Chapter 1
Three Seconds
You’re picking up where you left off.
I am not Chiara. But her mother recognised me in three seconds.
Three seconds is how long it takes the radio to give the time. I know how long that lasts. For twelve years, the radio was my only clock.
It was Thursday 19 February, at La Timone hospital in Marseille, on the fourth floor. In the room across the corridor, someone was listening to the news. The eleven o'clock bulletin hadn't started yet. There was talk of a football match, and of the rain that was coming in over the Var.
First I have to go back a day. Nothing else makes sense without it.
On the Wednesday morning, a car dropped me at the bottom of a long, steep street. How I'd got as far as that car, I'll explain later. I'd forced a hatch on the Monday. I'd walked. I'd been hungry. That's enough for now.
I'd had an address in my head for years: 56 rue d'Alger. A voice had said it once on the radio, something about passports and Italians living in Marseille. I'd kept it. You keep what you can.
There was a gate, a flag, a bell. A man behind a glass screen looked me up and down. I was wearing men's trousers held up at the waist with string, two jumpers one on top of the other, canvas shoes that were too big for me. I had no bag. He asked if I had an appointment.
I said in Italian that I wanted to speak to someone. He pressed a button.
The woman who came out wore her glasses on a little chain and had a blue cardigan on. She took me into a small room with a table and two chairs. She went to shut the door. I said no. She left it open, without asking why. She was the first person who didn't ask me why.
She sat down across from me with a notepad. She waited.
I'd rehearsed the sentence for two days, on the road, in the dark, under my breath. I said it in Italian, the way I'd prepared it.
“My name is Chiara Varenghi. I was kept in a cellar.”
She wrote the name down. She got up without a word. I heard her typing in the next room, stopping, typing again. When she came back, she was holding her notepad differently. She brought me a glass of water and a croissant wrapped in a paper napkin. She watched me eat. I was chewing on the left side. She noticed. I saw her notice.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-five.”
That was true. I was only lying about one thing. I'd promised myself I'd only lie about one thing.
The police came an hour later. One man on his own, plain clothes, about forty, clean-shaven, a dark jacket and a spiral notebook. He introduced himself: Lieutenant Yacine Saïdi. He spoke quietly, as if there were a child asleep in the room.
He explained the law to me. In France, when someone has no papers, the police can hold them for four hours to check who they are. Not a minute longer. He said I wasn't under arrest. I was a person reporting herself as a victim, and that was why he was there.
I answered him in French. He looked up from his notebook.
“Where did you learn French?”
“From the radio.”
He wrote that down. He didn't smile. I found out later that my accent didn't come from anywhere. The nurses said I talked like a weather presenter who'd grown up abroad. That was about right.
He asked me simple questions and wrote my answers down exactly as I gave them. A man. A cellar. In Italy first, then here, in France, in a house. He asked me the man's name.
“Ermes.”
“Ermes what?”
“Ermes.”
He asked me where the house was. I said above a village. On my way down on foot, I'd read a name on a sign: Gémenos. I said the man was dead, on the floor of his kitchen, and had been since the Friday. He stopped writing for a second. He went out into the corridor to make a call. I could hear him saying “Gémenos” and “gendarmerie”, and spelling out a first name I had never seen written down.
He took my fingerprints later, at police headquarters, with the say-so of someone on the phone. They meant nothing to any database in France. He told me so as if it were good news. He didn't know yet which question he ought to be asking.
That evening they drove me to La Timone. Saïdi said it was for my sake, to see what had been done to me, and for the file. Both were true.
A doctor examined me for an hour, with a junior doctor taking notes. They talked to each other as if I couldn't understand, and I understood every word.
In my blood, hardly any vitamin D left. Bones too light for my age. Two molars missing, bottom right and top left, and the rest needing work. Grey skin, “skin that's never seen daylight”, the junior said, and the doctor gave her a look to shut her up. My eyes: they had me read letters off a chart on the far wall. I could only make out the top line. I squinted, and it made no difference. Short-sighted, the doctor said. For how long? I didn't know. I'd never had anything far away to look at.
She looked at my right ankle, at the ring of skin there, paler and harder than the rest. She said nothing. She wrote.
She wanted to take the scarf off me. It was knotted round my left wrist, two turns and a reef knot. I covered it with my hand. She examined around it, the skin, the veins, without touching it. She said it was silk. I knew that. The background had once been a pale water green. You could still see leaves on it, and a moth, faded almost to white. The colours had gone, worn away by hands and by the cold.
I'd brought two things with me. That scarf. And an empty envelope, folded in four, which I'd slipped into my sock, against my ankle, under the ring of skin. Nobody found it. What was written on it, I'll come to in good time.
They gave me a room to myself. A nurse called Rose brought me a hospital gown, a tray and a toothbrush still in its wrapper. At nine o'clock she switched off the light and shut the door.
I got up. I opened the door again.
She came back a quarter of an hour later and shut it. I opened it again. The third time, she stopped in the doorway. She looked at me, sitting on the bed, bare feet on the tiles. She went and fetched a chair from the corridor and wedged it against the door.
“There. Now it won't move,” she said.
With the door open, I could hear the radio in the room across the corridor. An old man who couldn't sleep either. A phone-in where people rang up in the night to talk about their cats and their husbands. The midnight news, then one o'clock. I slept a little between bulletins. It was enough.
Now I have to say what I was waiting for.
I was waiting to be found out. I thought it would take two days, maybe three. Someone would come from Italy with a photo, a file, a question I wouldn't be able to answer. They'd ask me who I really was. I wanted those two days. I wanted to get inside a house and look at faces for two days. After that, they could do what they liked with me.
I hadn't come looking for a mother. I'd come looking for someone.
On the Thursday, Saïdi came back at about ten. He sat down on the chair in the doorway, without moving it.
“The mother's on her way,” he said. “She took the first flight out of Milan this morning. She'll be here in an hour.”
He watched me as he said it. I kept my hands flat on the sheet. There's nothing harder than keeping your hands flat.
“The Italians have had an alert out in your name since 2014,” he went on. “A missing minor. The consulate told Rome, Rome told the carabinieri, the carabinieri told the family. I won't pretend this isn't moving very fast.”
I said nothing. He waited, and went out again.
She arrived a little before eleven. I heard her footsteps in the corridor before I saw her: low heels, steady, unhurried. Next to them, Saïdi's, heavier, and Rose's.
I'm short-sighted. From the door, she was a grey, upright shape. She stopped in the doorway, beside the chair. She didn't run. She took three steps into the room and came into focus: a slim woman of nearly sixty, grey hair cut very short, a grey coat over a black jumper, a dark silk scarf at her throat. No make-up. Eyes that didn't blink.
She looked at my hands, at my wrist. Then at my face.
Three seconds.
“Chiara.”
She didn't cry out. She said it the way you read a name off a list, to tick it off. She crossed the room and took me in her arms. She smelt of a perfume I didn't know, powdery, cold. I found out later it was iris. Her arms were hard. She wasn't shaking.
Right against my ear, very low, in Italian, so low that neither Saïdi nor Rose could have heard, she said:
“Don't say anything. Not a word.”
She let go of me. She turned to the lieutenant. She spoke to him in French, good French, with hardly any accent.
“This is my daughter. There's nothing to check.”
Saïdi opened his mouth. He talked about procedures, comparisons, the usual timescale. She let him finish. She said the same sentence again, in the same tone, word for word. Rose was looking at the floor.
I stayed sitting on the bed. I could feel the knot of the scarf against my wrist. I thought about what I'd heard on the radio, all those years, every time someone was found. Mothers cry. Mothers ask. Where were you. Who did this to you. Were you hungry. Were you cold. Did you think about us.
A mother who gets her daughter back after twelve years has a thousand questions.
This one didn't have a single one. She had an instruction.