Accabadora (17 page)

THEY RAN DOWN THE STAIRS AT BREAKNECK SPEED, HE
agile as a cat, she following as fast as she could with her open coat flying behind her, anxious not to be left behind. It only took Piergiorgio an instant to realize that Anna Gloria was not in the road, before he started to run like a madman towards the Valentino park. Maria followed with her heart beating madly, more alarmed by his anxiety than by Anna Gloria's furtive escape. She had expected Anna Gloria's rebellious act; given her behaviour it was only a matter of time. What had taken her by surprise was the extreme reaction of her brother. She ran as fast as she could beside him, not so much in the hope of finding Anna Gloria – she was certain of that – but in the hope of reaching her at more or less the same moment as the desperate Piergiorgio.

They searched all over the park, but there was no trace of Anna Gloria. Running and stopping, searching the smaller paths with their eyes and hurrying quickly down the central one, after two hours Maria and Piergiorgio were out of breath but still side by side, he with a look of pure terror in his eyes, she much less optimistic than before about the outcome of their search. Breaking the silence imposed by breathlessness and reserve, they instinctively began to call her.

“Anna Gloria!” Maria shrieked.

“Anna!” Piergiorgio echoed in a strangled voice. Many turned to stare at the young woman and the boy with alarm and curiosity, but no-one answered their cries.

It was already six in the evening and the sun was setting when they came out of the park, perspiring and looking at one another in distress.

“It's your fault,” Piergiorgio said with hatred.

Maria winced but did not accuse him of injustice, because she knew perfectly well it was true: whatever had happened would in any case have been her fault. But she met his gaze, realizing that at the moment apportioning guilt was not the top priority.

“Let's try the river,” she said, trying to control her anguish.

They walked homewards, carefully following the water's edge, still calling out Anna Gloria's name but keeping their eyes fixed on the slope of the bank, terrified of seeing that someone had fallen in, of seeing something floating, or a motionless body among the trees near the water, from which a light haze was rising and making their search more difficult. They found nothing, but felt none the better for that and returned to via della Rocca full of anxiety, secretly hoping Anna Gloria might have got there before them.

The girl was indeed sitting waiting for them on the steps of the building, visibly nervous but clearly without the slightest intention of apologizing for her caprice. Piergiorgio stopped in the middle of the road, and Maria was worried by the flash she detected deep in his blue eyes. Presumably his sister was
unaware of any danger, since she got to her feet and said:

“Well, here you are. I've been waiting out here at least an hour! Why on earth did you go off like that?”

For a few moments they both stared at her in disbelief. Maria was about to answer in the same tone, but Piergiorgio was too quick for her and his conciliatory words disturbed Maria more than if he had shouted.

“We felt like taking a walk. Since when do I have to account to you for what I do?”

Without waiting for an answer, he climbed the front steps with deliberate nonchalance, pulled the keys out of his pocket, and smoothly unlocked the front door of the building. Then he held it open for the other two to go in. Passing close to him, Maria saw an expression on his face she could not remember ever having seen before; for once, he was as pale as his sister. He gave Maria a warning look and, in accordance with this tacit pact, both behaved until evening as though nothing had happened. Anna Gloria for her part took good care not to press the argument, deceived by the silence into thinking that she had succeeded with her display of willpower in weakening the hold of the prohibition that had so weighed her down.

Of course, things were not so simple, though something must have snapped in Piergiorgio, because during the night Maria could hear from her room the unmistakable sound of barely suppressed weeping. Anna Gloria had often slipped into Maria's bed in her pyjamas to dispel the ghosts of a nightmare, or to share the sort of intimate confidences that can be made only in darkness, but in nearly two years the door separating her from Piergiorgio had never once been opened. Neither had seen it as real; for all it had to do with them, it might just as well have been
merely a door drawn on the wallpaper. But faced with the sound of that weeping, there was no good reason for Maria not to breach the invisible barrier between them; the tension accumulated during the day had certainly made the rules seem both obscure and ineffectual, transformed by what had occurred into a limbo of temporary suspension.

When Piergiorgio noticed the door was open, his sobbing stopped abruptly. His voice, broken but harsh, rose from the utter darkness of the room.

“What do you want?”

“I could hear you.”

“So? Go away.”

“No.”

“I said go away. This is not your room.”

Moving forward in the darkness, Maria had no fear of tripping over anything; she knew the maniacal order in which the boy kept his things. Suddenly the bedside table lamp came on, showing Piergiorgio fully dressed on his bed, sitting with his back against the headboard and his pillow pressed between his knees, marked with the wet bites where he had been trying to hide his weeping. His face was red like that of a small child, but there was nothing childish about his rigid jaw and furious glare.

“Let's talk.”

“What about?”

“You know. About what happened today.”

“I've nothing to say to you. Anyway, nothing happened.”

He was looking at Maria with the same ferocious hatred she had seen when he accused her in the park.

“Please forgive me,” she said.

Seeing her give in without a fight he seemed to waver, but his hands were still clutching the pillow like a shield.

“What are you asking to be excused for?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Maria said, which was the truth. “What are you accusing me of?”

Piergiorgio hesitated; he had never liked straight questions. Maria could clearly see the telltale up-and-down movement of his Adam's apple, giving him away.

After a short pause he echoed her words: “I don't know.” But his eyes were still passing judgement.

She moved further into the room, disarmed and disarming in her yellow flannel pyjamas, asking everything she wanted to ask at once as if afraid she would never have another opportunity to hear the answers.

“Then why do you always treat me as if there's something about me that needs excusing? Where have I gone wrong? What have I done to you?”

Piergiorgio silently watched her come nearer the bed. Then he said stiffly,

“You've done nothing. It wasn't you, it was her.”

“Exactly, it has nothing to do with me.”

Suddenly, Maria sat down on the edge of the bed, deliberately invading the space that, huddled in one corner, he was guarding with his eyes. She had never been a cautious person, but never as reckless as at that moment, in which she sensed a fleeting mystery she felt it would have been irresponsible to ignore. She made no effort to calculate the risks of seizing the moment as she stared in silence into his blue eyes, seeing them change in character, assuming an empty, lost expression, dangerously absent. When he reached for the light-switch, Maria did nothing
to stop him, and the sudden darkness took away the breath of both, just as much as the course of events that afternoon had done.

For a few seconds Piergiorgio said and did nothing, then he started to speak. At first he whispered, seeming to return to a conversation that had been interrupted, but which in reality had never even started. At first Maria did not understand why he was telling her a story of hide-and-seek and small children's races, but then his words began to explode in the darkness with revelations almost as painful for her to listen to as they must have been for him to make. She was not at all certain he was speaking to her; rather she had the impression that he had turned the light off to be able to forget that she was there at all, and this understanding stopped her saying a single word.

In the darkness she could see him as a small child, his hair fairer than now, playing hide-and-seek with other children under the careless eye of the first nanny employed to look after him. As he recalled the past, Piergiorgio's voice gradually lost its power until it was as light as the voice of the little boy hiding among the trees by the river while he waited heart in mouth as his friends struggled to find him, before dashing like a rat for the agreed tree, shouting at the top of his voice “Home! I'm the quickest!” He had always been good at hiding; even at home his father and mother had to search for him for ages when he did not want to be found. But on this particular occasion his friends had problems finding him because it was difficult to see through the bushes on the riverbank, and even more difficult for them to reach him on their short legs. But for the vigilant eyes of an adult who had time to wait, and for the strong legs of an adult who knew how to search and find, that cunning hiding-place on the
riverbank would have been perfect for playing hide-and-seek with a child. Piergiorgio did not yet know that grown-ups do not play hide-and-seek in the bushes with children.

While the nanny was chattering with the other girls paid to look after other people's children, and while the other children were playing hide-and-seek as best they could with the setting sun flattening the trees against the ground in mobile, fugitive shadows, Piergiorgio Gentili got lost in the bushes and fell into the hands of a stranger, and no-one ever reported or even discovered the fact. The child they did find many hours later by the river had become incapable of hiding, or of throwing his arms round anyone at all, or ever trusting anyone again, and his parents thought he must have fallen, probably slipping on the bank, and that a blow to his head had perhaps knocked him out until sunset, or perhaps he had suffered the fear of death that all children experience when they pretend to hide and get lost and no-one comes to find them. Marta Gentili sacked the nanny on the spot and Piergiorgio equally abruptly even forgot her name, and from that moment neither he nor his sister were allowed ever again to play in the park or along the riverbank or anywhere else. Piergiorgio never told either his father or mother that everything they dreaded happening had already happened, and for ten years he had never said anything at all about it until that night, when he told the whole story to Maria in the darkness of his room, with his shoulders pressed against the bedhead and his head buried in a bush on the riverbank, remembering the smell of mud and other people's sweat.

Maria could not have said at what precise stage of the horror that Piergiorgio was describing she had moved closer without interrupting him, or at what precise point she had taken him in
her arms, nor would he have been able to name the moment when he had begun in the darkness to let shamed tears fall silently from his eyes. Morning surprised them in a blameless sleep, locked in an embrace in which he had finally found himself again, and she had lost herself.

From that moment Piergiorgio's attitude to Maria changed completely. He became courteous and almost considerate. He no longer answered her in monosyllables, and, in fact, even spoke to her when she had not spoken first; he helped her to carry clothes she had been ironing, offered to open doors for her when her arms were full of shopping, and at table was quick to pass everything before she asked for it, to the astonishment of the rest of the family. This gallantry was a particularly pleasant surprise to Attilio Gentili who, in the first clear fires of his son's adolescence, detected promising signs of a precocious maturity. On the other hand, this incomprehensible change in Piergiorgio made his mother suspicious, and particularly annoyed Anna Gloria who, aware of the effect Maria was having on him, found herself suffering a jealousy she had never before experienced. As soon as she realized that something had changed, the complicity she had built up with the Sardinian girl vanished overnight, and the more considerately her brother treated Maria, the more impatient his sister became at the idea of her remaining as their nanny. Maria for her part cared nothing about Anna Gloria's attitude, but seemed to have developed a sort of protectiveness towards Piergiorgio that had no reason to exist, since the boy was now well past the age of needing anyone to look after him; especially since Maria had never really fulfilled this role, as they both knew.

It was now that Maria for the first time began to be aware of
the budding manhood of his body as the softness of childhood disappeared from the ever more marked features of his face, and as his shoulders grew broader daily, emphasizing a natural grace that till then had merely seemed out of focus. The door between the two bedrooms was no longer just a picture on the wall, and the nights were filled with murmurs and laughter, carefully but happily smothered by the perpetrators, perfectly aware that what they were doing could not, ultimately, be considered innocent. They had nothing to hide, yet both made every effort to hide it. What they could not hide was visible in the mornings at breakfast, when the two insomniacs could not conceal the dark shadows under their eyes from the boy's unobservant parents but more particularly from the surly searching gaze of Anna Gloria as she rhythmically chewed toast, tense with increasing fury. Maria no longer went out as much, and when she did, she no longer fastened newspapers under her coat; she was in the grip of a burning fever that, had it not blinded her, she would have recognized. It was not the first time such a fever had coursed through her veins, but previously she had only been aware of it as the backwash after a wave, and this time it would be no different.