Page 1 of This Vicious Hunger
Prologue
Iam no stranger to the intricate rituals of death.
From the age of five I assisted my father in the sepulchre, guiding mourners from the gilded coffin we called the “cradle” to the pyre room below, where tradition dictated that the sisters and wives and mothers and daughters must shear their incense-braided hair to the chin at minimum and toss the rest to the flames. Upstairs, my father stood by while husbands and fathers and sons and brothers watched to ensure the cradle was engulfed entirely by the fragrant smoke.
From the age of eight I was the one who held and rang the little brass bell, its mournful peal announcing the beginning of the Silence—the multiday vigil held by the women around the freshly cleansed coffin. I ensured that no word was uttered, no food or drink except for water passed their lips, and any insults upon the house of the departed were reported.
By thirteen, after the death of my mother, it was I, and not my father, who reported the infractions to the fathers and husbands: a sliver of bread for the girl whose twin had died of the influenza, placed between her cracked lips by her own aunt; the pregnantwidow who fainted beside the cradle and could only be roused by the dabbing of the syrupy communal wedding wine between her lips; the crone who, having lost her husband and son, in a fit of grief made to return to the pyre room and throw herself into the pit rather than face her remaining life as a widow at the mercy of her son-in-law. I did not see the punishments, but I took them to my bed every night as if they were my own.
Death was indisputable. At times I both hated and loved these ritual beats, as familiar as my own skin. Just as there were those whose job it was to pioneer celebration—births and marriages and comings of age—my father always said it was our job as the chaperones of death to defend decorum, honour, and custom.
When my own father died two weeks into my marriage, I returned to the sepulchre and endured these old traditions easily. I had no desire to speak or eat anyway, wrapped as I was in my grief, and readily accepted the customary three-day vigil commanded by my husband. Three days of my life to honour my father and his decades of devotion to his craft seemed a fair price. I cut huge swathes of my braided hair for the fire, sweat pouring from every inch of me as I leaned close over the pit and sacrificed everything I could to the flames—determined that, although my father had no other family, his cradle would not go uncleansed.
Now it is my husband in the cradle upstairs, his body lying in silk-lined gold. It is not my father speaking the last rites, not his gentle hands that have arranged Aurelio’s limbs and daubed his forehead with sweet perfume. I am surrounded in this unfamiliar sepulchre by Aurelio’s family, not my own. They were never really mine. Aurelio’s mother, his five aunts, his seven sisters, countless cousins, and their daughters all embrace their Silence, heads bowed, veils obscuring their unspoken prayers. I watch them bitterly.
Each of their husbands and fathers commanded the customary three days, and two fewer for the young and frail. Aurelio’s mother volunteered for five and her husband did not argue. I did not volunteer for any—not that anybody would have listened. I have been Silent, in their eyes, since the moment my husband died.
No. For my sins, Aurelio commanded me one last time from beyond the gilded cradle. Not three or five, but thirteen days of mourning is his final wish. One to mark every week we were married.
I bear it, as he must have known I would, without complaint. But I am weak by the end, desperate for a wedge of lemon, a fistful of oily olives with their bitter pits, anything to smother the woodsy tang of frankincense from my too-short hair. I count each minute beyond death and wonder whether this is what it feels like to be free.
Chapter One
After Aurelio, only the university remains.
I have dreamt of it my whole life and I dream of it still. When I was a child my father described it like one of the Isliano palaces of old, a parade of white columns and sculpted stone women carrying water in vast urns. I imagined what it would be like to stroll through halls hung with masterpieces in gilded frames, to smell the smoky sweetness of clove cigarettes in the mouths of scholars.
My father described the university as though it was inevitable—as though I would one day see it. I did not realise until I was much older that he told such richly embellished stories because he never expected me to see it, and never expected he might see it again either, since he had never had a son. He took solace in the tales he told as I watched from my perch in the corner of the embalming room or looked on from the grassy slopes as he tended his garden of herbs; by the time I left home I could recount each story word for word, as I often had at bedtime to ward off the thoughts of what would come if my parents ever received an offer for my hand.
When I was a wife, the vision in my head became twistedby desperation, the university an oasis of dark cubbies, vaulted arches, and the cool darkness of libraries recessed deep underground. I never stopped thinking of it as mine, my story, my fairy tale. I knew by this time that I would never have the honour of attending as I might have if I’d been a boy instead of a wretched girl, but I longed for nothing more. I should never have been a daughter of Death, learning my father’s profession despite my mother’s protests, condemned to a life as little more than Aurelio LeVand’s wife. If my father had had his way—and if I had had mine—I would have been a son of science.
Instead, I was married and ordered to leave any childish dreams of education behind. I made a good match in Aurelio. His mother said he was charmed by my beauty, some softness in me that hadn’t been lost during the years of constant mourning—or perhaps a softness that had emerged from it. My father said there had been some scandal, years ago, and while Aurelio was a very good match for me, with my rising age and my diminished dowry, I was also a welcome match for him, even despite my strange upbringing and his family’s standing. He should have married a countess, but instead he got an undertaker’s spinster daughter.
Although Aurelio’s family settled for me, my husband himself was agreeable enough. He seemed relieved that I wasn’t ugly and was eager to teach me the proper behaviour expected of a respectable lady. I’d never considered what might happen if I ended up with a society husband because I’d always hoped I would never be a society wife, but my father assured me on my wedding day that all fresh brides fear change, and my only duty was not to let Aurelio see it.
I assumed, naively, that Aurelio’s teaching would open this new world up to me. After all, my father had nothing but my bestinterests at heart, so surely Aurelio must as well. I’d expected to make some sacrifices, of course—my father’s rules for the rules of domesticity, the trade of mourning for other wifely duties—but I wasn’t prepared, when it came to it, to release the hold my father’s tales still had on me.
Women, Aurelio had informed me the week after our wedding,do not read. I’d been holding a paperback novel—hardly scandalous material—and he swept it from my hands without pause, dashing it straight into the open fireplace.Now that you are grown you must set aside these childish fancies. Didn’t your father know he was doing you no favours by filling your head with such silly stories?
Aurelio never understood that these stories were the sun that warmed me through the winter days of my marriage; when all I had of my old life was the familiar scent of loamy dirt in the greenhouse and the steady growth of the unfurling leaves I’d cut from my father’s prized pothos vines, these remembered fantasies of the university reminded me that Death had taken my father but he was not entirely absent.
I never told Aurelio that my father’s stories about the university were perhaps the most normal parts of my childhood. The reading was foreign enough to him. Most women mourn perhaps five times in their whole lives: they celebrate their fathers and mothers, suffer the loss of their new babies, grown sons gone to war, or daughters taken in the birthing bed; if they are lucky, they might live long enough to mourn their husbands. I have mourned more in my life, spent more days in thoughtful, solemn Silence, than Aurelio has—had—spent days in the schoolroom. He might have assumed I had helped my parents on occasion, but I suspect if he realised how much of my life I’d spent wearing the veil of death, hewould have decided to give me thirteen hundred days of mourning instead of thirteen.
And now Aurelio is gone and the ceremony, and my Silence, is done. There are no more secrets I must keep from him. The house we once shared echoes with his absence, with the memory of how much space he demanded, how much clatter and bulk there was to him, and I spend the days after my mourning ends rattling around it like I still wear the chains of my Silence.
The servants stay out of my way as I catalogue the house and all its contents through the lens of my widowhood. Uncertainty colours the airy rooms, my thoughts returning, as they did during my Silence, as they have done my whole life, to the familiar stories of the university.
I know it is callous to say, but as I wander the halls of our home I’m struck not by the loss of my husband, of the life we shared and the potential of our future, but by the sequestered dreams of the university. I hadn’t realised how badly I had hoped, deep, deep down, that Aurelio might one day grow to be more like my father. How eventually he might have come around to my reading, my learning bits and pieces of science or history—and how one day, maybe, just maybe, he might have considered becoming a benefactor, letting me attend a few lectures as a guest… It was a stupid, senseless dream, not even something I paid much mind to while he was alive, but with him dead… It is even less of a dream than before, and the loss is a wave big enough to engulf me whole.
Now I am at the mercy of his family, nothing more than a tool to be bartered, another moving piece on the chessboard. I await my fate like the condemned awaits the axe. Is it too much to hope for a life of solitude, to be left alone to run my household and tend to my plants in the greenhouse? The alternative—the prospectof remarriage so soon after Aurelio’s death—leaves an ashy taste in my mouth. Will I have to simply trade one set of chains for another?
I am in the greenhouse three days after my mourning ends when Madame LeVand finds me. She insists we all, her children and their spouses included, call her that—Madame. Perhaps she thinks it is sophisticated; perhaps it makes her feel strong. She always marches about this house as though it is hers, coming and going without warning, hosting dinner parties at our table without even so much as telling me in advance, directing our staff by first name in very nearly the same tone she uses on me. Aurelio always told me that it wouldn’t be this way forever.Once you have children, he’d say,it’ll be different then. Onceyouhave children, as though it was my job—and mine alone—to create this new life.
With Aurelio dead it’s exactly as it was before. Madame stomps into the greenhouse while I am in the middle of repotting my poison ivy—I believe its proper name isToxicodendron radicans, though I’m not sure I’m remembering that correctly; I only ever saw it written in one of the books I left at my father’s house before he died. This time I’m wearing gloves. The rash on my left arm is still there from my last attempt the day before Aurelio died; I’d thought it was a kind of creeper, a mistake I won’t make again. Others might have had the servants throw it out, wretched little thing, but I’m surprisingly fond of it.
I half turn as my mother-in-law enters; I smelled her before I saw her, the clack of her heels accompanied as always by too much sickly rose perfume. Madame is tall and thin, not unlike Aurelio in the quiet strength in her shoulders, her stern jaw, straight nose, and piercing blue eyes, but she’s lost weight with the death of her only son—just about the only visible evidence of her loss.
“What are you doing rooting around in the dirt?” Madame says sniffily.
