The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini

putting little sugar puppets in her hand and pretending she has eaten them, which makes the cradle and the curtains all sticky. Sometimes Marianna is worried that their affection has become so aggressive and noisy that it might be dangerous for the baby, so she always has to keep an eye on them when they are near the cradle.
    Since Manina was born they have even left off playing with Lina and Lena, the twin daughters of the cowman Ciccio Cal@o, who lives next door to the stables. The two girls remain unmarried. After the death of their mother they devoted themselves entirely to their father, the cows and the house. They have grown tall and sturdy, and it is hard to distinguish between them. They dress alike in faded pink skirts, lilac-coloured velvet bodices and little blue aprons always smeared with blood. Now that Innocenza has made up her mind to refuse to kill any more chickens, the duty of strangling them and chopping them in pieces has fallen to the girls and they do it with great determination and speed.
    The gossips have it that Lina and Lena lie with their own father in the same bed where they used to sleep with their mother, that already they have both become pregnant
    and have aborted themselves with parsley. But these are slanders that Raffaele Cuffa once wrote on the back of a sheet of household accounts and it didn't do to pay any attention to such gossip.
    When they hang out the washing the Cal@o twins sing, which is wonderful. This has become known in a roundabout way from one of the servants, who comes to the house to do the washing. Marianna discovered it herself one morning as she leaned against the painted balustrade of the long terrace above the stables, watching the girls hanging out the washing on the line. They bent together over the big laundry basket, standing gracefully on tiptoe, taking a sheet and twisting it with one at one end and one at the other as if they were having a tug of war. She saw they were opening their mouths but she could not be sure whether they were singing. She was overcome with a desire to hear the sound of their voices, which people said were so beautiful, and this left her with a feeling of frustration.
    Their father the cowman calls them with a whistle just as he calls his cows. And they run to him with firm, resolute steps that come from doing heavy work and having strong muscles. As soon as their father has gone off, Lina and Lena whistle in their turn to the horse Miguelito. They mount him and ride round the olive grove, one of them clutching the back of the other, without worrying about the branches snapping against the flanks of the horse, or the overhanging brambles that get entangled in their long hair.
    Felice and Giuseppa go to find them in the dark sunless hovel next door to the stables, between the pictures of saints and the jugs full of milk set aside for ricotta. They get them to tell stories of murdered corpses and werewolves, which they then repeat to their father, who always gets cross and forbids them to mix with the twins. But as soon as he has gone off to Palermo the two children rush over to the cowman's house, where they eat bread and ricotta surrounded by hordes of horseflies.
    And their father is so absent-minded that he does not even recognise the smell they bring with them when they steal back to the house after having stayed for hours crouched on the straw, listening to terrifying stories that make their flesh creep.
    At night the two little girls often slip into their mother's bed because of the fear these stories have aroused. Sometimes they wake up crying and sweating. "Your daughters are so stupid: why do they keep going over there if they get frightened?" That is her
    husband's logic and one cannot disagree with it--except that logic is not sufficient to explain the fascination of associating with the dead in spite of the fear and the horror. Or even perhaps because of this.
    Thinking of her two eldest children forever running off, Marianna