Accabadora by Michela Murgia Page B

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 untildawn; 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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    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.