A Girl Returned

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

  The Gypsies arrived, too, and they stood apart, where a shaft of sunlight poked through. There were four of them, I think my brother’s age, except for one, who seemed more adult and wore a wide-collared purple shirt, with a mourning button pinned to the chest. They had polished shoes and brilliantine in their dark hair, combed back as on Sunday. Thus they paid homage to their friend, simply by their presence.

  Beyond the boundary wall the horses waited for them, left free.

  21.

  We went back to the cold house. That night snow appeared on the mountains, ahead of the season, and for several hours the wind whipped the valley. The windowpanes rattled in the rickety frames, drafts blew through the rooms. The neighbor, who had kept Giuseppe during the funeral, brought him back, but when she approached the mother with the child in her arms, the mother turned the other way. Not even Adriana wanted him. I took him, and sat down on a chair and leaned my head against the wall. I barely held him up, I had no strength. He felt that I wasn’t reliable, and didn’t move. The women from the other floors had prepared a funeral meal, food and drinks for us, on the table. I don’t know if anyone ate.

  After a while Giuseppe showed signs of restlessness, and wanted to get down. He crawled to his mamma, all in black, and looked at her from below with big, questioning eyes. Even from the depths of her despair she must have seen him. She went around him to go and lie on her bed, and she remained there until the following afternoon. The neighbors came to her in turn with a cup of hot broth, as when she had given birth, but she always twisted her lips.

  In the following days we were invited to every meal by one neighbor or another. I preferred to stay and make do with something and bread or with what Adriana brought me from the neighbors’ kitchens.

  At night I thought I heard Vincenzo tossing between the sheets, and so the death had been only a dream or a well executed trick. Sometimes it was his smell, so distinctive, spreading in the room. How harsh it was to return to the reality of his absence, afterward. His breath on my face even startled me awake, as when he had searched for me in the dark.

  He wasn’t the only one who occupied my hours of insomnia. At the cemetery I thought I had barely noticed my father, but his face, half hidden by the beard, returned, insistent. The eyes severe or, rather, disappointed. He had given up on the idea of speaking to me, I was sure of that. Maybe he was afraid that I would ask him to take me home again, or maybe there was more in his gaze. The weight of a silent reproach. And if he was the one who had decided to send me away? That was a possibility I had never imagined. But what could be my offense? Had he been told about a kiss in the school corridor? Too little to send a daughter away. I understood that, even though I was young, even in fantasies magnified by the night. If I had done something wrong, I didn’t remember what.

  At first the mother spent most of her time in bed, lying on her side with her eyes open. Giuseppe wanted to stay next to her, and he didn’t bother her. The drops of milk that until a few days earlier he had still been able to suck from her breast had dried up. He stayed curled against her, in that passive heat. He climbed over the limp body, he wandered around it. After a few attempts to get her attention he stopped trying, it would have been useless. Sometimes, though, he wailed unexpectedly and I rushed in. Standing still for a few seconds in the room, I didn’t know what to do. She looked at me with those eyes. So I picked up Giuseppe and took him away.

  Then she began to get up, and the neighbors, finding her on her feet, stopped helping. But the mother did nothing in the house: as soon as she had enough strength she walked along the highway, as far as the road lined with cypresses. She always dressed in black and her uncombed hair was like leaves still attached to the branches of a tree in winter. One morning I asked if I could go with her, and she stared at me without responding. I followed her, a step behind; for two kilometers we didn’t exchange a word. She came to life only on the ground that covered Vincenzo. Dead, he was the only child who counted for her.

  On the way back I observed her, again walking ahead of me. I slowed down, fitting my pace to hers. The weeds along the embankment scratched her and she didn’t feel them. Sometimes she strayed toward the center line, unaware of the danger. A honk made her jump, before I had time to correct her path. My pity suddenly turned to rage, inflamed me inside. There she was, the grieving mother of that reckless youth. She belonged completely to him, in his wooden box. She had nothing for me, who survived. Certainly when she gave me up, an infant of a few months, she hadn’t been reduced to this. I caught up and passed her, I went on without turning back to see if she was safe from the cars. If someone was to protect her, it wouldn’t be me.

  Several days later, Signora Perilli rang at the entrance to the building, and asked for Adriana and me. We came down, ashamed to invite her into the house.

  “Tomorrow you’ll come back to school, both of you,” she said imperiously. She added nothing else, her husband was waiting in the car with the motor running.

  “I’ll go back because I feel like it, not for her, she’s not even my teacher,” Adriana retorted on the stairs.

  After school we had to cook something for everyone, usually pastina in broth. On my first attempts I put too little water in the pot or I overcooked the pasta, if my sister didn’t pay attention to what I was doing.

  “You’re all head,” she said discouragingly. “All you know how to do with your hands is hold a pen.”

  She was a skillful shopper, too, at the greengrocer she’d buy a kilo of potatoes and ask for carrots and onion for our vegetable broths. At the butcher barely two hundred grams of ground meat and some scraps for the nonexistent dog. We would boil those, too, but for us. Today I can’t eat anything that might resemble our diet of that time. The mere odor of boiled meat makes me throw up.

  “Keep track, at the end of the month Papa will come by,” Adriana promised every shop owner. So quick and alert, with the bag in her hand, she disarmed them. Behind her, I was merely a mute reinforcement. The unease caused by the shopkeepers’ brief glances as they served us, mouths shut, accompanied me out of the stores.

  My sister was also fragile. She took refuge down on the ground floor, at the widow’s. In exchange for company and a few tasks, she received affection and nourishment. She brought Giuseppe with her: “otherwise he’ll die” slipped out one night when she came upstairs, carrying him half asleep.

  The mother had lost her appetite and didn’t think of ours. Returning from his shift at the factory the father sometimes brought some mortadella or salted anchovies, if the grocery was open. Otherwise he was satisfied with the pastina in broth that we prepared.

  Some afternoons she sat in the kitchen, arms inert on the table. No one was there, at those hours. I cut some bread, rubbed oil on it, and moved the plate toward her, but not too close. I sat down, too, opposite, and began eating. I pushed the plate a little closer, just barely, with a finger. If she didn’t feel forced, she might even take a piece and bite it, as if by reflex. She chewed slowly, like someone who is no longer used to it.

  “It needs salt,” she said at one of those moments.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot it.” I passed her the jar.

  “No, it’s fine without,” and she finished the piece of bread she was holding.

  More days of silence followed. She had again swallowed her voice.

  One Sunday she saw me struggling with an onion for the vegetable broth.

  “You always eat pastina in broth,” she burst out. “Don’t you know how to make sauce?”

  “No.”

  “Put in the oil and fry it.” We waited for the smell of the browning onion. She opened the bottle of tomato sauce we had prepared in August and I poured it in the pot. She instructed me on the height of the flame and the spices to add.

  “I’ll drain the pasta,” she said later. “You’re not practical, you’ll certainly burn yourself.”

  I serv
ed the rigatoni with tomato sauce to the whole family and they seemed pleased to have a normal meal, but no one breathed. She accepted three or four pieces of pasta, without much sauce. She sat with the others, as when Vincenzo was alive, but she held the plate on her lap under the edge of the table and ate like that, head down.

  22.

  The cream-colored Mercedes parked in the middle of the big square and was immediately surrounded by incredulous children. Two men got out, one with a mustache and the other in a broad-brimmed white hat. I saw them from the window, they asked a boy something and he pointed in my direction. They looked like Gypsies, and I was a little scared, but they didn’t even ring the bell. They leaned on the hood of the car and waited, smoking. From time to time I checked on them without being seen.

  When the father appeared at the end of the street, walking home from the factory, they threw the butts on the ground and moved toward him as if they recognized him. He merely slowed down and looked at them from a distance, then he headed toward the entrance, ignoring them. They barred his way and from his gestures I understood that the one with the mustache was talking first. I opened a window to listen.

  “Gypsies don’t enter my house. Tell me here what you want.”

  The acceleration of an engine muffled the answer, then again the father’s voice, raised.

  “If my son had debts with you, I don’t know about it and I don’t want to know. Go and get your money from him where he is now.”

  The closer one touched his arm as if to calm him, he gave him a push and the hat flew off, rolling white. Adriana had joined me at the window, we held our breath.

  Nothing happened, the two men got back in the car and left, our father came inside, slamming the door.

  Some days later they came up alongside us as we were leaving school, but the men weren’t the same, and the car, which we saw only at an angle, seemed to us much smaller and was dented in several places. Adriana took my hand, and we joined some girls from her class. The men in the car followed us slowly as we walked along the sidewalk, then they passed us and, a short distance ahead, stopped to wait. After the square we were alone, the others had turned off. The boy who wasn’t driving got out and came toward us with a half smile. My sister squeezed me with her sweaty palm, it was the agreed-on signal for an about-turn. That time she was the more frightened, she had heard stories about Gypsies who kidnapped children. We went quickly back toward the school, but at the corner where the tobacco shop was we practically embraced the man who was looking for us.

  “Why are you running away? I don’t want to bother you, just a question!”

  He might have been twenty and close up he was more attractive than threatening. Even Adriana was reassured, she let go of my hand and with a gesture of her chin let him speak. Perhaps he felt awkward with two girls, his kindness was slightly forced. Had Vincenzo by chance left something for them, his friends? And maybe we were guarding it?

  “But our brother certainly didn’t know he was going to die. What would he have left?”

  Adriana’s brisk manner confused him. He described money lent for a scooter that Vincenzo wanted to buy. But he had it ready to give back, so he’d said a few days before the accident. Couldn’t we look for it?

  “He’d hardly have brought it home. He’d built himself a wooden hut down near the river somewhere and he hid his stuff there,” the sly girl lied. Then she completed the work of diversion with vague hints about the site of the hut. So we freed ourselves from Vincenzo’s creditors.

  After lunch I saw her with an old shoe box under her arm. She whispered to me to come down to the garage with her.

  “The ring he’s wearing in the afterlife was here,” she said on the stairs. “But there were other things. Now we’d better look carefully.”

  We locked ourselves inside and I raised the lid on our brother’s secret world. A bunch of keys that weren’t house keys. A brand-new jackknife. A single sock, bulging because of something it contained. I stuck my hand in, cautiously, and I recognized the contents by touch. In front of Adriana’s pale face I took out a roll of bills held together with a rubber band. There were all denominations, from ten to a hundred thousand lire. Here was what the Gypsies wanted. Who knew if it was really their money, or if Vincenzo had earned it with his odd jobs and put it aside for the scooter.

  With her fingertips Adriana tested the consistency of the paper money—it must have been the first time she’d touched a value different from the poor metal of the coins she sometimes got. She was enchanted.

  “Who’s this old man?” she asked, caressing the beard of Leonardo on a fifty-thousand-lire note. She talked in a whisper, as if someone might be hiding in the trash around us.

  “And now?” I asked her and myself. “It’s too much, we can’t keep it.”

  “What do you mean? It’s never too much,” and she clutched it, with a sort of spasm of her fingers.

  Her excitement astonished me. That yearning in her eyes on the bills. I wasn’t acquainted with hunger and I lived like a foreigner among the hungry. The privilege I bore from my earlier life distinguished me, isolated me in the family. I was the arminuta, the one who’d returned. I spoke another language and I no longer knew who I belonged to. I envied my classmates in the town, and even Adriana, for the certainty of their mothers.

  My sister began to imagine everything we could buy. The money lighted up her face from below, kindled a different appetite in her pupils. In the glow of the bulb hanging from the garage ceiling, I had to disappoint her as she dreamed on a scale too grand—a television, a polished tombstone for Vincenzo, a new car for our father.

  “It’s not enough,” I said, touching her forehead as if she had a fever.

  “It’s impossible to understand you,” she said impatiently. “Now it’s too much, now not enough.”

  I saw her jump at a slight noise nearby, like something moving under a box. She pushed it with her foot and a thin tail disappeared behind a box of dried peppers.

  “I knew it,” she whispered. “See, we can’t leave it here, or the mice’ll eat it. Let’s bring it back upstairs, but we have to stay on our guard, cause if Sergio finds it it’s all over.”

  Toward evening the man from the funeral home showed up. In those days, we were often waiting for the head of the family to return. Without preamble, the corpse carrier, as everyone called him, demanded at least half the sum owed him for Vincenzo’s funeral. Our father told him to be patient a little longer, it was possible that the factory would close, and the owners were months behind with the pay.

  “The first money I get is yours, I swear it on my son,” he said, but the other granted him only a week.

  My sister and I listened with our heads down, avoiding each other’s eyes. We were thinking of the next day, of the shopping we had planned. In the afternoon, when the stores reopened, we went out, lacerated by driving sleet. The urgent need for a coat for Adriana led us right away to the only clothing shop in the town, managed by a woman who looked like a potato with a head. Her arms, hanging along her body, could barely budge, and her short fat hands moved only if necessary. But the place was well lighted, and smelled of old dusty fabrics. The pleasant warmth of a kerosene stove welcomed us, whereas she examined us suspiciously.

  “You’re shopping by yourselves? Oh yes, you’re the ones whose brother died, so your mother certainly isn’t with you. Poor woman, always at the cemetery, no one would have expected it of her,” she rattled off, all at once. “At least you have the money?”

  Adriana crumpled up a Leonardo da Vinci virtually under her nose and then put it back in her pocket, neatly folded in half. Then we took our time choosing a forest green loden, of a generous cut.

  “It has to fit when I go to middle school, too,” my sister said to the shopkeeper, while she looked in the mirror, trying to see the big pleat at the back. She left her old coat there, inside out on the counter, with th
e lining that had come unstitched.

  She walked home holding her feet stiffly in new loafers, so as not to ruin them. We were loaded with cheeses, packages of snack food, and doubts about how to explain the afternoon’s purchases. We had found a wallet with something in it, that’s what we’d say.

  “I don’t feel like hiding the food downstairs, let’s eat it all at once,” Adriana admitted.

  No one asked any questions; the mother was always grieving and the father distracted by debts. The brothers merely gorged themselves on bread and Nutella that we put on a tray. I gave some spoonfuls to Giuseppe.

  For a week we bought whatever we felt like, but the expenditures were always small, and mostly for sweets. The night the man from the funeral home returned we called to our father in the bedroom several times, and when he finally came out we put the money in his hands. So Vincenzo paid for his own funeral.

  23.

  It was a week before the holidays. At lunchtime there were two crates of oranges on the bare table, something never before seen in that house. Next to them was a carton of cans placed one on top of another, some of tuna and most of meat. There must have been a late condolence visit that morning, while Adriana and I were in school. Besides the perfume of the citrus I smelled, now and again, another, but so light and uncertain it seemed a dream.

  Giuseppe was sitting in a corner whimpering, he had bitten the skin of the fruit and it tasted bitter. From the bedroom the mother told us to open a can and be careful of the baby, she had gone to bed with a headache and hadn’t cooked. A few days earlier she had resumed some of the household tasks, but every so often she would suddenly go back to bed and stay there for hours, her eyes open and empty.