The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante Read Free Book Online Page A

the railing of the balcony.
    I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature. I stood leaning against the railing for I don’t know how long watching the cars that passed over her, mutilating her. Then I realized that Bianca, too, was watching, on her knees, with her forehead pressed against the bars of the railing. I picked her up, she let herself be held, yielding. I kissed her for a long time, I hugged her as if I wanted to take her back into my body. You hurt me, Mama, you’re hurting me. I left Elena’s doll on the sofa, lying on her back, belly up.
    The storm had moved quickly to land, violently, with blinding lightning and thunder that sounded like cars exploding, full of dynamite. I ran to close the windows in the bedroom before everything got soaked, I turned on the bedside lamp. I lay on the bed, arranged the pillows against the headboard, and began to work with a will, filling pages with notes.
    Reading, writing have always been my way of soothing myself. 

12
    A reddish light roused me from my work: it was no longer raining. I spent some time putting on makeup, dressing with care. I wanted to look like a respectable lady, perfectly proper. I went out.
    The Sunday evening crowd was less dense and noisy than Saturday’s, the extraordinary weekend flood was diminishing. I walked along the sea a little, then headed toward a restaurant next to the market. I ran into Gino: he was dressed the way he always was at the beach, maybe he was just returning. He nodded respectfully in greeting, and wished to pass on, but I stopped and so he was compelled to stop as well.
    I felt the need to hear the sound of my voice, to get it under control with the help of someone else’s voice. I asked him about the storm, what had happened on the beach. He said there had been a strong wind, a tempest of water and wind, many of the umbrellas had been overturned. People had run for shelter to the bath house, the bar, but the crush had been too great and most had given up, the beach emptied.
    “Luckily you left early.”
    “I like storms.”
    “Your books and notebooks would get ruined.”
    “Did your book get wet?”
    “A little.”
    “What are you studying?”
    “Law.”
    “How much longer do you have?” 
    “I’m behind, I’ve wasted time. Do you teach at the university?”
    “Yes.”
    “What?”
    “English literature.”
    “I saw that you know a lot of languages.”
    I laughed.
    “I don’t know anything really well, I also wasted some time. I work twelve hours a day at the university and I’m everyone’s slave.”
    We walked a little, I relaxed. I talked about this and that to put him at his ease, and meanwhile I saw myself from the outside: I dressed like a proper lady, he covered with sand, in shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops. I was amused, even rather pleased; if Bianca and Marta had seen me I would have been teased no end.
    He was certainly their age: a male child, a slender nervous body to care for. The young male bodies that had attracted me as an adolescent were like that, tall, thin, very dark, like Marta’s boyfriends, not small, fair, a little stocky and plump, like Bianca’s young men, always a little older than she, with veins as blue as their eyes. But I loved them all, my daughters’ first boyfriends, I bestowed on them an exaggerated affection. I wanted to reward them, perhaps, because they had recognized the beauty, the good qualities of my daughters, and so had freed them from the anguish of being ugly, the certainty of having no power of seduction. Or I wanted to reward them because they had providentially saved me, too, from bad moods and conflicts and complaints and attempts to soothe my daughters: I’m ugly, I’m fat; but I, too, felt ugly and fat at your age; no, you weren’t ugly and fat, you were beautiful; you, too, are beautiful, you don’t even realize how people look at you; they’re not looking at us, they’re looking at