Accabadora Page 10

  There are things you should do and things you should not do, and Maria was strongly aware of the difference. It was not a question of being right or wrong, because in her world such categories had no place. At Soreni the word “justice” was equivalent to the most violent curse, and it was only ever used when someone had to be hunted down at all costs. For the people of Soreni, justice could flay you like a pig or crucify you like a Christ, or fuck you up for fun the way men can when they behave like animals; there was nowhere you could hide from it, and it would never forget your name or the names of any of your children, but all this had nothing to do with the fact that there were some things you should do and some things you should not do.

  As she cut the onion into thin slices, Maria mulled obsessively over this difference, arranging the ingredients for supper with the same hypnotic slowness with which she was trying to order her thoughts. Andría’s words had been as crazy as the light in his eyes as he was saying them, and they had made no sense to Maria, though when set against certain memories they began to take on some sort of meaning. As she cut the tomato into pieces, the figure of the old seamstress huddled by the fire that very morning came back to trouble her: fully dressed and with her hair done as though she had just returned home, or already knew that she would soon have to go out. Maria had long ago stopped pondering the mysterious nocturnal expeditions of her elderly adoptive mother, but now these suppressed memories came back to hit her as if fired from the elastic of a catapult, prompting the insidious thought that Bonaria Urrai might indeed have something serious to hide. It was the first time such a thought had ever struck Maria, and she did not know how to cope with this suspicion which fitted so badly with the confidence she felt in the woman who had taken her to be her daughter. Bonaria could not possibly have lied to her, because there are things you should do and things you should not do, she reminded herself as she dropped the rest of the finely chopped vegetables into the sizzling oil. The wooden spoon evoked fragrances and memories among the browning onions and, as she slowly stirred them, Maria opened herself to both, and remembered an afternoon from many years before, only a few months after Tzia Bonaria had first taken her as her soul-child.

  She had not yet got over her bad habit of stealing little things she did not need but wanted to have. The habit had come with her from the home of Anna Teresa Listru, and for a time had continued to keep her company, so that she did not bother to ask permission whenever she could avoid doing so. Sometimes it was a piece of fruit she wanted, or a piece of bread; or it might be a toy, or a scrap of coloured cloth put aside as a trimming. If she thought no-one was looking, Maria would simply take the object and hide it, incapable of separating desire from stealth. Bonaria Urrai very soon became aware of this, partly because these little disappearances happened rather frequently. But this particular afternoon was the last time it happened, and Maria remembered it very clearly.

  It had been late October and sweetmeats were being prepared, with the ingredients for the pabassinos for the dead left out on the kitchen table, including orange peel, fennel seeds, slices of almond and a jar of saba of prickly pear as dark and sticky as caramel with a sweet taste full of flower perfumes, intended to hold the mixture together like an aromatic cement. Each ingredient had its own paper bag, except the raisins which had been put to soften in a bowl of orange-flower water. Bonaria noticed at the last minute that she had run out of bran, absolutely essential to stop the cakes sticking during baking. She had not told Maria not to touch what was on the table before she went out but, perfectly aware she was doing something she should not do, Maria had grabbed two handfuls of almond slices and run into her room to hide them in a drawer. When Bonaria came back with the bran, half the pile of almonds was missing, and Maria was sitting on the floor playing with an expression of serene innocence on her face. Bonaria did not start with an accusation.

  “Some almonds are missing.”

  Maria had raised her head, looking at Tzia with a questioning expression, which could have been taken as an answer, but Bonaria had no intention of being fobbed off with that.

  “Have you touched them?”

  “No.”

  The slap that caught Maria was violent and accurate, leaving a bloodless imprint on her left cheek. Her eyes wide with disbelief and surprise, the child stared at the old woman with her mouth open, forgetting to cry.

  “Get up,” Bonaria said in a serious voice.

  Maria got to her feet slowly, her eyes fixed on the floor to hide the deep shame now suffusing her face along with the red mark of the smack. Bonaria grabbed her arm and dragged her unceremoniously to her room. The old woman closed the door on her, and making sure it was properly locked, went back to making the sweets without another word. Maria stayed locked in her room till supper-time, going through a series of activities to distract herself from what she had done: first she cried silently, then tried to play with her toys as if nothing had happened, then finally, frustrated and exhausted, lay down on her bed and even fell asleep. But when the door opened again she was awake, and was sitting on the bed as if waiting for something. Bonaria picked up the chair by the wall and sat down facing Maria directly.

  “Do you understand why I hit you?”

  Maria had been expecting this question and nodded, once more blushing with humiliation.

  “Why?”

  “Because I stole the almonds.”

  “No.”

  Bonaria’s categorical denial surprised her, wrecking her personal interpretation of the afternoon’s events. She said no more, fastening astonished eyes on the old woman.

  “I hit you because you lied to me. I can buy more almonds, but there’s no cure for a lie. Every time you open your mouth to speak, remember that it was with words that God created the world.”

  At six years of age one’s understanding of theology is limited, and Maria could find nothing to say to that statement, which was altogether too vast for her to take in. But what little she did understand of it was more than enough for her to judge herself, and while she tried to nod with her lips pressed together, Bonaria leaned forward and took her loosely in her arms, like a cocoon round a silkworm. After this reconciliation which remained unique in their shared experience, Maria came out of the room hand in hand with the old woman to find the house filled with the intense fragrance of the sweetmeats, by now cooked and spread out to set on the baking tray like little dark bricks. For years she would associate the smell of freshly made pabassinos with that memory and, without being aware of the fact, she no longer felt any desire to steal things that were clearly already hers, because once this fact had been established, there was no-one left to lie to.

  * * *

  Remembering this, Maria Listru smiled to herself as she added water to the pan where the tomato had by now dissolved into a dense aromatic sauce. Whatever had happened that night, whatever Andría imagined he had seen, by the time the tomato sauce was ready, Maria was convinced that the woman who had taught her to wash her hands before speaking could not have deceived her in any way, least of all in such an important matter. There are things you should do and things you should not do, she told herself; and this is the way you do things you should do, she decided, tasting the sauce to find out whether it needed any salt.

  Maria was wrong, but she did not know how wrong she was until that evening, when Bonaria came home after one of the most difficult days of her life. Maria had not waited to eat with her, because with births and deaths you know when you go out but you can never be sure when you will be able to come back home, but there was a panful of cold water waiting on the hob and the sauce was still fresh from its first cooking. Maria was reading, as she often did in the evening after supper, and Bonaria was too tired to notice that there was something not quite natural in her manner.

  “Why did you go off like that? Have you quarrelled with Andría?”

  When she already knew the answer she expected, Bonaria sometimes started with a direct question.

  “Yes.” />
  Maria watched her with an appearance of calm, while measuring with her eyes the exhaustion visible in Bonaria’s bowed shoulders, marked face and black skirt disordered after spending so long sitting down. To Maria she looked old in the ordinary sense in which people commonly use the term, near her end like a well-kept promise.

  “Did that seem like the right time to go, with his brother dead in the house? You could have comforted him.”

  “I did comfort him.”

  “It didn’t look like that to me. You rushed away.”

  If only Bonaria had not been so insistent. If only she had not pressed for an explanation at all costs, perhaps Maria would have gone on thinking this might be a good moment to keep quiet. But the lack of respect in Bonaria’s accusations pushed her into answering sharply, moving the conversation into more treacherous waters.

  “If I’d stayed it would have been worse. He was saying things I wasn’t prepared to listen to.”

  “Bereaved people always say the same things. What did he want, did he want to die too? Did he blame himself for Nicola’s death?”

  Maria closed her book without bothering to mark her place. When she spoke again, it was with a careful lack of expression.

  “No, he didn’t blame himself. He blamed you.”

  Bonaria kept quite still, and her expression did not change in any way.

  “Blamed me? Good heavens! Why?”

  “He says he saw you going into Nicola’s room last night and suffocating him with a pillow.”

  Put like that, if it had not involved Nicola, it might even have sounded funny, and making such an indirect accusation made her aware of the lack of logic in what she was saying. Her reconstruction seemed to make no sense at all. But Bonaria did not laugh.

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes, exactly that, but then he vomited and said he’d made it up.”

  Bonaria Urrai sat down near the fire, carefully adjusting the folds of her skirt round her body, like the petals of a black flower. The conversation was over, but even so Maria felt a need to say something more:

  “He was completely beside himself, not making any sense.”

  The old woman turned to face the fire, hiding the expression of her eyes in a defensive gesture so unlike her that Maria felt within her a long finger of suspicion without quite knowing what it was she suspected. In a low voice she said,

  “Where were you last night?”

  Bonaria felt no need to break the silence, letting it be her answer. She kept her eyes fixed on the heavily smoking firewood. But for Maria it was as if Bonaria had replied in a complete sentence. Rising abruptly, she put down her book on the table set for one, going up to the old woman who was again huddled in the position in which she had surprised her that morning.

  “You went out, I know you did. Where did you go?”

  Bonaria lifted her eyes from the fire, holding Maria’s gaze without replying. In her empty eyes Maria saw the shadow of what she did not even know she should fear, and wavered.

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Maria . . .”

  “You did do it. You really did go to Nicola last night.” The girl was no longer even asking questions.

  “He asked me to.”

  The answer seemed trivial in comparison with Maria’s troubled face.

  “It’s not possible.”

  Bonaria stood up with a sigh. She had always known that this moment would come, but she had never for a moment imagined it would be like this.

  “What’s not possible? That he should have asked me or that I should have done it? You have eyes to see and you weren’t born stupid, Maria. You knew Nicola and you know me.”

  Maria shook her head violently.

  “No, I don’t know you. The person I know doesn’t go into people’s homes at night to suffocate cripples with pillows.”

  The brutality of what she was saying clashed with the girl’s whisper, slender as a tiny flame. As her suspicion gradually gained strength, the obscene implications of the truth multiplied in what she was saying.

  “Does Giannina know? Does Salvatore Bastíu know?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Bonaria knew she was lying but that did not stop her.

  “The fact that his mother and father don’t know that you killed their son doesn’t matter?”

  “That was how he wanted it, and I made him a promise.”

  “Why on earth should Nicola have had to ask such a thing from you of all people?”

  The old woman looked straight into Maria’s face and said nothing. No words existed to answer that question, or if they did exist she did not know them. But in Maria’s mind everything was suddenly clear and, in the instant she realized it, the daughter of Anna Teresa and Sisinnio Listru knew with certainty the truth about the woman standing before her. She opened her mouth to express her astonishment in a ritual oath, but all that came out was the gasp of a woman in childbirth, the sob of a strangled animal. She lifted her hand to her mouth, but held her eyes on the deathly pale face of the accabadora.

  “All those times when you came back at night . . .” she said.

  “I would have told you when the right moment came, Maria.” Bonaria made no attempt to ease the girl’s distress.

  “When? When would you have told me? Would you have taken me with you? Would you have asked me to hold your shawl while you did it?” Anger grew on Maria’s lips like a bitter foam. “When would you have done that?”

  “Not now, certainly. When you were ready for it.”

  “Ready!” The word echoed in the room like an object flung to the floor. “I would never have been ready to accept the idea that you killed people!”

  As soon as it was clear that there was no damming the stream, Bonaria gave up all hope of finding a lighter or more gentle way of saying what had to be said.

  “Don’t start giving names to things you don’t understand, Maria Listru. You will be faced by many choices you won’t want to make in life, and you too, like the rest of us, will make them because they have to be made.”

  “So this was one of those choices.” Maria’s scorn was ferocious, and she made no attempt to hide the fact. “And how do you go about doing this necessary thing? Why not tell me all about it, now you’ve got round to mentioning it?” She started walking round the table with a jerky step. “Do you always go in secretly like you did with Nicola? No, let me think . . . or does the family call you, like the night when Santino Littorra came?” The more clearly she remembered it, the sharper the girl’s anger seemed to become. “And how do you do it, Tzia? Tell me that!”

  Bonaria Urrai had seen enough of the world to know that rising to this provocation would not help.

  “So you want to make decisions about the how without understanding the why? You’re always in such a hurry to judge other people, Maria.”

  “It’s not me who’s in a hurry, rather the opposite. If things have to happen, they will happen of themselves when the right time comes.”

  The old woman tore off her shawl and dropped it roughly on the chair. Her dark eyes fixed Maria with a certain impatient severity. Whatever the truth about Nicola, Bonaria Urrai was still capable of defending herself.

  “They do happen of themselves,” she said with a cheerless smile. “Do you think you were self-generated, Maria? Did you deliver yourself from your mother’s belly by your own efforts? Or did you need help from someone else, like all living creatures?”

  “I have always . . .” Maria said, but Bonaria stopped her with an imperious wave of the hand.

  “Be quiet, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Did you cut the umbilical cord yourself? Didn’t others wash you and breastfeed you? Were you not born and brought up twice, thanks to other people, or are you so clever that you were able to do it all by yourself?”

  Recalled to her dependent status by what seemed to her an unfair blow beneath the belt, Maria stopped arguing, while Bonaria lowered her voice to a litany deprived of all emphasis.

/>   “So others made decisions for you, and will make more decisions when necessary. No-one alive has ever reached the light of day without the help of fathers and mothers at every corner of the road, Maria, and you more than anyone should know that.”

  The elderly seamstress was speaking with the sincerity of a woman confiding in unknown fellow-travellers on a train, knowing she will never have to see them again.

  “My own belly was never opened,” she said, “and God knows whether I would have wished it, but I taught myself that children must be smacked and caressed, and be given the breast, and wine at festivals, and everything necessary at the time it is needed. I too had a part to play, and I have played it.”

  “And what part was that?”

  “The final part. I have been the last mother some people have seen.”

  Maria stayed silent for a few minutes, her anger dying under the significance of those words, so unacceptable to her. When she did speak again, Bonaria knew there was nothing left for her to understand.

  Maria said, “You have been the most important person in my life, and if you asked me for death, I could not kill you just because you wanted it.”

  Bonaria Urrai stared at her, and Maria saw that she was tired.