Accabadora (4 page)

The teacher was dumbfounded, more by the expression on the face of the elderly seamstress than by her words.

“Please don't misunderstand me, I was referring to her natural mother; of course I have no wish to interfere in her relationship with you.”

“For Maria, her natural mother is the one she draws when people ask her to draw her mother.”

Perhaps it was the old woman's tone, so light and calm. Or perhaps her expressionless look, as if she were looking through the teacher. Whatever the reason, Maestra Luciana felt it wiser to say no more, tightening her lips into the rigid parody of a smile. The two women parted in a silence weighted with ambivalent tension: one sorry not to have said more at the exact point where the other was convinced she had heard more than enough.

That evening before supper Bonaria switched on the radio, while Maria sat in front of the fire playing with an old
shape-sorter puzzle, carefully fitting the cut-out pictures into the right slots. A few were missing, lost during her first years at school, when the objects and their names were still mysteries as yet undefined by the subtle violence of logical analysis.

“What did the teacher want to say?”

“Nothing much, you were quite right.”

“But you spent a long time with her.”

“We looked round the garden. She has some streaked geraniums hidden away there that I'd never seen before.”

Maria slotted the final pieces into their places, aware that whatever Tzia and the teacher had been discussing, she was not going to be able to find out what it was by direct questioning.

“But did she say I'm doing alright?”

“No, she said for a child as intelligent as you, you don't work hard enough and could do much better.”

The little girl stared in disbelief. Bonaria seemed deeply serious, her ear to the classical music coming from the radio, her eyes closed against Maria's inquisitive gaze.

“That can't be right. She always tells me I'm doing well. Best of the class!”

“The best in the class is Giovanni Lai's daughter, everyone in the village knows that. The teacher says you spend all your time drawing and don't like grammar and never stop chattering with Andría Bastíu.”

“It's not true I spend all my time drawing! Only a bit!”

Bonaria gave an imperceptible smile.

“But it's true you chatter and don't study your grammar properly.”

“Anyway, the Italian language is no use.”

“How do you mean it's no use?”

“Outside school we all speak Sard. You do too, and so do my sisters, and Andría. Everyone!”

The old seamstress was quite aware of the common dislike of the Soreni children for the Italian language; every mother in the village knew of that. Some mothers had even stopped speaking Sard to their children for that reason, tackling the new language with results often more comic than effective.

“Even if everyone here understands you when you speak Sard, you still need Italian because in this life you can never know. After all, Sardinia's part of Italy.”

“It's not part of Italy, we're separate from Italy! I've seen that on the map. There's the sea in between,” said Maria confidently.

Bonaria was not going to let herself be wrong-footed by a display of geographical knowledge.

“Maria, whose daughter are you?”

The little girl was taken by surprise. She hesitated, looking for a trap in the question, then planted her feet on firm ground.

“I'm the daughter of Anna Teresa and Sisinnio Listru.”

“Quite right. And where do you live?”

This time Maria saw the trap and paused before answering.

“I live at Soreni.”

“Maria,” said Bonaria, lifting her eyebrows. The little girl was forced to give in.

“I live here with you, Tzia.”

“So you live separate from your mother, but you are still her daughter. Isn't that so? You don't live together, but you are still mother and daughter.

Maria was silent, mortified, and looked down at the puzzle, in which each piece had its own special place and would fit no other. Her whisper came as light as a puff of air.

“We are mother and daughter, yes . . . but not really a family. If we'd been a family she would never have come to an arrangement with you . . . I mean, I think of you as my family. Because you and I are closer.”

This time it was Bonaria who was silent for a moment. The classical music still coming from the radio did nothing to drown the silence. When she spoke again, she tried a different tack.

“It makes me happy to hear you say that, but it doesn't alter the facts . . . because you know very well that my Arrafiei died in the war in the trenches of the Piave. And it was Italy that fought that war, not Sardinia. When someone dies for a country, that country becomes their own. No-one dies for a country that is not his own, unless he's stupid.”

Maria had no weapon against this logic, nor any consolation to offer for a grief so strong as to be still so powerful after forty years. She could see it shining like a light in Bonaria's eyes, the only grave where the lost/believed-missing Raffaele Zincu had never stopped being mourned. In confusion she murmured:

“What are you trying to say, Tzia . . . that I can never be your real daughter till I'm dead?”

Bonaria burst out laughing, breaking the tension so unashamedly revealed in Maria's question. Instinctively she pressed the little girl's head against her lap as if to warm it.

“You silly girl, Mariedda Listru! You became my daughter the very moment I first saw you, when you didn't even yet know who I was. But you must study Italian properly; I ask this of you as a favour to me.”

“Why, Tzia?”

“Because Arrafiei went up into the snows of the Piave in
useless light shoes, and unlike him, you must be ready. Italy or no Italy, you must come back safely from the wars, my daughter.”

Bonaria had never called Maria daughter before, nor would she ever do so again in quite the same way. But the intense pleasure Maria felt, as powerful as a pain in the mouth, stayed with her for a long time.

IF IT IS TRUE THAT THE LAND SPEAKS FOR THE PEOPLE WHO
own it, then the hills round Soreni must have given rise to some very complicated conversations. The tiny, irregular subdivisions told of families with too many children and no common sense, their properties defined by a myriad of contours built from dry walls of black basalt, each carrying its own particular resentment.

The Bastíu family property was just a little bigger than those of its neighbours, since over the years, thanks to God's grace, it had seen more wills than heirs.

At ten o'clock one warm morning in October, in the hillside vineyard known as Pran'e boe, the hand of Andría Bastíu landed clumsily on Maria's slender wrist, arresting the movement of her shears.

“Mind where you put your hand!”

“Why, what's wrong?”

“The web of a poisonous black widow.”

“I'm not scared of spiders.”

“Because you know nothing about them,” said Andría seriously. “Do you realize that if a black widow bites you, they'll have to bury you in dung and make women dance round you in groups of seven, first widows, then spinsters, and finally married women, till they discover the spider?”

“Where did you get that nonsense, Andrí?” Maria said, laughing as she cut off a large bunch of grapes and arranged it carefully in their plastic bucket, at the same time shaking her head in its headscarf patterned with yellow flowers, faded during earlier vintages.

The Bastíu family vineyard contained two thousand vines heavy with dark grapes the size of quails' eggs. When crushed, they produced a black juice of a consistent sweetness that looked like boiled pig's blood. The two youngsters had divided the work between them in relation to their strength, competing for speed with a parallel line of adults.

“No, I warn you, it's true. When my dad was young it happened to him. He told me if they hadn't made him sweat for two hours under a little mountain of shit, he would have been done for.”

“Wasn't it your dad who died twice in the war? While as for you, if they sent you out to buy a load of nothing in the form of dust, I bet you'd go and do it.”

Maria went on cropping the grapes, teasing Andría with her lively dancing eyes. The boy blushed in the sun, looking down at the pail which was almost full. They were about the same age but Maria, an adult smile on her lips red with grape-juice, had a special gift for finding words to make Andría feel small.

“I'll go and empty the pail into the cart.”

“O.K., off you go then, and I'll find myself something to drink. But beware of the black widow, because if I have to find seven mad women to dance on cowshit to save your life, I'm not at all sure I'll be able to do it!”

The harvesting had to be begun and ended in a single day, and at least six people were needed to cut off the bunches of grapes, rapidly stripping the rows of vines along the hillside. The Bastíus set out before the sun had made up its mind whether to shine or not, and the daughters of Anna Teresa Listru went with them, since the wine would later be shared. As the widow Listru liked to tell her neighbours, she had to re-enact the miracle in Cana: “Jesus Christ made wine out of water, and I make bread out of wine”.

Maria looked forward all summer to being called in to help, because she loved competing with Andría. No-one ever knew exactly when the harvest would begin, because it was up to old blind Chicchinu Bastíu to decide: exactly one day before it could be smelt in the air that the grapes were about to turn to must. His grandchildren would carry him out to the vineyard every day, and he would close his eyes and solemnly sniff the sea wind as it lightly touched the vines. As the air moved the leaves and rummaged among the tightly clustered grapes, the old man, like an expert midwife, was certain he could detect the voice of the wine before it was born. Maria never tired of hearing the story.

“They say he can tell the exact day!” she had said to Tzia Bonaria, in an attempt to astonish her with this mysterious
power of divination. The old woman listened with a half-smile, not particularly impressed.

“Well . . . it's no surprise if Chicchinu Bastíu and the wine understand each other. His nose is never out of his glass, so he's bound to know the smell.”

The little girl's eyes grew wider as suspicion gnawed away at her belief in this marvel.

“Are you saying he's a cheat then?”

“Are there any grapes still left in the vineyard the next day?”

“No, we always pick them all before sunset.”

“Then he can't be a cheat.” Tzia Bonaria, making no attempt to keep a straight face, lowered her eyes to her sewing again. She knew how much Maria enjoyed harvesting the grapes with the Bastíu family; it was one of the few times she allowed her to miss school.

While Andría was busy emptying their pail, Maria tried to solve the mystery of the vineyard air. She lowered a fat bunch of grapes into the basin of water at the end of the row and lifted it out again twice as heavy. Then she buried her face among the grapes, sniffing furiously in her search for the hidden clue. One grape had fermented and rotted in the sun, but once she had taken that out there was nothing left but the normal smell of ripe grapes, much more like a colour than a smell. Disappointed, she consoled herself by biting into a lukewarm grape as she absent-mindedly watched the heads of the others emerge one by one from the rows of vines.

The noise seemed to be coming from behind her, near the low wall. At first it was no more than a whimper, a stifled protest,
then it became more definite. Maria moved towards the place it seemed to be coming from, flattening the dry grass with her rapid steps. It was as if the little wall itself was weeping. Maria followed its irregular line for several metres without finding anything to dispel that impression. The faint sound was coming straight from the stones at the top.

“Maria, I'm back!” Andría said impatiently from the row of vines, but the girl took no notice, continuing to move cautiously along the boundary wall.