37

 37

THERE’S A STORY, and it harks back to the time before her birth. It seems that even the spiders know it, the crows and the treecreeper couple. She reads it in the branches poking through holes in the hut, in the sooty mold that covers some of the leaves like a felt hat, and in the few forgotten or decayed objects—spade, billhook, rake—with their shadowy corollas.

More than once she’s heard the voice of her grandmother, busy with something else as she always was: mending, sweeping, cooking, sharpening knives, plucking a hen. Silvia’s great-grandmother was working in exactly the same way in the other half of the house. It was Silvia who asked, “Why don’t you speak to each other? Why do you pretend that Great-grandmother doesn’t exist? Tell me again.” And her grandmother would give her a dirty look. There were plenty of reasons—it was obvious—but the official silence had begun with the zabaglione.

Her grandmother had had three children: Anselmo’s mother, Silvia’s mother, and another girl, and the third girl was blond with a small nose like a beak. She came down with meningitis and was very ill. Grandmother wanted to make a zabaglione to make her feel better, but her mother-in-law was against it. She was a hard, pitiless woman with an acid voice.

“That’s not necessary. It’s only a fever. You spoil the child!” she said. “We can use those eggs for lunch tomorrow. Someone will surely come. My son will bring us some devil of a socialist, you’ll see.” Grandmother gave in, but the baby died during the night. She hadn’t given her any zabaglione for fear of an argument, but from that moment on she stopped talking to her mother-in-law.

Silvia couldn’t comprehend how she had managed to impose upon her grandfather and convince him to erect a wall that divided the house in half, rendering the floor plan impossible and forcing them to build a staircase on the outer wall as well as wooden walkways enabling them to get from one floor to another. Grandmother shrugged. “I told him, ‘I won’t look your mother in the face anymore. I’d rather leave.’ And it was true: I was furious. Most of all with myself.”

From the moment her daughter had become ill, Grandmother became obsessed with feeding her. It had been a mistake to go along with the refusal of the zabaglione but she’d done it for a quiet life, out of weakness, knowing deep down that she should have insisted and shut her mother-in-law up, beating the egg yolks with a spoon until they turned lighter, barely dented with sugar, and put it in her baby’s bird’s mouth, filled her tummy with a simple, uncooked dessert. Luckily at the time she still had her other daughters, Delia and Albina. And later, when she’d lost Delia, too, Silvia had been left in her care, for her to raise. That’s exactly what she said.

“But my aunt was dying anyway,” Silvia had objected as a girl.

“Yes, she surely would have died regardless.”

“Even if she’d eaten the zabaglione.”

“Even if she’d eaten the zabaglione,” Grandmother repeated wearily.

Now Silvia remembers her grandmother’s impulse to stuff her with food, spreading a lump of butter on her bread, slipping shelled hazelnuts into her pocket like ransom money, and her own need to binge and then starve herself for entire days afterward, as if to drive her grandmother crazy. During those years Anselmo was often in the house as well, but he would eat and that was that. He’d eat everything without raising his face from his plate, and then he’d go to his disowned great-grandmother and get the same again.