The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante

  Outside the fair area was a chaos of cars, raveled streams of adults and children, either moving away from the stalls or converging on them. I went along the deserted streets. I climbed the stairs to my apartment, the last flight with a sensation of urgency.

  The doll was still on the table on the terrace, the sun had dried her dress. I undressed her carefully, taking everything off. I recalled that Marta, as a child, had the habit of sticking things in every little hole she found, as if to hide them and be sure of finding them again. Once I came across tiny pieces of uncooked spaghetti in the radio. I took Nani into the bathroom, I held her by the chest with one hand, head down. I shook her hard, dark drops of water trickled from her mouth.

  What had Elena put in there. I had been so happy to learn, when I was pregnant the first time, that life was reproducing in me. I wanted to do everything as well as possible. The women of my family swelled, dilated. The creature trapped in their womb seemed a long illness that changed them: even after the birth they were no longer the same. I, instead, wanted my pregnancy to be under control. I was not my grandmother (seven children), I was not my mother (four daughters), I was not my aunts, my cousins. I was different and rebellious. I wanted to carry my inflated belly with pleasure, enjoying the nine months of expecting, scrutinizing the process, guiding and adapting it to my body, as I had stubbornly done with everything in my life from early adolescence. I imagined myself a shining tile in the mosaic of the future. So I was vigilant, I followed the medical prescriptions rigorously. For the duration of the pregnancy I remained attractive, elegant, active, and happy. I talked to the creature in my belly, I had her listen to music, I read to her in the original the texts I was working on, I translated them for her with an inventive effort that filled me with pride. What later became Bianca was for me Bianca right away, a being at its best, purified of humors and blood, humanized, intellectualized, with nothing that could evoke the blind cruelty of live matter as it expands. I managed to vanquish even the long and violent labor pains I suffered, reshaping them as an extreme test, to be confronted with solid preparation, containing the terror, and leaving of myself—and above all to myself—a proud memory.

  I did well. How happy I was when Bianca came out of me and, holding her in my arms for a few seconds, I realized that it had been the most intense pleasure of my life. If I look now at Nani with her head down, vomiting into the sink a brown spray mixed with sand, I find no resemblance to my first pregnancy; even the morning sickness was mild and didn’t last. But then came Marta. She attacked my body, forcing it to turn on itself, out of control. She immediately manifested herself not as Marta but as a piece of living iron in my stomach. My body became a bloody liquid; suspended in it was a mushy sediment inside which grew a violent polyp, so far from anything human that it reduced me, even though it fed and grew, to rotting matter without life. Nani, with her black spittle, resembles me when I was pregnant for the second time.

  I was already unhappy, but I didn’t know it. It seemed to me that little Bianca, right after her beautiful birth, had suddenly changed and treacherously taken for herself all my energy, all my strength, all my capacity for imagination. It seemed to me that my husband, too caught up in his fury of accomplishment, didn’t notice that his daughter, now that she was born, had become voracious, demanding, hostile as she had never seemed when she was in my stomach. I gradually discovered that I didn’t have the strength to make the second experience exalting, like the first. My head sank inside the rest of my body, there seemed no prose, verse, rhetorical figure, musical phrase, film sequence, color capable of taming the dark beast I was carrying in my womb. The real breakdown for me was that: the giving up of any sublimation of my pregnancy, the destruction of the happy memory of the first pregnancy, the first birth.

  Nani, Nani. The doll, impassive, continued to vomit. You’ve emptied all your slime into the sink, good girl. I parted her lips, with one finger held her mouth open, ran some water inside her and then shook her hard to wash out the murky cavity of her trunk, her belly, to finally get the baby out that Elena had put inside her. Games. Tell the girls everything, starting from their childhood: they’ll take care, later, of inventing an acceptable world. I myself was playing now, a mother is only a daughter who plays, it was helping me think. I looked for my eyebrow tweezers, there was something in the doll’s mouth that wouldn’t come out. Begin again from here, I thought, from this thing. I should have noticed right away, as a girl, this soft reddish engorgement that I’m now squeezing with the metal of the tweezers. Accept it for what it is. Poor creature with nothing human about her. Here’s the baby that Lenuccia stuck in the stomach of her doll to play at making it pregnant like Aunt Rosaria’s. I extracted it carefully. It was a worm from the beach, I don’t know what the scientific name is: the ones amateur fishermen find at twilight, digging in the wet sand, as my older cousins did four decades ago, on the beaches between Garigliano and Gaeta. I looked at them then spellbound by my revulsion. They picked up the worms with their fingers and stuck them on the hooks as bait; when the fish bit, the boys freed them from the iron with an expert gesture and tossed them over their shoulders, leaving them to their death agonies on the dry sand.

  I held Nani’s pliant lips open with my thumb while I operated carefully with the tweezers. I have a horror of crawling things, but for that clot of humors I felt a naked pity.

  23

  I went to the beach in the late afternoon. I watched Nina in the distance, from my umbrella, again with the benevolent curiosity of the first days of the vacation. She was anxious, Elena wouldn’t leave her for an instant.

  At sunset, as they were preparing to go home and the child was screaming that she wanted to go swimming again, and Rosaria intervened, offering to take her to the water, Nina lost her composure and began yelling at her sister-in-law, in a harsh dialect, full of vulgarity, which attracted the attention of the whole beach. Rosaria was silent. Instead Tonino, Nina’s husband, interrupted, and dragged her toward the shore, holding her by one arm. He was a man who seemed trained never to lose his composure, not even when his actions become violent. He spoke to Nina firmly but as if in a silent film, not a sound reached me. She stared at the sand, touched her eyes with her fingertips, occasionally said no.

  The situation gradually became normal and the family swarmed in groups toward the villa in the pinewood, Nina exchanging cold words with Rosaria, Rosaria carrying Elena, now and again covering her with kisses. I watched Gino tidy up the beach chairs, lounge chairs, abandoned toys. I saw him pick up a blue pareo that had been left hanging on an umbrella and fold it carefully, with absorption. A boy came running back and, barely slowing down, grabbed the pareo rudely, then disappeared toward the dunes.

  Time slipped away in a melancholy fashion, the weekend came, with its great influx of beachgoers; already on Friday they were arriving in masses. It was hot. The crowd increased Nina’s tension. She watched her daughter obsessively, springing like an animal as soon as she saw her move a few steps. We exchanged brief greetings at the water’s edge, a few words about the child. I knelt beside Elena, said to her something in play; her eyes were red and she had mosquito bites on her cheek and forehead. Rosaria came to put her feet in the water, but she ignored me; it was I who said hello and she answered reluctantly.

  At one point during the morning I saw that Tonino, Elena, and Nina were having ice cream in the bar at the beach house. I passed by to go to the counter and order a coffee, but it seemed to me that they didn’t even see me, they were too taken up by the child. Yet, when I was about to pay, the manager told me that I owed nothing, Tonino had made a sign to put it on his bill. I wanted to thank him, but they had left, and were on the beach with Elena, paying little attention to her, though, for now they were quarreling.

  As for Gino, it was enough for me to turn my head every so often to catch him watching them from a distance as he pretended to study. The beach got more and more crowded, Nina mingled among the bathers, but the boy put aside his te
xtbook and began using the binoculars he had been issued, as if he feared from one moment to the next a tidal wave. I thought not so much of what he saw with his eyes empowered by the lenses but of what he imagined: the early hours of the hot afternoon, when the big family of Neapolitans retreated from the sea; the conjugal bed in the half light; Nina bound to the body of her husband, their sweat.

  The young mother returned to the beach around five in the afternoon, cheerful, her husband beside her with Elena in his arms, and Gino stared at her, desolate, then hid his gaze in his book. Every so often he turned in my direction but immediately looked away. We were both waiting for the same thing: for the weekend to go by quickly, the beach to become peaceful again; Nina’s husband would leave, and she would again be in contact with us.

  In the evening I went to the movies, an ordinary film in a half-empty theater. As the lights went out, and the film began, a group of boys came in. They ate popcorn, they laughed, they insulted one another, they tried out the rings of their cell phones, they shouted obscenities at the shadows of the actresses on the screen. I can’t bear to be disturbed when I’m watching a movie, even if it’s a bad movie. So at first I uttered imperious whispers, then, since they paid no attention, I turned to them and said that if they didn’t stop it I would call the usher. They were the boys from the Neapolitan family. Call the usher, they jeered, maybe they had never heard the word. One shouted at me in dialect: go ahead, bitch, why don’t you call the dickhead. I got up and went to the ticket window. I explained the situation to a bald man who seemed lazy but kind. He assured me that he would take care of it and so I went back into the theater amid the boys’ laughter. A moment later, the man pushed aside the curtain, entered, looked around. Silence. He stood there for a few minutes and then withdrew. Immediately the clamor started up again. The other spectators were silent; I rose and shouted, a little hysterically, I’m going to call the police. They began to sing, in falsetto, Viva, viva la polizia. I left.

  The next day, Saturday, the little gang was at the beach, they seemed to be waiting for me. They jeered, they pointed, they stared at me, muttering to Rosaria. I thought of appealing to Nina’s husband, but I was ashamed of the idea, it seemed to me that I had momentarily entered into the logic of the group. Around two, exasperated by the crowd, by the loud music coming from the beach house, I gathered up my things and left.

  The pinewood was deserted, yet soon I felt that I was being followed. The memory of the pinecone that had hit me in the back suddenly returned, and I walked faster. The scuffling sound behind me continued, and, in a panic, I started to run. The noises, the voices, the smothered laughter grew louder. The clamor of the cicadas, the odor of hot resin were no longer pleasant, but seemed a trove of anxiety. I slowed down: not because my fear was lessening but out of dignity.

  At the apartment I felt ill, I broke out in a cold sweat, then felt hot, as if I were suffocating. I lay on the couch and slowly calmed down. I tried to rouse myself, and swept the house. The doll was still naked, head down in the bathroom sink, and I dressed her. The water was no longer gurgling in her stomach; I imagined her womb as a dry ditch. Organize, understand. I thought how one opaque action generates others of increasingly pronounced opacity, and so the problem is to break the chain. Elena would be happy to have her doll again, I said to myself. Or no, a child never wants only what it’s asking for, in fact a satisfied demand makes even more unbearable the need that has not been confessed.

  I took a shower, looked in the mirror as I dried myself. The impression I had had of myself in these months changed abruptly. I wasn’t newly youthful but aged, excessively thin, a body so lean as to seem without depth, white hairs in the black of my sex.

  I went out, found a drugstore where I could weigh myself. The scale printed out weight and height on a piece of paper. I was three inches shorter and underweight. I tried again and my height diminished further, as did my weight. I went away disoriented. Among my most dreaded fantasies was the idea that I could get smaller, go back to being adolescent, child, condemned to relive those phases of my life. I didn’t start liking myself until I turned eighteen, when I left my family, my city, to study in Florence.

  I walked along the sea until evening, nibbling fresh coconut, toasted almonds, hazelnuts. The shops were lighted, the young Africans spread their wares on the sidewalks, a fire-eater began to spit out long flames, a clown knotted colored balloons into animal forms, attracting a big audience of children, the Saturday-night throng grew. I discovered that a dancing party was to be held in the square, and I waited for it to begin.

  I like dancing, I like to watch people dance. The orchestra started with a tango; it was mainly older couples who ventured out, and they were good. Among the dancers I recognized Giovanni, whose steps and figures had a serious intensity. The spectators multiplied, the circle around the edges of the square expanded. The dancers, too, grew in number, and their competence diminished. Now people of all ages were dancing, polite grandsons with grandmothers, fathers with ten-year-old daughters, old women with old women, children with children, tourists and local people. Suddenly Giovanni was standing in front of me, asking me to dance.

  I left my purse with an old woman he knew and we danced, a waltz, I believe. From then on we didn’t stop. He talked about the heat, the starry sky, the full moon, and how the mussels were flourishing. I felt better and better. He was sweaty, tense, but he continued to ask me to dance, with true courtesy, and I accepted, I was having a good time. He left me, apologizing, only when, at a certain point, the Neapolitan family appeared in the crowd, at the edge of the square.

  I went to get my purse and I observed him as he politely greeted Nina, Rosaria, and finally, with particular deference, Tonino. I also saw him trying clumsily to pet Elena, who, in her mother’s arms, was eating a roll of cotton candy twice as big as her face. When the greetings were over, he remained beside them, stiff, uneasy, saying nothing, but as if he were proud to be seen in their company. I understood that for me the evening was over and I prepared to go. But I realized that Nina was handing her daughter to Rosaria and now was forcing her husband to dance. I stayed a little longer to watch her. Her movements had a natural, pleasing harmony, even—or perhaps especially—in the arms of that graceless man. I felt a touch on my arm. It was Gino, who had leaped like a beast from some corner where he had been squatting. He asked if I wanted to dance, I said I was tired, very hot, but at the same time I felt light and gay, and so I took him by the hand and we danced.

  I quickly realized that he intended to guide me toward Nina and her husband, wanting her to see us. I helped him, and then I didn’t mind being seen in the arms of her suitor. But in the throng of couples it was difficult to reach them and we both gave up without saying anything. I had my purse on my shoulder but, well, all right. It was pleasant to dance with that slender, tall dark boy, with his shining eyes and mussed hair and dry palms. His nearness was so different from Giovanni’s. I felt the difference in bodies, in odors. I perceived it as a division in time: it seemed to me that that very evening, there in the square, had been split in half and that I had magically ended up dancing in two different stages of my life. When the music ended, I said I was tired, Gino wanted to take me home. We left the square behind us, the sea walk, the music. We spoke of his exam, of the university. At the door I saw that he was having a hard time saying goodbye.

  “Would you like to come up,” I asked.

  He made a gesture of no, he was embarrassed, he said:

  “It’s beautiful, the gift you gave Nina.”

  It irritated me that they had managed to see each other and that she had even showed him the pin. He added:

  “She was really grateful for your kindness.”

  I grumbled a yes, I was pleased. Then he said:

  “I have something to ask you.”

  “What.”

  He didn’t look me in the face, but stared at the wall behind me.

  “Nina wants to know if you would be willing to lend
us your place for a few hours.”

  I felt uneasy, a dart of bad humor that poisoned my veins. I looked at the boy to see if that formulation concealed a request not from Nina but born of his own desire. I said sharply:

  “Tell Nina I’d like to talk to her.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as she can.”

  “Her husband leaves tomorrow evening, before that it’s impossible.”

  “Monday morning is fine.”

  He was silent, now he was nervous and couldn’t leave.

  “Are you angry?”

  “No.”

  “But you made a face.”

  I said coldly:

  “Gino, the man who takes care of my apartment knows Nina and has business with her husband.”

  He had an expression of disdain, a half smile.

  “Giovanni? He doesn’t count. Ten euros and he says nothing.”

  Then I said to him with a rage that I couldn’t conceal: “Why did you decide to ask this of me in particular?”

  “Nina wanted it that way.”

  24

  I had a hard time getting to sleep. I thought about calling the girls, they were there, in a corner of my mind, but I kept losing them in the confusion of the days. This time, too, I decided against it. They’ll just give me a list of the things they need, I sighed. Marta will say that I went to the trouble of sending Bianca her notes, but forgot something—I don’t know what, there’s always something—that she’d asked for. It’s been like that since they were young, they live in the suspicion that I do more for one than for the other. Once it was toys, candy, even the quantity of kisses dispensed. Afterward they began to argue over clothes, shoes, motorcycles, cars—that is, money. Now I have to pay attention to give one exactly what I give the other, because each, resentful, keeps a secret account. They’ve felt since childhood that my affection is transient, and so they evaluate it on the basis of the concrete services I provide, the goods I distribute. Sometimes I think they see me now only as a material inheritance that they will have to quarrel over after my death. They don’t want the same thing to happen with the money, with our few goods, that, in their view, happened with the transmission of my physical features. No, I don’t feel like listening to their complaints. Why don’t they call me. If the phone doesn’t ring, evidently they don’t have urgent demands. I tossed and turned in the bed; I couldn’t get to sleep, and was enraged.