I turned away, one shouldn’t watch children’s games. But then I looked at her again. Nani was an ugly old doll, her face and body showed marks from a ballpoint pen. Yet in those moments a living force was released. Now it was she who kissed Elena with increasing frenzy. She kissed her lips with determination, she kissed her slender chest, her slightly swelling stomach, she pressed her head against the green bathing suit. The child realized that I was looking at her. She smiled at me with an abrasive gaze and as if in defiance hugged the doll’s head between her legs, with both hands. Children play games like this, of course, then they forget. I got up. The sun was burning, I was very sweaty. There wasn’t a breath of wind, on the horizon a gray mist was rising. I went to swim.
From the water, floating lazily in the Sunday crowd, I saw Nina and her husband continuing to argue. She was protesting, he was listening. Then the man seemed tired of talking, he said something decisive to her but without getting upset, calmly. He must truly love her, I thought. He left her on the shore and went to confer with those who had arrived the day before in the motorboat. Evidently they were the object of contention. It always happened like that, I knew from experience: first the party, friends, relatives, everyone loves each other; then the quarrels of close quarters, old resentments that explode. Nina couldn’t tolerate the guests any longer and, look, her husband was sending them away. After a while the men, the women of ostentatious wealth, the obese children abandoned, in no particular order, the clan’s umbrellas; they loaded their things onto the motorboat, and Nina’s husband helped them himself, perhaps to hurry their departure. They left as they had arrived, amid hugs and kisses, but none of them said goodbye to Nina. She for her part went off along the beach with her head down, as if she couldn’t bear to look at them a moment longer.
I swam a good distance, in order to leave behind the crowd. The sea water soothed my back, the pain ceased, or it seemed to me that it ceased. I stayed in the water a long time, until I saw that my fingertips were wrinkled and I began to tremble with cold. My mother, when she realized I was in that state, would drag me out of the water, yelling. When she saw that my teeth were chattering she became even more furious, yanked me, covered me from head to toe with a towel, rubbed me with such an energy, such violence that I didn’t know if it was really worry for my health or a long-fostered rage, a ferocity, that chafed my skin.
I spread the towel directly on the burning sand and lay down. How I love the hot sand after the sea has chilled my body. I looked where Elena had been. Only the doll remained, but in a painful position, arms spread, legs apart, lying on her back, her head half buried in the sand. Her nose could be seen, an eye, half her skull. I fell asleep because of the heat, the sleepless night.
10
I slept a minute, ten. When I woke, I stood up dazed. I saw that the sky had turned white, a hot white lead. The air was still, the crowd had grown, there was a clamor of music and human beings. In that Sunday throng, as if by a sort of secret call, the first person who leaped to my eyes was Nina.
Something was happening to her. She was moving slowly among the umbrellas, hesitant, her mouth working. She turned her head to one side, to the other, as if mechanically, like a bird in alarm. She said something to herself, from where I was I couldn’t tell what, then she hurried toward her husband, who was on a chair under the umbrella.
The man jumped to his feet, looked around. The severe old man pulled him by an arm, he wriggled free, went over to Rosaria. All the family, big and small, began to look around as if they were a single body, then they moved, scattered.
Calls began: Elena, Lenuccia, Lena. Rosaria walked with short but quick steps toward the sea as if she had an urgent need to go in. I looked at Nina. She made senseless gestures, she touched her forehead, she went to the right, then turned abruptly back to the left. It was as if from her very guts something were sucking the life from her face. Her skin turned yellow, her lively eyes were mad with anxiety. She couldn’t find the child, she had lost her.
She’ll turn up, I thought: I had experience with getting lost. My mother said that as a child all I did was get lost. In an instant I would vanish, she would have to run to the bath house and ask them to announce on the loudspeaker what I looked like, that I was called such and such, and meanwhile she would stay at the counter and wait. I didn’t remember anything about my vanishing, my memory held other things. I was afraid that it was my mother who would get lost, I lived in the anxiety of not being able to find her. But I remembered clearly when I had lost Bianca. I was running along the beach like Nina now, but I had Marta bawling in my arms. I didn’t know what to do, I was alone with the two children, my husband was abroad, I knew no one. A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties. It remained impressed on me that I had looked in every direction except toward the sea: I didn’t dare even to glance at the water.
I realized that Nina was doing the same thing. She was searching everywhere but she desperately kept her back to the sea, and suddenly I was moved, I felt like crying. From that moment I could no longer stand aside; I found it intolerable that the crowd on the beach didn’t even notice the frantic searching of the Neapolitans. There are movements so rapid that no draftsman can reproduce them, one is luminous, the other dark. Those who had appeared so autonomous, so overweening, seemed to me fragile. I admired Rosaria, who alone was searching the sea. With her large belly she walked, with her, but short steps, along the shore. I got up then, joined Nina, touched her arm. She turned suddenly, with a snakelike motion, and cried you’ve found her, speaking to me as if we knew each other well, even though we had never exchanged a word.
“She’s wearing your hat,” I told her, “she’ll be found, we’ll see her easily.”
She looked at me uncertainly, then nodded yes, ran in the direction in which her husband had vanished. She ran like a young athlete in a contest with a good or bad fate.
I set off in the opposite direction, along the first row of umbrellas, slowly. It seemed to me that I was Elena, or Bianca when she was lost, but perhaps I was only myself as a child, climbing back out of oblivion. A child who gets lost on the beach sees everything unchanged and yet no longer recognizes anything. She is without orientation, something that before had made bathers and umbrellas recognizable. The child feels that she is exactly where she was and yet doesn’t know where she is. She looks around with frightened eyes and sees that the sea is the sea, the beach is the beach, the people are the people, the fresh-coconut seller is really the fresh-coconut seller. Yet every thing or person is alien to her and so she cries. To the unknown adult who asks her what’s wrong, why is she crying, she doesn’t say that she’s lost, she says that she can’t find her mama. Bianca was crying when they found her, when they brought her back to me. I was crying, too, with happiness, with relief, but meanwhile I was also screaming with rage, like my mother, because of the crushing weight of responsibility, the bond that strangles, and with my free arm I dragged my firstborn, yelling, you’ll pay for this, Bianca, you’ll see when we get home, you must never go off again—never.
I walked for a while looking among the children, by themselves, in groups, in the arms of adults. I was in a turmoil, slightly sick to my stomach, but I was able to pay attention. Finally I saw the straw hat, and my heart skipped a beat. From a distance it seemed abandoned on the sand, but underneath it was Elena. She was sitting a few feet from the water, people passed her by without paying any attention; she was crying, a slow flow of silent tears. She didn’t say that she had lost her mother, she said that she had lost her doll. She was desperate.