I smiled, dazed by the wine, and leaned my head against Giovanni’s shoulder.
“Do you feel ill?” he asked, embarrassed.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Lie down for a while.”
I lay on the sofa, and he remained sitting beside me.
“Now it will pass.”
“Nothing has to pass, Giovanni, I feel fine,” I said gently.
I looked through the window, in the sky there was one cloud, white and slender, and Nani’s blue eyes were just visible; she was still sitting on the table, with her rounded forehead, her half-bald head. Bianca I nursed, but Marta wouldn’t attach herself: she cried, and I despaired. I wanted to be a good mother, an exemplary mother, but my body refused. I thought of the women of the past, overwhelmed by too many children, of the customs that helped them cure or control the most frantic ones: leaving them alone for a night in the woods, for example, or immersing them in a fountain of freezing water.
“Would you like me to make coffee?”
“No, thank you, stay there, don’t move.”
I closed my eyes. Nina returned to mind, with her back against the trunk of the tree, I thought of her long neck, her breast. I thought of the nipples that Elena had sucked. I thought of how she hugged the doll against her to show the child how one nurses a baby. I thought of the child who copied the position, the gesture. Yes, they had been lovely, the early days of the vacation. I felt the need to magnify their pleasure in order to get away from my present anguish. In the end what we need above all is kindness, even if it is pretended. I opened my eyes again.
“You’ve got your color back, you had turned quite pale.”
“Sometimes the sea makes me tired.”
Giovanni got up, said hesitantly, indicating the terrace:
“If you don’t mind, I’ll smoke a cigarette.”
He went out, lighted a cigarette. I joined him.
“Is it yours?” he asked, pointing to the doll, but like one who wants to say something witty to make himself important.
I nodded yes.
“Her name is Mina, she’s my good-luck charm.”
He took the doll by the chest, but he was disconcerted, put her down.
“There’s water inside.”
I said nothing, I didn’t know what to say.
He looked at me circumspectly, as if something about me, for a moment, had alarmed him.
“Did you hear,” he asked me, “about that poor child whose doll was stolen?”
21
I made myself study, and continued for much of the night. Starting in early adolescence I learned to be extremely disciplined: I chase thoughts out of my head, put pain and humiliation to sleep, push anxieties into a corner.
I stopped around four in the morning. The pain in my back had returned, where the pinecone had hit me. I slept until nine and had breakfast on the terrace, opposite the sea that trembled in the wind. Nani had remained outside, sitting on the table, and her dress was damp. For a fraction of a second it seemed to me that she moved her lips and stuck out the red tip of her tongue, as if playing a game.
I had no desire to go to the beach, I didn’t even want to leave the house. It bothered me to have to pass the bar and see Giovanni chatting with his friends, and yet I felt it was urgent to resolve the matter of the doll. I looked at Nani sadly, caressed her cheek. My unhappiness at losing her had not diminished, in fact it had increased. I was confused; at moments it seemed to me that Elena could do without her, while I could not. On the other hand I had been careless, I had let Giovanni come in without hiding her. I thought for the first time of cutting short my vacation, leaving today, tomorrow. Then I laughed at myself, where was I letting myself go, I was planning to flee as if I had stolen a child and not a doll. I cleaned up, washed, made myself up carefully. I put on a nice dress and went out.
There was a fair going on in the town. The square, the main avenue, the streets and side streets, closed to cars, were a labyrinth of stalls, while the traffic on the edges of town was choked as if it were a city. I mingled with a crowd of mainly women who were rummaging through a huge variety of goods—dresses, jackets, coats, raincoats, hats, scarves, trinkets, household objects of every kind, real or fake antiques, plants, cheeses and salamis, vegetables, fruit, crude marine paintings, miraculous bottles from herbalists. I like fairs, especially the stalls that sell old clothes and the ones with modern antiques. I buy everything, old dresses, shirts, pants, earrings, pins, knickknacks. I stopped to dig among the jumble, a crystal paperweight, an old iron, opera glasses, a metal sea horse, a Neapolitan coffeepot. I was examining a hatpin with a shiny point, dangerously long and sharp, and a beautiful handle of black amber, when my cell phone rang. My daughters, I thought, even if it was an unlikely time. I looked at the display, which showed the name of neither one but a number I seemed to recognize. I answered.
“Signora Leda?”
“Yes.”
“I’m the mother of the child who lost the doll, the one that . . .”
I was surprised, I felt anxiety and pleasure, my heart began to race.
“Hello, Nina.”
“I wanted to see if this was your number.”
“It’s mine, yes.”
“I saw you yesterday, in the pines.”
“I saw you, too.”
“I’d like to speak to you.”
“All right, tell me when.”
“Now.”
“Now I’m in town, at the fair.”
“I know, I’ve been following you for ten minutes. But I keep losing you, it’s so crowded.”
“I’m near the fountain. There’s a stall selling old trinkets, I won’t move from here.”
I pressed my chest, to slow my racing heart. I fingered objects, examined some, but mechanically, without interest. Nina appeared in the crowd, she was pushing Elena in the stroller. Every so often she held on with one hand to the big hat that her husband had given her to keep it from being carried away by the wind from the sea.
“Hello,” I said to the child, who had a tired look and the pacifier in her mouth. “Is the fever gone?”
Nina answered for her daughter:
“She’s fine, but she won’t get over it, she wants her doll.”
Elena took the pacifier out of her mouth, and said:
“She has to take her medicine.”
“Is Nani sick?”
“She has a baby in her stomach.”
I looked at her uncertainly.
“Is her baby sick?”
Nina interrupted with some embarrassment, laughing:
“It’s a game. My sister-in-law takes pills and she pretends to give them to the doll, too.”
“So Nani is pregnant, too?”
Nina said: “She decided that the aunt and the doll are both expecting a baby. Right, Elena?”
The hat flew off, I picked it up for her. Her hair was pulled up, her face looked more beautiful.
“Thank you, with the wind it won’t stay on.”
“Wait,” I said.
I arranged the hat carefully and used the long pin with the amber handle to fix it in her hair.