She never spoke about what was happening to her. She was convinced that these capricious scraps of memory which others would have dismissed as sudden homesickness were not something she could reveal to Piergiorgio. But meanwhile present and past faced one another as if after an armistice, burdening her breast with the dumb gratitude of survivors. She had long ago stopped stealing little things that already belonged to her, but now once again she found she had something to hide, since the awareness she shared with Piergiorgio was not and never could be true reciprocity. Her self-denial contained a bitter prophecy, and Maria knew she was the only one who could be aware of this. The fear of seeing it proved true forced her to move round the boy’s soul like someone walking on sand, afraid to leave too many traces of her footsteps. Every time he passionately sought to invoke eternity or other inconvenient guests on their behalf, Maria understood better that what divided them was not age or social status, so much as the persistence in him of the childish self-deception of confusing what one wants with what one has. This was why, every time she left his room and closed the door behind her after their final whisper, Maria renewed to herself her rejection of the man Piergiorgio would become.
The obvious fact that she could never be more than a temporary presence in the Gentili home did not prevent her from feeling that the ground was opening under her feet when a letter arrived from Regina asking her to come home at once. Just a few lines: her sister was good at many things but writing was not one of them. She had put down just the necessary minimum, and after she had opened the letter Maria kept it on her bedside table for two days, pretending it had not even arrived.
It was not until the third night that she found the courage to go into Piergiorgio’s room to tell him how things stood, and the anxiety of imminent loss was so great as to make her forget her caution. She did not wait to be sure that Anna Gloria was asleep before opening the door, and the slight squeak of the handle was enough to give the other girl the signal she had long been hoping for. While in the darkness Maria was sustaining the weight of Piergiorgio’s fury on being faced with the necessity of her decision, the light in the bedroom was suddenly switched on from outside, revealing the two young people in confusion in each other’s arms on the bed, but this was more than enough for the astonished eyes of Attilio and Marta Gentili. Piergiorgio and Maria did not protest their innocence, and they were undoubtedly not innocent, but they kept to themselves the precise nature of their fault, according to a pact that had never needed to be other than unspoken. The next day Anna Gloria shed not a single tear as Maria, overcome with shame, went down the stairs with her suitcase. Piergiorgio had not even been allowed to leave his room to say goodbye, and the money due to her was coldly handed over without references by the head of the family in an envelope that she did not even open for many days; the only envelope she repeatedly opened to reread its contents was the one from her sister Regina, which in a single alarming sentence added to the pain of parting the weight of responsibility likely to face her on arrival: “Mariedda darling, come back at once if you can: Bonaria Urrai has had a stroke and may be dying.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE TABLE-LAMP HAD BEEN TURNED OFF, BUT BONARIA Urrai did not need the light to know that Maria was sitting there somewhere in the shadows of the hospital room. It was not easy to say exactly when she had developed the habit of sitting to look at Bonaria in silence in the dark, whether she had always had this habit or whether she had developed it on the continent, in the place where she had been working and which she had not wanted to talk about to Bonaria. Bonaria suspected that Maria had picked up the nasty habit of spying on people in their sleep from herself, and she would have liked to have yielded to the temptation to tell Maria she was aware of it, perhaps starting with some sort of noise to make it clear from the first that she was awake. But something stopped her and she did not do it, just as she had not done it at the very beginning, before time decided to escape from her hand like a wolf in the night.
* * *
At the very beginning.
It had been silent in the shop, and Bonaria could still remember Anna Teresa Listru with her plaited hair dipping her stumpy hands into the bag of white beans from Tonara, as if to pick them out one by one. She had been eagerly sharing some gossip with the shopkeeper and the pharmacist’s wife, a woman from the continent, who was wearing a dark fur like a city lady as she carefully examined the various kinds of soup on display behind the glass windows of the showcase.
Amid those three women Maria had been as nothing, like an expiry date that has to be noted down so as not to be forgotten; she had not even benefited from the sort of nice things women usually say when they want to compliment other women on their children. Bonaria, sitting on a sack of dried beans in a corner, was waiting for the arrival of the daily milk delivery and watching the forgotten child moving about quickly among things of her own height: fruit, coloured plastic whirligigs, a large basket of fresh bread and her mother’s rough knees.
The old woman’s eyes were the only ones to notice a handful of black cherries secretly vanishing from a basket into a pocket among the folds of Maria’s little white dress. Tzia Bonaria saw neither shame nor self-awareness in the little girl’s face, as if this absence of judgement was the just counterpoise to her invisibility. Faults, like people, only exist if there is someone to notice them. But Maria was moving innocently along the counter where the other women were discussing the increased price of vegetables, creeping like an insect through the narrow space between the bottoms of her mother and the pharmacist’s wife, attracted by the latter’s dark glossy fur. She was staring at it with her mouth half-open, bewitched by the reflections that shimmered over the fur at the woman’s every movement. Bonaria Urrai knew what the little girl was about to do even before Maria’s fingers reached out to commit that downy sin. The child immersed her hand in the dense pelt, never before seen on a Christian, amazed that death could be so soft. The pharmacist’s wife showed no sign of having noticed anything, which encouraged Maria to go a little further. Moving close to that bum, grown fat on the ailments of others, she buried her face in the dark fur and avidly inhaled its smell. It was only then that the wife of the pharmacist became aware of this fingering of her person and let out a cry of annoyance, attracting everyone’s attention to Maria.
Now, stretched out in bed, Bonaria Urrai managed a feeble smile in the darkness at the sudden recovery of this memory of Maria, of Maria made substantial and real in this individual sin of a solitary child. But Bonaria did not see her cry that morning in the shop, while her mother struggled to find words to explain her uncouth behaviour, a sensory deprivation that had driven her to theft much more often than could have been justified by hunger:
“I never wanted her, because God knows three children are plenty for a woman in my situation . . .”
Not even that retroactive abortion had provoked any reaction on Maria’s face. She had stayed motionless with the numb unconsciousness of those who have never been properly born, while the colour of the stolen cherries began to spread over the white material from the right-hand pocket of her dress. A telltale redness spreading like a wound, almost black in some places. It was as if the stain was the only thing about her that was real, an obscene menarche of fruit. The shopkeeper was the first to see it.
“Have you been taking cherries from the basket?”
When Anna Teresa Listru became aware of the havoc on her daughter’s dress the slap was already on its way. The child did not close her eyes until the instant the hand hit her, then opened them again with a steady gaze and one hand thrust fiercely into her pocket, aggravating the external stain. Her tears were there, but she hid them.
“Giulia, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to say, add them to my bill . . .”
“Don’t worry, these things happen, they’re just children.” Behind the counter the shopkeeper played it down. “Though of course that mischievous hand . . .” she added maliciously with a half-smile.
More than anything else, it was that red stain on the little embroidered pocket that had made it clear to Bonaria Urrai that the barren period of her life might be over, and less than a week later she had gone to talk to Anna Teresa Listru about the possibility of taking Maria as a soul-child. And she had added an offer that Sisinnio Listru’s widow could not even dream of refusing. In any case Bonaria had devoted herself since her early years to dressmaking, because if she was really good at anything, it was taking the measure of people. And here too she made no mistake. Anna Teresa Listru accepted the plan without discussion, and ten days later Maria was already installed in her room in the ancestral home of the Urrai family, never even having been told that a fundamental change in her family status was envisaged.
* * *
Even after so many years, Maria was not yet sure how far the course of her life had deviated from the one chosen for her. The only thing that had been in the agreement from the beginning was this bed, at which her attendance now had the weight of the completion of a bargain. Tired of pretending to believe Bonaria was sleeping, she approached her pillow and said:
“I know you’re awake. Can I bring you anything?”
Bonaria opened wide her eyes, their pupils watered down by a veil of cataract, and saw Maria as nothing more than a vague shape. There was too little light in the room, and it had been kept like that for days, because the doctor had said strong light could give the patient a headache, as though Bonaria’s problem was migraine. She would have burst out laughing if she had been capable of it, but the stroke had partly paralysed her face, preventing even such a simple movement. In order to smile, Doctor Sedda had told her, she needed dozens of muscles, and she had lost the use of nearly all of them.
“Water . . .” she seemed to be saying.
Maria interpreted the mumbled vowels, and lifted the beaker with its straw to her mouth; the nurse had not yet come to insert the hydration drip in her arm. With a struggle Bonaria sucked water from the beaker, but her inability to control her lips sent some up her nose and some outside her mouth. She coughed violently, and Maria tried to lift her to make it easier for her to swallow the little water she had managed to get into her throat.
Bonaria had been in this state for nearly two months, and her age made it difficult for the doctors to predict any degree of recovery.
Maria’s return to Sardinia had surprised no-one. “It’s right for a soul-child,” they said at Soreni, as if this were a destiny she could not escape. But in reality few had believed she would actually return to fulfil it. Noting her hasty departure from the village, some had even said she had gone away because she was pregnant by Andría Bastíu, since the two of them had been constantly together, and the fact that there was not the slightest evidence to support the idea was for some the ultimate proof that it must be so. But in any case, everyone believed that something must have happened between the two women to break the sacred pact of adoption, restoring them to their earlier status of undowered orphan and childless widow.
But Anna Teresa Listru’s daughter had come back, and she seemed to have done so specially to pay her debt in the moment of need. In the eyes of the community, this restored to her the right of inheritance that she would not otherwise legally have been able to claim, and there was no harm in believing that she had done it for precisely this reason. From the point of view of inheritance, Maria could certainly call herself fortunate, though people did not assess her fortune so much on the volume of goods that would come to her as on the time she would have to spend looking after the old woman before the Lord decided she had eaten enough bread. There had been girls who had wasted the best years of their lives on tyrannical old women who could not make up their minds to die, with the irony of fate allowing them enormous inherited fortunes at an age when they no longer felt they could make the most of them. But this was not the case with Maria, since Bonaria Urrai was obviously more than halfway gone. She could not chew her food, and the paralysis of the right side of her body made it impossible for her to get out of bed and attend to her personal hygiene. Maria did everything for her with a dedication not even to be expected of a daughter, and on their doorsteps in the evening the old women praised the devotion of her self-sacrifice, ever more impressive the nearer it came to martyrdom.
In fact Maria, who made every effort to appear utterly serene in everything she did, was terrified by the idea that Bonaria might be dying, and the old woman knew her too well not to have realized it. They did not speak, and had not done so since Maria came back – in any case Bonaria still could not do so – but they had looked at one another often in the gloomy room, and had worked out between them a language that avoided most misunderstandings. The words spoken that evening when the Bastíu family had been mourning Nicola still lay between them, but it was clear that Maria was waiting, even if there was no hope that Bonaria would ever be able to speak in an articulate manner again.
When after four months it was finally clear that the condition of the old woman would never improve, she was discharged from hospital and the doctors allowed Maria to take her home, after explaining how to care for her in what was now agreed to be an unchanging state of health. What this meant was that Bonaria was stuck on the threshold of death, but at first Maria refused to accept this and treated her like a convalescent, with such dedication that after a few weeks Bonaria’s control over the movement of her lips improved to such an extent that she was able to articulate simple words, and ask for what she needed. For her part, Bonaria Urrai felt there were things between them that needed saying, but that in all probability could never be said. The long protraction of Bonaria’s state of immobility made it clear that she was one of those old people destined to die slowly, but while having time to reflect and beg pardon for his sins would have been a blessing for Don Frantziscu Pisu, it was certainly nothing of the sort for the accabadora. The old priest came to see her a couple of times to mumble over her paralysed body a series of short prayers in Latin which he only half knew how to pronounce. Bonaria, respecting his good intentions, let him go ahead, but after he had gone she made it clear to Maria that she would not welcome more visits from the priest.
With time even the visits of the curious became less frequent, until the only person left to look after Bonaria was Maria, helped from time to time by the expert hands of Giannina Bastíu. The old woman lost weight, but even so it was not at all easy to lift her from her bed, since her bones had become so fragile that there was a risk that even too vigorous a grasp might cause them to fracture.
Bonaria Urrai languished like this for nearly a year before entering her death throes without ever having said any of the words she had wanted to say to Maria. She remained lucid, though she could only speak with her eyes. But by now Maria did not even need a gesture to understand what Bonaria needed. She slept in the same room and got up several times each night to check that the old woman was still alive; as soon as she had the tiniest confirmation of this she would go back to her camp bed.
It was during one of those nights that Bonaria Urrai started shouting. She did not exactly cry out, but the moans emerging from her mouth had a note of violent desperation about them. Maria got out of bed, and understood at once that it was not water that Bonaria wanted. In recent weeks her suffering had become more intense, and her body had become so frail that even a simple massage could have been enough to crush her increasingly fragile bones. Though so far she had complained little, it now seemed that she could bear it no longer, and her wide-open eyes searched Maria’s face with ravenous desperation. Maria found herself much weaker than she had always believed herself to be. The sounds the old woman was making drove her on the first night to leave the room so as not to have to listen to the rattle in her throat. But on the second night she forced herself to remain, doing her best to soothe her. But it was pointless, and the third night Maria stayed weeping on her camp bed. Bonaria could hear her clearly, and moaned so loudly that Maria thought she would die of exhaustion, in fact she almost wished she wo
uld, but in the morning the old woman was still painfully alive. After two weeks of this torture, the girl began to understand what Bonaria had meant three years earlier when she had said: “Never say: I shall not drink from this water.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PROTECTION OR GUILT. AT SORENI THESE WERE THE only things that could cause a bad death, and Maria did not know which of the two was preventing Bonaria Urrai from taking her leave. In her uncertainty, she decided to deal with things over which she had some control. Just as Bonaria had done many years earlier for her, she cleared the shelves of images of the sacred heart and mystic lamb, and took away the holy-water stoup with its raised relief of Santa Rita. Next she took down all the religious pictures from the bedroom walls, removed images taken from the pages of books or hidden at the bottom of drawers, untied all green ribbons from doorhandles, and swept from the corners every piece of horn meant to guard against spirits. Most important of all, she carried away the blessed Holy Week palm hanging behind the door, completely dried out but not for this reason innocuous. The old woman was wearing no scapulars or other objects that might hold her back; only her baptismal chain, which Maria took off her neck with great care while Bonaria fixed her eyes on her without protest. After this, they waited. For the next two weeks Bonaria, hardly more than skin and bone, continued to teeter on the edge of death without falling over it.
As the days passed, Maria decided in her utter impotence that what was forcing Bonaria Urrai to cling so agonizingly to life could not be protection. The same night she went to sit beside the old seamstress’s bed, gazing at her in silence. After a few minutes Bonaria opened her veiled eyes and fixed her with a stare.
“What must I do?” Maria said.
The old woman seemed to be trying to say something, but all that came from her mouth was a struggling breath. Maria knelt down beside the bed with her elbows on the coverlet, aware of the ever stronger sour smell of the old woman. When she spoke it was with deliberate slowness:
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