Novel Readings

Help me say what can’t be said, you ask me.

This would be the most extraordinary outcome. Managing to say out loud, dry-eyed, the things that can’t be said because no one knows where to put them, no one wants to hold them, because they burn. And you—when people ask about you—feel guilty because you are a red-hot ember that scorches anyone that touches it.

Concita De Gregorio’s The Missing Word is just barely fiction, by which I mean both that it tells a true story and that it tells its true story with exceptional lightness, almost delicacy, not of tone but of touch or glance, as if to help her readers hold Irina’s story in their minds without scorching.

What happened to Irina is this: she married Mathias; they had twins; she and her husband eventually separated but made amicable arrangements to share time with their daughters; one day he picked them up and they were never seen again. Mathias took his own life, leaving no traces or clues of the girls’ fate. Irina lives on, because “that’s what nature has decided: pain on its own doesn’t kill you.” Eventually she meets another man, Luis, and is happy with him, though she is also, always, grieving: “It’s a never-ending occupation. A constant battle. A siege, as you call it The presence of those who are absent besieges you.”

Some of the chapters of The Missing Word are told by the narrator (Concita, as I understand both the novel’s conceit and its fictionalized truth) addressing Irina with questions or observations about Irina’s story, or Irina’s desire to tell her about it:

You want to talk about you. About what you’re like now. You want to say, eyes wide with surprise, that it can happen, something that you never imagined possible has happened to you. Love is back, it never really left: it was hidden in a corner, crouching in fear with its hands over its head, but it was there  . . . You talk and talk. You talk about changes. Memories. You wonder.

Other chapters are in Irina’s voice. She talks about about her family history, her marriage, her children, their disappearance, her memories, her mourning:

No. I don’t have a single picture with me. I don’t have one in my wallet. I don’t need to see them captured and immobilized in the past. I see them alive in the present, I don’t even need to close my eyes. I see them and hear them . . . There isn’t one image in particular that comes to mind. Every single one. All my memories are here: it’s not that they return, they never left. They haven’t been dislodged since the second they came into the world. Sometimes you’re surprised by the moment when they manifest themselves to you.

Other chapters are letters and documents: Irina writing to her friends, to her Nonna, to the girls’ teacher (begging, poignantly, for the school to release their stories and pictures to her), to judges or investigators (pressing for the investigation—which was inept, half-hearted, inconclusive—to continue). A couple of the chapters are lists: things Irina is angry about, things that make her happy, things she “mustn’t forget”—I made a list with that heading too, after Owen died.

“It must be said,” Irina says to Concita, “that losing a child is the touchstone of grief, the gold standard of pain. The benchmark.” This is uncomfortable territory: it doesn’t seem right to weigh one grief against another. “Never would I compare my state with that of, say, a widow’s,” Denise Riley says in Time Lived, Without Its Flow”; “never would I lay claim to ‘the worst grief of all.'” Yet Riley, whose adult son died suddenly of a previously undetected heart defect, goes on to make other comparisons:

And, among my own kind, never would I compare my own infinitely lighter lot with that of the parent of a murdered or tortured child, or a suicidal child, or one killed in a stupid accident, or one very young, dying painfully slowly.

Irina does not know how or even whether Livia and Alessia died. She feels the impossibility of their survival, because surely there would have been some sign after so much time:

They’re very sensitive, Alessia and Livia. Highly intelligent. They understand, they hear everything. They would have found a way, in these years of absence, to let me know: we’re here. One person, a trick. Even if someone had said Mamma’s dead, or Mamma doesn’t want you anymore, she left. They would have come across something or someone, I think, able to capture a signal and transmit it. To be suspicious, feel sorry, understand.

But against the ninety-nine percent probability of their death, she sets the one percent chance that they are “somewhere in the world”: “all I can do is squeeze every fiber of my being into that infinitesimal space.” Maybe that would be worse, the not knowing for sure, the persistence of that tiny hope, although my mother’s heart says it might be better than what I know.

“There’s no specific noun for the parent of a dead child,” Riley remarks. That is the “missing word” of De Gregorio’s title. Maybe, both writers imply, there is no ready vocabulary because this is the loss (worst or not) that people, or parents anyway, least want to contemplate. It frustrates Riley when people say (as they have said to me too) “I can’t imagine what you are feeling”: “I’d like them to try to imagine,” she says, “it’s not so difficult.” I have thought the same, but I also understand the refusal; Riley calls it “a disavowal of the possibility of empathy,” but surely it is only self-preservation. Concita reflects on Irina’s reluctance to tell people the truth about her daughters:

People ask: Do you have children? You say nothing. Yes, two, you’d like to say. Because it’s true, you have two. They’re there all the time. You can’t free yourself of their absence . . . Then you should add: but they’re dead. Presumed dead, if you really want to be precise. But you don’t say it. You don’t say it spontaneously and then it’s too late, and you can’t find the courage to say it. Courage, yes, that’s the word. Because you’re ashamed to embarrass people . . . They truly didn’t want to know: they didn’t want to hear it.

“Well, do you know what would be amazing?” she goes on; “If people you speak to about yourself had the capacity to hold their peace, listen, and not feel duty-bound to put their two cents of horrified clichés in. To accept, and find a place for what you are saying.” That is what The Missing Word offers its readers as well as Irina: a place to listen, a story of love and loss to make up for the word we don’t have to give our grief a place—a story, too, of movement, which for Irina makes a new story and a new love possible, not replacing the old story or the old love but continuing them:

Searching, traveling, seeing, trying to understand what the bigger picture is. This is the only thing we can do. Not stopping ourselves, not suppressing our desire, ever. Another step. One meter further. Forgetting and remembering. Letting things out and then bringing them back into your heart.

I read The Missing Word on what would have been Owen’s 26th birthday. Another step.