Accabadora (14 page)

Upset by these incomprehensible revelations, Maria left the house without another word. Andría stayed sobbing in the courtyard, his gratified relatives interpreting this as deep grief for the death of his brother.

ALTHOUGH IMMERSED IN THE COLLECTIVE RITUAL OF
the mourning, Bonaria Urrai had not failed to notice how precipitately Maria had left the Bastíu house, though she only half understood the reason for this unseemly behaviour. But the old woman could not allow herself the luxury of behaving impulsively on such an occasion, and Nicola Bastíu deserved her respect every inch of the way to his grave. Only now could she honour the secret promises she had made him, while Maria would still be at home when she got back. Thus reasoned the Soreni seamstress as she stayed close to Giannina and Salvatore Bastíu who had always treated her like a member of the family, and she sang the
Requiescat
together with everyone else who happened to be present, as if for her this was a dead person like any other, different only in name.

In fact Nicola's face, relaxed in the artificial serenity of someone who no longer had any questions to ask, seemed finally at
peace, but this optical illusion could not arrest the tumult of uncertainty in the soul of Bonaria Urrai. In any case the old woman was so used to never revealing any feelings except those expected of her that she had no difficulty, in the presence of the body, in maintaining her composure just as she had always done over the years, assisting the dead man's parents to concentrate on their many happy memories of him, recreating a healthy, laughing Nicola Bastíu, utterly respectable in body and soul. For several hours the voices of women and men round the corpse alternated in a liturgical sequence of weeping, prayer and memory. None of these sections could be left out of this code essential to the community in repairing the break between presence and absence. By this act of acceptance of individual grief, even the most controversial death could be reconciled with the tragic quality naturally inherent in every life. Thus when the priest left after pontificating on the communion of saints, the people of Soreni came together to celebrate the communion of sinners, absolving the surviving relatives of blame for their unique grief. There would be time later to answer other questions.

There are things you should do and things you should not do, and Maria was strongly aware of the difference. It was not a question of being right or wrong, because in her world such categories had no place. At Soreni the word “justice” was equivalent to the most violent curse, and it was only ever used when someone had to be hunted down at all costs. For the people of Soreni, justice could flay you like a pig or crucify you like a Christ, or fuck you up for fun the way men can when they
behave like animals; there was nowhere you could hide from it, and it would never forget your name or the names of any of your children, but all this had nothing to do with the fact that there were some things you should do and some things you should not do.

As she cut the onion into thin slices, Maria mulled obsessively over this difference, arranging the ingredients for supper with the same hypnotic slowness with which she was trying to order her thoughts. Andría's words had been as crazy as the light in his eyes as he was saying them, and they had made no sense to Maria, though when set against certain memories they began to take on some sort of meaning. As she cut the tomato into pieces, the figure of the old seamstress huddled by the fire that very morning came back to trouble her: fully dressed and with her hair done as though she had just returned home, or already knew that she would soon have to go out. Maria had long ago stopped pondering the mysterious nocturnal expeditions of her elderly adoptive mother, but now these suppressed memories came back to hit her as if fired from the elastic of a catapult, prompting the insidious thought that Bonaria Urrai might indeed have something serious to hide. It was the first time such a thought had ever struck Maria, and she did not know how to cope with this suspicion which fitted so badly with the confidence she felt in the woman who had taken her to be her daughter. Bonaria could not possibly have lied to her, because there are things you should do and things you should not do, she reminded herself as she dropped the rest of the finely chopped vegetables into the sizzling oil. The wooden spoon evoked fragrances and memories among the browning onions and, as she slowly stirred them, Maria opened herself to
both, and remembered an afternoon from many years before, only a few months after Tzia Bonaria had first taken her as her soul-child.

She had not yet got over her bad habit of stealing little things she did not need but wanted to have. The habit had come with her from the home of Anna Teresa Listru, and for a time had continued to keep her company, so that she did not bother to ask permission whenever she could avoid doing so. Sometimes it was a piece of fruit she wanted, or a piece of bread; or it might be a toy, or a scrap of coloured cloth put aside as a trimming. If she thought no-one was looking, Maria would simply take the object and hide it, incapable of separating desire from stealth. Bonaria Urrai very soon became aware of this, partly because these little disappearances happened rather frequently. But this particular afternoon was the last time it happened, and Maria remembered it very clearly.

It had been late October and sweetmeats were being prepared, with the ingredients for the
pabassinos
for the dead left out on the kitchen table, including orange peel, fennel seeds, slices of almond and a jar of
saba
of prickly pear as dark and sticky as caramel with a sweet taste full of flower perfumes, intended to hold the mixture together like an aromatic cement. Each ingredient had its own paper bag, except the raisins which had been put to soften in a bowl of orange-flower water. Bonaria noticed at the last minute that she had run out of bran, absolutely essential to stop the cakes sticking during baking. She had not told Maria not to touch what was on the table before she went out but, perfectly aware she was doing something she should not do, Maria had
grabbed two handfuls of almond slices and run into her room to hide them in a drawer. When Bonaria came back with the bran, half the pile of almonds was missing, and Maria was sitting on the floor playing with an expression of serene innocence on her face. Bonaria did not start with an accusation.

“Some almonds are missing.”

Maria had raised her head, looking at Tzia with a questioning expression, which could have been taken as an answer, but Bonaria had no intention of being fobbed off with that.

“Have you touched them?”

“No.”

The slap that caught Maria was violent and accurate, leaving a bloodless imprint on her left cheek. Her eyes wide with disbelief and surprise, the child stared at the old woman with her mouth open, forgetting to cry.

“Get up,” Bonaria said in a serious voice.

Maria got to her feet slowly, her eyes fixed on the floor to hide the deep shame now suffusing her face along with the red mark of the smack. Bonaria grabbed her arm and dragged her unceremoniously to her room. The old woman closed the door on her, and making sure it was properly locked, went back to making the sweets without another word. Maria stayed locked in her room till supper-time, going through a series of activities to distract herself from what she had done: first she cried silently, then tried to play with her toys as if nothing had happened, then finally, frustrated and exhausted, lay down on her bed and even fell asleep. But when the door opened again she was awake, and was sitting on the bed as if waiting for something. Bonaria picked up the chair by the wall and sat down facing Maria directly.

“Do you understand why I hit you?”

Maria had been expecting this question and nodded, once more blushing with humiliation.

“Why?”

“Because I stole the almonds.”

“No.”

Bonaria's categorical denial surprised her, wrecking her personal interpretation of the afternoon's events. She said no more, fastening astonished eyes on the old woman.

“I hit you because you lied to me. I can buy more almonds, but there's no cure for a lie. Every time you open your mouth to speak, remember that it was with words that God created the world.”

At six years of age one's understanding of theology is limited, and Maria could find nothing to say to that statement, which was altogether too vast for her to take in. But what little she did understand of it was more than enough for her to judge herself, and while she tried to nod with her lips pressed together, Bonaria leaned forward and took her loosely in her arms, like a cocoon round a silkworm. After this reconciliation which remained unique in their shared experience, Maria came out of the room hand in hand with the old woman to find the house filled with the intense fragrance of the sweetmeats, by now cooked and spread out to set on the baking tray like little dark bricks. For years she would associate the smell of freshly made
pabassinos
with that memory and, without being aware of the fact, she no longer felt any desire to steal things that were clearly already hers, because once this fact had been established, there was no-one left to lie to.

* * *

Remembering this, Maria Listru smiled to herself as she added water to the pan where the tomato had by now dissolved into a dense aromatic sauce. Whatever had happened that night, whatever Andría imagined he had seen, by the time the tomato sauce was ready, Maria was convinced that the woman who had taught her to wash her hands before speaking could not have deceived her in any way, least of all in such an important matter. There are things you should do and things you should not do, she told herself; and this is the way you do things you should do, she decided, tasting the sauce to find out whether it needed any salt.

Maria was wrong, but she did not know how wrong she was until that evening, when Bonaria came home after one of the most difficult days of her life. Maria had not waited to eat with her, because with births and deaths you know when you go out but you can never be sure when you will be able to come back home, but there was a panful of cold water waiting on the hob and the sauce was still fresh from its first cooking. Maria was reading, as she often did in the evening after supper, and Bonaria was too tired to notice that there was something not quite natural in her manner.

“Why did you go off like that? Have you quarrelled with Andría?”

When she already knew the answer she expected, Bonaria sometimes started with a direct question.

“Yes.”

Maria watched her with an appearance of calm, while measuring with her eyes the exhaustion visible in Bonaria's bowed shoulders, marked face and black skirt disordered after spending
so long sitting down. To Maria she looked old in the ordinary sense in which people commonly use the term, near her end like a well-kept promise.

“Did that seem like the right time to go, with his brother dead in the house? You could have comforted him.”

“I did comfort him.”

“It didn't look like that to me. You rushed away.”

If only Bonaria had not been so insistent. If only she had not pressed for an explanation at all costs, perhaps Maria would have gone on thinking this might be a good moment to keep quiet. But the lack of respect in Bonaria's accusations pushed her into answering sharply, moving the conversation into more treacherous waters.

“If I'd stayed it would have been worse. He was saying things I wasn't prepared to listen to.”

“Bereaved people always say the same things. What did he want, did he want to die too? Did he blame himself for Nicola's death?”

Maria closed her book without bothering to mark her place. When she spoke again, it was with a careful lack of expression.

“No, he didn't blame himself. He blamed you.”

Bonaria kept quite still, and her expression did not change in any way.

“Blamed me? Good heavens! Why?”

“He says he saw you going into Nicola's room last night and suffocating him with a pillow.”

Put like that, if it had not involved Nicola, it might even have sounded funny, and making such an indirect accusation made her aware of the lack of logic in what she was saying. Her reconstruction seemed to make no sense at all. But Bonaria did not laugh.

“He told you that?”

“Yes, exactly that, but then he vomited and said he'd made it up.”

Bonaria Urrai sat down near the fire, carefully adjusting the folds of her skirt round her body, like the petals of a black flower. The conversation was over, but even so Maria felt a need to say something more: