Accabadora (2 page)

For Bonaria the most difficult thing about her decision to take a
fill'e anima
was by no means the curiosity of others, rather it was the initial reaction of the child she had taken into her home. After six years sharing the air of a single room each night with three sisters, it was natural for Maria to believe her
own private space could never extend further than the length of her arm. Coming into the house of Bonaria Urrai had caused a major upheaval in the little girl's interior geography, now that she was living between walls where the spaces she could think of as her own were so ample that it took her several weeks to realize that no-one would come out from behind the doors of the many closed rooms to say, “Don't touch, that's mine.” But Bonaria Urrai never made the mistake of pressing Maria to treat the house as her own; she never used any of those conventional clichés that only serve to remind guests that they are most certainly not in their own homes. Bonaria preferred to wait until those spaces left empty for years gradually adjusted themselves to the little girl's presence and, when within a month all the rooms had been opened and were left open, she felt she had been right to let the house look after itself. As soon as Maria felt strong in the new confidence she had developed within those walls, she gradually began to show more curiosity about the woman who had brought her there to live.

“Whose daughter are you, Tzia?” she said one day through a mouthful of soup.

“My father's name was Taniei Urrai, that gentleman over there.”

Bonaria pointed at the faded brown photograph hanging over the fireplace, in which Daniele Urrai, standing stiffly in a velvet waistcoat at the age of about thirty looked to the little girl like anything but the father of the old woman in front of her. Bonaria read the disbelief in Maria's rosy face.

“Of course he was young then, I hadn't even been born,” she said.

“Didn't you have any
mamma
?” said Maria, who was clearly
unfamiliar with the idea that it was possible to be the daughter of a father.

“Of course I did, she was called Anna. But she too died many years ago.”

“Like my father,” Maria said seriously. “Sometimes they do that.”

Bonaria was astonished at her clarification.

“What?”

“They do that. They die before we are born.” Maria gave Bonaria a patient look. Then she forced herself to add: “Rita told me, Angelo Muntoni's daughter. Her
papà
died before she was born too.”

As she explained, she waved her spoon in the air like a violinist his bow.

“Yes, some do. But not all,” said Bonaria, watching her with a vague smile.

“Oh no, not all,” said Maria. “One at least has to stay alive. For the children. That's why you always have two parents.”

Bonaria nodded, dipping her spoon into her soup in the belief that the conversation was at an end.

“And there were two of you?”

It took Bonaria a moment to understand. Then she went on eating, and spoke again in the same almost casual tone.

“Yes, we were two. My husband's dead as well.”

“Oh. He's dead . . .” Maria said after a short pause, uncertain whether to be relieved or sorry.

“Yes,” Bonaria said, serious in her turn. “Sometimes they do that.”

Comforted by this personal revelation, the little girl went back to blowing on her soup. Every now and then, looking up
through the steam from her spoon, she found herself meeting Tzia Bonaria's eyes and could not help smiling.

After that, whenever Bonaria went out in the morning to buy the bread, Maria would sit at the kitchen table swinging her feet, silently counting the number of times her rubber shoes hit the chair. After about three hundred, Tzia Bonaria would be back, and before Maria went off to school they would be able to enjoy some warm bread with baked figs.

“Eat, Maria, so your titties can grow!” Tzia would say, tapping the meagre remnants of her own breasts with her hand.

Maria would laugh and cram two figs into her mouth at once, then run into her room with seeds still stuck between her teeth to check, because everything Tzia Bonaria said was God's law on earth. Yet in all the thirteen years they shared a home, Maria never once called her ‘
Mamma
', because mothers are something different.

FOR SOME TIME MARIA THOUGHT THAT TZIA BONARIA
was a seamstress. She would spend hours at a time sewing, and one of the rooms was always full of remnants and pieces of cloth. Women would come to be measured for skirts and headscarves, and men sometimes for trousers and formal shirts. Tzia Bonaria would never allow the men into the room where she kept her cloth, but received them in the sitting-room where they had to remain standing. She would crawl about on her knees with her tape measure like a female spider, rapidly weaving a mysterious web of measurements round her immobile prey.

The women, while they were being measured, would chatter about their own lives while pretending to discuss the lives of others. The men on the other hand kept quiet, gloomy and as if naked, faced by those extraordinarily precise eyes. Maria would watch and ask questions.

“It embarrasses men to be measured because you're a woman, doesn't it?”

At this Bonaria Urrai would give her a cunning look that contrasted strangely with the studied severity of her face.

“Good heavens, Mariedda! They aren't embarrassed, they're scared. They know what sort of a coat they might get from me.” Then she would laugh gently and give the cloth a sharp shake to stretch it.

Scared or not, the men would even come from as far away as Illamari and Luvè, before weddings or saints' days, or just for a new Sunday suit. Sometimes the house was like a market, with metres of cloth hung over the backs of chairs, perhaps material for skirts or embroidery. Maria would sit and watch, ready to hand Bonaria a needle or a piece of chalk to mark the length of a hem. Once, wanting a pair of trousers, no less a figure than Boriccu Silai from the mining consortium came, together with his domestic servant. The girl must have been about sixteen; her name was Annagrazia and she had a pockmarked face and eyes like snails without their shells. She stood in silence by the wall, holding a package with at least four metres of smooth velvet, something only really rich people could afford. Tzia Bonaria was not at all intimidated and continued to measure Boriccu Silai with her usual care, noting his shape below the belt with the expert eye of one who needs very little information to understand a great deal.

Finally, eyeing his flies, she asked with the air of a meticulous tailor, “Which side do you dress?” He gestured with his head to the girl leaning against the wall.

“The left,” Annagrazia answered for her employer, staring at the old woman without further explanation. Bonaria held the servant's eyes for a moment, then slowly began rewinding her
leather tape measure round its lemon-wood stick. Boriccu waited, but when Tzia Bonaria spoke again she no longer seemed to be addressing him.

“Well, I'm sorry but I won't be able to get the job done by St Ignazio's day. Try Rosa Cadinu, she needs the work.”

Boricco Silai and Tzia Bonaria stood still, summing each other up in silence. Then the man and his intimate servant left the house without another word; more than enough had already been said. Tzia Bonaria carefully shut the door behind them, then turned to Maria with a tired sigh and replaced her tape measure in the pocket of her well-used overall.

“To hell with them, a job lost . . . but with some things it's better not to know the exact measurements, Maria. Do you follow me?”

Maria had not understood anything at all but nodded all the same, because you cannot always expect to understand everything you hear the minute you hear it. In any case, she was still under the impression that Tzia Bonaria worked as a seamstress.

The first time Maria noticed Tzia Bonaria go out at night was just after Epiphany, in the the winter of 1955, when she was eight years old. She had been allowed to stay up and play until the
Ave Maria
sounded, then Tzia Bonaria had taken her to her room for an early night, closing the shutters and refilling the open warming-pan with embers and hot ashes.

“Now go to sleep. It's up early tomorrow for school.”

Maria hardly ever paid much attention to this parody of night-time, sometimes lying awake for hours watching the shadows cast by the dying embers on the ceiling.

On this occasion she was still awake when she heard a knock on the front door, and the hushed though emotional voice of a man speaking too quietly for her to recognize him. Keeping still under the bedclothes in the light of the glowing embers, she heard the unmistakable sound of the courtyard gate opening and Tzia Bonaria's familiar step going out and coming back a few minutes later. Getting out of bed and oblivious of the cold floor against her bare feet, Maria groped her way towards the door but accidentally kicked her chamber pot in the darkness. Even before she came out of her room, Tzia knew she was awake.

“The child!” the man said in a low voice from the shadows of the hall. He was tall and broad-shouldered and his face was vaguely familiar, but Maria had no time to identify him because Tzia was instantly before her, black and severe in the long woollen shawl she only wore when she went out to keep appointments. The shawl enclosed her lean body as tightly as a jewel-case, concealing both her figure and her intentions, whatever they may have been.

“Go back to your room.”

Maria could not see her face, perhaps the reason she had the courage to ask questions.

“Where are you going, Tzia? What's happening?”

“I'll be back soon. But you go to your room.”

It was a command, and had already been given once more than strictly necessary, and in front of a stranger at that. Maria backed silently into the narrow opening of her door. Until she closed it, the old woman stayed motionless, forcing her caller to do the same. On the other side of the door Maria held her breath like a secret, until she heard them move quickly again,
going out and leaving the house unnaturally silent. Stupefied by the cold, she followed her usual routine and tapped her finger softly on the wooden door-jamb to count, but by around three times a hundred Bonaria Urrai had still not come back. Resigned, the little girl went back to bed in wide-awake silence, until despite everything the warmth in the room lulled her to sleep. When the old woman did come back, Maria was asleep and did not notice. Which was just as well.

In the morning the familiar sounds of the household woke her. The questions of the night had proved as evanescent as the smell from the dying embers. She dressed and went to look for Tzia, finding her shaking out a piece of cloth in the air, to free it of dust and stretch its threadbare texture, like a bird with just one wing. When Bonaria saw Maria she stopped, then spoke.

“What you did last night must never happen again.”

The command reached Maria as sharply as a whiplash of cloth, suppressing all questions with its menace. Maria understood then and there that she stood to lose something more precious than her sleep. Then the old woman's face relaxed, and she folded away the piece of cloth and said:

“Eat now, because we've a lot to do today.”

She dressed Maria in her little party dress and put on her own best mourning skirt even though it was a Tuesday with no religious obligations. She plaited her grey hair with her eyes fixed on the windowpane while the shadows wove a subtle texture on her face. Among the folds of skirt and womanhood Maria for the first time became aware of a departed beauty, and felt sad there was no longer anyone to remember it.

“Where are we going, Tzia?”

The old woman put on her blackest headscarf, the silk one with the long fringe that constantly got into knots. Then she turned to the little girl with a strange expression on her dry face.

“We must pay a mourning call at the house of Rachela Littorra, who's lost her husband. It's our duty as neighbours.”

The old woman walked at her usual speed and beside her Maria had to struggle to keep up, even though her little white dress was much lighter than the old woman's long heavy skirt. It was not far to the dead man's house, but the sombre tones of the formal lament could already be heard from a few hundred metres away. Each time the rough music of the lament came through, it was as if every household were singing of its sorrows to the people of Soreni, both sorrows of the present and sorrows of the past, because the mourning of any one family reawakened the still-sensitive memory of every single lamentation that had gone before. This was why the neighbourhood shutters were half-closed to shield the eyes of the houses from the sun, as everyone hurried to mourn their own dead vicariously through this latest death.