Accabadora (16 page)

“Children, this is Maria.”

The wide flourish of the hand with which the signora indicated her to the children secretly annoyed Maria as it made her feel as if she had been acquired as part of the furnishings, but when she saw that Marta Gentili took the same attitude to her own children, she realized that it was just the mother's personal vision of the world.

“And these are my children, dear. Don't let their angelic air fool you, they are real earthquakes. Especially Piergiorgio!”

Maria smiled politely, even though she could not really see anything angelic in them. They were certainly good-looking, both with that uncertain fairness that tends to darken with age, but while Anna Gloria had inherited her mother's china-doll skin, Piergiorgio had the bronzed complexion of a ship's boy at sea, though this suggestion of warmth went no further than the rims of his cold blue eyes. Both had the hauteur of those born to wealth; it almost seemed they had long ago left the fragility and weaknesses of infancy behind them. But the white knuckles of their clenched fists would have revealed to a perceptive eye that all was not quite as it seemed. Maria instinctively understood as she studied them that her work would not be as easy as she had been led to believe, but that it might in the long run prove more interesting.

In accordance with the terms of her employment, Maria stayed with the children all the time they were not at school, following them in their games and duties regardless of whether their parents were at home or not. She slept in the yellow room, a small space between the two larger ones
reserved for the children, and the fact that it communicated with both led her to believe that it had probably been intended as a sort of large wardrobe area where eventually, when there was no more need for a nanny, both brother and sister would be able to store their clothes.

The first thing she had to reckon with was that they never went out to play with other children. It was true that the Gentili apartment had no access to a courtyard, but the street where they lived was very close to the large Valentino park and shady avenues along the Po, an exciting place where a mass of potentially fatal temptations would have driven any child mad with delight. But on this subject Marta Gentili was firm: the children could only be allowed outside with herself and their father. Going out to play without their parents was not even an option, and Maria very soon realized that part of her job was precisely to ensure that this never happened. In practice it was not a difficult rule to obey because Piergiorgio never showed any sign of wanting to go out and Anna Gloria, though more restless, seemed for the moment satisfied with her many fine toys. On the other hand Maria, in her few free hours, went out alone into the streets whenever she could, cautious but fascinated by the great city. Signora Gentili had told her the strange story of the rectangular street plan of Turin which seemed to have been designed in advance to fit the areas the streets were intended to lead to, on the principle that the citizens had had first to decide where they wanted to go, and only then to start planning and building their houses, squares and apartment blocks; the apparent illogicality of this led Maria to describe it in her first letters home to her sisters as an amusing novelty. This planning down to the last millimetre offended her good sense, convinced as she
was that the only meaningful way to plan streets was the way it was in Soreni, where they seemed to have emerged from the houses like a seamstress's discarded scraps, clippings, and misshapen remnants, taken piecemeal from the spaces accidentally left over after the irregular emergence of the houses, which seemed to prop one another up like elderly drunks after a party given by their patron. Marta Gentili explained to Maria that the real reason for the geometrical plan of the streets of Turin had been security, since a royal capital must not offer rebels or enemies convenient places to hide, but this merely reinforced her view that to construct anything so deliberately on the basis of straight lines could only be an admission of weakness: who would ever take the trouble to design such straight streets unless they were trembling with fear?

All the same, she enjoyed walking aimlessly along the elegant arcades, looking into shop windows full of chocolate confectionery, or ready-made clothes draped with calculated formality round tailor's dummies. She would stop in front of the clothes shops and study them with her critical seamstress's eye, searching out badly made hems and uneven lapels and smiling with satisfaction when she detected such defects behind the shop windows. At moments like this she would think of Bonaria Urrai, but otherwise put all her strength into the delicate surgical operation she had started on the ferry, of which these walks were a fundamental part. The one thing she could not get used to was the insane cold of Turin; it was not just that it was cold – she had experienced that before – but the air was so frozen that to survive it she had to inhale in quick little snatches. The cold seriously threatened to spoil her pleasure, since it only took a few minutes to penetrate her thin coat,
sticking knives even into her bones, despite her determinedly energetic walk.

The first times Maria came home with her muscles tense and her stomach shrunk, it took her at least an hour to recover from the headache gripping her brow like a noose. She could not understand how the people of Turin could survive, but she was determined not to give in without a fight. The third time she came back numb with cold, she decided she must find a solution. With Marta Gentili's permission, she fished out of the newspaper basket in the living-room the daily papers which the master of the house had already read, and hid in her room to pin them on round her chest, back and stomach before putting on the green coat and venturing out into the street again. The cold seemed to find it more difficult to penetrate the smothered rustling of newsprint, and she kept her little secret all through the winter assisted by her convenient solitude: if she had had another girl to share her walks and sit with in cafés, it could have been complicated trying to explain, because she liked to keep her coat on as if glued to her while drinking her hot chocolate. But Maria had been careful not to make any friends. Meanwhile Attilio Gentili found it rather gratifying that his childrens' nanny seemed to be a passionate student of current affairs.

Looking after Anna Gloria proved less difficult than Maria had first feared, perhaps because, with her instinctive understanding of other natures as diffident as her own, she never made the mistake of trying to win her over with flattery, which the girl must have been only too accustomed to. What overcame Anna
Gloria's instinctive shyness was the curiosity and passion that the little girl, bored by the amusements constantly thrust upon her, showed for tongue-twisters and word games, a speciality of Maria's. Together in the living-room they would laugh at comic pronunciations, while Maria would lift the child's fingers one by one as she recited her favourite rhyme:

“
Custu est su procu, custu dd'at mottu, custu dd'at cottu, custu si dd'at pappau et custu
. . . ,” here she would agitate her little finger wildly, making the little girl laugh fit to burst, “. . .
mischineddu! No ndi nd'est abarrau!
”

“I understand nothing!” Anna Gloria would protest when she got over laughing at the strange-sounding words.

“That's just because you've never seen what can happen to a piglet in a family with four children.”

“Well, what can happen to a piglet in a family with four children?” the child would say, holding out her fist ready to start the game again.

Maria took the child's hand again with a conspiratorial air and started opening her fingers in order, beginning with her thumb.

“This is the pig, now he's dead, now he's cooked, and now . . .” shaking the child's little finger like a bell, “. . . poor little thing! There's nothing left of him!”

Maria taught her many other rhymes, some in Italian and some in Sard, and the child often unexpectedly repeated them with an ability that astonished her parents, to whom that simple glimmer of discipline seemed miraculous. Thanks to this ploy, after three weeks of tongue-twisting she and Anna Gloria were able to consider themselves, if not quite friends, at least accomplices, which enabled Maria to exercise at least a
modicum of control over the rebellious and spoilt character of the little girl.

Piergiorgio Gentili was a quite different kettle of fish. From the very first he gave Maria no chance to establish any degree of familiarity, and though never less than polite, he seemed to Maria to aim every word or gesture precisely at ensuring a hostile distance between them. He noted with ill-concealed irritation the intimacies his little sister was sharing with the Sardinian girl and, while the two were enjoying themselves together, he would sit on the other side of the room, wary of the potential contagion of this new bond. Elegant by nature and very tall for his fifteen years, Piergiorgio had none of the comic adolescent awkwardness Maria had known in Andría Bastíu. Despite the clear signs of incipient manhood struggling furiously with the remnants of his childhood for control of him, there was something already decisive in the boy's dark look that disconcerted her and made her cautious of him.

Eventually the day came when Maria was able to learn what was hidden behind this behaviour. It was autumn in Turin, Piergiorgio was now sixteen and his sister eleven, and Maria had been working in the Gentili home for a year and ten months, during which time she had always lied to her sisters, writing that she was happy, that everyone treated her like a daughter and that she did not want to come home. From time to time Regina would pass on indirectly some item of news about Bonaria, who seemed to be suffering the natural infirmities of old age, but Maria systematically skipped anything that referred to the old seamstress.

“Why don't we go to the Valentino? It's a nice day.”

With that mock-natural statement, Anna Gloria disturbed
her brother's concentration on his Latin translation, while Maria lifted her head in astonishment from the braid she was using to edge a skirt. Attilio and Marta Gentili had gone as they often did to the Langhe dai Remotti, and would not be back before the next day.

“No.” Piergiorgio's tone of voice allowed no hint of explanation.

“Why not? We never go out, we're always at home, and we even go to school by car. We never go out for a walk, and I'm bored to death.” Anna Gloria turned to Maria, in the hope of support. “What do you say?”

Piergiorgio looked hard at Maria for a moment, as if to discourage her from answering, then said:

“Since when has Maria been making the decisions?”

“Well, who does make the decisions then, you?” His sister challenged him, obstinate.

“Mamma and Papà make the decisions, and you know perfectly well they don't want us to go there.”

“They didn't when we were little, but we're big now. Anyway, we have Maria with us.”

Anna Gloria seemed in no mood to give in; she must have been planning her move for days, and Piergiorgio must in some way have realized it, because he got to his feet and in three strides covered the distance to his sister.

“You are still little and I don't want to go out. So we're staying at home. I think that's quite clear.”

The little girl was quiet, meeting the force of those eyes so similar to her own without allowing herself to be intimidated. Her impotence was driving her mad, but she kept her mouth shut.

“Good,” Piergiorgio said, satisfied with her silence.

After this, evidently intended as the end of the conversation, Piergiorgio went back to his desk, without letting anything in his attitude or look include Maria even by accident. Anna Gloria leaped to her feet, deliberately letting her geography book fall to the floor. Giving Maria a resentful look, she walked quickly out of the room, slamming the door behind her with a sharp sound that shook the coloured wooden clock on the wall. As though deaf, Piergiorgio kept his eyes firmly on his Latin exercise book. A few minutes later he and Maria could hear water running in the shower. Maria paid no attention; she was used to the explosive quarrels between the two that tended to pass as quickly as they started, but which were growing more frequent as Anna Gloria got older, and her rebellious nature became less and less inclined to tolerate the hitherto unchallenged authority of her brother. Piergiorgio pretended to be indifferent to these quarrels, but by now Maria knew enough to understand that in fact he knew no way to bridge the distance between himself and his sister. She kept this secret knowledge to herself, fully aware that this reciprocal game of pretences was the closest thing to complicity they would ever be able to share. But when after twenty minutes the water was still running in the shower, Piergiorgio raised his head from his books, and looked at Maria with an interrogative air.

“This shower's taking a long time.”

Maria broke off the knotted thread of her work, put the skirt down on the bed and went to look. Knocking on the bathroom door and getting no response, she opened it to find water pouring down from an empty shower. It took her only a few seconds to realize that Anna Gloria had never been under it at all.

“She's not here!” she said.

Returning to the room in alarm, she found Piergiorgio hastily pulling on his overcoat. He took the house keys from the cupboard and set off without worrying in the least whether anyone else was with him.