled up, her face looked more beautiful.

“Thank you, with the wind it won’t stay on.”

“Wait,” I said.

I arranged the hat carefully and used the long pin with the amber handle to fix it in her hair.

“There, it won’t fall off. But be careful for the child, disinfect it when you get home, you could easily get a bad scratch.”

I asked the man at the stall how much it cost, Nina wanted to pay, I objected.

“It’s nothing.”

After that she relaxed a little. She complained of the fatigue of recent days, the child had been impossible.

“Come, sweetheart, let’s put that pacifier away,” she said, “let’s not make a bad impression on Leda.”

She spoke of her daughter with agitation. She said that ever since Elena had lost the doll she had regressed, she wanted to be either carried or pushed in the stroller, and had even gone back to the pacifier. She looked around, as if searching for a more tranquil spot, and pushed the stroller toward the gardens. She said with a sigh that she was really tired, and she stressed “tired,” she wanted me to hear it as not only physical tiredness. Suddenly she burst out laughing, but I understood that she wasn’t laughing in fun, there was a bad feeling about it.

“I know you saw me with Gino, but you mustn’t think badly of me.”

“I don’t think badly of anything or anyone.”

“Yes, that’s obvious. As soon as I saw you, I said to myself: I would like to be like that lady.”

“What is it about me in particular?”

“You’re beautiful, you’re refined, it’s clear that you know a great many things.”

“I don’t really know anything.”

She shook her head energetically.

“You have such self-confidence, you’re not afraid of anything. I saw it the moment you arrived on the beach for the first time. I looked at you and hoped that you would look in my direction, but you never did.”

We wandered a little on the garden paths, and she spoke again of the pinewood, of Gino.

“What you saw has no meaning.”

“Now, don’t tell lies.”

“It’s true, I hold him off, and I keep my lips closed. I just want to be a girl again, a little, but pretending.”

“How old were you when Elena was born?”

“Nineteen, Elena is almost three.”

“Maybe you became a mother too soon.”

She shook her head no, insistently.

“I’m happy with Elena, I’m happy with everything. It’s just lately, because of these days. If I find the person who is making my child suffer . . .”

“What will you do,” I said ironically.

“I know what I’ll do.”

I caressed one arm lightly as if to tame her. It seemed to me that she was dutifully mimicking the tone and the formulations of her family, she had even accentuated the Neapolitan cadence to be more convincing, and I felt something like tenderness.

“I’m fine,” she repeated several times, and told me how she had fallen in love with her husband, she had met him in a discotheque, at sixteen. He loved her, adored her and the daughter. She laughed again, nervously.

“He says my breasts are exactly the size of his hand.”

The phrase seemed to me vulgar and I said: “And if he should see you the way I saw you?”

Nina became serious. “He would cut my throat.”

I looked at her, at the child. “What do you expect from me?”

She shook her head and murmured: “I don’t know. To talk a little. When I see you on the beach I think I would like to sit the whole time under your umbrella and talk. But then you’d be bored, I’m stupid. Gino told me that you’re a professor at the university. I was enrolled in literature after high school, but I only took two courses.”

“You don’t work?”

She laughed again.

“My husband works.”

“What does he do?”

She avoided the question with a peevish gesture, and a flash of hostility lighted her eyes. She said: “I don’t want to talk about him. Rosaria is doing the shopping, at any moment she might call me and then my time is up.”

“She doesn’t want you to talk to me?”

She frowned angrily.

“According to her I mustn’t do anything.”

She was silent for a moment, then she said hesitantly:

“May I ask you a personal question?”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Why did you leave your daughters?”

I thought, searching for an answer that might help her.

“I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.”

I realized that she was no longer laughing continuously, now she was paying attention to my every word.

“You didn’t see them for three years.”

I nodded yes.

“And how did you feel without them?”

“Good. It was as if my whole self had crumbled, and the pieces were falling freely in all directions with a sense of contentment.”

“You didn’t feel sad?”

“No, I was too taken up by my own life. But I had a weight right here, as if I had a stomachache. And my heart skipped a beat whenever I heard a child call Mama.”

“You felt bad, then, not good.”

“I was like someone who is taking possession of her own life, and feels a host of things at the same time, among them an unbearable absence.”

She looked at me with hostility.

“If you felt good why did you go back?”

I chose my words carefully.

“Because I realized that I wasn’t capable of creating anything of my own that could truly equal them.”

She had a sudden contented smile.

“So you returned for love of your daughters.”

“No, I returned for the same reason I left: for love of myself.”

She again took offense.

“What do you mean?”

“That I felt more useless and desperate without them than with them.”

She tried to dig inside me with her eyes: into my chest, behind my forehead.

“You found what you were looking for and you didn’t like it?”

I smiled at her.

“Nina, what I was looking for was a confused tangle of desires and great arrogance. If I had been unlucky it would have taken me my whole life to realize it. But I was lucky and it took only three years. Three years and thirty-six days.”

She seemed unsatisfied.

“How did it happen that you decided to go back?”

“One morning I discovered that the only thing I really wanted to do was peel fruit, making a snake, in front of my daughters, and then I began to cry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If we have time I’ll tell you.”

She nodded, in an ostentatious way, to let me understand that she would like nothing more than to stay and listen, and meanwhile she realized that Elena had fallen asleep and she gently removed the pacifier, wrapped it in a kleenex, put it in her purse. With a pretty frown she conveyed the tenderness her daughter inspired, and began again:

“And after your return?”

“I was resigned to living very little for myself and a great deal for the two children: gradually I succeeded.”

“So it passes,” she said.

“What.”

She made a gesture to indicate a vertigo but also a feeling of nausea.

“The turmoil.”

I remembered my mother and said:

“My mother used another word, she called it a shattering.”

She recognized the feeling in the word, and her expression was that of a frightened girl.

“It’s true, your heart shatters: you can’t bear staying together with yourself and you have certain thoughts you can’t say.”

Then she asked me again, this time with the mild expression of someone seeking a caress: “Anyway, it passes.”

I thought that neither Bianca nor Marta had ever tried to ask me questions like Nina’s, and in this insistent tone. I looked for words, in order to lie to her by telling the truth.

“With my mother it became a sort of sickness. But that was another time. Today you can live perfectly well even if it doesn’t pass.”

I saw her hesitate, she was about to say something else, she stopped. I felt in her a need to hug me, the same need I, too, was feeling. It was an emotion of gratitude that manifested itself as an urgent need for contact.

“I have to go,” she said and instinctively kissed me on the lips with a light embarrassed kiss.

When she drew back I saw behind her, at the end of the garden, against the stalls and the crowd, Rosaria and her brother, Nina’s husband.