As long as I stayed on the beach I pretended to read. In reality, all I could hear, as if amplified, was the clan’s dialect, their shouts and laughter, and it kept me from concentrating. They were celebrating something, eating, drinking, singing, they seemed to think they were the only people on the beach, or anyway that our task was simply to delight in their happiness. From the supplies that had been brought on the motorboat all sorts of things emerged, a sumptuous meal, lasting for hours, with wine, desserts, liqueurs. No one glanced in my direction, no one said even a vaguely ironic word that concerned me. Only when I got dressed, and was preparing to leave, did the woman with the big belly leave the group and come toward me. She offered me a little plate with a slice of a raspberry-colored ice.
“It’s my birthday,” she said seriously.
I took the ice even though I didn’t feel like it.
“Happy birthday. How old are you?”
“Forty-two.”
I looked at the stomach, the protruding navel like an eye.
“You have a nice big belly.”
She had a very satisfied expression.
“It’s a girl. I never had children, and now look here.”
“How much longer?”
“Two months. My sister-in-law had hers right away, I had to wait eight years.”
“These things happen when they’re supposed to happen. Thank you, and have a happy birthday.”
I held out the plate to her after two bites, but she paid no attention.
“Do you have any children?”
“Two girls.”
“Did you have them right away?”
“When I had the first I was twenty-three.”
“They’re grown.”
“One is twenty-four, the other twenty-two.”
“You seem younger. My sister-in-law says you couldn’t be more than forty.”
“I’m almost forty-eight.”
“Lucky you, to have stayed so attractive. What’s your name?”
“Leda.”
“Neda?”
“Leda.”
“Mine is Rosaria.”
I held out the plate more decisively, and she took it.
“I was a bit anxious, earlier,” I said, apologizing reluctantly.
“Sometimes the sea isn’t good for us. Or is it the girls who are worrying you?”
“Children are always cause for worry.”
We said goodbye; I realized that Nina was looking at us. I went through the pinewood discontentedly, now feeling in the wrong. What would it have cost me to change umbrellas, the others had done it, even the Dutch, why hadn’t I? Sense of superiority, presumption. Defense of my leisure for thinking, snobbish tendency to give lessons in civility. All nonsense. I had paid so much attention to Nina only because I felt her to be physically closer, while I had given not a single glance to Rosaria, who was ugly and without pretensions. How many times they must have called her by name and I hadn’t noticed. I had kept her outside my range, without curiosity, anonymous image of a woman who carries her pregnancy crudely. That’s what I was, superficial. And then that remark: children are always cause for worry. Said to a woman about to bring one into the world: how stupid. Always words of contempt, skeptical or ironic. Bianca had cried to me once between her tears: you always think you’re best. And Marta: why did you have us if all you do is complain about us? Fragments of words, mere syllables. The moment arrives when your children say to you with unhappy rage, why did you give me life: I walked absorbed in thought. The pine trees had a violet tinge; there was a wind. I heard a creaking noise behind me, perhaps footsteps, I turned, silence.
I began walking again. A violent blow struck my back, as if I had been hit with a billiard ball. I cried out in pain and surprise together, turned, breathless, and saw a pinecone tumbling into the undergrowth, big as a fist, closed. Now my heart was racing, and I rubbed my back hard, to get rid of the pain. Unable to recover my breath, I looked around at the bushes, at the pines above me, tossing in the wind.
8
Once I was home, I undressed and examined myself in the mirror. Between my shoulder blades was a livid spot that looked like a mouth, dark at the edges, reddish at the center. I tried to reach it with my fingers; it hurt. When I examined my shirt, I found sticky traces of resin.
To calm myself I decided to go into the town, take a walk, have dinner out. Where had the blow come from. I searched my memory, but to no purpose. I couldn’t decide if the pinecone had been thrown deliberately from the bushes or had fallen from a tree. A sudden blow, in the end, is only wonder and pain. When I pictured the sky and the pines, the pinecone fell from on high; when I thought of the undergrowth, the bushes, I saw a horizontal line traced by a projectile, the pinecone cutting through the air to land on my back.
The streets were filled with the Saturday evening crowd, all sunburned: entire families, women pushing strollers, irritated or angry fathers, young couples entwined or old ones holding hands. The smell of suntan lotion mixed with the aroma of cotton candy, of toasted almonds. The pain, like a burning ember stuck between my shoulder blades, kept me from thinking of anything except what had happened.
I felt the need to call my daughters, tell them about the accident. Marta answered, and started talking about how she was doing, non-stop and shrill. I had the impression that she was more than usually afraid I might interrupt, with some insidious question, a reproof, or simply that I might turn her exaggerated-light-ironic tone into something serious that would have imposed on her real questions and real answers. She went on at length about a party that she and her sister had to go to, I didn’t understand clearly when, if it was that evening or the following day. It meant a lot to their father, his friends would be there, not only colleagues from the university but people who worked in television, important people he wanted to impress, to show that although he was not yet fifty he had two grown daughters, well behaved, pretty. She talked and talked, and at a certain point she began complaining about the climate. Canada, she exclaimed, is an uninhabitable country, both winter and summer. She didn’t even ask me how I was, or maybe she asked but gave me no space to respond. Probably also because she never mentioned her father, I heard him between one word and the next. In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken. That night, while Marta rambled on with her torrents of words, I imagined for an instant that she was not yet born, that she had never come out of my womb but was in someone else’s—Rosaria’s, for example—and would be born with a different look, a different reactivity. Maybe that was what she had always secretly desired, not to be my daughter. She was telling me about herself neurotically, from a distant continent. She was talking about her hair, about how she had to wash it constantly because it never came out right, about the hairdresser who had ruined it, and so she wasn’t going to the party, she would never go out of the house with her hair looking like that, Bianca would go alone, because her hair was beautiful, and she spoke as if it were my fault, I hadn’t made her in such a way that she could be happy. Old reproaches. I felt that she was frivolous, yes, frivolous and boring, situated in a space too far away from this other space, at the sea, in the evening, and I lost her. While she went on complaining, my eyes focused on the pain in my back and I saw Rosaria, fat, tired, following me through the pinewood with the gang of boys, her relatives, and she squatted, her big bare belly resting like a cupola on her broad thighs, and pointed to me as the target. When I hung up, I was sorry I had called, I felt more agitated than before; my heart was pounding.