Accabadora (12 page)

Nicola was dreaming of the sea, the sea he had known for twenty years, the only sea he had ever seen. Eight years earlier he had rolled up his trousers and immersed himself in it up to
his chest, letting the hard salt water strike him. His cousins were surfing the waves and hurling the water-melon as if they were back home in the hay. But Nicola had stared wide-eyed at the horizon where the sea ended, and the more he gazed at it, the more he wanted to retreat slowly backwards to the shore, without running or turning round, as one does when faced with certain snakes. Now in his dream it was as if he were back on that Easter Monday, but the sand on the sea bottom was much stickier, a boneless monster that would not let him walk. If only he could have died like this, drowning in the water of his dreams, it would have been better for everyone. But he suddenly opened his eyes, groping in his crippled state among the sheets. It took him a few moments to remember who he was and what was happening, since the more deeply you sleep the more difficult it is to wake. It was some time before he became aware of the thin figure impinging on the air of the room, motionless by the wall at the foot of his bed. Nicola had never been a man of many words, but in that moment not even silence seemed appropriate.

“You've come . . .” he whispered, hoarse and pale.

The woman approached the bed, but it was only when she came close that Nicola was reminded that she seemed to bring with her the bitter smell of the old. When she spoke, he knew he was fully awake.

“I've come, but I can also go away again. Tell me you've changed your mind and I'll go and not look back. I swear we'll never speak of it again, as if nothing had ever happened.”

Nicola answered rather too quickly, as if afraid to allow time for doubts.

“I haven't changed my mind. I'm already dead, and you know it.”

She looked straight into his eyes, moving her head to force him to hold her gaze. She found what she did not want to find and said in a tired voice:

“No, Nicola, I don't know it. Only you can know that. I've come as I promised, but pray to the Lord to grant you what you are asking of me, because it is unholy and not even necessary.”

“It is necessary for me,” said Nicola, acknowledging the curse with a slight movement of his head.

The
accabadora
reached out from under her shawl, her hands holding tightly a small earthenware pot with a wide opening. When she lifted its lid a thread of smoke rose from the pot. Nicola became aware of an acrid smell, not that he expected anything different, took a deep breath and murmured words the old woman showed no sign of having heard. He held the poisonous fumes in his lungs and closed his eyes, anaesthetized for the last time. He may have already been asleep when the pillow was pressed down on his face, because he did not move or struggle. Perhaps he would not have fought back in any case, since for him it would have only made sense to die in the same way as he had lived: breathlessly.

Andría Bastíu, cold with terror and watching through the crack in the door, saw the black female soul talking with his brother, then bending over him with the pillow in her hands. That was not what souls came to do. Or was it? Perhaps that was why his mother had said the door must be closed, and closed firmly, not left ajar because the dead can envy your breath and may suddenly come and steal it away in a pillow. And the dinner is set out to distract them, not to please them. They eat until
dawn; in the darkness in the house they mistake the sauce of the culurgiones for blood, and the meat of the sucking-pig for red thighs and cheeks, and they never realize that there are living people behind the other doors, unless someone reminds them. And in that moment Andría knew that, if he survived, he would never touch a
curlugione
in his life again.

When the figure of the female soul near Nicola's bed moved to replace the pillow under his head, Andría retreated blindly into the corridor miming with his lips fragments of the
Pater ave gloria
, which he had never known well. It was only by accident that he managed not to break the silence that had been his protection, managing to separate himself from the apparition with the insubstantial thickness of the door of his room. As he was carefully closing it, he caught sight of the figure walking quickly towards the way out. An aunt, a grandmother, the drowned sister of his mother, he no longer wanted to know who it was, but he was not quick enough to escape finding out: a ray of moonlight from the open front door was all it needed for Andría Bastíu to recognize in the tear-streaked face of the woman hurrying down the corridor the unmistakable features of Bonaria Urrai. Then night returned, for real.

LIKE OWLS' EYES, SOME THOUGHTS CANNOT TOLERATE THE
full light of day. Such thoughts can only be born at night, when they work like the moon, moving tides of feeling to some invisible distant part of the soul. Bonaria Urrai had many thoughts of this kind, and over the years had learnt how to control them, patiently choosing on which nights to let them surface. The
accabadora
shed only a few tears as she left the Bastíu house, burdened though she was by Nicola's breathing, but each tear cut a new furrow in her already well-lined face. Had the sun risen at that moment, Bonaria Urrai would have appeared many years older than she actually was, and she was certainly feeling the weight of every one of those extra years. Decades had passed since she had first responded to a deathbed plea for peace, but she could confidently claim that neither then nor later had she ever felt anything to equal the weight now hanging from her like a wet cloak.

She had a clear memory of that first time, when she was not yet fifteen. With the other women of the family she had been present at the home confinement of a cousin of her father, thirteen hours of labour which cost the mother more than her baby, who was born alive. Neither chicken broth nor prayers had been able to stop the woman's bleeding, which was followed by days of such suffering as to extinguish any hope of recovery. This being the case, the room was emptied of every holy object, every well-wisher's present and every religious picture, so that the things which had been intended so far to protect the woman during childbirth did not now lock her into a state of eternal suffering. When she begged for mercy the others had reacted in an atmosphere of shared naturalness, when doing nothing would have seemed more like doing wrong. No-one ever explained this to Bonaria, but it had been obvious to her that the women had ended the mother's suffering with the same logic as they had used when they cut the child's umbilical cord.

That first bitter practical lesson taught the daughter of Taniei Urrai the unwritten law that the only accursed state was dying or being born alone, and that her own perfectly acceptable function had been just to stand by and watch. At fifteen years of age Bonaria had already been able to understand that with some things, doing them yourself or watching others do them involves the same degree of guilt, and from then on she had never had any problem distinguishing between compassion and crime. At least, not until that evening, when what she read in the eyes of Nicola Bastíu was not determination to find peace, but determination to find an accomplice.

No souls visited the house of Bonaria Urrai that night, but
her door stayed open till morning, when the tolling of the death bells woke Soreni from the torpor of sleep. Maria found the old woman sitting with her eyes fixed on the spent hearth, bound up in her black shawl like a spider trapped in her own web.

When they came to tell Frantziscu Pisu that there had been a death in the Bastíu home, his first thought was that the head of the family must have had a stroke. The whole village had been saying that old Salvatore had been in a decline for months since the accident to his eldest son and, though he pretended to Nicola that everything could be fixed, when he was out drinking with his friends he bitterly mourned the loss of his son, now dead in every respect that made a man's life worthwhile. For weeks this had been the only subject of discussion in the bars, and on the doorsteps at sunset. Nothing had helped Salvatore imagine any acceptable future for his son because, just as iron cannot be made from wood, the worst curse old Bastíu could imagine was being still alive with people referring to one in the past tense.

Knowing that this was the way things stood, when Don Tzicu learnt that the dead man was Nicola, he made a gesture halfway between the sign of the cross and an exorcism and, heading for the house, felt too late a guilty conscience for not having more effectively persuaded young Bastíu to accept his condition as a mystery of the divine will. In fact, though he was convinced that half the things in life were mysteries of the divine will, Frantziscu Pisu knew very well that the other half were clearly the fruit of human stupidity; and what had happened to Nicola Bastíu was surely best explained by the
second hypothesis. An inability to lie was the most obvious of Frantziscu Pisu's failings, and for a priest this was not a negligible defect. Certainly, if he had known that Nicola would die like this, he would probably have put a little more effort into his lying, but who could imagine the poor man had so displeased heaven as to suffer the misfortune of dying in his sleep? Even among those with such short memories as to believe their consciences were in good shape, there was no-one who did not hope for the last-minute redemption of the thief on the cross, and the elderly priest who, to be fair to him, did have quite a good memory, recited a
Pater noster
with the heartfelt fervour of an exorcism.

Only the closest members of the family were there in the corridor, and the body had not yet been prepared for the procession of mourners that would fill the house with cries and weeping during the next few hours; there was an atmosphere of shock and incompleteness, emphasized by the table still laid for the dead and easily visible from the corridor, which made it clear to everyone that death had taken the family by surprise. Giannina, paralysed by grief, was in Nicola's open room and was not even wearing black; when she saw the priest come in she showed no trace of her customary politeness, and went on sitting in silence by the bed, her hand in the dead hand of her son, which was cold but still soft. It was Salvatore Bastíu who received the priest; Don Frantziscu saw him come forward, pale and awkward, with no trace of his usual arrogance, like an innocent man just handed a severe sentence.

“Thank you for coming, Don Frantziscu. I'm sure a good word will be a great help to Giannina in this misfortune . . .”

The priest nodded, took off his skullcap and began to move
tactfully towards the woman beside the bed. It was only then that he noticed someone else in the room. Andría Bastíu was standing back to the wall in the corner behind the door, with his hands behind his back and his gaze fixed on the bed where the motionless body of his brother was lying. The boy nodded stiffly to the priest, fixing him with feverish sleepless eyes.

“Giannina . . .” Don Frantziscu turned gently to the woman, who spoke as if answering a question.

“He wasn't a bad boy, Nicola, he was a good son.”

“I know, Giannina, I know.”

“Then bless him for me . . . so the Lord can accept him as he is, because he wasn't a bad boy, my son . . .”

As she spoke, Giannina Bastíu lost something of the calm she had preserved until that moment, letting silent tears fall from her eyes. Don Frantziscu draped a purple stole round his neck and began to pray as a respectful form of distraction. While the priest was inflicting on the defenceless corpse what Nicola would never have accepted alive, Andría abruptly went out of the room, leaving his mother to console herself with the rhythmical Latin of the prayers. He waited outside with his father until the priest came out, listening in silence to their conversation.

“Is it known what happened?” Don Frantziscu said.

Old Bastíu shook his head in bewilderment. “Dr Mastinu has spoken of a heart attack. To me that doesn't seem possible. If any part of my son was still in good shape, it was his heart.”

“The Lord never gathers unripe fruit, Salvatore. We all leave when the time is ripe for us to depart. Be strong.”

“I'm not short of strength, Don Frantziscu. It's just that pain's an ugly thing, and you can't know that until you feel it.”

“Be comforted in the knowledge that he is better off where he is now.”

To crown this series of trite remarks, the priest turned to Andría, who had not responded positively to any of his invitations to resign himself. Like a shadow at Salvatore's shoulder, the lad seemed to be waiting for something.