Accabadora (11 page)

“But you do it when others ask for it. Am I worth less than they are?”

“You've never understood your own life, Nicola, and you're certainly not in any position to understand mine. Just get it into your head that I can't help you.”

Nicola sighed as if resigned, then changed his tone.

“What would you say if I wanted to marry Maria?” he asked bluntly, leaving her for a moment dumbfounded.

“That would be for Maria to answer. How on earth could I ever decide such a thing?”

Nicola deliberately made the cover slip from his lap to the floor. Supporting himself on the arms of the chair with his hands, he forced himself as far upright as he could. With this parody of standing to attention he seemed to be challenging Bonaria to look at his exposed stump, still red from the amputation.

“Look at me, Tzia, look at my leg: why play games with reality? Maria would never marry me, nor would anyone else, because I'm a cripple. I'll never be able to work or support a family, or do any of the things a woman needs from a man.” His voice, calm to begin with, gradually grew more tense. “It's like I was already dead.”

In recent months his body had lost weight and tone, but he was otherwise healthy and his will seemed as strong as ever. Perhaps that was the real problem. If his spirit had been broken, perhaps he could have resigned himself to his condition. Instead there was something obsessive about his determination; in every way he was the same as he had always been. Whether she liked it or not, Nicola Bastíu was one of the most vigorously alive creatures Bonaria had ever seen, though she did not admit this when she turned back to him.

“You're alive to your mother, and she wants the benefits of life for you.”

“My mother's only happy when she has someone to look after. She wants to see me as a child again, but that's no reason for me to stay in this world.”

“It would kill her, and your father too.”

“They'll die anyway, and who'll care about me after that? Will my brother's wife wipe my arse for me? And what woman will marry him when she realizes she'll be inheriting the care of a cripple as well?”

Bonaria closed her eyes. If Giannina Bastíu had come in at that moment she would have assumed the old woman had dozed off in the sun, bored with Nicola's lack of conversation. But she shook her head and opened her eyes again, ever vigilant.

“Even if I wanted to do what you're asking me, I could never do it without the consent of your family.”

Nicola's face lit up; it was as if he had sensed the vague shadow of a possibility. He relaxed from his tiring upright position and settled back comfortably again in his chair, leaving the cover on the ground. The indecent display of his stump, so inconsistent with his previous rejection of his mutilation, contained the calculated use of a psychological weapon. He could have been a marvellous soldier, Nicola, or a criminal of the highest class.

“I'd never even ask for their consent, but if you were agreeable, there would be a way of avoiding having to ask them.”

“There is no such way, and even if there were I'd have nothing to do with it.” Bonaria's words were final, but her eyes seemed to be asking a question, and Nicola sensed encouragement.

“The night of All Saints. When the door's left open for the dinner for the dead souls, you'd be able to go in and out without anyone suspecting anything! In the morning they'll find me dead in bed and think I've had an accident.”

Bonaria got up quickly and bent down to pick up the coverlet and rearrange it over his legs. This almost intimate position
enabled Nicola to grasp her wrist again, this time with insinuating gentleness. He did not speak, and Bonaria responded to his silence with a murmur:

“You're asking me to compromise myself before God and man. You must be out of your mind, Nicola.”

“I've never been more sane than I am today. You may be able to accept the idea of seeing me live the rest of my life as a worm, but it would be three times harder for me. If you help me, my death will pass for natural causes. If not, I'll find a way of my own.”

Whatever Nicola may have hoped, Bonaria Urrai had never for an instant considered the idea of agreeing to what he wanted until that moment. But now she wavered for the first time, because she had heard such words once before, long ago, when behind the hill known as Mont'e Mari there had still been a wood and a time of youth and promise.

The war that would later be known as the Great War had already earned its name, summoning from Soreni no less than three levies of men to the trenches of the Piave, and even so many had not been enough. Those discharged seriously wounded from the front brought back news of the heroism of the Sassari Brigade and, at the age of twenty, Bonaria had already seen enough of the world to know that the word “hero” was the masculine singular of the word “widow”. Even so, she liked to imagine herself a bride as she lay on the grass beneath the pines, breathing deeply the resinous perfume of the soil and pressing the curly head of Raffaele Zincu to her breast.

Raffaele was not strictly speaking handsome, though every woman of marriageable age in Soreni had dreamed of him as
her husband. If the truth be told, some women who already had husbands dreamed of him too because, although there were richer or taller men, no-one at twenty had eyes of that sharp, mocking green that could pierce the eyes of others as if regardless of any price that might have to be paid later. Raffaele's lower lip was as soft as a woman's, and his wayward and sensual character could make girls blush even to speak to him. It meant nothing to Bonaria that the arrogant line of his jaw contained a warning that his passing fancies might not always have entirely innocent consequences. Ever since childhood he had worked together with dozens of others on Taniei Urrai's land, harvesting melons in summer and olives in winter with an energy that had earned him the respect of his employer and his companions. Whoever knocked down the olives with Raffaele would finish the day first and best, and old Urrai often boasted of the results at supper, insisting that Raffaele was a superman in hand and word; Bonaria, who also knew of other superior qualities in Raffaele, would agree with carefully calculated stinginess. Where her father counted vines she counted pines, and if he dreamed of seas of golden ears of corn she was able to run her hand through a field of dark curls on certain Saturday afternoons when her father was not there, and no war would ever be able to extinguish Raffaele's fire in her blood. They did talk, sometimes for hours, about the possibility he might be called up to the front, but Raffaele always assumed he would come home again.

“Will you still want me if I come back like Vincenzo Bellu?”

“With only one arm? Of course, because they'll give you the Order of Vittorio Veneto and I'll be your lady!” Bonaria had laughed softly and lightly touched his ears.

“I'm not joking. Would you still want me if I was a cripple? Deafened by a grenade or with no legs like Luigi Barranca?”

“I'd want you back in any condition, as long as you were still alive.”

Bonaria's unconditional reply had not reassured him. At such times his voice had been darker than usual.

“Maybe you can imagine having me back as a worm, but I'd rather die full of life ten times over than have to live ten years like a dead man. If that happens to me I shall do what Barranca did and shoot myself.”

“Never let me hear you say that, Arrafiei.”

Bonaria had not even dared to look up at the sky as she put her hand over his mouth to stop his words, and pulled his head on to her lap. As she gazed at him in that peaceful shade, he seemed more perfect than ever, so vibrant with vitality that even his healthy body, intact in every part, could not contain it.

“They'll never call you up, just wait and see,” she had said as if pronouncing an exorcism.

“Who knows, but if I do go, you must pray for me to come back. Then when I get home, I'll see to everything else myself.”

But they did call him up, and Bonaria had had to spend thirty-five years praying for him, because no-one ever did come back to Soreni to report that the son of Lizio Zincu had been a hero in the trenches.

When Giannina Bastíu returned with a tray of steaming coffee, she found Nicola alone in the sun with three empty chairs and a strange smile on his face.

THE SOULS KNOW US, THEY ARE OUR OWN RELATIVES SO
they will not hurt us, and we have even prepared a feast for them. This was what Andría Bastíu was thinking while he was getting ready in his room for the night of the first of November. He took off his outdoor shoes but did not undress since he had no intention of going to sleep. The previous year his mother had deliberately made him spend all day lifting potatoes to tire him out, so that in the evening he had fallen asleep despite himself, betrayed by his body. But this time they had not tricked him; he was awake and would be able to watch the spirits eating and taking the tobacco cut up for them from the table, where in the morning fingermarks would be found. So he would know what to say to Maria when she claimed the souls never go around tormenting people, because the mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ did not allow it. If Our Lord Jesus Christ had allowed his brother to lose a leg, surely he would not prevent the dead eating a couple of
culurgiones
.

So he had sat down in silence on a little bench made of rods he had used as a child, with nails which dug into his bottom, keeping an eye on the crack in his door with the determination of a frontier guard. After twenty minutes he was ready to doze off, but he went on crouching behind the half-closed door, his eye firmly on the line of the corridor leading from the front door to the table laid ready with the feast for the dead souls. There were always many souls abroad that night, Nicola had told him, having the previous year even seen the soul of Antoni Juliu, his mother's older brother, walking down the road towards their house. Antoni Juliu had gone as an emigrant to the mines in Belgium, but when he returned he no longer seemed to feel at home: he would look about like someone afraid of his creditors, and never got rid of the black coal dust under his nails. He had been unhappy to go away, and was even less happy to be back. The third summer he had hanged himself on the Gongius' family farm, shocking the sharecroppers who found him hanging from a branch like a rotten pear with his tongue sticking out, having emigrated from himself to heaven knew where.

Maybe Antoni Juliu really would come that night. A dish had been prepared for him with a small glass of
abbardente
beside it, because he had been fond of
eau de vie
, rather too fond in fact. If he did not come and drink it, Andría's father would drink it before dinner, or Nicola who, God knows, had need of it. But that black figure heading down the corridor like a curse could not be the soul of Antoni Juliu, passing Andría's door with a swish of skirts. That head in its black scarf could not possibly be that of his uncle, that firm step was of someone who had never been forced to leave this earth.

When Andría saw the mysterious figure come into the house he closed his eyes in disbelief, tormented by the discrepancy between faith and fact. Were there dead females in the family? He wanted to close his door at once, slamming it hard and beating against it with his fear, but the soul would have been too close not to notice. But luckily the figure stopped just after his room, in front of Nicola's door. Andría saw it enter, then took a short breath, and in what he hoped was perfect silence performed the first reckless act of his life, and left his room to go into the corridor.

On a night like this night of souls, the church bell did not toll. It could have been any hour, but nothing would have been any different. All along the streets the house doors were open in spite of the cold, as if every family in Soreni had run away so quickly that they had forgotten to close their front door. More in her element on this night than any other in the year, the tall woman close to the wall walked down the street with the step of one who knew exactly where she was going. She moved quickly, wrapped in a dark shawl, until her skirts touched the threshold of the Bastíu house. Then she slipped soundlessly down the corridor leaving no memory of herself in the street. In that house she moved even at night with the confident step of a member of the family, passing the rooms to reach the only door she knew would not be shut, the one behind which Nicola Bastíu, stupefied by pain and expectation, was stealing a moment of sleep.