“You took her.”
I nodded yes and she jumped up, leaving the keys on the table as if they burned her, murmured, “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She raised her voice suddenly, said:
“You read, you write all day, and you don’t know?”
“No.”
She shook her head, incredulous, her voice lowered. “You had her. You kept her, while I had no idea what to do. My daughter was crying, she was driving me mad, and you, you didn’t say a word, you saw us but you didn’t make a move, you didn’t do a thing.”
I said: “I’m an unnatural mother.”
She agreed, exclaiming yes, you’re an unnatural mother, took the doll from my hands with a fierce gesture of reappropriation, to herself she cried in dialect I have to go, and to me in Italian: I don’t want to see you anymore, I don’t want anything from you, and she went toward the door.
I made a broad gesture, and said:
“Take the keys, Nina. I’m leaving tonight, the house will be empty till the end of the month,” and I turned toward the window, I couldn’t bear to see her so maddened by rage, I murmured: “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t hear the door close. For a second I thought she had decided to take the keys, then I heard her behind me, hissing insults in dialect, terrible as the ones my grandmother, my mother used to utter. I was about to turn away, but I felt a pain in my left side, swift as a burn. I looked down and saw the point of the pin that was shooting out of my skin, above my stomach, just under my ribs. The point appeared for a fraction of a second only, the time that Nina’s voice lasted, her hot breath, and then disappeared. The girl threw the pin on the floor, she didn’t take her hat, didn’t take the keys. She ran off with the doll, closing the door behind her.
I leaned one arm against the window and looked at my side, the tiny drop of blood immobile on the skin. I waited for something to happen to me, but nothing did, the drop became dark, clotted, and the impression of the painful thread of fire that had pierced me faded.
I sat down cautiously on the sofa. Maybe the pin had pierced my side the way a sword pierces the body of a Sufi ascetic, doing no harm. I looked at the hat on the table, the crust of blood on the skin. It was dark. I rose and turned on the light. I started to pack my bags, but moving slowly, as if I were gravely injured. When the suitcases were ready, I dressed, put on my sandals, smoothed my hair. At that point the cell phone rang. I saw Marta’s name, I felt a great contentment, I answered. She and Bianca, in unison, as if they had prepared the sentence and were performing it, exaggerating my Neapolitan cadence, shouted gaily into my ear:
“Mama, what are you doing, why haven’t you called? Won’t you at least let us know if you’re alive or dead?”
Deeply moved, I murmured:
“I’m dead, but I’m fine.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. The Lost Daughter is her third novel to be published by Europa Editions. The Days of Abandonment, described by The New Yorker as “a deeply observed, excruciatingly blunt novel,” was published in 2005 and Troubling Love was published in 2006.