Accabadora (9 page)

The bed where they had put him was the double bed in the guestroom reserved for visiting aunts and uncles staying over for festivals, and otherwise used as a store for valued objects. Nicola sat in the middle of the bed supported by a mass of cushions, wearing a simple light-coloured shirt and with his injured leg outside the covers to facilitate medical attention. The coloured chenille bedspread featured an indiscreet fantasy of little
putti
carrying abundant cornucopias, but thanks to an irreverent play of superimpositions they also looked as if they were holding up his gangrenous limb, passing it from one to another on their chubby little arms. Above this baroque fresco Nicola lay like an obstinate stain, grim of eye and word.

“They say I can't get better. Even Dr Schintu has been here from Gavoi, and he says nothing can be done. They're going to have to take off my leg.”

He looked accusingly at Bonaria, as if the blame for this judgement was flitting round the room in the air and could not wait to find someone to settle on. In case the gravity of the disaster was not entirely clear, Nicola added:

“I shall die.”

Bonaria Urrai looked at the pale figure lying on the bed and clenched her hands in her lap. Until that moment she had deliberately avoided his censorious gaze, because it is never a good idea to apportion blame on a sickbed. When she spoke, it was in a light clear voice, as if chatting about trivial matters.

“You aren't going to die, they're only going to remove one leg.”

“That's the same thing. Isn't a horse dead when it goes lame? Or do they feed it on cripple fodder?”

“You're not a horse, Nicola.”

“Of course I'm not a horse. That's why I deserve something better than to spend the rest of my life mourning for myself.”

“You wouldn't be the first or the last.”

“I'd rather kill myself.”

Bonaria heard him with steely eyes. Despite her fondness for Nicola, her bony ringless hands showed him no pity, locked together like a ball of wool ready for use. Her voice had become as cold as the surrounding air, as if the old woman had turned herself into a bracing draught to freshen the unhealthy atmosphere in the room.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. We can't always have what we want.”

Nicola laughed, a dry laugh, full of the rage of a man who has never before felt powerless.

“Have they turned you into a priest, Tzia Bonaria? We have a woman priest at Soreni and no-one knew it! Who's going to tell Don Frantziscu that the daughter of the Urrai family has become his curate?”

“Poking fun at me won't help you.” Bonaria was not bothered even by what others would have considered an insufferable lack of respect.

Nicola decided to make the most of it, and put all his cards on the table.

“But I can change the circumstances of my death. Or you can . . .”

Bonaria Urrai grew wary, fixing him with eyes like thorns.

“I don't understand,” she said tonelessly.

“Yes you do.” Nicola lowered his voice to a murmur, ruthless in his desperation. “Santino Littorra has told me what you did when his father died. I'm not asking for anything different.”

Bonaria suddenly sprang out of her chair as if she had been scalded, took several steps towards the window so as to have her back to Nicola, and when she turned round again the expression in her eyes was one he had never seen before.

“You're talking about things that have nothing to do with you, and Santino is wrong to do the same. And whatever he said, the two cases have nothing in common. Giacomo Littorra was dying.”

“And I'm already dead but they can't bury me.”

Bonaria made an angry gesture with her hand, more expressive than any word.

“Do you really think my job is to kill people who haven't the courage to face their problems?”

“No, I believe it's to help those who can't bear to suffer any more.”

“That's Our Lord's job, not mine. Doing what is right has never mattered to you, so are you now trying to get me to do what is wrong?”

Nicola, not much inclined to respect divine roles in the comedy in which he himself played the principal part, was suddenly impatient with Bonaria's evasiveness. He called for his
mother in a loud voice. She immediately hurried into the room, drying her hands on her apron.

“What is it, Nicò?”

“Tzia Bonaria's turning into a priest, Ma. She's already quoting the scriptures like someone who has to live on alms. Just listen to her!”

Giannina turned to Bonaria in confusion, but the elderly woman had not moved, and held Nicola's feverish gaze with a neutral expression.

“But what are you saying, Nicola? Is that the way to talk to people who come to pay you a visit?”

“Your son's not well and is saying silly things, Giannina. Don't listen, I'm not listening to him either.”

“I'm not saying silly things. But you are, coming here on two legs to tell me I can walk on one leg alone. That's the way of priests, and stupid people.”

“Nicola, you know why I'm telling you things. There's no point in wasting your anger on me.”

“Then why are you talking like a woman who knows nothing about real life?”

“Only one person in this room knows nothing about real life. If you had any sense you'd thank your guardian angel for the miracle that you're still alive. After what happened you could easily have been dead and buried, with the rest of us in mourning round your grave.”

“Spending my whole life in bed, you call that a miracle? Being carried on a chair when I need to shit, you call that a miracle? Certainly I was a miracle once, a man with only one equal in Soreni, and maybe not even that. Now I'm a cripple,
not even worth the air I breathe. I'd have been a hundred times better dead!”

Bonaria made no response, turning towards the window from where the light of what was still full day was painting the room an unreal warm rose colour. The little
putti
on the coverlet glistened rudely in this luminous embrace, creating among the folds of chenille the optical illusion of a hysterical infantile dance. Bonaria snatched her shawl from the chair as a prelude to departure. Going out she said:

“If this is what you really believe, Nicola, I think you're wrong. If all it needs to make a man is a leg, then every table is more of a man than you are.”

Giannina Bastíu irritably reproved her silenced son, then ran out after Bonaria. The two women faced each other in silence in the narrow corridor, while the sound of angry little movements, as abrupt as Nicola's condition permitted, came from the bed inside the room. After waiting nervously for a minute or two, Giannina whispered:

“He won't accept it. What can we do?”

“Try getting the priest to come and see him.”

“Don Frantziscu? And what can he do for my son who doesn't even believe in God?”

Bonaria pursed her lips and she looked at her friend.

“I don't know, Giannina, but in a time of weakness some would rather be believers than tough guys. Maybe the priest could convince him in the name of God to accept himself as he is.”

Giannina Bastíu nodded, but with a hint of resignation. Deep down, the idea of her son becoming a believer was no easier to believe than the fact that her son was a cripple.

THE BICYCLE WAS UPSIDE DOWN, PROPPED ON ITS SADDLE
and handlebars. Andría Bastíu was turning the back wheel slowly with his hand, while his eyes searched for the thorn that was probably what had punctured the inner tube. Maria came out of the back door with a basin half-full of water, which she set down beside the bicycle.

“Don't worry, if you were on your way to Turrixeddu it's bound to be only a little one. You should dip the tube in the water then you'll be able to see exactly where the air's coming out.”

Andría did not share this view. Showing no sign of having heard her, he ran the tyre through his fingers in search of the tell-tale object, patient and silent as a miner.

“Andría, I can't stand here all afternoon just for a punctured tyre.”

Maria's voice disturbed his concentration, and he lifted his eyes from the suspended wheel with an interrogative air.

“If you've got things you have to do, go and get on with them. I have to finish this. But I couldn't have done it at home, Nicola is only just back from the hospital. I can't start working on a bike in the yard right under his window.”

Maria nodded, going to sit on the kerb in front of Bonaria Urrai's house, oblivious of the fact that she was wearing new jeans.

“How is he?”

“He makes me sick. Growling like an animal, attacking everybody and saying all the time he wants to die.”

“I can understand him up to a point, but it must be difficult for the rest of you.”

“He was never an easy person, but this is the worst thing that could have happened to him. Mamma cries in secret, but dad pretends everything's fine and that enrages Nicola even more. It seems that everything I do gets on his nerves.”

Meanwhile Andría had taken off the tyre and extracted the inner tube, and begun to pump it up with his little white pump.

“I'd like to go and see him, but I don't want to intrude.”

“It might not be a good idea, but maybe with you he would control himself.”

Andría turned the tube slowly in the basinful of water, until from an invisible point a tell-tale column of little bubbles rose.

“Got you, you little horror! Now let's have the patch, and we'll seal it up,” Andría said with satisfaction. “The less there is to see, the worse it really is, that's always the way.”

Ever since they had cut off his right leg at the hospital at Mont'e Sali, Nicola slept four hours a night, and then only after
sedation. Dr Mastinu said this was normal, that it needed a little time. But Giannina Bastíu had her doubts, because Nicola had never been in the habit of making a fuss about pain. He had broken bones no less than seven times. As a small boy he had never been afraid either of heights or depths, with nests up in trees and snakes down in ditches always an irresistible challenge to him, and taking risks had been his favourite game, to the perpetual despair of his mother and a certain ill-concealed satisfaction on the part of his father. Once at foot-ball he had even broken a bone in his hand, a tiny little bone that no-one had ever heard of before, and his friends had teased him by saying he was so anxious to break something that he had managed to invent a bone that did not even exist. He had never been one to make a fuss about pain, Nicola Bastíu. Giannina would have been much happier if he had, because seeing him silent and hostile in bed with his stump sewn up and covered by a sheet, burned inside her like a ball of hot fat that refused to dissolve, and rolled up and down while she remade his bed, brought him something to eat or simply looked in to see if there was anything he wanted. They had moved the television into his room to distract him when there was no-one to keep him company, but Nicola hardly ever turned it on and preferred to look out of the window, inhabiting a world of silent rage in which he was the only citizen with an official right of residence. This was how the priest found him when Giannina, overcoming her reluctance, plucked up the courage to follow Bonaria's advice and asked him to come and pay her son a visit.

Vicar of Soreni for the last twenty-one years, Don Frantziscu Pisu had a round belly over which the buttons of his cassock
strained mightily every time he took a deep breath. This embarrassing embonpoint contrasted strongly with the rest of his physique which was dry and almost spindly, so that in profile he looked like a lizard that had swallowed an egg, entirely spoiling the austere elegance of his well-worn cassock. At Soreni, everyone smiled at his nervous tic of constantly passing his hands over his belly to smooth down his cassock in an attempt to minimize what he considered his only visible reason for shame. Even the most good-natured people had taken to mangling his name to
Pisittu
or Pussycat, perhaps because this obsessive action reminded them of the patient licking of a cat smoothing its fur. But some, less charitably inclined, called him
Tzicu
, which was not only a diminutive form of his name but also meant “little drop”, hinting at alcoholic origins for his swollen stomach. He was familiar with both nicknames, but with the patient superiority of one who for more than twenty years had conducted every funeral, even of the disrespectful, he had never taken too much notice. Probably such thoughts were not a million miles from his mind when he knocked on the front door of the Bastíus, a family of men who had most certainly never risked breaking a bone by stumbling up the steps into the church. Even so, he was not entirely amazed when Giannina Bastíu asked him to call on her eldest son, because it would not have been the first time that some self-styled priest-eater had been exposed as God-fearing
in extremis
. When they face crucifixion, all thieves become good men.