One day I looked up from my book and, for the first time, saw the young woman and the little girl. They were returning from the water’s edge to their umbrella, she no more than twenty, her head bent, and the child, three or four years old, gazing up at her, rapt, holding a doll the way a mother carries a child in her arms.
This novel is a story about two women and their respective families, but ultimately it is a three-character drama plus a doll. The three characters at its core are the narrator, Leda, and the mother and child described here, Nina and Elena. At this point, Leda has already been on vacation for several days—maybe as long as a week—and the mother and her daughter had also been there for that long she hadn’t taken notice of them. That it takes a little while for her to get into the groove, as it were, and come to take special notice of this duo says something about her, surely, but it is way too early determine exactly what. Still, the very intensity of her observation is enough for the reader to take notice and even, perhaps, raise some hackles. Right from the beginning, something seems a little office about her interest, but as narrator she is not giving the game away.
I don’t know what bothered me, the game with the water, perhaps, or Nina flaunting her pleasure in the sun. Or the voices, yes, especially the voices that mother and daughter attributed to the doll. Now they gave her words in turn, now together, superimposing the adult’s fake-child voice and the child’s fake-adult voice. They imagined it was the same, single voice coming from the same throat of a thing in reality mute. But evidently I couldn’t enter into their illusion, I felt a growing repulsion for that double voice.
As it turns out, however, it is really not so much either mother or daughter that is the real object of the narrator’s increasingly creepy fascination. As indicated, this is a three-character drama plus a doll and it is only if one is willing to elevate the doll to the same level as the humans that it becomes a quartet. But this is not one of those stories about a ventriloquist dummy that psychologically occupies half the humanity of the belly speaker nor is it a horror story in which the doll is endowed with sentience. The doll is just a doll and it remains a just doll. It is an object no more worthy of elevation to character status than the beach. That said, however, the doll becomes invested with greater meaning because of Leda’s perverse reaction and treatment to it. But even with that said, it is not to suggest that she gives it life. She merely gives it meaning which it never had before.
I took my bag, carried it out onto the terrace in the sun, spilled the contents onto the table. The doll fell on one side, I spoke to her, the way one does to a cat or a dog, then I heard my voice and was immediately silent. I decided to take care of Nani, for company, to calm myself.
The doll which provides Nina and Elena so much pleasure comes to wind up in the possession of Leda. The circumstances by which that possession is transferred makes up a good deal of the meat of the plot so it won’t be explained here. Suffice to say that the doll makes its way into Leda’s purse in a way that is not exactly what one would describe as psychologically sound. This is a three-character story with a doll that at certain point becomes way more important to the narrator’s story than the other two characters. But, again, as is made clear here, that twist in the direction of the narrative is one in which Leda herself personifies the doll into something more than mere object while recognizing that she is doing so and therefore not really doing it at all. The fun thing about stories with dolls at their center is the plot usually veers toward an element of some sort of madness or, at the very least, psychosis. This novel is substantially different in that it purposely evades that sort of easy facilitation of plot melodramatics. Ultimately, though it remains a three-character story with a doll, its significance twists on its becoming a story about a woman and a doll. A doll that isn’t a character but is definitely a metaphor.
