Accabadora (15 page)

“He was completely beside himself, not making any sense.”

The old woman turned to face the fire, hiding the expression of her eyes in a defensive gesture so unlike her that Maria felt within her a long finger of suspicion without quite knowing what it was she suspected. In a low voice she said,

“Where were you last night?”

Bonaria felt no need to break the silence, letting it be her answer. She kept her eyes fixed on the heavily smoking firewood. But for Maria it was as if Bonaria had replied in a complete sentence. Rising abruptly, she put down her book on the table set for one, going up to the old woman who was again huddled in the position in which she had surprised her that morning.

“You went out, I know you did. Where did you go?”

Bonaria lifted her eyes from the fire, holding Maria's gaze without replying. In her empty eyes Maria saw the shadow of what she did not even know she should fear, and wavered.

“It's not possible.”

“Maria . . .”

“You did do it. You really did go to Nicola last night.” The girl was no longer even asking questions.

“He asked me to.”

The answer seemed trivial in comparison with Maria's troubled face.

“It's not possible.”

Bonaria stood up with a sigh. She had always known that this moment would come, but she had never for a moment imagined it would be like this.

“What's not possible? That he should have asked me or that I should have done it? You have eyes to see and you weren't born stupid, Maria. You knew Nicola and you know me.”

Maria shook her head violently.

“No, I don't know you. The person I know doesn't go into people's homes at night to suffocate cripples with pillows.”

The brutality of what she was saying clashed with the girl's whisper, slender as a tiny flame. As her suspicion gradually gained strength, the obscene implications of the truth multiplied in what she was saying.

“Does Giannina know? Does Salvatore Bastíu know?”

“It doesn't matter.” Bonaria knew she was lying but that did not stop her.

“The fact that his mother and father don't know that you killed their son doesn't matter?”

“That was how he wanted it, and I made him a promise.”

“Why on earth should Nicola have had to ask such a thing from you of all people?”

The old woman looked straight into Maria's face and said nothing. No words existed to answer that question, or if they did exist she did not know them. But in Maria's mind everything was suddenly clear and, in the instant she realized it, the daughter of Anna Teresa and Sisinnio Listru knew with certainty the truth about the woman standing before her. She opened her mouth to express her astonishment in a ritual oath, but all that came out was the gasp of a woman in childbirth, the
sob of a strangled animal. She lifted her hand to her mouth, but held her eyes on the deathly pale face of the
accabadora
.

“All those times when you came back at night . . .” she said.

“I would have told you when the right moment came, Maria.” Bonaria made no attempt to ease the girl's distress.

“When? When would you have told me? Would you have taken me with you? Would you have asked me to hold your shawl while you did it?” Anger grew on Maria's lips like a bitter foam. “When would you have done that?”

“Not now, certainly. When you were ready for it.”

“Ready!” The word echoed in the room like an object flung to the floor. “I would never have been ready to accept the idea that you killed people!”

As soon as it was clear that there was no damming the stream, Bonaria gave up all hope of finding a lighter or more gentle way of saying what had to be said.

“Don't start giving names to things you don't understand, Maria Listru. You will be faced by many choices you won't want to make in life, and you too, like the rest of us, will make them because they have to be made.”

“So this was one of those choices.” Maria's scorn was ferocious, and she made no attempt to hide the fact. “And how do you go about doing this necessary thing? Why not tell me all about it, now you've got round to mentioning it?” She started walking round the table with a jerky step. “Do you always go in secretly like you did with Nicola? No, let me think . . . or does the family call you, like the night when Santino Littorra came?” The more clearly she remembered it, the sharper the girl's anger seemed to become. “And how do you do it, Tzia? Tell me that!”

Bonaria Urrai had seen enough of the world to know that rising to this provocation would not help.

“So you want to make decisions about the how without understanding the why? You're always in such a hurry to judge other people, Maria.”

“It's not me who's in a hurry, rather the opposite. If things have to happen, they will happen of themselves when the right time comes.”

The old woman tore off her shawl and dropped it roughly on the chair. Her dark eyes fixed Maria with a certain impatient severity. Whatever the truth about Nicola, Bonaria Urrai was still capable of defending herself.

“They do happen of themselves,” she said with a cheerless smile. “Do you think you were self-generated, Maria? Did you deliver yourself from your mother's belly by your own efforts? Or did you need help from someone else, like all living creatures?”

“I have always . . .” Maria said, but Bonaria stopped her with an imperious wave of the hand.

“Be quiet, you don't know what you're talking about. Did you cut the umbilical cord yourself? Didn't others wash you and breastfeed you? Were you not born and brought up twice, thanks to other people, or are you so clever that you were able to do it all by yourself?”

Recalled to her dependent status by what seemed to her an unfair blow beneath the belt, Maria stopped arguing, while Bonaria lowered her voice to a litany deprived of all emphasis.

“So others made decisions for you, and will make more decisions when necessary. No-one alive has ever reached the light of day without the help of fathers and mothers at every corner of the road, Maria, and you more than anyone should know that.”

The elderly seamstress was speaking with the sincerity of a woman confiding in unknown fellow-travellers on a train, knowing she will never have to see them again.

“My own belly was never opened,” she said, “and God knows whether I would have wished it, but I taught myself that children must be smacked and caressed, and be given the breast, and wine at festivals, and everything necessary at the time it is needed. I too had a part to play, and I have played it.”

“And what part was that?”

“The final part. I have been the last mother some people have seen.”

Maria stayed silent for a few minutes, her anger dying under the significance of those words, so unacceptable to her. When she did speak again, Bonaria knew there was nothing left for her to understand.

Maria said, “You have been the most important person in my life, and if you asked me for death, I could not kill you just because you wanted it.”

Bonaria Urrai stared at her, and Maria saw that she was tired.

“Never say: I shall not drink from this water. You could find yourself in the water without having any idea how you got there.” Bonaria picked up the shawl she had dropped on the chair and slowly began to fold it, aware this was the only thing she still had the power to tidy away.

“That moment will never come.” Maria did not realize she had reached a decision until the moment it escaped her lips. “I want to go away from you.”

If these words surprised the old woman, she did nothing to show it. She never even looked at the girl.

“I understand.”

“At once. Tomorrow.”

“Alright. I'll speak to your mother.”

“No.” The girl seemed to hesitate. “I don't want to go back to my mother. I'll think of something else.”

“As you like.” This was not what Bonaria wanted to say, but she had been doing so many things she had not wanted to do in the last few days.

“Of course, I shall never forget the gratitude I owe you,” Maria added in a whisper.

The old woman looked at her, then said quietly:

“There is nothing I need that you can do for me, Maria Listru.”

They went to bed without saying anything more because no more words were needed, but neither slept. The water in the pan on the spent hob was not the only thing that stayed cold that night in the former home of Taniei Urrai.

Early the next morning, Maestra Luciana opened the door to Maria, believing she had come to return the book she had borrowed; instead Maria had a suitcase in her hand and no meaningful explanation for it. But thirty years as a teacher had taught her that there are times for not asking questions, and before the end of the week Maria had a ticket for the Genoa ferry and an address in Turin on via della Tocca, where a family of the name of Gentili were waiting impatiently for the new Sardinian nanny specially recommended to them by Luciana Tellani.

A NEW LIFE, THAT'S WHAT MAESTRA LUCIANA HAD TOLD HER.
What you need is a new life, where no-one knows who you are, or whose daughter or what sort of daughter. Maria had not explained what had happened, or told her what she and Bonaria had said to each other, but one shrewd glance from the green eyes of the woman from Turin had been enough to make it clear to Maria that she herself was the only person in Soreni who had not known who Bonaria Urrai really was. She tried in vain to overcome the emptiness caused in her by this betrayal, which seemed to her so nearly a death, but without the consolation of being able to keep vigil beside the body of a loved person, or fencing round with earth in burial the tears that were suffocating her. She had lived for years with Bonaria in the belief that her double birth had made her equal to others, a right birth after a wrong one, but now the balance
seemed a mass of errors and cancellations, leaving her out again like a left-over remainder.

A new life, Luciana Tellani had repeated firmly, as if being born again were simple. Yet she came to see that these were merely appropriate words, the sort that teachers reserve for eventualities like these, and the opportunity to establish at least one of her inconvenient multiplicity of births was a more powerful incentive than any other in persuading Maria to leave in such haste.

As she clung to the salty, sticky rail of the
Tirrenia
between Olbia and Genoa, she began to feel grown up and strong, almost free, without the shadowed eyes that so often become permanent in those forced to emigrate in search of food, people in no way looking forward to being born again in a new place. But Maria, as she cut the umbilical cord at a precise moment chosen by herself, remembered that day so long ago when, under the lemon tree in the yard of Anna Teresa Listru, she had first made up her mind what she wanted to put into her mud tarts. During the voyage Maria made a point of not sleeping at all, even for an hour. She needed every minute to process her memories as if she were herself an
accabadora
, judging the events of her life as if they were themselves people who might or might not be allowed to accompany her to the continent. She marked them off one by one, and by the time they reached Genoa she was convinced a burden had been lifted from her, and that she had left the whole dead weight of her wounds behind in the other land.

The walls of the home of Attilio and Marta Gentili, on the fifth floor of an expensive apartment block in the historic centre of
Turin, were painted a creamy white that had nothing in common with the gaudy colours of homes in Soreni. Maria had only ever seen such white walls at school and at the hospital, and this too contributed to her sense of subjection, a subtle discomfort given added force by the ease with which they immediately addressed her with the familiar tu. The living-room Signora Gentili showed her into before going to call her children was a masterpiece of spaciousness, dominated by a large smoke-grey glass chandelier whose highly polished rounded drops hung from the ceiling like a great cluster of sucked sweets. In the few minutes she was left on her own, Maria stopped pretending not to be impressed by the high ceilings and the large art nouveau windows that occupied an entire wall; even at four in the afternoon with the sun already long past its zenith, she could imagine how the light must explode in there every cloudless morning. Trying to look at ease, she perched on the edge of the cream-coloured sofa, though she was in fact paralysed by the ostentation of so much unjustified space, which the little marble fireplace near the door certainly could not have been enough to heat; but it was a relief to be able to get to her feet when the Gentili children were brought in, though she was utterly unaware that, with her slender figure and bottle-green overcoat, she must seem to the children like nothing more than a rip in the wallpaper. With a certain solemnity Piergiorgio and Anna Gloria advanced hand-in-hand in front of their mother, dressed as if to create the illusion that they were twins. Maria offered an attempt at a smile, but Piergiorgio, already aware of the difference between reality and pretence, confined himself to staring at her from the awkward pride of his fifteen years, still firmly grasping his little sister's hand.