The Lost Daughter

4

The young mother and her daughter I became aware of later. I don’t know if they had been there since my first day on the beach or appeared afterward. In the three or four days following my arrival I hardly noticed a rather loud group of Neapolitans, children, adults, a man in his sixties with a mean expression, four or five children who fought fiercely in the water and on land, a large woman with short legs and heavy breasts, nearly forty, perhaps, who went back and forth between the beach and the bar, painfully dragging a pregnant belly, the great, naked arc stretched between the two halves of her bathing suit. They were all related, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, cousins, in-laws, and their laughter rang out noisily. They called each other by name with drawn-out cries, hurled exclamatory or conspiratorial comments, at times quarreled: a large family group, similar to the one I had been part of when I was a girl, the same jokes, the same sentimentality, the same rages.

One day I looked up from my book and, for the first time, saw the young woman and the little girl. They were returning from the water’s edge to their umbrella, she no more than twenty, her head bent, and the child, three or four years old, gazing up at her, rapt, holding a doll the way a mother carries a child in her arms. They were talking to each other peacefully, as if they alone existed. From the umbrella, the pregnant woman called out irritatedly in their direction, and a fat gray-haired woman in her fifties, fully dressed, who was perhaps the mother, made gestures of discontent, disapproving of I don’t know what. But the girl seemed deaf and blind, she went on talking to the child and walking up from the sea with measured steps, leaving on the sand the dark shadow of her footprints.

They, too, were part of the big noisy family, but she, the young mother, seen this way, from a distance, with her slim body, the tastefully chosen one-piece bathing suit, the slender neck, the shapely head and long, wavy, glossy black hair, the Indian face with its high cheekbones, the heavy eyebrows and slanting eyes, seemed to me an anomaly in the group, an organism that had mysteriously escaped the rule, the victim, now assimilated, of a kidnapping or of an exchange in the cradle.

I got into the habit of looking every so often in their direction.

There was something off about the little girl, I don’t know what; a childish sadness, perhaps, or a silent illness. Her whole face expressed a permanent request to her mother that they stay together: it was an entreaty without tears or tantrums, which the mother did not evade. Once I noticed the tenderness with which she rubbed lotion on her. And once I was struck by the leisurely time that mother and daughter spent in the water together, the mother hugging the child to her, the child with her arms tight around the mother’s neck. They laughed together, enjoying the feeling of body against body, touching noses, spitting out streams of water, kissing each other. On one occasion I saw them playing with the doll. They did it with such pleasure, dressing her, undressing her, pretending to put suntan lotion on her; they bathed her in a green pail, they dried her, rubbing her so that she wouldn’t catch cold, hugged her to their breast as if to nurse her, or fed her baby food of sand; they kept her in the sun with them, lying on their towel. If the young woman was pretty herself, in her motherhood there was something that distinguished her; she seemed to have no desire for anything but her child.

Not that she wasn’t well integrated into the big family group. She talked endlessly to the pregnant woman, played cards with some sunburned youths of her own age, cousins, I think, walked along the shore with the fierce-looking old man (her father?), or with the boisterous young women, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law. It didn’t seem to me that she had a husband or someone who was obviously the father of the child. I noted instead that all the members of the family took affectionate care of her and the child. The gray, fat woman in her fifties accompanied her to the bar to buy ice cream for the little girl. The children, at her sharp cry, interrupted their squabbling and, though they grumbled, went to get water, food, whatever she needed. As soon as mother and daughter went out a little way from the shore in a small red-and-blue rowboat, the pregnant woman cried Nina, Lenù, Ninetta, Lena, and hurried breathlessly to the water’s edge, alarming even the attendant, who jumped to his feet, to keep an eye on the situation. Once when the girl was approached by two young men who wanted to start a conversation, the cousins immediately intervened, with shoving and rude words, nearly provoking a fistfight.

For a while I didn’t know if it was the mother or the daughter who was called Nina, Ninù, Ninè, the names were so many, and I had trouble, given the thick weave of sound, arriving at any conclusion. Then, by listening to voices and cries, I realized that Nina was the mother. It was more complicated with the child, and in the beginning I was confused. I thought she had a nickname like Nani or Nena or Nennella, but then I understood that those were the names of the doll, from whom the child was never parted and to whom Nina paid attention as if she were alive, a second daughter. The child in reality was called Elena, Lenù; the mother always called her Elena, the relatives Lenù.

I don’t know why, I wrote those names in my notebook, Elena, Nani, Nena, Leni; maybe I liked the way Nina pronounced them. She talked to the child and her doll in the pleasing cadence of the Neapolitan dialect that I love, the tender language of playfulness and sweet nothings. I was enchanted. Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother’s lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can’t take you anymore, I can’t take any more. Commands, shouts, insults, life stretching into her words, as when a frayed nerve is just touched, and the pain scrapes away all self-control. Once, twice, three times she threatened us, her daughters, that she would leave, you’ll wake up in the morning and won’t find me here. And every morning I woke trembling with fear. In reality she was always there, in her words she was constantly disappearing from home. That woman, Nina, seemed serene, and I felt envious.