Sometimes, but seldom and just barely, I had a small, fleeting taste of revenge. It might happen, for example, that Lucilla arrived at the wrong moment, when the two little sisters were involved in their game, so involved that Aunt Lucilla’s games either had to be openly put off until later or, if imposed, bored them. She put a good face on a bad situation, but inside she was bitter. I felt that she was wounded, as if she really were a companion of theirs who had been excluded, and I have to admit that I was pleased, but I didn’t know how to take advantage of it, I’ve never been able to use an advantage. I immediately softened, maybe deep down I was afraid that her affection for the children would diminish and I was sorry. So, sooner or later, I ended up by saying in a sort of apology: it’s that they’re used to playing with each other, they have their habits, maybe they’re a little too self-sufficient. Then she would recover, say yes, and gradually begin to speak ill of my daughters, to pick out flaws and failings. Bianca was too egotistical, Marta too fragile, one had little imagination, the other too much, the older was dangerously closed in on herself, the younger capricious and spoiled. I listened, my small vindication was already changing tune. I felt that Lucilla was compensating for the children’s rejection by looking for a way to humiliate me, as if I were their accomplice. I began to suffer again.
The harm she did me in that period was enormous. Whether she was celebrating herself in the games, or becoming bitter when she was excluded from them, she led me to believe that I had done everything wrong, that I was too full of myself, that I wasn’t made to be a mother. Damn, damn, damn her. Certainly I must have felt that when, one time, we were at the beach. It was a morning in July, Lucilla had appropriated Bianca, leaving out Marta. Maybe it was because she was younger, maybe because she considered her stupid, maybe because she got less satisfaction from her, I don’t know. She must have said something that made her cry and wounded me. I left the little girl whining near Gianni and Matteo, who were sitting under the umbrella, engrossed in conversation, and I took my towel, spread it out a few steps from the sea, and lay down, exasperated, in the sun. But Marta came over to me, she was two and a half, three, she trotted over to play and lay down, all sandy, on my stomach. I hate getting covered with sand, I hate my things getting dirty. I called to my husband to come and get the child. He hurried over, aware that my nerves were on edge; he feared my scenes because he perceived them as uncontrollable. For a while I had made no distinctions between public areas and private ones, I didn’t care if people heard me and judged me, I felt a strong desire to act out my rage as if in the theater. Take her, I cried, I can’t bear her any longer. I don’t know why I was so annoyed with Marta, poor little thing—if Lucilla had been mean to her I should have protected her, but it was as if I believed that woman’s reproaches, they made me angry and yet I believed them: as if the child really were stupid, and always whining—I couldn’t take it anymore.
Gianni picked her up, giving me a look that meant calm down. I turned my back on him angrily, dived into the water to get rid of the sand and the heat. When I came out, I saw that he was playing with Bianca and Marta, together with Lucilla. He was laughing, Matteo, too, was approaching; Lucilla had changed her mind, she had decided that now Marta could play, she had decided to show me that it could be done.
The child, I saw, was smiling: she was sniffling, but she was really happy, a moment, two. I felt that I harbored in my belly a destructive energy, and by chance I touched my ear. I discovered that the earring was missing. It wasn’t of great value, I liked the earrings but wasn’t attached to them. Still, I became agitated, I shouted to my husband that I’d lost an earring; I looked on the towel, it wasn’t there, and I shouted louder, I’ve lost an earring; erupting like a fury into their game, I said to Marta: you see, you’ve made me lose an earring, I said it to her with hatred, as if she were responsible for something that was extremely serious for me, for my life, and then I turned back, I dug in the sand with my feet, with my hands, my husband came over, Matteo came, they began searching. Only Lucilla continued her game with the children, she kept herself out of it, and kept them out of my discomposure.
Later, at home, I yelled at my husband, in front of Bianca and Marta, saying that I didn’t want to see her anymore, that bitch, never, and my husband said all right, in order to live in peace. When I left him he and Lucilla had an affair. Maybe he hoped that she would leave her husband, that she would take care of the children. But she did neither of those things. She loved him, yes, of course, but she remained married and paid no more attention to Bianca and Marta. I don’t know how her life went, if she still lives with her husband, if she separated and remarried, if she had children of her own. I no longer know anything about her. We were girls then, who knows what’s become of her, what she thinks, what she does.
17
I parked, went through the pinewood, dripping with rain. I came to the dunes. The bath house was deserted, Gino wasn’t there, nor was the manager. The beach, in the rain, had become a dark craggy crust against which the whitish slab of the sea gently bumped. I went over to the Neapolitans’ umbrellas and stopped at Nina and Elena’s, where, piled up under the beach chair and the lounger or stuck in an enormous plastic bag, were the child’s many toys. Chance, I thought, or a silent call, should send Nina here, by herself. Forget the child, forget everything. Greet each other without surprise. Unfold two beach chairs, look at the sea together, describe in tranquility my experience, our hands touching every so often.
My daughters make a constant effort to be the reverse of me. They are clever, they are competent, their father is starting them out on his path. Determined and terrified, they advance like whirlwinds through the world, they will manage better than us, their parents. Two years ago, when I had a presentiment that they would be gone a long time, I wrote a letter for them in which I recounted in detail how it happened that I had abandoned them. I wanted to explain not my reasons—what were they?—but the impulses that more than fifteen years earlier had sent me away. I made two copies of the letter, one for each, and left them in their rooms. But nothing happened, they never answered, they never said: let’s talk about it. Only once, at a slightly bitter allusion on my part, Bianca retorted as she went out the door: lucky you, you have time to write letters.
How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say: I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you. Nina, on the other hand—I am not Nina’s history, Nina could even see me as a future. Choose for your companion an alien daughter. Look for her, approach her.
I stood there for a while, digging with one foot until I found dry sand. If I had brought the doll, I thought, but without regret, I could have buried her here, under the crust of the wet sand. It would have been perfect, someone would have found her the next day. Elena no, I would have wanted Nina to find her, I would have gone up to her, said: are you happy? But I hadn’t brought the doll, hadn’t done it, hadn’t even thought of it. Instead I had bought Nani a new dress, shoes, another action without meaning. Or, in any case, as for so many little things in my life, a meaning that I can’t find. I reached the water’s edge, I wanted to walk and tire myself out.