Accabadora (19 page)

“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 would, 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.”

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:

“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.