Accabadora (18 page)

In Piergiorgio's adoring eyes she saw herself as beautiful in a way she could not remember ever having felt before, as beautiful as when she wore the bread crown on her head in her mother's fragrant bedroom and had seen herself reflected in the wardrobe mirror, with her bare breast and the little gold chain that had given her the distinction of a lady in a portrait. Her sister's husband had certainly never seen her like this, and even Andría Bastíu's love for her had been more homely: they had never shared in the confession of secrets so foul as to stain
the night for ever, nor had Maria ever been afraid to touch his hand for fear of making the blood surge under her skin, as constantly happened when she looked at Piergiorgio's fine profile. She had always known she was female, but only now did she discover what it felt like to be a woman, because no-one had ever before shown it to her with the passionate frenzy she saw in the eyes of the sixteen-year-old Piergiorgio Gentili every time he looked at her.

As the weeks passed, instinctively aware of the dangerous hostility of Anna Gloria, Maria and Piergiorgio became more furtive, carefully avoiding situations in which they themselves might bring an end to Maria's continued but now virtually superfluous presence in the house. At night they only met for a few minutes at a time, careful as thieves not to touch each other even accidentally, before returning to their own beds with the hot guilt of perpetually frustrated desire. Maria knew a mere gesture would have been enough to tip the balance, and she was extremely careful not to let this happen, bridging the distance between them with other little intimacies. It was as if both realized that their instinctive need for one another at the time of sleep made them a separate entity in the ecosystem of the house, an organism too fragile to risk exposing it to infection through an incautious exchange of fevers.

This care saved Maria in many ways, though at first she was not aware of it. She was too wrapped up in what was happening to realise that their mutual comings and goings at night were having an effect not only on Piergiorgio's wounded past, but also on her own. If he seemed to have succeeded in resolving
certain memories, she was inadvertently beginning to awaken others, in a game of interrelationships that seemed to have no apparent logic. Many things that she thought she had left behind when the ferry sailed for Genoa now came back one after the other, like pieces of wood thrown up on the beach after a storm at sea.

The first time Maria realized that something was changing was one night, as she was slowly returning barefoot to her room. The feel of the moquette carpet under her feet suddenly brought back the shaggy tawny fur of Mosè, and the exact colour of the dog's round eyes. And so her first memories began to surface, always at night and when she was unexpectedly distracted by a physical sensation. Then memories began to surface by day too, when she could no longer blame the tricks of sleep if the angle of a sunbeam in the living-room reminded her of sunlight in the house of Bonaria Urrai. Slowly they came back to her one by one, faces, voices and places from her childhood, and Maria discovered that she could inhabit them effortlessly. While she was sewing, the slow rhythms of her hand would unconsciously echo other needlework, already experienced somewhere else, on different cloth but not in a different life, though she had been arguing the opposite with herself for months.

She never spoke about what was happening to her. She was convinced that these capricious scraps of memory which others would have dismissed as sudden homesickness were not something she could reveal to Piergiorgio. But meanwhile present and past faced one another as if after an armistice, burdening her breast with the dumb gratitude of survivors. She had long ago stopped stealing little things that already belonged to her, but
now once again she found she had something to hide, since the awareness she shared with Piergiorgio was not and never could be true reciprocity. Her self-denial contained a bitter prophecy, and Maria knew she was the only one who could be aware of this. The fear of seeing it proved true forced her to move round the boy's soul like someone walking on sand, afraid to leave too many traces of her footsteps. Every time he passionately sought to invoke eternity or other inconvenient guests on their behalf, Maria understood better that what divided them was not age or social status, so much as the persistence in him of the childish self-deception of confusing what one wants with what one has. This was why, every time she left his room and closed the door behind her after their final whisper, Maria renewed to herself her rejection of the man Piergiorgio would become.

The obvious fact that she could never be more than a temporary presence in the Gentili home did not prevent her from feeling that the ground was opening under her feet when a letter arrived from Regina asking her to come home at once. Just a few lines: her sister was good at many things but writing was not one of them. She had put down just the necessary minimum, and after she had opened the letter Maria kept it on her bedside table for two days, pretending it had not even arrived.

It was not until the third night that she found the courage to go into Piergiorgio's room to tell him how things stood, and the anxiety of imminent loss was so great as to make her forget her caution. She did not wait to be sure that Anna Gloria was asleep before opening the door, and the slight squeak of the handle was enough to give the other girl the signal she had long been
hoping for. While in the darkness Maria was sustaining the weight of Piergiorgio's fury on being faced with the necessity of her decision, the light in the bedroom was suddenly switched on from outside, revealing the two young people in confusion in each other's arms on the bed, but this was more than enough for the astonished eyes of Attilio and Marta Gentili. Piergiorgio and Maria did not protest their innocence, and they were undoubtedly not innocent, but they kept to themselves the precise nature of their fault, according to a pact that had never needed to be other than unspoken. The next day Anna Gloria shed not a single tear as Maria, overcome with shame, went down the stairs with her suitcase. Piergiorgio had not even been allowed to leave his room to say goodbye, and the money due to her was coldly handed over without references by the head of the family in an envelope that she did not even open for many days; the only envelope she repeatedly opened to reread its contents was the one from her sister Regina, which in a single alarming sentence added to the pain of parting the weight of responsibility likely to face her on arrival: “Mariedda darling, come back at once if you can: Bonaria Urrai has had a stroke and may be dying.”

THE TABLE-LAMP HAD BEEN TURNED OFF, BUT BONARIA
Urrai did not need the light to know that Maria was sitting there somewhere in the shadows of the hospital room. It was not easy to say exactly when she had developed the habit of sitting to look at Bonaria in silence in the dark, whether she had always had this habit or whether she had developed it on the continent, in the place where she had been working and which she had not wanted to talk about to Bonaria. Bonaria suspected that Maria had picked up the nasty habit of spying on people in their sleep from herself, and she would have liked to have yielded to the temptation to tell Maria she was aware of it, perhaps starting with some sort of noise to make it clear from the first that she was awake. But something stopped her and she did not do it, just as she had not done it at the very beginning, before time decided to escape from her hand like a wolf in the night.

* * *

At the very beginning.

It had been silent in the shop, and Bonaria could still remember Anna Teresa Listru with her plaited hair dipping her stumpy hands into the bag of white beans from Tonara, as if to pick them out one by one. She had been eagerly sharing some gossip with the shopkeeper and the pharmacist's wife, a woman from the continent, who was wearing a dark fur like a city lady as she carefully examined the various kinds of soup on display behind the glass windows of the showcase.

Amid those three women Maria had been as nothing, like an expiry date that has to be noted down so as not to be forgotten; she had not even benefited from the sort of nice things women usually say when they want to compliment other women on their children. Bonaria, sitting on a sack of dried beans in a corner, was waiting for the arrival of the daily milk delivery and watching the forgotten child moving about quickly among things of her own height: fruit, coloured plastic whirligigs, a large basket of fresh bread and her mother's rough knees.

The old woman's eyes were the only ones to notice a handful of black cherries secretly vanishing from a basket into a pocket among the folds of Maria's little white dress. Tzia Bonaria saw neither shame nor self-awareness in the little girl's face, as if this absence of judgement was the just counterpoise to her invisibility. Faults, like people, only exist if there is someone to notice them. But Maria was moving innocently along the counter where the other women were discussing the increased price of vegetables, creeping like an insect through the narrow space between the bottoms of her mother and the pharmacist's wife, attracted by the latter's dark glossy fur. She was staring at it
with her mouth half-open, bewitched by the reflections that shimmered over the fur at the woman's every movement. Bonaria Urrai knew what the little girl was about to do even before Maria's fingers reached out to commit that downy sin. The child immersed her hand in the dense pelt, never before seen on a Christian, amazed that death could be so soft. The pharmacist's wife showed no sign of having noticed anything, which encouraged Maria to go a little further. Moving close to that bum, grown fat on the ailments of others, she buried her face in the dark fur and avidly inhaled its smell. It was only then that the wife of the pharmacist became aware of this fingering of her person and let out a cry of annoyance, attracting everyone's attention to Maria.

Now, stretched out in bed, Bonaria Urrai managed a feeble smile in the darkness at the sudden recovery of this memory of Maria, of Maria made substantial and real in this individual sin of a solitary child. But Bonaria did not see her cry that morning in the shop, while her mother struggled to find words to explain her uncouth behaviour, a sensory deprivation that had driven her to theft much more often than could have been justified by hunger:

“I never wanted her, because God knows three children are plenty for a woman in my situation . . .”

Not even that retroactive abortion had provoked any reaction on Maria's face. She had stayed motionless with the numb unconsciousness of those who have never been properly born, while the colour of the stolen cherries began to spread over the white material from the right-hand pocket of her dress. A telltale redness spreading like a wound, almost black in some places. It was as if the stain was the only thing about her that
was real, an obscene menarche of fruit. The shopkeeper was the first to see it.

“Have you been taking cherries from the basket?”

When Anna Teresa Listru became aware of the havoc on her daughter's dress the slap was already on its way. The child did not close her eyes until the instant the hand hit her, then opened them again with a steady gaze and one hand thrust fiercely into her pocket, aggravating the external stain. Her tears were there, but she hid them.

“Giulia, I'm so sorry, I don't know what to say, add them to my bill . . .”

“Don't worry, these things happen, they're just children.” Behind the counter the shopkeeper played it down. “Though of course that mischievous hand . . .” she added maliciously with a half-smile.

More than anything else, it was that red stain on the little embroidered pocket that had made it clear to Bonaria Urrai that the barren period of her life might be over, and less than a week later she had gone to talk to Anna Teresa Listru about the possibility of taking Maria as a soul-child. And she had added an offer that Sisinnio Listru's widow could not even dream of refusing. In any case Bonaria had devoted herself since her early years to dressmaking, because if she was really good at anything, it was taking the measure of people. And here too she made no mistake. Anna Teresa Listru accepted the plan without discussion, and ten days later Maria was already installed in her room in the ancestral home of the Urrai family, never even having been told that a fundamental change in her family status was envisaged.

* * *

Even after so many years, Maria was not yet sure how far the course of her life had deviated from the one chosen for her. The only thing that had been in the agreement from the beginning was this bed, at which her attendance now had the weight of the completion of a bargain. Tired of pretending to believe Bonaria was sleeping, she approached her pillow and said: