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  “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.

  The dead man of the moment lay stretched on a bed in the middle of the entrance hall, his shod feet pointing towards the front door. They had already dressed him for burial as if for a party, in the best suit he had worn to be married when he was slim and healthy and had life under control. The buttons were strained across his stomach even with his body stretched out, and the atmosphere was heavy with the broken breathing of women, while the men stood motionless against the wall as if on guard. The official principal mourner or attittadora launched into a sing-song lament, a grieving note that seemed to emerge from deep down where her knees bent against the floor. The women echoed her with rhythmic moans, creating a lugubrious chorus that Tzia Bonaria made no attempt to join. Telling Maria to wait, she went up to the widow Rachela Littorra, who was huddled on the chair nearest to the dead man’s head, rocking herself in silence while the other women did her lamenting for her. When she saw Tzia Bonaria she seemed to rouse herself, getting to her feet in a gesture of welcome.

  “Highly esteemed sister! May God repay you for everything . . .”

  For a moment her words rose above the professional lament of the mourners. Then the rest of what she had to say was lost in Tzia Bonaria’s black wool shawl, where the widow buried her face in a surge of uncontrolled emotion, attracting the attention of the onlookers. Rachela Littorra seemed to recover her control a little only when Tzia whispered something to her, touching her head lightly with a grace Maria had never seen in her before.

  The attittadora had meanwhile changed her note, intoning an improvised poem in praise of the dead man. To hear her shrieking in rhyme you would imagine no better man than Giacomo Littorra had ever lived, whereas everyone knew he had been a stingy husband who believed that virtue consisted in being as pitiless towards everyone else as he believed destiny had been to him. While the hired mourners wept and pretended to rip their sleeves with their teeth, Maria could read this inadmissable thought on the faces of those present, scarcely lifting her eyes as she glanced from one to another.

  It was then that she recognized him, the man.

  Standing against the wall behind his mother’s chair and holding his hat in his hand, the son of the dead man was the tallest man present. Santino Littorra’s eyes were fixed on the rigid body of his father, as if hypnotized by the sounds of grief simulated by the professional mourners. Maria recognized the broad shoulders and the controlled and patient manner of the night before. Eight years were too few to understand everything, but they were enough for her to know intuitively that there was more to understand. Returning home less than two hours later, Maria walked as slowly as if carrying a burden, but it was perhaps the last time she dragged behind Tzia Bonaria on the road.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOR FIVE YEARS BONARIA URRAI DID NOT GO OUT A
GAIN at night, or if she did Maria was not aware of it, busy learning her place as a legitimate daughter. Somehow her unusual relationship with Tzia Bonaria worked, because by the time she reached her final year at primary school it had long been accepted by the people of Soreni; it was no longer the subject of conversation in the bars, and even during doorstep conversations at dusk the subject of the old woman and the child had been replaced by more recent and more dramatic news. Without realizing what a useful contribution she was making in this respect, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Rosanna Sinai had been so considerate as to become pregnant by a man as yet unknown, a godsend to the local gossips. Anyone but Bonaria Urrai, once the murmur of rumours behind her back had ceased, would have been astonished that the subject had been dropped so quickly because in places where little of real interest ever happens, an event of this kind can remain newsworthy for a generation. But Bonaria could not have been surprised, because she had worked so hard from the first to create that fragile normality. The elderly seamstress had always treated the child like the fruit of her own womb, allowing her the freedom of the house when people came to call, and taking her wherever she went, so that everyone was free to stuff themselves with insatiable curiosity until it was coming out of their ears as far as the nature of her elective motherhood was concerned. On the other hand, Maria, used to thinking herself profoundly insignificant, had found it more difficult to accept that she had become important. Her birth mother, Anna Teresa Listru, loved numbers, and had always fallen back on a ritual formula to teach Maria her place in a series of sisters:

  “And who is this pretty child?”

  “Oh, she’s my last.” Or, “She’s the fourth.”

  So powerful had been the influence of this racecourse classification on Maria that at first she had had to bite her tongue so as not to present herself automatically as the fourth or last. Bonaria could not have known this but must in some way have intuited it because, when she had to introduce Maria to strangers, she would always speak before they could ask anything:

  “This is Maria.”

  And that she was simply Maria had to be enough for everyone, including those who were dying to know more. It took a little time for the people of Soreni to grasp this, but in the end they came to accept the antiphony of that mysterious liturgy, and suddenly it was as if it had always been that way: a soul and the child of that soul, a less guilty way of being mother and daughter. Only once did anyone look for a more ample explanation from Bonaria, and in many ways that single episode affected everything that came after.

  The children of 5B found it hard to believe that their teacher, Maestra Luciana, was really fifty because she was too beautiful to be old, and beautiful in that dangerous way only found in women from the outside world. She had long been married to Giuseppe Meli, a Soreni landowner who specialized in growing rice and who often travelled to the continent to arrange deals connected with the export of the Sardinian arboreal variety. This was how Giuseppe had come to meet his wife, a slim girl of middle-class Piedmontese stock, a well-mannered young teacher with jade-green eyes, uncommon even in the girls of the world she came from, where strings of pearls abounded. Luciana Tellani had surprised her family and friends by agreeing to follow Giuseppe Meli without so much as a backward glance, but even though she had now been teaching at Soreni for more than twenty years, she still spoke the Italian of Turin. During this time she had taught many to read and write, and they in return had silently and completely accepted her as one of themselves, with the gratitude and respect modest people often feel for good teachers. The foreigner who in the late forties had married the farmer Giuseppe Meli, was now known at Soreni simply as Maestra Luciana.

  Her still youthful fair hair barely reached her shoulders and she never covered her head even in church, where her blonde head stood out among the rest like a poppy in a cornfield. Even so, the worst that could ever be said against her was that being a continental she was much taller than the average for the neighbourhood, and if she also happened to be blonde, well, secondary defects like her height could easily be forgiven, even at Soreni. What Maria particularly liked about her teacher’s hair was that she wore it loose. Not smoothly plastered against her head like the fur of a mouse that had fallen into the olive oil, or curly like her birth-mother’s hair, which was so convoluted you could never get your hands through it. There was a softness in Maestra Luciana’a hair that responded to every least breath of wind.

  “Maestra, do you press your hair with a hot iron to get it like that?”

  “The very idea, Maria! How would I ever have time to curl my hair each morning with you lot waiting for me in the classroom!”

  The teacher liked this girl with her slightly impudent intelligence, and was happy to accept her unusual family background, assisted by clarifications from her husband and one or two of those simple souls always anxious to explain the more complicated lives of others. But a little tension had been caused by the failure of Bonaria Urrai to turn up to any of the meetings the teacher tried to arrange with her. When the girl brought home her exercise book with a written request from Maestra Luciana, Tzia Bonaria gave her a sharp look.

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing!” Maria said, untying the green bow on her school uniform.

  “Then why does the teacher want to see me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have done something, or she wouldn’t be asking to see me.”

  “I haven’t done anything, and I’m getting on fine at school too: I got ‘Excellent’ for geometry yesterday!”

  Bonaria helped her off with her black school overall and said nothing more, but next day she dressed as for a formal occasion and went to see Maestra Luciana. She knocked on the classroom door at the specified time, and a few seconds later the two women were face to face, the teacher in a blue tailor-made houndstooth suit of the kind women wore in the city, and the seamstress in her traditional long skirt with a black shawl round her shoulders. They were scarcely ten years apart in age, but they looked as if they had been born in different generations. Leaving the caretaker to keep an eye on the other children, Maestra Luciana took Bonaria into the corridor.

  “You worry me. Has Maria been up to something?” Bonaria said.

  “No, not at all. I only asked you to come because I wanted to meet you; it’s normal for teacher and parents to meet occasionally to exchange their impressions of a child’s progress.”

  If Bonaria noticed a very slight hesitation in the voice of the Piedmontese woman, she kept it to herself.

  “Well, if that’s all it is, here I am. How is Maria getting on?”

  “Very well, she’s intelligent and works hard. She likes school, maths especially, and gets her homework done on time. Do you supervise her work at home?”

  “Not always. Sometimes I’m too busy, and sometimes she’s doing things even I can’t understand. I only reached third grade in elementary school, you know; I never did much studying.”

  Anyone else would have blushed to make such an admission. But Bonaria looked fearlessly into the other woman’s eyes, and curiously enough it was the teacher who felt a need to justify herself in some way.

  “Yes of course, but you know, sometimes it doesn’t mean very much how many years someone spent at school; in the third grade of elementary school they used to do as much Latin as they do today in the fifth grade of grammar school.”

  The two went out into the garden that surrounded the school and walked among the flowerbeds, entirely engrossed in each other. Bonaria darted quick direct looks at the teacher while Luciana restricted herself to an occasional glance at the sharp profile of the other woman when she thought herself unobserved.

  “It’s strange, you know, this business 0f being a ‘child of the soul’. . .”

  “What’s strange about it?” Bonaria’s voice was expressionless.

  “Maria does not seem to have been affected by it. Does she often see her birth family?”

 
; “Yes, whenever she asks to. Why should she feel resentment?”

  Luciana Tellani answered at once, as if she had already been thinking the matter over for a long time to be ready for the day the old woman should come for their interview.

  “I don’t know, just that it surprises me, for example, that when I ask her to draw a picture of her parents, Maria always draws you and not her real mother.”

  Bonaria showed no surprise at this revelation, leaving a silence so that the other, embarrassed, felt a need to go on.

  “Well, it seems to me rather strange that a little girl should be taken away . . . with consent of course, but anyway, that she should be taken away from her family in this way, without showing any signs of trauma.”

  “There’s nothing strange about it, it happens from time to time in this district. If you go to Gennari you’ll find at least three soul-children, one of them a girl of about Maria’s age.” Bonaria stopped to let the idea sink in. “It’s not strange at all.”

  The Piedmontese woman did not seem convinced, but said no more. She let the conversation move on to the child’s less brilliant academic achievements, and when they got back to the door of the classroom the teacher indicated that the interview was at an end. But Bonaria had one last question for her.

  “I wanted to ask you, about Maria’s drawings . . . what exactly did you mean when you said she never draws her real mother?”

  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.”