The Lost Daughter (5 page)

Nina came over to me. Immediately afterward Rosaria also arrived, she seemed proud of having been the first to establish a relationship with me, who had been so decisive. 

“I wanted to thank you,” said Nina.

“It was a good scare.”

“I thought I would die.”

“My daughter got lost on a Sunday in August, almost twenty years ago, but I couldn’t see anything—anguish is blinding. In this situation strangers are more useful.”

“Luckily you were there,” Rosaria said. “So many bad things happen.” Then evidently her gaze fell on my back, because she exclaimed with a gesture of horror, “My goodness, what happened here, to your back, what was it?”

“A pinecone, in the woods.”

“It looks painful—did you put something on it?”

She wanted to go and get an ointment she had, she said it was miraculous. Nina and I remained alone; the cries of the child reached us insistently.

“She won’t calm down,” I said.

Nina smiled.

“It’s a bad day: we found her and she lost her doll.”

“You’ll find it.”

“Of course, if we don’t find her, what will we do—she’ll get sick.”

I felt a sudden sensation of cold on my back, Rosaria had come up behind me silently and was spreading her cream.

“How is it?”

“Good, thank you.”

She continued, attentively. When she had finished, I put my dress on over my bathing suit, picked up my bag.

“Until tomorrow,” I said. I was in a hurry to get away.

“You’ll see, already by tonight it’ll feel better.”

“Yes.”

I looked again at Elena, who was wriggling and writhing in her father’s arms, calling alternately for her mother and the doll.

“Let’s go,” Rosaria said to her sister-in-law, “let’s find the doll, because I can’t stand hearing her scream anymore.”

Nina gave me a nod of farewell, went off to her daughter. Rosaria instead began immediately to ask children and parents, searching meanwhile, without permission, among the toys piled under the umbrellas.

I went back up over the dunes, and into the pinewood, but even there I seemed to hear the child’s cries. I was confused, placed a hand on my chest to calm my racing heart. I had taken the doll, she was in my bag.

As I drove home I grew calmer. I discovered that I couldn’t recall the exact moment of an action that I now considered almost comic, comic because senseless. I felt like someone at the moment of realizing, perhaps with fear, perhaps with amusement: look what happened to me.

I must have had one of those waves of compassion that, from the time I was a child, have engulfed me, with no obvious reason, for people, animals, plants, things. I liked the explanation; it seemed to allude to something intrinsically noble. It had been a spontaneous impulse to help, I thought. Nena, Nani, Nennella, or whatever her name was. I saw her abandoned in the sand, limbs askew, her face half buried, as if she were about to suffocate, and I picked her up. An infantile reaction, nothing special, we never really grow up. I decided that I would give her back the next day. I’ll go to the beach very early, I’ll stick her in the sand just where Elena left her, I’ll do it in such a way that she’ll find the doll herself. I’ll play with the child a little and then say, look, she’s here, let’s dig. I felt almost happy.

At home I took bathing suits and towels and lotions out of my bag, but I left the doll in the bottom, to be sure, the next day, not to forget her. I took a shower, washed my bathing suits, hung them out to dry. I also made a salad and ate it on the terrace, looking at the sea, at the foam around the tongues of lava, at the array of black clouds leaving the horizon. Then suddenly it seemed to me I had done something mean, unintentional but mean. A gesture like one you make in sleep, when you turn over in bed and upset the lamp on the night table. Compassion doesn’t have anything to do with it, I thought, there was no question of a generous feeling. I felt like a drop that slides over a leaf after the rain, carried along by a clearly inevitable movement. Now I’m trying to find excuses, but there are none. I feel confused, the months of lightness are already gone, perhaps; I’m afraid that racing thoughts and whirling images are returning. The sea is becoming a violet band, the wind has come up. How changeable the weather is, the temperature has fallen abruptly. On the beach Elena must still be crying, Nina is desperate, Rosaria has combed the sand, inch by inch, the clan must be at war with all the other beachgoers by now. A paper napkin flew away, I cleared the table; and for the first time in many months I felt alone. I saw in the distance, on the sea, curtains of dark rain falling from the clouds.

In the space of a few minutes the wind had gained strength, moaning as it whipped against the building and blowing dust, dry leaves, dead insects into the house. I closed the door to the terrace, took the bag, sat down on the small sofa in front of the window. I couldn’t even hold on to my intentions. I fished out the doll, turned her in bewilderment between my hands. No clothes, who knows where Elena had left them. She was heavier than I expected, she must be full of water. Her sparse blond hair stuck out of her head in widely scattered tufts. Her cheeks were too puffy, she had stupid blue eyes and small lips with a dark opening at the center. Her chest was long, her stomach protruding; between short fat legs one could just make out a vertical line that continued without a break between broad buttocks. 

I would have liked to dress her. I had the idea of buying her some clothes as a surprise for Elena, a kind of reparation. What is a doll to a child. I had had one with beautiful curly hair, I had taken great care of her, had never lost her. Her name was Mina, my mother said that I had given her the name. Mina, mammina.
Mammuccia
came to mind, a word for “doll” that hasn’t been used for a long time. Play with the
mammuccia
. My mother had rarely yielded to the games I tried to play with her body. She immediately got nervous, she didn’t like being the doll. She laughed, pulled away, grew angry. It annoyed her when I combed her hair, put ribbons in it, washed her face and ears, undressed her, redressed her. 

I, on the other hand, no. As an adult I tried to keep in mind the misery of not being able to handle the hair, the face, the body of my mother. So when Bianca was a small child I patiently became her doll. She dragged me under the kitchen table, it was our playhouse, and made me lie down. I was very tired, I remember: Marta wouldn’t sleep at night, only during the day, and then only a little, and Bianca was always around me, full of demands, she didn’t want to go to day care; when I did manage to leave her there she got sick, complicating my existence even further. Yet I tried to keep my nerves under control, I wanted to be a good mother. I lay on the floor, let myself be cared for as if I were sick. Bianca gave me medicine, brushed my teeth, combed my hair. Sometimes I fell asleep, but she was little and didn’t know how to use the comb, and when she pulled my hair I started, and woke. I felt my eyes tearing with pain.

I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study, I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires. When Marta began to howl in the other room it was almost a liberation. I got up, rudely cutting off Bianca’s game, but I felt innocent, it wasn’t I who was leaving my daughter, it was my second-born who was tearing me away from the first. I have to go to Marta, I’ll be right back, wait. She would begin crying.

It was in a moment of feeling generally inadequate that I decided to give Mina to Bianca; it seemed to me a fine gesture, a way of relieving her envy for her little sister. So I fished the old doll out of a cardboard box on top of the wardrobe and said to Bianca: see, her name is Mina, this was Mama’s doll when she was little, I’m giving her to you. I thought she would love her; I was sure she would devote herself to her as she had devoted herself to me in our games. Instead she put her aside, she didn’t like Mina. She preferred an ugly rag doll with stringy yellow yarn hair her father had brought as a present from somewhere or other. I was hurt.

One day Bianca happened to be playing on the balcony: it was a place she really liked. As soon as spring arrived I would leave her there; I didn’t have time to take her outside, but I wanted her to have air and sun, even if the noise of the traffic and a strong smell of exhaust rose from the street. I hadn’t been able to open a book for months; I was exhausted and angry; there was never enough money, I barely slept. I found Bianca sitting on Mina, as if she were a chair, and meanwhile playing with her doll. I told her to get up right away, she mustn’t ruin something that was dear to me from my childhood: she was really cruel and ungrateful. I called her ungrateful, and I yelled, I think I yelled that giving her the doll had been a mistake, she was my doll and I would take her back.

How many things are done and said to children behind the closed doors of houses. Bianca was already a cool character, she’s always been like that, swallowing up anxieties and feelings. She remained sitting on Mina; measuring her words, the way she still does when she declares her wishes, as if they were her last: no, it’s mine. Then I gave her a nasty shove: she was a child of three but at that moment she seemed older, stronger than me. I tore Mina away from her and finally her eyes showed fear. I discovered that she had taken off the doll’s clothes, even her little shoes and socks, and had scribbled all over her, from head to foot, with markers. It was a disfigurement that could be corrected but to me it seemed without remedy. Everything in those years seemed to me without remedy, I myself was without remedy. I hurled the doll over the railing of the balcony.

I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature. I stood leaning against the railing for I don’t know how long watching the cars that passed over her, mutilating her. Then I realized that Bianca, too, was watching, on her knees, with her forehead pressed against the bars of the railing. I picked her up, she let herself be held, yielding. I kissed her for a long time, I hugged her as if I wanted to take her back into my body. You hurt me, Mama, you’re hurting me. I left Elena’s doll on the sofa, lying on her back, belly up.

The storm had moved quickly to land, violently, with blinding lightning and thunder that sounded like cars exploding, full of dynamite. I ran to close the windows in the bedroom before everything got soaked, I turned on the bedside lamp. I lay on the bed, arranged the pillows against the headboard, and began to work with a will, filling pages with notes.

Reading, writing have always been my way of soothing myself. 

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.