The Lost Daughter Page 2

  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.

  5

  Nearly a week of vacation had already slipped away: good weather, a light breeze, a lot of empty umbrellas, cadences of dialects from all over Italy mixed with the local dialect and the languages of a few foreigners who had come for the sun.

  Then it was Saturday, and the beach grew crowded. My patch of sun and shade was besieged by coolers, pails, shovels, plastic water wings and floats, racquets. I gave up reading and searched the crowd for Nina and Elena as if they were a show, to help pass the time.

  I had a hard time finding them; I saw that they had dragged their lounge chair closer to the water. Nina was lying on her stomach, in the sun, and beside her, in the same position, it seemed to me, was the doll. The child, on the other hand, had gone to the water’s edge with a yellow plastic watering can, filled it with water, and, holding it with both hands because of the weight, puffing and laughing, returned to her mother to water her body and mitigate the sun’s heat. When the watering can was empty, she went to fill it again, same route, same effort, same game.

  Maybe I had slept badly, maybe some unpleasant thought had passed through my head that I was unaware of; certainly, seeing them that morning I felt irritated. Elena, for example, seemed to me obtusely methodical: first she watered her mother’s ankles, then the doll’s, she asked both if that was enough, both said no, she went off again. Nina, on the other hand, seemed to me affected: she mewed with pleasure, repeated the mewing in a different tone, as if it were coming from the doll’s mouth, and then sighed, again, again. I suspected that she was playing her role of beautiful young mother not for love of her daughter but for us, the crowd on the beach, all of us, male and female, young and old.

  The sprinkling of her body and the doll’s went on for a long time. She became shiny with water, the luminous needles sprayed by the watering can wet her hair, too, which stuck to her head and forehead. Nani or Nile or Nena, the doll, was soaked with the same perseverance, but she absorbed less water, and so it dripped from the blue plastic of the lounger onto the sand, darkening it.

  I stared at the child in her coming and going and I don’t know what bothered me, the game with the water, perhaps, or Nina flaunting her pleasure in the sun. Or the voices, yes, especially the voices that mother and daughter attributed to the doll. Now they gave her words in turn, now together, superimposing the adult’s fake-child voice and the child’s fake-adult voice. They imagined it was the same, single voice coming from the same throat of a thing in reality mute. But evidently I couldn’t enter into their illusion, I felt a growing repulsion for that double voice. Of course, there I was, at a distance, what did it matter to me, I could follow the game or ignore it, it was only a pastime. But no, I felt an unease as if faced with a thing done badly, as if a part of me were insisting, absurdly, that they should make up their minds, give the doll a stable, constant voice, either that of the mother or that of the daughter, and stop pretending that they were the same.

  It was like a slight twinge that, as you keep thinking about it, becomes an unbearable pain. I was beginning to feel exasperated. At a certain point I wanted to get up, make my way obliquely over to the lounge chair where they were playing, and, stopping there, say That’s enough, you don’t know how to play, stop it. With that intention I even left my place, I couldn’t bear it any longer. Naturally I said nothing, I went by looking straight ahead. I thought: it’s too hot, I’ve always hated crowded places, everyone talking with the same modulated sounds, moving for the same reasons, doing the same things. I blamed the weekend beach for my sudden attack of nerves and went to stick my feet in the water.

  6

  Around noon something new happened. I was napping in the shade, even though the music that came from the bath house was too loud, when I heard the pregnant woman calling Nina, as if she had something extraordinary to announce.

  I opened my eyes, noticed the girl pick up her daughter, and point out to her something or someone behind me with exaggerated cheerfulness. I turned and saw a heavy, thickset man, between thirty and forty, who was coming down the wooden walkway, his head completely shaved, wearing a tight-fitting black T-shirt that held in a substantial belly above green bathing trunks. The child recognized him, made signs of greeting, but nervously, laughing and coyly hiding her face between her mother’s neck and shoulder. The man, with a serious expression, gave a faint wave. His face was handsome, his eyes sharp. In no hurry, he stopped to greet the manager, gave an affectionate pat to the young attendant, who had immediately come over, and at the same time an entourage of large jovial men in bathing suits also stopped, one with a backpack, one with a cooler, one with two or three packages, which, to judge from the ribbons and bows, must be gifts. When the man finally reached the beach, Nina came up to him carrying the child, again stopping the little procession. He, still serious, with composed gestures, first of all took Elena from her embrace; the child hugged him, arms around his neck, giving his cheeks small anxious kisses. Then, still offering his cheek to her, he seized Nina behind the neck, almost forcing her to bend over—he was at least four inches shorter than she was—and fleetingly touched her lips, with restrained, proprietary command.

  I guessed that Elena’s father had arrived, Nina’s husband. Among the Neapolitans a kind of party started up immediately, and they crowded around, right up to the edge of my umbrella. I saw that the child was unwrapping presents, that Nina was trying on an ugly straw hat. Then the new arrival pointed to something on the sea, a white motorboat. The old man with the mean look, the boys, the fat gray-haired woman, the girl and boy cousins gathered along the shore, shouting and waving their arms in signs of greeting. The motorboat passed the line of red buoys, zigzagged among the swimmers, crossed the line of white buoys, and arrived, its motor still running, amid children and old people swimming in the shallow water. Heavy men with worn faces, ostentatiously wealthy women, obese children jumped out. Embraces, kisses on the cheek, Nina’s hat carried it off by the wind. Her husband, like a motionless animal that at the first sign of danger springs with unexpected force and decisiveness, grabbed it in midair, despite the child in his arms, before it ended up in the water, and gave it back to her. She put it on more carefully; suddenly the hat seemed pretty, and I felt an irrational pang of unease.

  The confusion grew. The new arrivals were evidently disappointed by the arrangement of the umbrellas; the husband called Gino over, and the manager came, too. I got the impre
ssion that they all wanted to be together, the resident family group and those who were visiting, forming a compact wedge of loungers and chairs and coolers, of children and adults having a good time. They pointed in my direction, where there were two free umbrellas, with a lot of gestures, especially the pregnant woman, who eventually began asking her neighbors to move, to shift from one umbrella to another, just as at the movies someone asks if you would please move over a few seats.

  A game-like atmosphere was created. The bathers hesitated, they didn’t want to move, with all their belongings, but both the children and the adults of the Neapolitan family were already cheerfully packing up, and finally most of the bathers moved almost willingly.

  I opened a book, but by now I had a knot of bitter feelings inside that at every impact of sound, color, odor grew even more bitter. Those people annoyed me. I had been born in a not dissimilar environment, my uncles, my cousins, my father were like that, of a domineering cordiality. They were ceremonious, usually very sociable; every question sounded on their lips like an order barely disguised by a false good humor, and if necessary they could be vulgarly insulting and violent. My mother was ashamed of the rude nature of my father and his relatives, she wanted to be different; within that world, she played at being the well-dressed, well-behaved lady, but at the first sign of conflict the mask cracked, and she, too, clung to the actions, the language of the others, with a violence that was no different. I observed her, amazed and disappointed, and determined not to be like her, to become truly different and so show her that it was useless and cruel to frighten us with her repeated “You will never ever ever see me again”; instead she should have changed for real, or left home for real, left us, disappeared. How I suffered for her and for myself, how ashamed I was to have come out of the belly of such an unhappy person. That thought, now, amid the confusion on the beach, made me more anxious and my disdain for the habits of those people grew, along with a thread of anguish.

  Meanwhile the moving process had hit a snag. There was a small family to whom the pregnant woman couldn’t manage to explain herself, another language, foreigners, they wanted to stay under their umbrella. The children tried to convince them, the dark cousins, the fierce old man: nothing. Then I realized that they were talking to Gino, they were looking in my direction. He and the pregnant woman came toward me like a delegation.

  The young man, embarrassed, pointed out to me the foreigners—father, mother, two small boys. Germans, he called them, and asked if I knew the language, if I would act as interpreter, and the woman, holding one hand behind her back and thrusting her naked belly forward, added in dialect that with those people you couldn’t understand anything, I was to tell them that it was just a matter of changing umbrellas, no more, to enable the Neapolitans to stay together, friends and relatives, they were having a party.

  I gave Gino a cold nod of assent and went to talk to the Germans, who turned out to be Dutch. I felt Nina’s eyes on me, and spoke in a loud, confident voice. With my first words, I felt, I don’t know why, a desire to show off my skills, and I conversed with enthusiasm. The head of the family was persuaded, the air of friendliness returned, Dutch and Neapolitans mingled. When I returned to my umbrella, I walked by Nina on purpose and for the first time saw her from close up. She seemed to me less beautiful, not as young, the waxing at her groin had been done badly, the child she held in her arms had a red runny eye, a forehead pimpled with sweat, and the doll was ugly and dirty. I returned to my place, outwardly calm but in fact extremely agitated.

  I tried again to read, without success. I thought not of what I had said to the Dutch people but of the tone I had used. I had the suspicion that without wanting to I had been the messenger of that overbearing disorder, that I had translated into another language what was in substance a discourtesy. I was angry now, with the Neapolitans, with myself. So, when the pregnant woman pointed to me with a grimace of impatience and turned to the children, to the men, to Gino, and cried, this lady also has to move—right, signora, you’ll move?, I answered brusquely, with hostile severity: no, I’m fine here, I’m sorry but I have no desire to move.

  7

  I left at sunset as usual, but tense and resentful. After my refusal the pregnant woman had grown insistent, in an increasingly aggressive tone, and the old man had come over and said things like what’s it to you, you do us a favor today we do one for you tomorrow; but it all lasted just a few minutes, maybe I didn’t even have time to say no again, clearly, but confined myself to shaking my head. The matter was ended by an abrupt remark from Nina’s husband, words uttered at a distance but in a loud voice: that’s enough, he said, we’re fine like this, leave the lady alone. And they all withdrew, the young attendant last, murmuring an apology as he returned to his post.

  As long as I stayed on the beach I pretended to read. In reality, all I could hear, as if amplified, was the clan’s dialect, their shouts and laughter, and it kept me from concentrating. They were celebrating something, eating, drinking, singing, they seemed to think they were the only people on the beach, or anyway that our task was simply to delight in their happiness. From the supplies that had been brought on the motorboat all sorts of things emerged, a sumptuous meal, lasting for hours, with wine, desserts, liqueurs. No one glanced in my direction, no one said even a vaguely ironic word that concerned me. Only when I got dressed, and was preparing to leave, did the woman with the big belly leave the group and come toward me. She offered me a little plate with a slice of a raspberry-colored ice.

  “It’s my birthday,” she said seriously.

  I took the ice even though I didn’t feel like it.

  “Happy birthday. How old are you?”

  “Forty-two.”

  I looked at the stomach, the protruding navel like an eye.

  “You have a nice big belly.”

  She had a very satisfied expression.

  “It’s a girl. I never had children, and now look here.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Two months. My sister-in-law had hers right away, I had to wait eight years.”

  “These things happen when they’re supposed to happen. Thank you, and have a happy birthday.”

  I held out the plate to her after two bites, but she paid no attention.

  “Do you have any children?”

  “Two girls.”

  “Did you have them right away?”

  “When I had the first I was twenty-three.”

  “They’re grown.”

  “One is twenty-four, the other twenty-two.”

  “You seem younger. My sister-in-law says you couldn’t be more than forty.”

  “I’m almost forty-eight.”

  “Lucky you, to have stayed so attractive. What’s your name?”

  “Leda.”

  “Neda?”

  “Leda.”

  “Mine is Rosaria.”

  I held out the plate more decisively, and she took it.

  “I was a bit anxious, earlier,” I said, apologizing reluctantly.

  “Sometimes the sea isn’t good for us. Or is it the girls who are worrying you?”

  “Children are always cause for worry.”

  We said goodbye; I realized that Nina was looking at us. I went through the pinewood discontentedly, now feeling in the wrong. What would it have cost me to change umbrellas, the others had done it, even the Dutch, why hadn’t I? Sense of superiority, presumption. Defense of my leisure for thinking, snobbish tendency to give lessons in civility. All nonsense. I had paid so much attention to Nina only because I felt her to be physically closer, while I had given not a single glance to Rosaria, who was ugly and without pretensions. How many times they must have called her by name and I hadn’t noticed. I had kept her outside my range, without curiosity, anonymous image of a woman who carries her pregnancy crudely. That’s what I was, superficial. And then that remark: children are always cause for worry. Said to a woman about to bring one into the world: how stupid. Always words of contempt, skeptic
al or ironic. Bianca had cried to me once between her tears: you always think you’re best. And Marta: why did you have us if all you do is complain about us? Fragments of words, mere syllables. The moment arrives when your children say to you with unhappy rage, why did you give me life: I walked absorbed in thought. The pine trees had a violet tinge; there was a wind. I heard a creaking noise behind me, perhaps footsteps, I turned, silence.

  I began walking again. A violent blow struck my back, as if I had been hit with a billiard ball. I cried out in pain and surprise together, turned, breathless, and saw a pinecone tumbling into the undergrowth, big as a fist, closed. Now my heart was racing, and I rubbed my back hard, to get rid of the pain. Unable to recover my breath, I looked around at the bushes, at the pines above me, tossing in the wind.