Accabadora

by Michela Murgia

  “Never say: I shall not drink from this water. You could find yourself in the water without having any idea how you got there.” Bonaria picked up the shawl she had dropped on the chair and slowly began to fold it, aware this was the only thing she still had the power to tidy away.

  “That moment will never come.” Maria did not realize she had reached a decision until the moment it escaped her lips. “I want to go away from you.”

  If these words surprised the old woman, she did nothing to show it. She never even looked at the girl.

  “I understand.”

  “At once. Tomorrow.”

  “Alright. I’ll speak to your mother.”

  “No.” The girl seemed to hesitate. “I don’t want to go back to my mother. I’ll think of something else.”

  “As you like.” This was not what Bonaria wanted to say, but she had been doing so many things she had not wanted to do in the last few days.

  “Of course, I shall never forget the gratitude I owe you,” Maria added in a whisper.

  The old woman looked at her, then said quietly:

  “There is nothing I need that you can do for me, Maria Listru.”

  They went to bed without saying anything more because no more words were needed, but neither slept. The water in the pan on the spent hob was not the only thing that stayed cold that night in the former home of Taniei Urrai.

  Early the next morning, Maestra Luciana opened the door to Maria, believing she had come to return the book she had borrowed; instead Maria had a suitcase in her hand and no meaningful explanation for it. But thirty years as a teacher had taught her that there are times for not asking questions, and before the end of the week Maria had a ticket for the Genoa ferry and an address in Turin on via della Tocca, where a family of the name of Gentili were waiting impatiently for the new Sardinian nanny specially recommended to them by Luciana Tellani.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A NEW LIFE, THAT’S WHAT MAESTRA LUCIANA HAD TOLD HER. What you need is a new life, where no-one knows who you are, or whose daughter or what sort of daughter. Maria had not explained what had happened, or told her what she and Bonaria had said to each other, but one shrewd glance from the green eyes of the woman from Turin had been enough to make it clear to Maria that she herself was the only person in Soreni who had not known who Bonaria Urrai really was. She tried in vain to overcome the emptiness caused in her by this betrayal, which seemed to her so nearly a death, but without the consolation of being able to keep vigil beside the body of a loved person, or fencing round with earth in burial the tears that were suffocating her. She had lived for years with Bonaria in the belief that her double birth had made her equal to others, a right birth after a wrong one, but now the balance seemed a mass of errors and cancellations, leaving her out again like a left-over remainder.

  A new life, Luciana Tellani had repeated firmly, as if being born again were simple. Yet she came to see that these were merely appropriate words, the sort that teachers reserve for eventualities like these, and the opportunity to establish at least one of her inconvenient multiplicity of births was a more powerful incentive than any other in persuading Maria to leave in such haste.

  As she clung to the salty, sticky rail of the Tirrenia between Olbia and Genoa, she began to feel grown up and strong, almost free, without the shadowed eyes that so often become permanent in those forced to emigrate in search of food, people in no way looking forward to being born again in a new place. But Maria, as she cut the umbilical cord at a precise moment chosen by herself, remembered that day so long ago when, under the lemon tree in the yard of Anna Teresa Listru, she had first made up her mind what she wanted to put into her mud tarts. During the voyage Maria made a point of not sleeping at all, even for an hour. She needed every minute to process her memories as if she were herself an accabadora, judging the events of her life as if they were themselves people who might or might not be allowed to accompany her to the continent. She marked them off one by one, and by the time they reached Genoa she was convinced a burden had been lifted from her, and that she had left the whole dead weight of her wounds behind in the other land.

  The walls of the home of Attilio and Marta Gentili, on the fifth floor of an expensive apartment block in the historic centre of Turin, were painted a creamy white that had nothing in common with the gaudy colours of homes in Soreni. Maria had only ever seen such white walls at school and at the hospital, and this too contributed to her sense of subjection, a subtle discomfort given added force by the ease with which they immediately addressed her with the familiar tu. The living-room Signora Gentili showed her into before going to call her children was a masterpiece of spaciousness, dominated by a large smoke-grey glass chandelier whose highly polished rounded drops hung from the ceiling like a great cluster of sucked sweets. In the few minutes she was left on her own, Maria stopped pretending not to be impressed by the high ceilings and the large art nouveau windows that occupied an entire wall; even at four in the afternoon with the sun already long past its zenith, she could imagine how the light must explode in there every cloudless morning. Trying to look at ease, she perched on the edge of the cream-coloured sofa, though she was in fact paralysed by the ostentation of so much unjustified space, which the little marble fireplace near the door certainly could not have been enough to heat; but it was a relief to be able to get to her feet when the Gentili children were brought in, though she was utterly unaware that, with her slender figure and bottle-green overcoat, she must seem to the children like nothing more than a rip in the wallpaper. With a certain solemnity Piergiorgio and Anna Gloria advanced hand-in-hand in front of their mother, dressed as if to create the illusion that they were twins. Maria offered an attempt at a smile, but Piergiorgio, already aware of the difference between reality and pretence, confined himself to staring at her from the awkward pride of his fifteen years, still firmly grasping his little sister’s hand.

  “Children, this is Maria.”

  The wide flourish of the hand with which the signora indicated her to the children secretly annoyed Maria as it made her feel as if she had been acquired as part of the furnishings, but when she saw that Marta Gentili took the same attitude to her own children, she realized that it was just the mother’s personal vision of the world.

  “And these are my children, dear. Don’t let their angelic air fool you, they are real earthquakes. Especially Piergiorgio!”

  Maria smiled politely, even though she could not really see anything angelic in them. They were certainly good-looking, both with that uncertain fairness that tends to darken with age, but while Anna Gloria had inherited her mother’s china-doll skin, Piergiorgio had the bronzed complexion of a ship’s boy at sea, though this suggestion of warmth went no further than the rims of his cold blue eyes. Both had the hauteur of those born to wealth; it almost seemed they had long ago left the fragility and weaknesses of infancy behind them. But the white knuckles of their clenched fists would have revealed to a perceptive eye that all was not quite as it seemed. Maria instinctively understood as she studied them that her work would not be as easy as she had been led to believe, but that it might in the long run prove more interesting.

  In accordance with the terms of her employment, Maria stayed with the children all the time they were not at school, following them in their games and duties regardless of whether their parents were at home or not. She slept in the yellow room, a small space between the two larger ones reserved for the children, and the fact that it communicated with both led her to believe that it had probably been intended as a sort of large wardrobe area where eventually, when there was no more need for a nanny, both brother and sister would be able to store their clothes.

  The first thing she had to reckon with was that they never went out to play with other children. It was true that the Gentili apartment had no access to a courtyard, but the street where they lived was very close to the large Valentino park and shady avenues along the Po, an exciting place where a mass of potentially fatal t
emptations would have driven any child mad with delight. But on this subject Marta Gentili was firm: the children could only be allowed outside with herself and their father. Going out to play without their parents was not even an option, and Maria very soon realized that part of her job was precisely to ensure that this never happened. In practice it was not a difficult rule to obey because Piergiorgio never showed any sign of wanting to go out and Anna Gloria, though more restless, seemed for the moment satisfied with her many fine toys. On the other hand Maria, in her few free hours, went out alone into the streets whenever she could, cautious but fascinated by the great city. Signora Gentili had told her the strange story of the rectangular street plan of Turin which seemed to have been designed in advance to fit the areas the streets were intended to lead to, on the principle that the citizens had had first to decide where they wanted to go, and only then to start planning and building their houses, squares and apartment blocks; the apparent illogicality of this led Maria to describe it in her first letters home to her sisters as an amusing novelty. This planning down to the last millimetre offended her good sense, convinced as she was that the only meaningful way to plan streets was the way it was in Soreni, where they seemed to have emerged from the houses like a seamstress’s discarded scraps, clippings, and misshapen remnants, taken piecemeal from the spaces accidentally left over after the irregular emergence of the houses, which seemed to prop one another up like elderly drunks after a party given by their patron. Marta Gentili explained to Maria that the real reason for the geometrical plan of the streets of Turin had been security, since a royal capital must not offer rebels or enemies convenient places to hide, but this merely reinforced her view that to construct anything so deliberately on the basis of straight lines could only be an admission of weakness: who would ever take the trouble to design such straight streets unless they were trembling with fear?

  All the same, she enjoyed walking aimlessly along the elegant arcades, looking into shop windows full of chocolate confectionery, or ready-made clothes draped with calculated formality round tailor’s dummies. She would stop in front of the clothes shops and study them with her critical seamstress’s eye, searching out badly made hems and uneven lapels and smiling with satisfaction when she detected such defects behind the shop windows. At moments like this she would think of Bonaria Urrai, but otherwise put all her strength into the delicate surgical operation she had started on the ferry, of which these walks were a fundamental part. The one thing she could not get used to was the insane cold of Turin; it was not just that it was cold – she had experienced that before – but the air was so frozen that to survive it she had to inhale in quick little snatches. The cold seriously threatened to spoil her pleasure, since it only took a few minutes to penetrate her thin coat, sticking knives even into her bones, despite her determinedly energetic walk.

  The first times Maria came home with her muscles tense and her stomach shrunk, it took her at least an hour to recover from the headache gripping her brow like a noose. She could not understand how the people of Turin could survive, but she was determined not to give in without a fight. The third time she came back numb with cold, she decided she must find a solution. With Marta Gentili’s permission, she fished out of the newspaper basket in the living-room the daily papers which the master of the house had already read, and hid in her room to pin them on round her chest, back and stomach before putting on the green coat and venturing out into the street again. The cold seemed to find it more difficult to penetrate the smothered rustling of newsprint, and she kept her little secret all through the winter assisted by her convenient solitude: if she had had another girl to share her walks and sit with in cafés, it could have been complicated trying to explain, because she liked to keep her coat on as if glued to her while drinking her hot chocolate. But Maria had been careful not to make any friends. Meanwhile Attilio Gentili found it rather gratifying that his childrens’ nanny seemed to be a passionate student of current affairs.

  Looking after Anna Gloria proved less difficult than Maria had first feared, perhaps because, with her instinctive understanding of other natures as diffident as her own, she never made the mistake of trying to win her over with flattery, which the girl must have been only too accustomed to. What overcame Anna Gloria’s instinctive shyness was the curiosity and passion that the little girl, bored by the amusements constantly thrust upon her, showed for tongue-twisters and word games, a speciality of Maria’s. Together in the living-room they would laugh at comic pronunciations, while Maria would lift the child’s fingers one by one as she recited her favourite rhyme:

  “Custu est su procu, custu dd’at mottu, custu dd’at cottu, custu si dd’at pappau et custu . . . ,” here she would agitate her little finger wildly, making the little girl laugh fit to burst, “. . . mischineddu! No ndi nd’est abarrau!”

  “I understand nothing!” Anna Gloria would protest when she got over laughing at the strange-sounding words.

  “That’s just because you’ve never seen what can happen to a piglet in a family with four children.”

  “Well, what can happen to a piglet in a family with four children?” the child would say, holding out her fist ready to start the game again.

  Maria took the child’s hand again with a conspiratorial air and started opening her fingers in order, beginning with her thumb.

  “This is the pig, now he’s dead, now he’s cooked, and now . . .” shaking the child’s little finger like a bell, “. . . poor little thing! There’s nothing left of him!”

  Maria taught her many other rhymes, some in Italian and some in Sard, and the child often unexpectedly repeated them with an ability that astonished her parents, to whom that simple glimmer of discipline seemed miraculous. Thanks to this ploy, after three weeks of tongue-twisting she and Anna Gloria were able to consider themselves, if not quite friends, at least accomplices, which enabled Maria to exercise at least a modicum of control over the rebellious and spoilt character of the little girl.

  Piergiorgio Gentili was a quite different kettle of fish. From the very first he gave Maria no chance to establish any degree of familiarity, and though never less than polite, he seemed to Maria to aim every word or gesture precisely at ensuring a hostile distance between them. He noted with ill-concealed irritation the intimacies his little sister was sharing with the Sardinian girl and, while the two were enjoying themselves together, he would sit on the other side of the room, wary of the potential contagion of this new bond. Elegant by nature and very tall for his fifteen years, Piergiorgio had none of the comic adolescent awkwardness Maria had known in Andría Bastíu. Despite the clear signs of incipient manhood struggling furiously with the remnants of his childhood for control of him, there was something already decisive in the boy’s dark look that disconcerted her and made her cautious of him.

  Eventually the day came when Maria was able to learn what was hidden behind this behaviour. It was autumn in Turin, Piergiorgio was now sixteen and his sister eleven, and Maria had been working in the Gentili home for a year and ten months, during which time she had always lied to her sisters, writing that she was happy, that everyone treated her like a daughter and that she did not want to come home. From time to time Regina would pass on indirectly some item of news about Bonaria, who seemed to be suffering the natural infirmities of old age, but Maria systematically skipped anything that referred to the old seamstress.

  “Why don’t we go to the Valentino? It’s a nice day.”

  With that mock-natural statement, Anna Gloria disturbed her brother’s concentration on his Latin translation, while Maria lifted her head in astonishment from the braid she was using to edge a skirt. Attilio and Marta Gentili had gone as they often did to the Langhe dai Remotti, and would not be back before the next day.

  “No.” Piergiorgio’s tone of voice allowed no hint of explanation.

  “Why not? We never go out, we’re always at home, and we even go to school by car. We never go out for a walk, and I’m bored to death.” A
nna Gloria turned to Maria, in the hope of support. “What do you say?”

  Piergiorgio looked hard at Maria for a moment, as if to discourage her from answering, then said:

  “Since when has Maria been making the decisions?”

  “Well, who does make the decisions then, you?” His sister challenged him, obstinate.

  “Mamma and Papà make the decisions, and you know perfectly well they don’t want us to go there.”

  “They didn’t when we were little, but we’re big now. Anyway, we have Maria with us.”

  Anna Gloria seemed in no mood to give in; she must have been planning her move for days, and Piergiorgio must in some way have realized it, because he got to his feet and in three strides covered the distance to his sister.

  “You are still little and I don’t want to go out. So we’re staying at home. I think that’s quite clear.”

  The little girl was quiet, meeting the force of those eyes so similar to her own without allowing herself to be intimidated. Her impotence was driving her mad, but she kept her mouth shut.

  “Good,” Piergiorgio said, satisfied with her silence.

  After this, evidently intended as the end of the conversation, Piergiorgio went back to his desk, without letting anything in his attitude or look include Maria even by accident. Anna Gloria leaped to her feet, deliberately letting her geography book fall to the floor. Giving Maria a resentful look, she walked quickly out of the room, slamming the door behind her with a sharp sound that shook the coloured wooden clock on the wall. As though deaf, Piergiorgio kept his eyes firmly on his Latin exercise book. A few minutes later he and Maria could hear water running in the shower. Maria paid no attention; she was used to the explosive quarrels between the two that tended to pass as quickly as they started, but which were growing more frequent as Anna Gloria got older, and her rebellious nature became less and less inclined to tolerate the hitherto unchallenged authority of her brother. Piergiorgio pretended to be indifferent to these quarrels, but by now Maria knew enough to understand that in fact he knew no way to bridge the distance between himself and his sister. She kept this secret knowledge to herself, fully aware that this reciprocal game of pretences was the closest thing to complicity they would ever be able to share. But when after twenty minutes the water was still running in the shower, Piergiorgio raised his head from his books, and looked at Maria with an interrogative air.