The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante Read Free Book Online

the
mammuccia
. My mother had rarely yielded to the games I tried to play with her body. She immediately got nervous, she didn’t like being the doll. She laughed, pulled away, grew angry. It annoyed her when I combed her hair, put ribbons in it, washed her face and ears, undressed her, redressed her. 
    I, on the other hand, no. As an adult I tried to keep in mind the misery of not being able to handle the hair, the face, the body of my mother. So when Bianca was a small child I patiently became her doll. She dragged me under the kitchen table, it was our playhouse, and made me lie down. I was very tired, I remember: Marta wouldn’t sleep at night, only during the day, and then only a little, and Bianca was always around me, full of demands, she didn’t want to go to day care; when I did manage to leave her there she got sick, complicating my existence even further. Yet I tried to keep my nerves under control, I wanted to be a good mother. I lay on the floor, let myself be cared for as if I were sick. Bianca gave me medicine, brushed my teeth, combed my hair. Sometimes I fell asleep, but she was little and didn’t know how to use the comb, and when she pulled my hair I started, and woke. I felt my eyes tearing with pain.
    I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study, I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires. When Marta began to howl in the other room it was almost a liberation. I got up, rudely cutting off Bianca’s game, but I felt innocent, it wasn’t I who was leaving my daughter, it was my second-born who was tearing me away from the first. I have to go to Marta, I’ll be right back, wait. She would begin crying.
    It was in a moment of feeling generally inadequate that I decided to give Mina to Bianca; it seemed to me a fine gesture, a way of relieving her envy for her little sister. So I fished the old doll out of a cardboard box on top of the wardrobe and said to Bianca: see, her name is Mina, this was Mama’s doll when she was little, I’m giving her to you. I thought she would love her; I was sure she would devote herself to her as she had devoted herself to me in our games. Instead she put her aside, she didn’t like Mina. She preferred an ugly rag doll with stringy yellow yarn hair her father had brought as a present from somewhere or other. I was hurt.
    One day Bianca happened to be playing on the balcony: it was a place she really liked. As soon as spring arrived I would leave her there; I didn’t have time to take her outside, but I wanted her to have air and sun, even if the noise of the traffic and a strong smell of exhaust rose from the street. I hadn’t been able to open a book for months; I was exhausted and angry; there was never enough money, I barely slept. I found Bianca sitting on Mina, as if she were a chair, and meanwhile playing with her doll. I told her to get up right away, she mustn’t ruin something that was dear to me from my childhood: she was really cruel and ungrateful. I called her ungrateful, and I yelled, I think I yelled that giving her the doll had been a mistake, she was my doll and I would take her back.
    How many things are done and said to children behind the closed doors of houses. Bianca was already a cool character, she’s always been like that, swallowing up anxieties and feelings. She remained sitting on Mina; measuring her words, the way she still does when she declares her wishes, as if they were her last: no, it’s mine. Then I gave her a nasty shove: she was a child of three but at that moment she seemed older, stronger than me. I tore Mina away from her and finally her eyes showed fear. I discovered that she had taken off the doll’s clothes, even her little shoes and socks, and had scribbled all over her, from head to foot, with markers. It was a disfigurement that could be corrected but to me it seemed without remedy. Everything in those years seemed to me without remedy, I myself was without remedy. I hurled the doll over