Once, I was perhaps excessively flirtatious with a friend of Bianca’s, a surly fifteen-year-old, practically mute, with an unwashed and suffering appearance. When he left, I called my daughter, she came to my room: she and then, out of curiosity, Marta.
“Did your friend like the cake?”
“Yes.”
“I should have put chocolate on it, but I didn’t have a chance, maybe next time.”
“Next time, he said, if you’d give him a blow job.”
“Bianca, what kind of language is that?”
“That’s what he said.”
“He didn’t.”
“He did.”
Gradually I yielded. I taught myself to be present only if they wanted me present and to speak only if they asked me to speak. It was what they required of me and I gave it to them. What I wanted of them I never understood, I don’t know even now.
I looked at Gino, I thought: I’ll ask him if he’ll have dinner with me. I also thought: He’ll invent an excuse, he’ll say no, never mind. Instead he said only, but timidly:
“I should go and take a shower, change.”
“You’re fine like that.”
“I don’t even have my wallet.”
“I’m inviting you.”
Gino made an effort at conversation during the entire meal—even attempting to make me laugh—but we had almost nothing in common. He knew that he had to entertain me between one mouthful and the next, he knew that he had to avoid silences that were too long, and he did his best, he hurled himself onto the most diverse paths, like a lost animal.
Of himself he had little to say, he tried to make me talk about myself. But his questions were stiff, and I read in his eyes that he had no real interest in my answers. Although I tried to help him, I couldn’t escape the fact that the topics of conversation were quickly being used up.
First he asked about what I was studying, I told him I was preparing a course for the next year.
“On what.”
“Olivia.”
“What’s that?”
“A story.”
“Is it long?”
He liked short exams, he was very annoyed by professors who pile on the books to show that their exam is important. He had big white teeth, a wide mouth. His eyes were small, almost slits. He gesticulated a lot, he laughed. He knew nothing of Olivia, nothing of what I was passionate about. Like my daughters, who, growing up, had stayed cautiously away from my interests, had studied science, physics, like their father.
I spoke a little about them, saying a lot of nice things but in an ironic tone. At last, slowly, we fell back on what we did have in common: the beach, the bath house, his employer, the people on the beach. He talked to me about the foreigners, almost always pleasant, and the Italians, pretentious and arrogant. He spoke with sympathy of the Africans, of the Asian girls who went from umbrella to umbrella. But only when he began to speak of Nina and her family did I understand that I was there, in that restaurant with him, for this.
He told me about the doll, about the child’s desperation.
“After the storm I looked everywhere, I raked the sand until an hour ago, but I couldn’t find it.”
“It will turn up.”
“I hope so, especially for the mother: they’re furious with her, as if it were her fault.”
He alluded to Nina with admiration.
“She’s been coming here on vacation since her daughter was born. Her husband rents a villa in the dunes. You can’t see the house from the beach. It’s in the pinewood, it’s a beautiful place.”
He said that she was a really well brought up girl, she had finished high school and had even gone, briefly, to the university.
“She’s very pretty,” I said.
“Yes, she’s beautiful.”
They had talked a few times—I gathered—and she had told him she wanted to go back to her studies.
“She’s only a year older than I am.”
“Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-three, I’m twenty-two.”
“Like my daughter Marta.”
He was silent for a moment, then said suddenly, with a dark look that made him ugly:
“Have you seen her husband? Would you ever have made your daughter marry someone like that?”
I asked, ironically:
“What’s wrong with him, what don’t you like?”
He shook his head, and said seriously:
“Everything. Him, his friends and relatives. His sister is unbearable.”
“Rosaria, the pregnant lady?”
“Lady, her? Forget about her, it’s better. I admired you yesterday, when you wouldn’t move from your umbrella. But don’t do things like that anymore.”
“Why?”
The boy shrugged his shoulders, shook his head unhappily.
“They’re bad people.”
13
I got home around midnight. We had finally found a subject that interested both of us and the time passed quickly. I learned from Gino that the fat gray-haired woman was Nina’s mother. I learned also that the stern old man was named Corrado and wasn’t her father but Rosaria’s husband. It was like discussing a film that one has watched without fully understanding the relationship between the characters, at times not even knowing their names, and when we said good night it seemed to me that I had a clearer idea. Only about Nina’s husband had I learned little or nothing, Gino said his name was Toni, he came on Saturday and left Monday morning. I understood that he hated him, he didn’t even want to speak about him. And I, besides, felt very little curiosity about that man.
The boy waited politely until I had closed the street door behind me. I climbed the dimly lighted stairs to the fourth floor. Bad people, he had said. What could they do to me. I went into the apartment, turned on the light, and saw the doll supine on the sofa, her arms turned up to the ceiling, her legs spread, her face toward me. The Neapolitans had turned the beach upside down to find her, Gino had doggedly searched the sand with his rake. I wandered through the rooms, the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen; the town, too, seemed to be quiet. I discovered, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, that my face was drawn, my eyes puffy. I chose a clean T-shirt and got ready for bed, although I wasn’t sleepy.
The evening with Gino had been pleasant, but I felt that something had left me with a vague irritation. I opened the door onto the terrace, a fresh breeze came from the sea, the sky was without stars. He likes Nina, I thought, it doesn’t take much to see that. And, instead of being touched or amused, I felt a pang of discontent that reached toward the girl, as if, appearing every day on the beach and attracting him, she had taken something away from me.
I moved the doll, lay down on the sofa. If Gino had met Bianca and Marta, I wondered almost out of habit, which of the two would he have liked more. Since my daughters’ early adolescence, I had had this passion for comparing them with their friends, close friends, classmates who were considered pretty, who were successful. In a confused way I felt that they were rivals of the two girls, as if the others’ exceptional self-confidence, seductiveness, grace, intelligence took something away from my daughters and, in some obscure way, from me. I controlled myself, I spoke kindly, yet I tended to demonstrate silently to myself that they were all less pretty or, if pretty, unlikable, empty, and I would list the quirks, the stupidities, the temporary defects of those growing bodies. Sometimes, when I saw Bianca or Marta suffer because they felt outdone, I couldn’t resist, I intervened rudely with their friends who were too extroverted, too attractive, too ingratiating.