Accabadora Read online

  Bonaria got up quickly and bent down to pick up the coverlet and rearrange it over his legs. This almost intimate position enabled Nicola to grasp her wrist again, this time with insinuating gentleness. He did not speak, and Bonaria responded to his silence with a murmur:

  “You’re asking me to compromise myself before God and man. You must be out of your mind, Nicola.”

  “I’ve never been more sane than I am today. You may be able to accept the idea of seeing me live the rest of my life as a worm, but it would be three times harder for me. If you help me, my death will pass for natural causes. If not, I’ll find a way of my own.”

  Whatever Nicola may have hoped, Bonaria Urrai had never for an instant considered the idea of agreeing to what he wanted until that moment. But now she wavered for the first time, because she had heard such words once before, long ago, when behind the hill known as Mont’e Mari there had still been a wood and a time of youth and promise.

  The war that would later be known as the Great War had already earned its name, summoning from Soreni no less than three levies of men to the trenches of the Piave, and even so many had not been enough. Those discharged seriously wounded from the front brought back news of the heroism of the Sassari Brigade and, at the age of twenty, Bonaria had already seen enough of the world to know that the word “hero” was the masculine singular of the word “widow”. Even so, she liked to imagine herself a bride as she lay on the grass beneath the pines, breathing deeply the resinous perfume of the soil and pressing the curly head of Raffaele Zincu to her breast.

  Raffaele was not strictly speaking handsome, though every woman of marriageable age in Soreni had dreamed of him as her husband. If the truth be told, some women who already had husbands dreamed of him too because, although there were richer or taller men, no-one at twenty had eyes of that sharp, mocking green that could pierce the eyes of others as if regardless of any price that might have to be paid later. Raffaele’s lower lip was as soft as a woman’s, and his wayward and sensual character could make girls blush even to speak to him. It meant nothing to Bonaria that the arrogant line of his jaw contained a warning that his passing fancies might not always have entirely innocent consequences. Ever since childhood he had worked together with dozens of others on Taniei Urrai’s land, harvesting melons in summer and olives in winter with an energy that had earned him the respect of his employer and his companions. Whoever knocked down the olives with Raffaele would finish the day first and best, and old Urrai often boasted of the results at supper, insisting that Raffaele was a superman in hand and word; Bonaria, who also knew of other superior qualities in Raffaele, would agree with carefully calculated stinginess. Where her father counted vines she counted pines, and if he dreamed of seas of golden ears of corn she was able to run her hand through a field of dark curls on certain Saturday afternoons when her father was not there, and no war would ever be able to extinguish Raffaele’s fire in her blood. They did talk, sometimes for hours, about the possibility he might be called up to the front, but Raffaele always assumed he would come home again.

  “Will you still want me if I come back like Vincenzo Bellu?”

  “With only one arm? Of course, because they’ll give you the Order of Vittorio Veneto and I’ll be your lady!” Bonaria had laughed softly and lightly touched his ears.

  “I’m not joking. Would you still want me if I was a cripple? Deafened by a grenade or with no legs like Luigi Barranca?”

  “I’d want you back in any condition, as long as you were still alive.”

  Bonaria’s unconditional reply had not reassured him. At such times his voice had been darker than usual.

  “Maybe you can imagine having me back as a worm, but I’d rather die full of life ten times over than have to live ten years like a dead man. If that happens to me I shall do what Barranca did and shoot myself.”

  “Never let me hear you say that, Arrafiei.”

  Bonaria had not even dared to look up at the sky as she put her hand over his mouth to stop his words, and pulled his head on to her lap. As she gazed at him in that peaceful shade, he seemed more perfect than ever, so vibrant with vitality that even his healthy body, intact in every part, could not contain it.

  “They’ll never call you up, just wait and see,” she had said as if pronouncing an exorcism.

  “Who knows, but if I do go, you must pray for me to come back. Then when I get home, I’ll see to everything else myself.”

  But they did call him up, and Bonaria had had to spend thirty-five years praying for him, because no-one ever did come back to Soreni to report that the son of Lizio Zincu had been a hero in the trenches.

  When Giannina Bastíu returned with a tray of steaming coffee, she found Nicola alone in the sun with three empty chairs and a strange smile on his face.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE SOULS KNOW US, THEY ARE OUR OWN RELATIVES SO they will not hurt us, and we have even prepared a feast for them. This was what Andría Bastíu was thinking while he was getting ready in his room for the night of the first of November. He took off his outdoor shoes but did not undress since he had no intention of going to sleep. The previous year his mother had deliberately made him spend all day lifting potatoes to tire him out, so that in the evening he had fallen asleep despite himself, betrayed by his body. But this time they had not tricked him; he was awake and would be able to watch the spirits eating and taking the tobacco cut up for them from the table, where in the morning fingermarks would be found. So he would know what to say to Maria when she claimed the souls never go around tormenting people, because the mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ did not allow it. If Our Lord Jesus Christ had allowed his brother to lose a leg, surely he would not prevent the dead eating a couple of culurgiones.

  So he had sat down in silence on a little bench made of rods he had used as a child, with nails which dug into his bottom, keeping an eye on the crack in his door with the determination of a frontier guard. After twenty minutes he was ready to doze off, but he went on crouching behind the half-closed door, his eye firmly on the line of the corridor leading from the front door to the table laid ready with the feast for the dead souls. There were always many souls abroad that night, Nicola had told him, having the previous year even seen the soul of Antoni Juliu, his mother’s older brother, walking down the road towards their house. Antoni Juliu had gone as an emigrant to the mines in Belgium, but when he returned he no longer seemed to feel at home: he would look about like someone afraid of his creditors, and never got rid of the black coal dust under his nails. He had been unhappy to go away, and was even less happy to be back. The third summer he had hanged himself on the Gongius’ family farm, shocking the sharecroppers who found him hanging from a branch like a rotten pear with his tongue sticking out, having emigrated from himself to heaven knew where.

  Maybe Antoni Juliu really would come that night. A dish had been prepared for him with a small glass of abbardente beside it, because he had been fond of eau de vie, rather too fond in fact. If he did not come and drink it, Andría’s father would drink it before dinner, or Nicola who, God knows, had need of it. But that black figure heading down the corridor like a curse could not be the soul of Antoni Juliu, passing Andría’s door with a swish of skirts. That head in its black scarf could not possibly be that of his uncle, that firm step was of someone who had never been forced to leave this earth.

  When Andría saw the mysterious figure come into the house he closed his eyes in disbelief, tormented by the discrepancy between faith and fact. Were there dead females in the family? He wanted to close his door at once, slamming it hard and beating against it with his fear, but the soul would have been too close not to notice. But luckily the figure stopped just after his room, in front of Nicola’s door. Andría saw it enter, then took a short breath, and in what he hoped was perfect silence performed the first reckless act of his life, and left his room to go into the corridor.

  On a night like this night of souls, the church bell did not toll. It could have b
een any hour, but nothing would have been any different. All along the streets the house doors were open in spite of the cold, as if every family in Soreni had run away so quickly that they had forgotten to close their front door. More in her element on this night than any other in the year, the tall woman close to the wall walked down the street with the step of one who knew exactly where she was going. She moved quickly, wrapped in a dark shawl, until her skirts touched the threshold of the Bastíu house. Then she slipped soundlessly down the corridor leaving no memory of herself in the street. In that house she moved even at night with the confident step of a member of the family, passing the rooms to reach the only door she knew would not be shut, the one behind which Nicola Bastíu, stupefied by pain and expectation, was stealing a moment of sleep.

  Nicola was dreaming of the sea, the sea he had known for twenty years, the only sea he had ever seen. Eight years earlier he had rolled up his trousers and immersed himself in it up to his chest, letting the hard salt water strike him. His cousins were surfing the waves and hurling the water-melon as if they were back home in the hay. But Nicola had stared wide-eyed at the horizon where the sea ended, and the more he gazed at it, the more he wanted to retreat slowly backwards to the shore, without running or turning round, as one does when faced with certain snakes. Now in his dream it was as if he were back on that Easter Monday, but the sand on the sea bottom was much stickier, a boneless monster that would not let him walk. If only he could have died like this, drowning in the water of his dreams, it would have been better for everyone. But he suddenly opened his eyes, groping in his crippled state among the sheets. It took him a few moments to remember who he was and what was happening, since the more deeply you sleep the more difficult it is to wake. It was some time before he became aware of the thin figure impinging on the air of the room, motionless by the wall at the foot of his bed. Nicola had never been a man of many words, but in that moment not even silence seemed appropriate.

  “You’ve come . . .” he whispered, hoarse and pale.

  The woman approached the bed, but it was only when she came close that Nicola was reminded that she seemed to bring with her the bitter smell of the old. When she spoke, he knew he was fully awake.

  “I’ve come, but I can also go away again. Tell me you’ve changed your mind and I’ll go and not look back. I swear we’ll never speak of it again, as if nothing had ever happened.”

  Nicola answered rather too quickly, as if afraid to allow time for doubts.

  “I haven’t changed my mind. I’m already dead, and you know it.”

  She looked straight into his eyes, moving her head to force him to hold her gaze. She found what she did not want to find and said in a tired voice:

  “No, Nicola, I don’t know it. Only you can know that. I’ve come as I promised, but pray to the Lord to grant you what you are asking of me, because it is unholy and not even necessary.”

  “It is necessary for me,” said Nicola, acknowledging the curse with a slight movement of his head.

  The accabadora reached out from under her shawl, her hands holding tightly a small earthenware pot with a wide opening. When she lifted its lid a thread of smoke rose from the pot. Nicola became aware of an acrid smell, not that he expected anything different, took a deep breath and murmured words the old woman showed no sign of having heard. He held the poisonous fumes in his lungs and closed his eyes, anaesthetized for the last time. He may have already been asleep when the pillow was pressed down on his face, because he did not move or struggle. Perhaps he would not have fought back in any case, since for him it would have only made sense to die in the same way as he had lived: breathlessly.

  Andría Bastíu, cold with terror and watching through the crack in the door, saw the black female soul talking with his brother, then bending over him with the pillow in her hands. That was not what souls came to do. Or was it? Perhaps that was why his mother had said the door must be closed, and closed firmly, not left ajar because the dead can envy your breath and may suddenly come and steal it away in a pillow. And the dinner is set out to distract them, not to please them. They eat until dawn; in the darkness in the house they mistake the sauce of the culurgiones for blood, and the meat of the sucking-pig for red thighs and cheeks, and they never realize that there are living people behind the other doors, unless someone reminds them. And in that moment Andría knew that, if he survived, he would never touch a curlugione in his life again.

  When the figure of the female soul near Nicola’s bed moved to replace the pillow under his head, Andría retreated blindly into the corridor miming with his lips fragments of the Pater ave gloria, which he had never known well. It was only by accident that he managed not to break the silence that had been his protection, managing to separate himself from the apparition with the insubstantial thickness of the door of his room. As he was carefully closing it, he caught sight of the figure walking quickly towards the way out. An aunt, a grandmother, the drowned sister of his mother, he no longer wanted to know who it was, but he was not quick enough to escape finding out: a ray of moonlight from the open front door was all it needed for Andría Bastíu to recognize in the tear-streaked face of the woman hurrying down the corridor the unmistakable features of Bonaria Urrai. Then night returned, for real.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LIKE OWLS’ EYES, SOME THOUGHTS CANNOT TOLERATE THE full light of day. Such thoughts can only be born at night, when they work like the moon, moving tides of feeling to some invisible distant part of the soul. Bonaria Urrai had many thoughts of this kind, and over the years had learnt how to control them, patiently choosing on which nights to let them surface. The accabadora shed only a few tears as she left the Bastíu house, burdened though she was by Nicola’s breathing, but each tear cut a new furrow in her already well-lined face. Had the sun risen at that moment, Bonaria Urrai would have appeared many years older than she actually was, and she was certainly feeling the weight of every one of those extra years. Decades had passed since she had first responded to a deathbed plea for peace, but she could confidently claim that neither then nor later had she ever felt anything to equal the weight now hanging from her like a wet cloak.

  She had a clear memory of that first time, when she was not yet fifteen. With the other women of the family she had been present at the home confinement of a cousin of her father, thirteen hours of labour which cost the mother more than her baby, who was born alive. Neither chicken broth nor prayers had been able to stop the woman’s bleeding, which was followed by days of such suffering as to extinguish any hope of recovery. This being the case, the room was emptied of every holy object, every well-wisher’s present and every religious picture, so that the things which had been intended so far to protect the woman during childbirth did not now lock her into a state of eternal suffering. When she begged for mercy the others had reacted in an atmosphere of shared naturalness, when doing nothing would have seemed more like doing wrong. No-one ever explained this to Bonaria, but it had been obvious to her that the women had ended the mother’s suffering with the same logic as they had used when they cut the child’s umbilical cord.

  That first bitter practical lesson taught the daughter of Taniei Urrai the unwritten law that the only accursed state was dying or being born alone, and that her own perfectly acceptable function had been just to stand by and watch. At fifteen years of age Bonaria had already been able to understand that with some things, doing them yourself or watching others do them involves the same degree of guilt, and from then on she had never had any problem distinguishing between compassion and crime. At least, not until that evening, when what she read in the eyes of Nicola Bastíu was not determination to find peace, but determination to find an accomplice.

  No souls visited the house of Bonaria Urrai that night, but her door stayed open till morning, when the tolling of the death bells woke Soreni from the torpor of sleep. Maria found the old woman sitting with her eyes fixed on the spent hearth, bound up in her black shawl like a spider trapped in her own web
.

  When they came to tell Frantziscu Pisu that there had been a death in the Bastíu home, his first thought was that the head of the family must have had a stroke. The whole village had been saying that old Salvatore had been in a decline for months since the accident to his eldest son and, though he pretended to Nicola that everything could be fixed, when he was out drinking with his friends he bitterly mourned the loss of his son, now dead in every respect that made a man’s life worthwhile. For weeks this had been the only subject of discussion in the bars, and on the doorsteps at sunset. Nothing had helped Salvatore imagine any acceptable future for his son because, just as iron cannot be made from wood, the worst curse old Bastíu could imagine was being still alive with people referring to one in the past tense.

  Knowing that this was the way things stood, when Don Tzicu learnt that the dead man was Nicola, he made a gesture halfway between the sign of the cross and an exorcism and, heading for the house, felt too late a guilty conscience for not having more effectively persuaded young Bastíu to accept his condition as a mystery of the divine will. In fact, though he was convinced that half the things in life were mysteries of the divine will, Frantziscu Pisu knew very well that the other half were clearly the fruit of human stupidity; and what had happened to Nicola Bastíu was surely best explained by the second hypothesis. An inability to lie was the most obvious of Frantziscu Pisu’s failings, and for a priest this was not a negligible defect. Certainly, if he had known that Nicola would die like this, he would probably have put a little more effort into his lying, but who could imagine the poor man had so displeased heaven as to suffer the misfortune of dying in his sleep? Even among those with such short memories as to believe their consciences were in good shape, there was no-one who did not hope for the last-minute redemption of the thief on the cross, and the elderly priest who, to be fair to him, did have quite a good memory, recited a Pater noster with the heartfelt fervour of an exorcism.