Accabadora Read online

  Accabadora

  Accabadora

  A NOVEL

  MICHELA MURGIA

  COUNTER POINT

  BERKELEY

  Accabadora

  Copyright © Michela Murgia 2012

  First published in the Italian language as Accabadora

  Copyright © 2009, Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino

  English translation copyright © 2011 by Silvester Mazzarella

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication is available.

  ISBN 978-1-61902-133-4

  Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Cover design by Ann Weinstock

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my mother.

  Both of them.

  CONTENTS

  GLOSSARY

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  GLOSSARY

  abbardente

  highly alcoholic, transparent spirit, sometimes flavoured with wild fennel or arbutus berry

  amaretto

  small cake or biscuit made with bitter almonds

  aranzada

  softened orange peel with honey, almonds and sugar

  attittadora

  woman paid to attend funerals to pray and cry

  babbo

  dad, father

  capigliette

  filled pastry with almonds and lemon

  culurgiones

  small pasta envelopes filled with potatoes, cheese, spices, etc. and served with tomato sauce and grated pecorino cheese

  gueffus

  balls of almond paste

  mistral

  strong, cold wind coming from the north or northwest

  nuraghe

  Bronze Age structure from the Nuragic civilization particular to Sardinia, a truncated conical tower of stone resembling a beehive

  pabassinos

  small cakes with either sultanas (uva sultanina) or raisins (uva secca)

  pirichittus

  filled pastry containing lemon

  saba

  a kind of molasses or treacle made with grape must or prickly pear

  tiliccas

  filled pastry with saba, almonds, spices and grated orange or lemon peel

  tzia/tzio

  aunt/uncle

  Accabadora

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fill’e anima: soul-child.

  THAT IS WHAT THEY CALL CHILDREN WHO ARE CONCEIVED twice, from the poverty of one woman and the sterility of another. Maria Listru became such a child, late fruit of the soul of Bonaria Urrai.

  When the old woman stopped under the lemon tree to speak to the child’s mother, Anna Teresa Listru, Maria was six years old, a mistake after three things done right. With her sisters already grown into young ladies, she was playing alone in the dirt, making a mud tart full of live ants with the attentive care of a young housewife. The ants died slowly, waving their reddish legs under the decoration of wild flowers and sand masquerading as sugar. Under the fierce July sun Maria’s pudding grew in her hands with the beauty that sometimes characterizes evil things. Looking up from the mud, the little girl saw Tzia Bonaria Urrai smiling beside her, backlit against the bright sun, her hands resting on her meagre stomach which had just been filled by an offering from Anna Maria Listru. Maria would not understand the significance of that offering until much later.

  Still, she went off with Tzia Bonaria that very day, carrying her mud tart in one hand and in the other, her mother’s pitiful final gesture to see her on her way, a bag of fresh eggs and parsley.

  Maria was smiling. She felt intuitively that there must be a reason to cry, but she could not quite remember what it was. And already, as they left, she was finding it difficult to remember her birth-mother’s face, as if she had forgotten it long ago, in that mysterious moment when a young girl first makes up her mind what will be the best ingredients for her own mud tart. But she did remember that hot sky for many years and the feet of Tzia Bonaria in her sandals, one slipping out under the hem of her black skirt as the other was hidden by it, in a silent dance whose rhythm Maria’s own legs had difficulty in following

  Tzia Bonaria gave her a bed all to herself in a room full of saints, all nasty ones. Thus did Maria learn that paradise is no place for children. Two nights she lay awake, silent, eyes wide open in the darkness, expecting to see tears of blood or sparks fly from haloes. On the third night she gave way to her terror of the sacred heart with the finger pointed at it, made even more alarming by the three heavy rosaries that hung amid the blood spurting from the chest. She could take it no longer, and cried out.

  Tzia Bonaria, opening the door a few seconds later, found Maria standing by the wall hugging the shaggy wool pillow she had chosen as her comfort-blanket. She looked next at the bleeding statue which seemed to be nearer the bed than ever. She carried it away under her arm without a word, and next day the holy-water bowl with a picture of Santa Rita inside it disappeared from the dresser, and so did the mystical plaster lamb, curly like a dog but as ferocious as a lion. It took a while for Maria to begin reciting the Ave again, and even then she did it very softly for fear the Madonna might hear and take her seriously in the hour of our death amen.

  It was hard to guess Tzia Bonaria’s age in those days; she seemed ageless, immutable, frozen in time, as though she had suddenly decided for herself to be much older than her calendar years and was now patiently waiting for time to catch up. Whereas Maria, arriving too late into her mother’s womb, had always known she was the last concern in a family already weighed down with cares. But now, in the house of this woman, she began to experience the unfamilar feeling that she mattered. She knew, when she set off for school in the morning, holding tight her textbook, that she had only to turn to see her benefactor standing watching her, leaning against the frame of the door as if holding it up.

  Maria was not aware of it, but it was especially at night that the old woman came close to her, on ordinary nights when the little girl had no sin to blame for keeping her awake. Tzia Bonaria would come silently into the room and sit down by the sleeping child’s bed, gazing at her in the darkness. Meanwhile, imagining herself first in the thoughts of Bonaria Urrai, Maria would sleep, untroubled as yet by the knowledge that she was unique.

  It was perfectly clear to the people of Soreni why Anna Teresa Listru had given her youngest daughter to the old woman. Ignoring the advice of her family, she had married the wrong man, simply to spend the next fifteen years grumbling that he had shown him-self able to do only one thing well. Anna Teresa Listru loved to complain to her neighbours that her husba
nd had been useless even in death since he had not even had the grace to snuff it in the war so as to leave her with a pension. Rejected as unfit for military service because he was so small, Sisinnio Listru had died as stupidly as he had lived, squashed like a pressed grape under the tractor of Boreddu Arresi, for whom he had worked from time to time as a share tenant. As a widow with four daughters, Anna Teresa Listru had dwindled from being poor to being destitute and learning, as she often was heard to say, to make stew with the shadow of the church bell. But now that Tzia Bonaria had asked if she could take Maria as her own daughter, it was almost beyond Anna Teresa’s wildest dreams that she could add a couple of potatoes grown on the Urrai property to her soup every day. The fact that her youngest child was the price she paid for this privilege was of little concern to her; after all, she still had three others.

  But no-one had the slightest idea why Tzia Bonaria Urrai at her age should have wanted to take another woman’s daughter into her home. The silences lengthened like shadows when the old woman and the child passed down the road together, provoking whispered fragments of gossip among those sitting on the village benches. Bainzu, the tobacconist, was inspired to say that even the well-off, when they grew old, needed a second pair of hands to help wipe their bums. But Luciana Lodine, grown-up daughter of the plumber, could not understand why anyone should need to take on an heir to do what any well-paid servant could do. And Ausonia Frau, who knew more about bums than any nurse, would cap the discussion by declaring that not even vixens liked to die alone, and after this no-one had anything more to add.

  Of course it was true that, had not Bonaria Urrai been born into a wealthy family, she would have ended up no different from any other female without a man, let alone have been able to take on a fill’e anima. The widow of a husband who had never married her, she would perhaps in a different station of life have been a whore, or have lived out the rest of her life dressed in black behind closed shutters in monastic seclusion either at home or in a convent. She had lost her wedding-dress to the war, even if some did not believe that Raffaele Zincu had really died on the Piave: perhaps he had been crafty enough to find another woman up there and save himself the trouble and expense of the journey home. Perhaps this was why Bonaria Urrai had become old even when still young, and why no night ever seemed blacker to Maria than Bonaria’s skirt. But all the local gossips knew the district was full of “widows” whose husbands were still alive, and Bonaria Urrai knew it too, which was why she would walk with her head held high and would never stop to talk to anyone but go straight home stiff as a rhymed verse after going out each morning to collect her new-baked bread.

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 kn
ow 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.