Accabadora

by Michela Murgia

  “You are in penance for something you have done, Tzia.”

  At these words Bonaria closed her eyes, in a simulation of sleep that Maria found entirely unconvincing. She took the old woman’s hand.

  “Who have you injured?”

  The eyelids remained closed and the old woman’s hand did not move. It occurred to Maria that even death could not have made her more absent.

  “You are not allowed to go because you have debts, but only you know what they are. I can go from house to house asking forgiveness on your behalf, and when this is all over, I’ll know I’ve found the right one.”

  The old woman reacted to these words as if to a threat, opening wide her clouded eyes and fixing them on the face of her adopted daughter. Her hand contracted in a surprisingly strong spasm and Maria, not expecting such resistance, took it as confirmation, and continued:

  “I’ll start with the Bastíus.”

  Bonaria Urrai emitted a groan like a shout. Determined to understand, Maria did not move from the bedside where she was kneeling.

  “Don’t you want that?”

  The old woman barely moved her head, but her denial was very clear.

  “Don’t you understand that this is why you can’t go in peace?”

  Bonaria stared blankly at Maria with a stubborn determination but without any visible shadow of remorse. Confronted with that fierce willpower, their roles were for an instant reversed, and Maria felt that it was she who was paralysed. She gently withdrew her hand from the convulsive grip of the old woman.

  For the next few days Maria acted as if this conversation had never happened, busying herself just as usual. She cleaned Bonaria, fed her and combed the few thin hairs left on her fragile skull, chatting to her about the weather and the scant local news, ignoring the fact that Bonaria had never taken any interest in such matters. The old woman suffered from cramps and other pains, especially at night, but no degree of suffering seemed able to put a final end to her strength. Bonaria Urrai continued to live, there were no two ways about it.

  When the moment was right, Maria returned to the subject of their discussion, after carefully feeding Bonaria the last teaspoonful of her pear purée. Having no appetite, Bonaria had refused half of it, and Maria knew that within an hour at most she would deposit the other half on her bib, left in place for that reason.

  “Have you thought about what I said to you?” she said, putting the plate on the bedside table.

  The old woman did not pretend not to understand; rather her immobility constituted a clear assent.

  “Tzia,” Maria said, coming closer to the bed, “I can’t bear to see you like this. If there was anything I could do . . .”

  With a struggle Bonaria took hold of her hand, and squeezed it as hard as her weakness permitted. It was not a strong grip, but there was something spirited about it that affected Maria more than if she had been bitten. The old woman tried to articulate a word or two, and Maria bent to catch what she was trying to say. A light breath touched her cheek like a tentative caress, but there were no clear words. She searched for meaning in the old woman’s eyes, but instantly regretted having wanted to understand. Bonaria Urrai was staring at her with such intensity that she had to turn away.

  “Tell me what you’d like me to do,” she said in terror.

  When it was clear there would be no answer, she left the bed and carried the plate to the kitchen with her heart beating like a hammer on hot iron.

  The same evening she went to the Bastíu house to look for Andría. They had met once or twice since her return, but always with the guilt felt by victims of theft, incapable of reviving the confidence that had once made them accomplices in the un-confessable crimes for which children are capable of blaming themselves before being given to understand that they are innocent. Giannina occasionally came to help with Bonaria, but Maria had not set foot in the Bastíu house since the day Nicola died.

  Andría did not seem surprised to see her, and received her with a certain ill-concealed coolness. He was much taller than Maria remembered him, with a trace of piratical beard that gave him a look utterly incongruous with his kindly eyes, which were still just as Maria remembered them. This gave her the strength to tell him what she had come for, and when she had finished Andría stood up abruptly and stuck his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  “Did she ask you that?”

  “She can’t speak.”

  “That’s not an answer. Has she given you to understand that she would want me to do it?”

  Maria hesitated, but she had no intention of lying.

  “No, on the contrary.” Then she added at once: “But I’m sure this is why she’s still suffering.”

  Andría shook his head vigorously, then gave her a serious look, clearly unwilling to see things from her point of view.

  “It makes no sense, and you’re behaving like a superstitious old woman. If she doesn’t kick the bucket, it’s because her time hasn’t come.”

  At these crude words Maria was overcome by an irresistible wave of impatience, and got to her feet in her turn. They faced each other across the room like two caged dogs looking for a chance to sink their teeth into each other. But Maria was the weaker of the two, and she knew it.

  “Maybe if she could look at you, if you could speak to her . . . Come and see her!”

  He was aware of the note of real desperation in the girl’s voice but he showed no sign of pity. When he answered, there was something so ferocious in his tone that Maria clearly saw the limitations of the platitude that time heals all suffering.

  “The continent has done you no good, our Mariedda. You’ve become so arrogant about other people’s sins. Has it never struck you that there may be nothing to forgive?”

  Surprised and hurt, Maria returned his look, opening her mouth to speak. Then she shut it again without a word, and Andría went on.

  “Because you seem so sure of your . . . But perhaps you’re wrong, perhaps in heaven they don’t judge people the way you do.”

  “I thought you’d understand . . . he was your brother!”

  “Of course he was my brother. And he wanted to die.”

  They looked at each other, Maria’s face uncomprehending, Andría’s tense and hard.

  “You’ve changed too. That day you didn’t talk like this.”

  “We all grow up, Marí. Or did you assume you’d always be the clever one?”

  The accomplice of her childhood games was lost; instead she was faced with a stranger intent on brutally revenging himself on her in more ways than one. Maria felt exhausted, and even worse, stupid.

  “I should never have come. I don’t even know now why I did, I’m sorry.”

  She left without another word, and he did not even see her to the door, staying on the hard sofa in the front room, having chosen on purpose to meet her in the room for strangers, the room for tiresome visits and funeral vigils.

  When Bonaria heard the front door open, the thought that Maria might not be alone sent coursing through her veins the little adrenalin her body was still capable of producing. But it closed again and the girl came in alone, with a defeated air. That evening Maria ate her supper alone by the fire before going into Bonaria’s room to check the flow of the drip; when she replaced it by the weak light of the bedside lamp, the old woman gave no sign of having noticed. Then she went to her own room and wept all the rage and pain out of her body. She wept so much that she could no longer remember whether she was crying for the dying or for someone already dead.

  A week later Bonaria Urrai fell into a coma. Doctor Mastinu said it would not be long now, and Maria did not feel like reminding him that he had said the same thing six months ago. Don Frantziscu asked whether he should come to administer extreme unction, and from the way Maria told him she would let him know in good time, he understood there would never be a convenient moment, but had enough shame to hide his relief.

  Maria’s life with the living corpse of Bonaria Urrai was a monotonous lam
ent that no-one but she seemed able to hear. She continued as before, interpreting her waiting with the vision of an architect who must build houses before the roads that will lead to them exist. Despite Doctor Mastinu’s words, three months later Bonaria Urrai was still imprisoned in her own body as if suspended on a thread of steel too slender to be visible but too strong to snap. And her adopted daughter shared her condition with her.

  It was at the end of a day spent embroidering sheets for some woman’s wedding and raging solicitously around the old woman’s inert body, that something in Maria wavered. The unthinkable assailed her while she was changing the pillowcase on the bed for a freshly laundered one. It was the very softness of the pillow that touched her, nothing more than that, but it might have been more than enough for that tiny stream of breath. The image was brief, but so intense that Maria was forced to sit down, horrified at her own daring. She let the pillow fall to the floor and stared at it as though it were a poisonous snake. From that moment she moved circumspectly round the bed, carefully watching her own movements, afraid of herself. The thought came to her again, always unexpectedly, sometimes when she was asleep, sometimes by day when she was busy with ordinary household duties, innocent actions concealing ferocious possibilities she had never even imagined. She began to dread being alone at night in Bonaria’s room. In the weeks that followed, the idea of acting to end their mutual imprisonment gradually became less shocking: each time the thought came to her it seemed to be a little less sacrilegious and abrupt and more gentle and feasible.

  In the Gentili home, during her nights spent talking to Piergiorgio, Maria had come to understand that many things that actually happen are merely parodies of things imagined; for this reason, once Bonaria had fallen into a coma, she was perfectly aware that she could have killed her countless times without anyone ever knowing, not even the doctor who still came regularly to monitor the state of this deathless decomposition. Then one morning in June when she thought she was opening the door to the doctor, she found herself facing the tall, sturdy figure of Andría Bastíu.

  “Ciao,” he said, not coming in.

  “Ciao.” She was too surprised to remember to show hostility.

  “Can I come in?” She remembered her manners.

  “Of course, sorry. Come in, it’s just that . . .”

  “You weren’t expecting me,” he said calmly.

  Maria took him into the kitchen, where he made straight for the place that always used to be his own, near to the fire where Mosè, no longer subject to Bonaria’s prohibitions, was sleeping placidly. He stopped near the dog, but stayed standing.

  “Sit down, I’ll make you some coffee.” She pointed to the chair.

  “Never mind coffee, that’s not what I came for.”

  “Why did you come, then?” She stared at him.

  The surviving Bastíu son shifted slightly on the chair, then indicated the corridor.

  “To see her.”

  The words made Maria smile with a sort of bitter grimace that momentarily distorted her face.

  “Now you want to see her . . .”

  Andría’s anger seemed to have vanished, as if he had poured it all out that evening before Christmas, when she had been the one to beg him to come. She nodded with a weary sigh, and he followed her slowly down the corridor, keeping pace with her. The bedroom was still dimly lit, despite the fact that Bonaria no longer noticed either light or darkness. The body, reduced to its basic functions, was so tiny that the bed seemed about to swallow it up in its covers. Andría stopped a moment at the door and looked to Maria for a sign, then went to Bonaria’s bedside. Maria did nothing to impede him, even when she saw him bend over the living corpse. Andría did not sit down by the bed, but knelt on the carpet to get closer, as if to see Bonaria more clearly. Maria felt an impulse to go out and leave him alone but he intervened.

  “Don’t go,” he said, and it did not seem strange to either of them that he should be the one giving orders.

  Maria said nothing but stayed standing by the door, while Andría silently watched the face of the accabadora of Soreni. She saw him stoop till his head was resting on the bedcover but without pressure, as though he were afraid of crushing the fragile body beneath it, a gesture of tenderness that revealed to Maria the part of him she thought she had lost. For a time they stayed like this, she standing watching, he breathing on his knees. Then Andría stood up and very lightly touched the comatose old woman’s hand. Maria opened the door, and both went out, silent until they reached the front door.

  “Thank you,” Andría said.

  “It was nothing.” Maria surprised herself with her answer, disarmed by his gentle tone. “If you’d like to come, some time. . .”

  He shook his head.

  “No, there’s no point, all I needed was to see her like that. But if you need to go out, to get a bit of air . . .” He interrupted himself, embarrassment fitting him like a glove. “I mean, you know where I am.”

  She gave him a smile, and when she went back into the house her heart was much less heavy. In some mysterious way related to his visit, the thought that had been eating her for weeks like a worm had pierced the threshold of potentiality, and become a clear decision. Going into the bedroom she found the pillow ready on the armchair beside the bed, picked it up and went closer, certain that this time no sense of guilt would stop her. Perhaps it was the gesture of tenderness she had seen in Andría that made her bend over Bonaria’s face before acting, touching the old woman’s cheek with a lightness she could not remember ever having felt before since she came home.

  There are things one is absolutely certain of, and no evidence can do anything but confirm them; it was the sharp shadow of intuition that made Maria Listru certain that her mother, Bonaria Urrai, was dead.

  In the days that followed, the whole village attended the funeral vigil of the accabadora of Soreni; not even those disabled in war stayed away from her funeral. Anna Teresa Listru made a constant display of a grief she most certainly did not feel, trusting in the wealth fallen into the hands of Maria, the daughter she now believed to have been transformed from her worst mistake into her best investment. On the other hand, every member of the Bastíu family wept for the dead woman with sincere grief, while the priest Don Frantziscu Pisu desperately ransacked the twisted depths of his feeble rhetoric in an attempt to find acceptable words in which to avoid saying that, in his opinion, the woman should not even be buried in a consecrated churchyard.

  Just as Bonaria had taught her, Maria Listru Urrai wore her mourning with discretion. Once Mass had been celebrated on the seventh day and everything had been performed correctly, Maria took Mosè and went to fetch Andría. Together they walked as far as the Pran’e boe vineyard, as far as the stone structure that had been intended to fix the altered boundary for once and for all. In fact the stones had never been moved again, yet nothing really seemed in its natural place. Andría sat down on the wall, while Maria sat on the ground with the dog beside her, leaning back against the wall to look at the vines, then closing her eyes in the sunlight.

  Depending on the shifting direction of the wind, the smell of cut stubble reached them with varying intensity, while from high in the sky came the cries of birds to whom the sea beyond the hills was visible. The uneven stones pressed against Maria’s back and under Andría, but neither seemed anxious to find a more comfortable position. Then Maria leaped deftly to her feet, and moving a few paces raised her face to the breeze blowing from the sea as it caressed the vines in the valley. As the wind moved her dark skirt in an uncertain dance she breathed in, filling her lungs. Andría did not move but watched her in silence, then asked in a low voice:

  “Now what will you do?”

  “The only thing I know: dressmaking.”

  “You’ll stay here, you mean . . .”

  “Have I ever gone away, Andrí?” she said, turning to look at him.

  In her delicate profile he recognized something accomplished and familiar, and smiled. They
had walked to the vineyard together, and together they returned home, totally undisturbed by the thought that they might be feeding the people of Soreni with even more idle gossip.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  MICHELA MURGIA was born in Cabras, Sardinia, in 1972. Accabadora, her third novel, won six major literary prizes in Italy, including the prestigious Campiello and SuperMondello, and firmly establishes her alongside Marcello Fois and Davide Longo at the forefront of a recent renaissance in Italian fiction.

  SILVESTER MAZZARELLA is a translator of Italian and Swedish literature, including works by Tove Jansson and Dacia Maraini. He learned English from his mother, Italian from his father, and Swedish while teaching at the University of Helsinki. He lives in Canterbury.