The Lost Daughter

8

Once I was home, I undressed and examined myself in the mirror. Between my shoulder blades was a livid spot that looked like a mouth, dark at the edges, reddish at the center. I tried to reach it with my fingers; it hurt. When I examined my shirt, I found sticky traces of resin.

To calm myself I decided to go into the town, take a walk, have dinner out. Where had the blow come from. I searched my memory, but to no purpose. I couldn’t decide if the pinecone had been thrown deliberately from the bushes or had fallen from a tree. A sudden blow, in the end, is only wonder and pain. When I pictured the sky and the pines, the pinecone fell from on high; when I thought of the undergrowth, the bushes, I saw a horizontal line traced by a projectile, the pinecone cutting through the air to land on my back.

The streets were filled with the Saturday evening crowd, all sunburned: entire families, women pushing strollers, irritated or angry fathers, young couples entwined or old ones holding hands. The smell of suntan lotion mixed with the aroma of cotton candy, of toasted almonds. The pain, like a burning ember stuck between my shoulder blades, kept me from thinking of anything except what had happened.

I felt the need to call my daughters, tell them about the accident. Marta answered, and started talking about how she was doing, non-stop and shrill. I had the impression that she was more than usually afraid I might interrupt, with some insidious question, a reproof, or simply that I might turn her exaggerated-light-ironic tone into something serious that would have imposed on her real questions and real answers. She went on at length about a party that she and her sister had to go to, I didn’t understand clearly when, if it was that evening or the following day. It meant a lot to their father, his friends would be there, not only colleagues from the university but people who worked in television, important people he wanted to impress, to show that although he was not yet fifty he had two grown daughters, well behaved, pretty. She talked and talked, and at a certain point she began complaining about the climate. Canada, she exclaimed, is an uninhabitable country, both winter and summer. She didn’t even ask me how I was, or maybe she asked but gave me no space to respond. Probably also because she never mentioned her father, I heard him between one word and the next. In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken. That night, while Marta rambled on with her torrents of words, I imagined for an instant that she was not yet born, that she had never come out of my womb but was in someone else’s—Rosaria’s, for example—and would be born with a different look, a different reactivity. Maybe that was what she had always secretly desired, not to be my daughter. She was telling me about herself neurotically, from a distant continent. She was talking about her hair, about how she had to wash it constantly because it never came out right, about the hairdresser who had ruined it, and so she wasn’t going to the party, she would never go out of the house with her hair looking like that, Bianca would go alone, because her hair was beautiful, and she spoke as if it were my fault, I hadn’t made her in such a way that she could be happy. Old reproaches. I felt that she was frivolous, yes, frivolous and boring, situated in a space too far away from this other space, at the sea, in the evening, and I lost her. While she went on complaining, my eyes focused on the pain in my back and I saw Rosaria, fat, tired, following me through the pinewood with the gang of boys, her relatives, and she squatted, her big bare belly resting like a cupola on her broad thighs, and pointed to me as the target. When I hung up, I was sorry I had called, I felt more agitated than before; my heart was pounding.

I had to eat, but the restaurants were too crowded; I hate being a woman alone in a restaurant on a Saturday. I decided to get something in the bar near the house. I arrived wearily, and looked in the glass case beneath the counter: swarm of flies. I got two potato croquettes, an orange, a beer. I ate without much enthusiasm, listening to a group of old men behind me chattering in a thick dialect. They were playing cards, raucously; coming in I had just glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye. I turned. At the card players’ table was Giovanni, the caretaker who had welcomed me on my arrival, and whom I hadn’t seen since.

He left his cards on the table, joined me at the counter. He made vague conversation, how was I, had I settled in, how was the apartment, chitchat. But the whole time he was smiling at me in a complicitous manner, even though there was no reason to smile like that; we had met once, for a few minutes, and I couldn’t understand what there was that we could be complicitous in. He kept his voice very low, and with every word advanced a few inches closer; twice he touched my arm with his fingertip, once he laid a hand covered with dark spots on my shoulder. When he asked if he could do anything for me he was practically whispering in my ear. I observed that his companions were staring at us silently, and I felt embarrassed. They were his age, around seventy, and, like an audience at the theatre, appeared to be watching, incredulous, an astonishing scene. When I finished eating, Giovanni nodded to the man behind the counter, in a way that meant it’s on me, and there was no way I could manage to pay. I thanked him and left in a hurry; only when I crossed the threshold and heard the loud laughter of the players did I realize that that man must have boasted of some intimacy with me, the stranger, and that he had tried to prove it by assuming for the onlookers attitudes of a lord and master.

I should have been angry, but I felt abruptly better. I thought of going back into the bar, sitting down beside Giovanni, and visibly rooting for him in the card game, like a blond bimbo in a gangster movie. What was he, in the end: a lean old man, with all his hair, only the skin spotted and deeply lined, the irises yellow and the pupils faintly veiled. I would have whispered in his ear, rubbed my breast against his arm, put my chin on his shoulder as I peered at his cards. He would have been grateful to me for the rest of his days.

Instead I went home and waited on the terrace for sleep to come, while the beam of the lighthouse struck.